I thought that I had my plans for my final exhibit so organized, until it was time to put them all down. Originally, the only topic that I had planned to focus on was religion and the role that the Depression played in aiding the rise of Conservatism within America, with a focus on which areas of the country remain to some extent still seized in that grip. Studying the greater pop culture movements, and unique art and storytelling mediums, that emerged out of the 1930s and reactions to the Depression made me realize, though: religion was only one fold of a much bigger picture.
The Great Depression was a societal tipping point for America, and had the call for massive social reform of “financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage”[1] not been heeded, I don’t believe it an exaggeration to say that it could have been the beginning of the end for America. But even as the people and the government both struggled to find their footing after the upheavals of the stock market crash and the Dust Bowl, it’s not as though everyone was content to just make that existence their lives. They found refuge not just in religion, but in music, stories, film, and one another. Nobody wanted to spend their spare night out or free time stewing in their own misery. They set to work, to improve not only their own lives, but affecting the lives of those around them as well. Country preachers set out to call more sheep to their flocks. Ordinary Americans and displaced migrants used the music of their upbringings to spread the stories of what had happened to them. What was coming out of the film studios and the publishing houses brought about not only entertainment, but impactful social movement, as “when our society was most unstable and insecure, we somehow, as if by a law of compensation, produced the most buoyant popular culture that Americans had ever seen”[2].
What was I doing, thinking I was going to be able to categorize any of that, reducing it down to a cultural spreadsheet and not the lifeblood of a nation? True to the words of Trevor Owens, my data required “choices about what and how to collect and how to encode the information”[3]. The best that I could do was track patterns and pin down locations, although the preservation of that information would likely not have been thought possible at the time of its origin. Digital history is about more than just calling up dates, but examining how the evolution of media goes hand-in-hand with the hindsight of studying these events which happened over 80 years ago in the context of the present day, like finding out exactly how “a folk song collector wound up as the legal co-author of a Jay-Z diss track”[4]. Could the first audiences to watch Snow White in theaters have known that they were witnessing the origins of what is today the biggest entertainment company in the world? Could Bonnie and Clyde have known that their names would become an idea, an archetype, and for some even a goal? Could a Jewish man walking the streets of New York City in 1939 have known how much further reaching his fears of fascism would extend beyond the next decade?
http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/coping-with-great-depression–
