The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (The Haymarket Series) [Paperback]

Michael Denning (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1859841708 | ISBN-13: 978-1859841709 | Publication Date: July 1, 1998

As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Cafe Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Popular Front, a momentous groundswell of social activism during the Great Depression, was marked by activism among creative artists of all types that called attention to both the ends and the means of the production of art. Later historians would dismiss the socialist and communist elements of this cultural movement as minor sidelines of little if any significance. But, writes historian Michael Denning, "just as the radical movements of abolition, utopian socialism, and women's rights sparked the antebellum American Renaissance, so the communisms of the depression triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture, what I will call the laboring of American culture."

Although the early portions of the book, which establish the historical and social contexts of the Popular Front, are interesting, readers may likely find most fascinating the later chapters on some of the artists who took part in the movement, including Billie Holiday, who first began singing "Strange Fruit" at a left-wing cabaret, Duke Ellington, and John Dos Passos. His essay on the antifascist crusading of Orson Welles--"the American Brecht, the single most important Popular Front artist in theater, radio, and film"--is particularly insightful. Like Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty, The Cultural Front is a panoramic history that brings vibrancy and passion to the telling of American culture. --Ron Hogan

From Library Journal

The American Thirties was a period of fertile political coalitions that drew largely from grass-roots labor and Civil Rights activism to give New Deal liberalism its left-wing content and orientation. Denning (American studies, Yale) is ostensibly concerned here with an examination of the cultural counterpart to that American popular front. The breadth of his study is stunning, ranging from the compositional innovations of Duke Ellington and blues popularizations of Josh White to the Marxist critical theorizing of Kenneth Burke, from Orson Welles's Shakespeare adaptations to Tillie Olson's feminist-labor stories. But this is not a work of popular history in any sense; it is a model of currents in cultural studies. Denning has produced a work that will sit alongside Warren Susman's Culture as History (Pantheon, 1985) as the deepest contemplation of Depression-era popular (and high) culture. For scholars and cultural studies enthusiasts.?Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 594 pages
• Publisher: Verso (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841708
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841709
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #814,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trenchant analysis of the leftist movement between the wars., September 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (The Haymarket Series) (Paperback)

Denning's examination of the leftist, socialist, proletarian, avant-garde,CIO amalgamation in the era between the wars is an extremely informative analysis of the labor-based reaction to post-World War I's economic, political and social,development. Derailing the myth that much of the movement was communist based or inspired, Denning instead argues that the uniting of a variety of movements in the arts, politics, intellectual circles, and mass media illustrated the country's increasing interest in redefining the American dream as it applied to the lower and middle classes. His trenchant analysis is bolstered by a hostof references and examples, unearthing mounds of literary, artistic, governmental and social works that--though forgotten today--were hallmarks of the era. Ultimately, Denning is able to explain how America's shift to the left eventually gave way to a dialectic shift back to the right after World War II as the country's interest in promoting business and mass production overrode its desire to bring civil and economic liberties to all. I have yet to read any book that as thoroughly and convincingly documents this time period's absorption with mass culture.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente, January 9, 2007

By 

Enrique Leiva Vojkovic "Viernes" (Barcelona, Catalonia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (The Haymarket Series) (Paperback)

Un maravilloso libro que refiere lo que no sólo es una contextualización sociocultural de las luchas sociales, sino sobre todo "el otro frente", el que se dirime en las trincheras de la geografía cultural, de la mano de las luchas laborales. No es un mero contexto, sino una lucha en sentido propio, con tanta o más incidencia sobre las subjetividades que la lucha socio-laboral. A tal punto meritoria como centro de atención específico de la genealogía de un proceso de antagonismo social, que incluso sus propios protagonistas se erigen en genuinos héroes de la lucha por la emancipación y la autonomía, aunque hayan pasado a la posteridad -cuando tuvieron la fortuna de hacerlo- como meros "artistas". Mucho que aprender tenemos las generaciones actuales tanto de la articulación de luchas globales que atraviesan todo la fenomenología social, como de la absoluta trascendencia de ese "frente cultural".