Earth (1929) and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) represent a new, 'proletarian' literary departure. Jack Conroy, an active writer and editor during and after the thirties, has suggested that 'the rebellion of the 20s was directed principally against the fetters of form and language taboos'; whereas, after the crash, 'editors and publishers began to realize that people would read about such unpleasant things as unemployment and hunger.' Conroy's is a simplistic but still useful paradigm of the movement from formalism to the idea of art as a means for shaping social values. Driving this transformation was a profound, widespread emotional response to the sudden crash: to most ordinary Americans it represented the devastating, unthought-of collapse of an earlier, hopeful dream that their work was destined to fulfill. By 1933 at least 12 million workers were unemployed. While many stood on soup lines waiting for handouts, the government, in an effort to bolster prices, was paying farmers millions of dollars to plough under wheat, kill off hogs, and dump milk into ditches. Such experiences of hunger, Hoovervilles, and hopelessness brought people to question the economic and social values they had been taught to revere. Yet to some, the calamity seemed to open a new opportunity: to build out of the wreckage of capitalism an economic system of cooperation and equality. In this effort, those on the Left developed special prestige: not only had the Soviet Union avoided the horrors of the Depression, -334- but the Communist Party and its allies took the lead at home in organizing the unemployed, fighting for aid to the dispossessed, turning despair into militance. For many writers, painters, and dramatists, also, the grim downward spiral offered a chance to turn art from a marginal commodity into an instrument for inspiring and shaping change. I would symbolize this leap into a new, 'proletarian' art of hunger and fear, of protest and search, of old anger and fresh hope by the publication of Smedley's and Gold's books.
It is not that stories about working-class life nor fictions devoted to social protest or even revolutionary activity were recent developments in American, much less in European, culture. Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis, among others, had written powerfully in such modes. It would be untrue to picture the 1920s wholly as a period in which artists were devoted to creating experimental works directed to sophisticated upper-class audiences. Yet, relatively little of the fiction of the 1920s was concerned with working-class life, much less with revolutionary politics. Thus, the publication of Daughter of Earth and Jews Without Money represents something more than an arbitrary divide.
Both books are fictionalized accounts of coming-of-age in working-class communities. Both dramatize the tensions between working-class families and bourgeois institutions of acculturation and social control, like schools, landlords, and employers. Both, like many proletarian fictions, chronicle the painful efforts of their young, often abrasive working-class protagonists to gain, through education, work, or politics, a sense of agency, a meaningful vocation in a fundamentally hostile world. And both, perhaps most significantly, express a deep yearning not just to gain a 'place' in that world but to help transform the predatory society they picture into a true community; neither book, also characteristically, dramatizes real success in that critical project. Taken together, both in what they accomplish and in how they fail, they offered for their time a basic definition of proletarian fiction: it is focused, generally in realistic forms, on the experiential details of working-class life; energized by an often angry, sometimes bitter, insistence on forcing American culture to recognize the particular qualities of working-class experience and to respond to the distinctive imperatives of working-class values; and committed to -335- the act of writing in order to critique the dying old society, to validate the beauty often buried in working-class life, and thus to help inspire the movement to create a new, just, and therefore socialist future. Both these novels are also products of writers who devoted almost all their literary energies to the causes they supported: in fact, while both Smedley and Gold continued to write extensively, mainly as chroniclers and propagandists of revolutionary movements, neither again completed a substantial piece of fiction.
For all these parallels, it would be hard to find two books more different either in tone or in their subsequent receptions. The differences were functions not simply of subject matter or style. Gold's book, written in short, punchy, journalistic sentences, and in a voice that combines outrage, sentiment, and bitter humor, offers a series of loosely related sketches of early twentieth-century life in the ghettos of New York's Lower East Side. The tone and mid-American origins of Daughter of Earth are established in the opening pages: 'To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty. I belong to those who die from other causes — exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power, fighters in a great cause…. For we are of the earth and our struggle is the struggle of earth.' Jews Without Money went through eleven printings within the eight months after its publication in February 1930; was translated into at least sixteen languages, including German, Yiddish, Bohemian, and Tartar, by the time Gold himself prepared an 'Introduction' for a new edition in 1935; and, with his more polemical writings, rapidly helped project Gold as one of the leading figures of the cultural Left in the United States. Further, the book became something of a model for proletarian fiction, which Gold had been making efforts to define since the early twenties. It helped generate a group of semiautobiographical novels that constitutes one major form in which men of working- class origins expressed their lives in fiction during the 1930s.
Daughter of Earth, while it was also reprinted in 1935 with an appreciative introduction by Malcolm Cowley, never gained anything remotely resembling the currency of Gold's book, and Smedley remained, at best, a marginal figure on the Left cultural scene. To be sure, that was partly because she lived in China for much of the -336- thirties and worked at the fringes of the Communist movement rather than, like Gold, at the very center of the American Communist Party. Still the differences in the books, and in their receptions, express more fundamental tensions.
About a year before the publication of Jews Without Money Gold pictured his idea of a proletarian writer in a frequently quoted New Masses editorial, 'Go Left, Young Writers' (January 1929):
A new writer has been appearing; a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of working-class parents, who himself works in the lumber camps, coal mines, harvest fields and mountain camps of America. He is sensitive and impatient. He writes in jets of exasperated feeling and has no time to polish his work. He is violent and sentimental by turns. He lacks self confidence but writes because he must — and because he has real talent.
The style is perfect Gold — as is, one suspects, the image of the proletarian writer he projects, complete with impatience, loud feelings, and masculine assertiveness, as well as the sense of swallowing life whole, like Walt Whitman and Jack London, to whom Gold refers in a succeeding paragraph. But the image, for all its individual resonance, is not simply a projection of Mike Gold; rather, it represents a widely held conception on the Left not only of the proletarian writer but of the idealized proletariat. It insists that mines, mills, and lumber camps are the only true sites of proletarian action. And it reveals the extent to which even those ideologically committed to a collectivist ethos bought into quite individualistic conceptions of agency-in art and in society as well.
Smedley's Marie Rogers confronts many of the same problems encountered by Gold's hero. But for Marie, there is nothing like the easy solution almost accidentally provided by the discovery of socialism on the last page of Jews Without Money. When she moves to New York from the West seeking an active political community, Marie finds herself altogether ill-at-ease among the middle-class intellectuals whose Bohemian lifestyle seems to dominate the socialist movement early in the second decade of the century. The talky, sexually experimental Greenwich Village Bohemia of Floyd Dell and Max and Crystal Eastman, of The Masses magazine, of the Provincetown Playhouse, of John Reed and Louise Bryant, paralyzes -337- Marie, and Smedley herself. The culture of her class becomes, ironically, a barrier to her participation in a movement ostensibly designed to liberate her class. Subsequently, she becomes deeply engaged in the movement to free India from British rule, spending some months in jail as an 'enemy' collaborator during World War I. But her involvement in this movement, too, is cut short by sexual blackmail and by the inability of male members of the movement, including her husband, to accept real equality for a woman comrade. Thus Daughter of Earth concludes on the edge of despair, rather than with the 'proletarian optimism' Gold prescribed for proletarian fiction and expressed in the familiar concluding peroration of Jews Without Money: 'O workers' Revolution…. You are the true Messiah.'
Like a number of other thirties novels by women — for example, Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932), Fielding Burke's (Olive Tilford Dargan's) Call Home the Heart (1932), and Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) — Daughter of Earth dramatizes class struggle differently, as Barbara Foley points out, from
