Michael Gold's 1941 Address to the Fourth Congress of American Writers: An Excerpt

In a 1941 speech to the Fourth Congress of American Writers, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold said the following:

“…From 1930 to 1940, our literature set forth on a second discovery of America. As in a famous decade in czarist Russia, the inverted, book-proud intellectuals `went to the people.’ Whole new areas of American life were opened up—the deep South, the daily life in factories, mills and mines, the struggle of the farmer, the souls of black folk, the problems of the recent immigrant and his children.

“Now, at last, American literature came to grips with its own enormous and wonderful continent. Scores of gifted young `depression’ authors appeared during each publishing season. There appeared a host of little magazines no longer filled with the usual poetic dewdrops, but proletarian in tone. The older writers were affected, too; many tried to come out of their introspective skins or warm little nests of sophisticated comfort. Some failed, but all were shaken and changed.

“A sign of the renaissance was the furious literary controversies that set in. Literature was alive and dangerous, a social factor in the national life such as it had not been since the days of the Civil War. The Federal Arts Projects were created, a veritable revolution in popular culture such as America had never known.

“Yes, it was a great and fruitful decade, one that burned much of the shoddy opportunism and adolescent fear and hesitation out of our literature. It taught American authors to be proud of their craft, because through it they could lead the people to great goals. It taught them to act and write like…citizens, not like mere entertainers or perpetual Harvard…mystic outcasts from the national life. No longer was the writer an alien; he had rooted himself in the soil of the American people…

“In America, our people’s movement of the Thirties was felt in many directions. The proletarian seed sown in a few first novels about strikes and unemployment grew by a hundred branches until it brought new dignity even to Hollywood…

“A prolific Southern literature arrived, deeply progressive in tone. Faulkner’s picture had been only an upper class truth; it described only the demoralized and defeated feudalism still lingering among the ruins of the Civil War. A new class, the discovery of new social hopes, was needed to rejuvenate this region of broken Attic columns and moldering customs and prejudices…

“I cannot hope to describe at this point the battle over Marxism which raged in all the literary journals of America, pro and con; it would need a bibliographer to trace. I cannot refrain, however, from recalling one amusing tactic of the enemy critics. Whenever a new proletarian novel or play appeared, possessing enough quality and virtuosity not to be ignored, these critics would hail it as `an exception to the Marxist rule.’ Their dogmatic prejudice assured them all proletarian literature was schematic, monotonous, coarsely materialist, obviously didactic and narrow. But here was a novel rich in human nature, dramatic and not didactic, and broad and free as life itself. So what? So they hailed it as a delightful revolt against Marxism, as a welcome exception to the rule of the Moscow literary dictatorship, etc. etc. Thus, in time, the exceptions grew and grew until there was a new exceptional literature; proletarian literature itself, not an exception or accident, but the thing itself…

“…Democracy was dead in our literature in the Twenties. It was Marxism that revived it, and that saved the intellectuals from fascism by giving a democratic form and method for their inchoate protests…

“One might venture to outline roughly the steps by which the decade of the Thirties unfolded:

“1. The economic crisis and the Wall Street crash.

“2. The misery grows of twenty million disinherited and unemployed Americans…

“3. On March 6, 1930, a million unemployed American men and women…demonstrate in all the cities, demanding not the wretched bones of private charity, but unemployment insurance as the democratic right of every citizen and worker.

“4. This mighty demonstration set the tone of the decade. It became a decade of social struggle, instead of defeatism and despair, in literature a Maxim Gorky decade, instead of a T.S. Eliot or lost generation decade.

“5. Thousands of professionals, intellectuals and other middle-class people found themselves attracted to Marxism and communism as an adequate answer to their own problems and despairs.

“6. Many writers changed rapidly in the furnace fires of those first bewildering years of the depression. A Congress of such writers was called by an organizing committee in 1935.

“7. Other congresses took place among artists, dancers, musicians, the various arts and professions…

“8. It is a pioneering movement, comparatively small yet able to join its pressure with that of the economic problems of unemployment upon the government, until the great Federal Arts Projects are forced upon Washington, just as works projects and home relief were similarly won for the American masses…