The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #67966 Message #1140493
Posted By: Q (Frank Staplin)
18-Mar-04 - 08:27 PM
Thread Name: The Weavers and the McCarthy Era
Subject: RE: The Weavers and the McCarthy Era
Steinbeck received the Pulitzer Prize in 1940- I think of him as a voice of the dirty thirties and the dustbowl days. And Dos Passos with USA- FDR was in the White House, and make-work projects and some reforms were underway. Both writers had entered into the reading program in my highschool, although there was some backlash against Dos Passos- we were told how we should interpret him. This was just before WW2.
WW2 added to the population shifts that began in the thirties. Jobs had increased exponentially, and I don't think that the Weavers, Guthrie and the others really affected the thinking of the average American. People were just too busy climbing the ladder. We listened to the songs and learned to appreciate folk music, but the beliefs of the singers didn't penetrate our skulls, at least not those of the people I knew. Action came a little later, in the 1950s, when the struggle for equal rights (not only for blacks but for the farm laborers) started to receive support from the more socially conscious portion of the population.
Now this view is biased by my own experiences in the circle that I belonged to and therefore myopic. Reading through histories of the post-war era could well change my opinions, but I have deliberately kept this on a personal level- I think the initiator of this thread wanted that. The writers of history may well place the emphasis differently.