comparable men's books: as a phenomenon not just of 'making history' but of making daily life (in Richard Flacks's terms). Smedley's book insists that the kitchen and the bedroom are, as much as the mill, the union hall, and the strike, places where the struggle for a new socialist society must be joined. Fewer than a quarter of all women and less than 15 percent of married women worked outside the home through most of the thirties. If the industrial 'workplace' only was to be the focus for art, as it mainly was for organizing efforts by the Left, then relatively little of women's lives would be discovered in art. Further, if the working class was defined and portrayed entirely in terms of its relation to the means of production, then the significance of other distinctive group experiences — of gender, race, ethnicity-would be diminished.
It would not be accurate to claim that Smedley's book offers a paradigm for the experience of women on the Left. To the contrary, as has frequently been pointed out, the Left broadly and the Communist Party specifically, for all its patriarchal practice, provided encouragement and support for women artists unusual in American society. The 'Woman Question' was taken seriously on the Left: the Party press published substantial analyses that, with older classics like those of Engels and Bebel, provided the basis for political discussions. -338-
Moreover, in significant ways the Left carried on the heritage of feminism that spoke for radical change (Smedley, for example, was deeply involved in the movement to provide birth control to workingclass women), and it provided opportunities for many women to be active on behalf of themselves and others in the working class. In fact, some women, like Meridel Le Sueur and Josephine Herbst, played significant public roles in Left cultural circles during the Depression. The Book Union, a leftist book club, selected three novels by women — A Stone Came Rolling by Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford Dargan), Marching! Marching! by Clara Weatherwax, and A Time to Remember by Leane Zugsmith — as its primary selections of 'proletarian novels.' Still, the 'pessimism' of Daughter of Earth, like the long-delayed completion and publication of important works by Le Sueur and Olsen, suggests that the thirties Left, including its women writers, had no secure answers for vital questions about the relationship of social and cultural transformations (especially those having to do with gender roles) to a political and economic revolution.
The books that most resonate with Jews Without Money include some focused on the blighted worlds of the 'bottom dogs' of society, as well as others that detail the efforts of plain working-class Americans to live through the multiplying disasters of Depression, Dust Bowl, and dispossession, to find jobs, and perhaps to organize. It became the object of a number of writers of the late 1920s as well as the 1930s to extend a 'downward' view to the bottoms of American society generally unseen by the middle-class reading public. Edward Dahlberg's novels Bottom Dogs (1929), From Flushing to Calvary (1932.), and Those Who Perish (1934) gave a name and one definition to such fictions. His first book follows Lorry Lewis as he grows up around his mother's barber shops, especially in Kansas City, in a Cleveland Jewish orphanage, hobo camps, the YMCA and Solomon's Dancepalace in Los Angeles. The second book finds Lorry and Lizzie Lewis in and around New York, as Lizzie, rapidly aging, tries to establish herself as a lady eligible for marriage and Lorry tries to discover himself along the waterfront, in the cemetery, at a Coney Island festival, and finally through a pilgrimage back to the orphanage. One can observe how, as the first two books progress, the style changes from what Dahlberg himself later derogated as 'the rude American vernacular,' conveyed with a kind of ironic gusto, to the -339- increasingly erudite and allusive technique that marks his later works. In 1929 he had written with a Whitmanesque sense of the expressiveness of everyday details: 'The barber shop, with its odor of soap and hair tonics, the Paramount Building on Times Square with its tawdry lighting effects at night, the offices and hotels along Broadway, a cheap yellow and red symphonic surge in brick are just as artistically suggestive as the Chartres Cathedral or the cafes along the walk of the Montmartre.' In Bottom Dogs and Calvary Dahlberg carries out the artistic program implicit in this comment, capturing and, as Jules Chametzky has suggested, legitimizing, even celebrating that seamy, loathsome landscape just at the edges of destitution-the deluded lower middle-class America of Lizzie Lewis that at once repels and consumes Lorry. Those Who Perish, one of the first American fictions to dramatize the Nazi threat and also to attack Jewish collaborationism and self-interest, is written in a much more selfconsciously literary style; and the wandering, rootless young hero of the earlier books, who anticipates Jack Kerouac's road-drawn hipsters and, perhaps, Saul Bellow's tamer Augie March, emerges as the suicidal Eli Malamed. Dahlberg's work finally constitutes an increasingly elaborate (self)portrait of the artist transformed from hobo to guru. Politics is not his occupation, nor does revolutionary optimism characterize his people: Bottom Dogs ends with Lorrie wondering whether he has caught the clap from a dance-hall girl. And all the central characters of Those Who Perish do, indeed, die needlessly or by their own hands.
Dahlberg's people skirt the bottom, in fact; Tom Kromer's live there. Waiting for Nothing (1935), Kromer's essentially autobiographical narrative, captures from the inside the experiences of men on the fritz. The book begins — and ends — nowhere, or anywhere: a dark, nameless urban street where the hungry narrator backs off from clubbing a passing man, to an anonymous flophouse, where he lies caught between aching weariness and the fierce biting of lice. Dahlberg's wanderer hitches rides on the rails; Kromer's nails a fast drag at night, smashing against the side of the boxcar, hanging on for life, knowing that, like others he has seen, he will end in a ditch or be cut to ribbons under the wheels if his grip fails. Lorry Lewis always seems to find a friend; Kromer's narrator can, at best, fall in with a smart -340- stiff who teaches him to earn his daily keep by diving 'down on a doughnut in front of a bunch of women.'
Kromer's is probably the least romanticized of the books portraying the lower depths of America. His title echoes ironically one of the era's best-known works, Clifford Odets's agitational drama Waiting for Lefty. Kromer's narrator, waiting for no future, cut off from any past, isolated from any movement, is confined at the end to thinking only about 'three hots; and a flop.' Even Nelson Algren's gloomy Somebody in Boots (1935) provides glimpses, if transient, of real companionship and of a movement for a better society, though his central figure, Cass McKay, seems utterly unable to turn himself toward them. Like Lorry Lewis, Cass takes to the road partly from aimlessness, partly from hunger, though partly to escape the meaningless brutality and ugliness of his Texas home. But he finds, finally, that there is no place much better to go in Depression America, only a jungle where 'the strong beat the weak' and all 'strike out at something' when they can, if only to pass on to others their own pain. In Chicago, he is beaten for befriending an African American Communist, loses his job, is left by Norah, a young working woman with whom he has struck up a relationship, and drifts back onto the bum. Cass can briefly perceive that his condition is a result of the corruption and greed of capitalism, and briefly understand, too, how racism keeps working people separated. But to the extent that he comes to have a class identification, it seems to be that of the lumpenproletariat, the breeding ground for Fascist recruits. Indeed, Richard Pells has suggested that 'Algren suspected that the 'people' were not incipient socialists but potential brownshirts who might come together solely for an orgy of looting and arson,' like the people of Chicago's depths in Jack London's The Iron Heel. That judgment may be unfair to Algren's effort to symbolize in the nightmare jungles traversed by his homeless men and women the American dream that vanished with the Depression. Like his later and better-known postwar work, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), Somebody in Boots may best be read not as a realistic coming-of-age novel but, like most of the books I am discussing, as 'a gloomy parable' (Pells) of disconnection from that older, pastoral American society now 'gone with the wind.' -341-
In many ways, the book that most fulfilled the promise of Jews Without Money is Jack Conroy's The Disinherited (1933). Like Gold working class in origin, Conroy came from a very different tradition of American radicalism: Midwestern, small-town, populist, native, anarchic — represented by Moberly, Missouri, where Conroy was born and grew up. The Disinherited originated as a series of autobiographical sketches published by H. L. Mencken in the conservative American Mercury and was then adapted into the form of a novel in order to get a commercial press to publish it. An expert storyteller and an important editor, Conroy had always been interested in the folk dimensions of working-class culture: the tales, ballads, jokes of a rich oral tradition. In fact, The Disinherited is a treasure-chest of such materials, and it may best be understood as the search of its first-person protagonist, Larry Donovan, to find a meaningful cultural and communal center to his life after the traditional miners' world of Monkey Nest Camp has been destroyed by lost strikes, the mining deaths of his father and brothers, the fragmentation of modern society, and plain poverty. Initially, Larry believes that he can 'rise' to a white-collar job if he gains sufficient education. Later, he works in a steel mill and in the burgeoning auto
