What Were The Major Cultural Changes Of The 1930s?

Culture in the Thirties

Despite the Great Depression, culture in the 1930s, both commercial and funded by New Deal programs as part of the relief try, flourished.

Learning Objectives

Depict the culture in the 1930s

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Despite the Great Depression 's devastating impact on many Americans, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of many influential cultural trends. Literature, arts, music, and cinema of the period became vehicles for establishing and promoting what would exist presented  as truly American traditions and values.
• A number of New Bargain programs were established to back up artists, writers, musicians, and theater professionals. Projects funded through these programs were often seen every bit serving an important mission of bringing culture and arts to the masses.
• Fine arts followed both global and regional trends, including Social Realism, American Regionalism, and Precisionism. Photography likewise became a pop medium of documenting the lives of ordinary Americans.
• The 1930s came to be known as the "golden age" of Hollywood. Many popular depression-budget and epic expensive movies that reached the status of classic were produced during the period.
• The Move Picture show (or Hollywood) Product Code of 1930 forbade sure subjects from being addressed or portrayed in picture show.
• The 1930s were also a very important and productive decade for American literature.

Central Terms

• Public Works of Art Projection: The first New Deal program that employed artists to create public art works. It ran from December 1933 to June 1934.
• Section of Painting and Sculpture: A New Deal programme that aimed to select high quality fine art to decorate public buildings in the form of murals, making art accessible to all people.
• Federal Fine art Projection: The visual arts arm of the Federal Project Number One (under the Works Progress Assistants) operating from August 29, 1935, until June 30, 1943. Through the program, artists created posters, murals, and paintings, some of which still stand among the most significant pieces of public art in the country.
• Motion Picture (or Hollywood) Production Code of 1930: A set of rules and guidelines that major Hollywood motion-picture show studios agreed upon under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations that sought to remove what was considered obscene and indecent from the movie industry.

The Great Depression and American Culture

Despite the Great Depression's devastating bear upon on many Americans, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of many influential cultural trends. Historians note that literature, arts, music, and picture palace of the catamenia flourished and became vehicles for establishing and promoting what would exist presented as truly American traditions and values–a phenomenon that was a response to the demoralizing consequence of the economic crisis. The New Bargain, with its core idea of the regime'southward intervention in the economy, politics, and social life, included also programs that funded and promoted various cultural projects, many of them focusing on the documentation of the experience of ordinary Americans during the dramatic economic depression.

The New Deal and Culture

The first curt-lived New Deal program that supported cultural projects was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) that ran from Dec 1933 to June 1934. PWAP was a relief program that created jobs for artists who were hired to paint scenes depicting gimmicky ordinary American life in public buildings and spaces. PWAP was replaced by the Federal Art Projection (FAP), ane of the cultural programs under the 1935 Works Progress Administration (WPA) and a much more than ambitious and expansive arts plan than its predecessor. FAP provided funding for artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theater design, and craft. It established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public fine art without brake to content or bailiwick affair, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Low. Additionally, in 1934, the Section of Painting and Sculpture was established in club to commission high quality murals in public buildings. Artists worked with government-provided guidelines that focused on realistic themes relevant to the life of local communities.

FAP was part of the Federal Project Number One, a WPA umbrella program that supported not merely visual arts just also literature (under the Federal Writers' Project), music (the Federal Music Project), and theater (the Federal Theater Project). Writers, musicians, and theater artists were funded to create both their ain original projects and projects under the auspices of the authorities. Documenting what was seen as American traditions drove many of the latter. For example, literary professionals were hired to produce the Country Guide Series–a serial of pop guidebooks for every state. Writers and musicians engaged in a series of ethnographic and archival projects that aimed to preserve American history and cultural legacy, including collecting oral histories among former slaves, recording traditional folk songs, or preserving and organizing archival collections. Public funding was as well used to make theater productions easily available to mass audiences.

Arts

Visual arts in the United States of the 1930s followed both global and regional trends. Many of the works created under WPA belonged to Social Realism–an international fine art movement that depicted the everyday life of ordinary people, most notably, the working class and the poor. The move's aim was not simply to represent just to critique the realities of social inequalities and injustice. Related to Social Realism was American Regionalism, which depicted rural America, both realistic and as a subject of myths and folk legends, also equally images drawn from American history. Regionalism and Social Realism are sometimes described as a rural branch and an urban branch (respectively) of American Scene Painting, although borders between the meanings of these three terms are not always clear. Another move of the era, Precisionism, focused on images of urban industrial America. While sometimes differences between artists and fine art works belonging to these movements may be blurry, the i characteristic that they all shared was realism, or focusing on depicting American life as it was.

The delivery to realism resulted also in the popularization of photography. For example, under the Farm Security Administration, a New Bargain agency that aimed to combat rural poverty, photographers documented rural areas and the misery of working grade rural Americans. The works of such photographers as Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans remain among the well-nigh iconic images of the Not bad Depression. Much later, these documentary photography projects would exist criticized for their racial bias. Despite the fact that at the time, and then many poor rural Americans were black, the New Deal photographs create an impression that poor rural America was predominantly white.

In architecture and blueprint, the 1930s was the height of Fine art Deco–an eclectic style inspired past industrialization that combines traditional craft motifs with Machine Age imagery and materials.

Migrant Female parent: Dorothea Lange's Migrant Female parent–an iconic image of the Dandy Depression–depicts Florence Owens Thompson, age 32, a mother of 7 children and a migrant worker, in Nipomo, California.

Hollywood

1930 marks the beginning of what is considered to exist the "aureate historic period" of Hollywood, a period which lasted through the 1940s. The studio system was at its meridian, with studios having corking control over creative decisions. While in the first years of the Nifty Depression all the major studios experienced losses (much less people went to see movies and ticket prices decreased), already in the mid-1930s, they began to record profits.

A lasting instance of the studio influence was the Film (or Hollywood) Production Lawmaking of 1930 (known likewise as the Hays Lawmaking, after Will H. Hays, who was the president of the Motility Moving picture Producers and Distributors of America). In response to a number of scandals in the 1920s and under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations, the studios adopted a serial of topics that were to be avoided (e.thousand., strictly defined sexual content and ridicule of clergy) and guidelines for how certain topics should be depicted (e.k., a buss could not final longer than three seconds). The code was not strictly implemented until 1934, when the Production Lawmaking Assistants was established. The PCA enforced the code past reviewing and making suggestions on all studio scripts before they went into production, so doing the aforementioned with all completed films before issuing a PCA document. Directors frequently institute a mode to dispense the codes that were enforced more and more loosely during the mail service-Globe War menstruum and finally abased in the 1960s.

As the belatedly 1920s witnessed the popularization and commercialization of a audio film, both popular and more ambitious cinema flourished in the 1930s. A number of pop genres, including gangster films, musicals, comedies, or monster movies, attracted mass audiences, regardless of the economic crunch. Careers of some of iconic Hollywood's performers too flourished in the 1930s, including Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Errol Flynn (best known for his role as Robin Hood), or child star Shirley Temple. Charlie Chaplin, the greatest star of the silent era, successfully transitioned into audio film.

In addition to more popular and low-budget genres, the most acclaimed works of the period were much more than ambitious and expensive films with epic stories at their center. Adaptations of classic or all-time-selling literary works, biographies of famous individuals, and large adventure movies were the most common examples. Among them are such classics of American movie theater as King Kong (1933), Anna Karenina (1935),The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Literature

The Peachy Depression produced some of the greatest works in American literature. Like to visual artists, writers focused on blunt and direct representation of American life and offered social criticism, coming often from the perspective of leftist political views. John Steinbeck (1902–1968) became the quintessential author of the era. He ofttimes wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life. The Grapes of Wrath, considered his masterpiece, is a socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family unit from Oklahoma, and their journey to California in search of a improve life. Other pop novels include Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and E of Eden. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Other of import literary works of the Great Depression that reached the status of American classics include William Faulkner 's Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and As I Lay Dying; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Nighttime;Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; John Dos Passos'south U.South.A.trilogy; Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra; and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Amid American authors in the 1930s who wrote their usually more than controversial or experimental and less realistic works were Gertrude Stein, who in 1933 published the memoir of her Paris years entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Henry Miller, who in the 1930s wrote and published his semi autobiographical novelsTropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn. Although their themes and stylistic innovations exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of American writers, Miller's groundbreaking novels were banned in the U.s.a. until the early 1960s.

The 1930s too witnessed the development of popular literary genres. Pulp fiction magazines began to feature distinctive, gritty, hazard heroes that combined elements of difficult-boiled detective fiction and the fantastic adventures of the before pulp novels. Two particularly noteworthy characters introduced were Doc Savage and The Shadow, who would later on influence the creation of characters such as Superman and Batman. Near the end of the decade, two of the world's nigh iconic superheroes and recognizable fictional characters, Superman and Batman, were introduced in comic books.

Popular Culture

The 1930s witnessed the development of mass cultural trends fueled by contemporary technological advances, including radio and sound film.

Learning Objectives

Depict the popular culture of the 1930's

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Despite the Great Depression, popular culture flourished in the The states in the 1930s. Like to visual arts and literature, popular civilization of the era focused on emphasizing what was presented equally uniquely American experiences and contributions.
• Technological advances like radio and sound in film contributed to the massive popularity these forms of amusement.
• Side by side to jazz, blues, gospel, and folk music, swing jazz became immensely popular in the 1930s.
• Radio, increasingly easily accessibly to near Americans, was the main source of amusement, data, and political propaganda.
• Despite the Nifty Depression, Hollywood and popular film production flourished.
• The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, were a fundamental pop sporting outcome of the era that acquired controversy over Hitler's politics.

Primal Terms

• fireside chats: Term used to describe a series of 30 evening radio conversations (chats) given past President Franklin D. Roosevelt betwixt 1933 and 1944.
• Motility Movie (or Hollywood) Production Lawmaking of 1930: A gear up of rules and guidelines that major Hollywood film studios agreed upon under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations that sought to remove what was considered obscene and indecent from the movie industry.
• Leni Riefenstahl: An innovative and favorite filmmaker of Adolf Hitler. She was commissioned by the High german Olympic Commission to film the games for $7 million and her film, titled Olympia, pioneered many of the techniques now common in the filming of sports.

Despite the Great Depression, popular civilization flourished in the United States in the 1930s. Similar to visual arts and literature, pop culture of the era focused on emphasizing what was presented as uniquely American experiences and contributions. The mass popularization of civilization was as well linked to important technological advances. Many Americans, even in poor rural areas, had admission to phonographs and radios. The latter was incredibly popular in the 1930s, becoming the critical source of data and entertainment. Another contemporary groundbreaking technological development was the popularization of sound film. While in the kickoff years of the Great Depression, Americans did non visit movie theaters as frequently as prior to the economic crisis, in the mid-1930s, cinema was 1 of the favorite forms of entertainment.

Music

Trends in pop music reflected social processes triggered by the economic crunch. Although the Peachy Migration of African Americans from the South (initiated around 1910) slowed downwardly with the onset of the economic depression, hundreds of thousands of black Southerners continued to seek opportunities somewhere else, mostly in northern cities. With the transfer of people, music created and popularized by African Americans, including jazz, blues, and gospel, became increasingly popular in the North. Despite the existing racial inequalities and the ongoing blackness ceremonious rights struggle, the American origins of these musical genres fit into the narrative of uniquely American cultural contributions. Analogously, American folk music, created and performed by both white performers and musicians of color, attracted mass audiences across the country. With their focus on the plight of ordinary Americans, folk songs were now collected and recorded as part of the American legacy by the Library of Congress and artists working for the Works Progress Administration.

The 1920s (known as the "Jazz Age") witnessed the transformation of jazz from its modest African American/New Orleans origin to a global phenomenon. By 1930, new forms and styles adult and swing emerged as a dominant form in American music. Virtuoso soloists often led their swing big bands (thus swing was as well known as "big jazz") and their popularity was enormous, too considering swing music developed with corresponding swing trip the light fantastic toe. Live swing bands were broadcast on the radio nationally every evening. Amongst the well-nigh famous bandleaders and arrangers were Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, and Jimmie Lunceford. The pioneer of jazz music, Louis Armstrong, connected to inspire both mass audiences and swain musicians. Musical theater also followed the predominant tendency and contributed some of the most popular standards of the 1930s, including George and Ira Gershwin'southward "Summertime," Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart'south "My Funny Valentine," and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein Two's "All the Things You Are."

Swing uses a potent rhythm section of double bass and drums as the anchor for a lead section of brass instruments such every bit trumpets, trombones, saxophones, clarinets, and sometimes stringed instruments such as violin and guitar at medium to fast tempos and a "lilting" swing time rhythm. The flow between 1935 and 1946 is known every bit the Swing Era.

Radio

The 1930s was the era of the immense popularity of radio. Those Americans who did not own a radio could still access one in their communities through friends or neighbors. Popular content spanned from comedy, with Bob Hope being one of the biggest comedic radio personalities of the fourth dimension, and music, theater, and soap operas, to news and political content. Never earlier was radio used as such a powerful tool of dissemination of political messages. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed about and advocated for New Deal policies in his fairly regular "fireside chats." His political opponents likewise used radio to concenter their supporters. Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, FDR's two most fervent populist critics, built their vast pop support through radio shows that attracted tens of millions of Americans. In 1938, Orson Welles' famous circulate of War of the Worlds by H.Yard. Wells, caused panic among the show'south listeners who feared that the conflict between humans and aliens (the field of study of Wells' novel) was real. Although historians debate over how wide the audition of the show was and thus how widespread the panic could be, the episode demonstrates the incredible power of radio circulate at the time.

Fireside chat on government and capitalism (September xxx, 1934)

Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House in Washington, D.C., delivering a national radio address in 1934. National Archives and Records Administration

Hollywood

1930 marks the beginning of what is considered to be the "aureate age" of Hollywood, a menses which lasted through the 1940s. The studio system was at its tiptop, with studios having great control over artistic decisions. While in the outset years of the Great Depression all the major studios experienced losses (much less people went to see movies and ticket prices decreased), in the mid-1930s, they began to record profits.

A lasting instance of the studio influence was the Motion-picture show (or Hollywood) Production Lawmaking of 1930 (known likewise equally the Hays Lawmaking, afterwards Volition H. Hays, who was the president of the Movement Picture Producers and Distributors of America). In response to a number of scandals in the 1920s and under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations, the studios adopted a series of topics that were to exist avoided (e.m., strictly defined sexual content and the ridicule of clergy) and guidelines for how certain topics should exist depicted (eastward.m., a buss could not terminal longer than iii seconds). The code was not strictly implemented until 1934, when the Production Code Administration was established. The PCA enforced the lawmaking by reviewing and making suggestions on all studio scripts before they went into production, and so doing the same with all completed films before issuing a PCA certificate. Directors oft found a way to manipulate the codes that were enforced more than and more than loosely during the post-World War period and finally abandoned in the 1960s.

As the late 1920s witnessed the popularization and commercialization of a audio film, both popular and more than aggressive movie house flourished in the 1930s. A number of pop genres, including gangster films, musicals, comedies, or monster movies, attracted mass audiences, regardless of the economical crisis. Careers of some of the iconic Hollywood's performers also flourished in the 1930s, including Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Errol Flynn (best known for his role every bit Robin Hood), and child star Shirley Temple. Charlie Chaplin, the greatest star of the silent era, successfully transitioned into audio film.

In add-on to more than popular and depression-budget genres, the about acclaimed works of the menstruum were much more than aggressive and expensive films with epic stories in their center. Adaptations of archetype and best-selling literary works, biographies of famous individuals, and big gamble movies were the most mutual examples. Among them are such classics of American movie theater as Male monarch Kong (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939), andGrapes of Wrath (1940).

1936 Summertime Olympics

The 1936 Summertime Olympics was an international multi-sport event that was held in Berlin, Deutschland. To outdo the Los Angeles games of 1932, the Nazis built a new 100,000-seat track and field stadium, six gymnasiums, and many other smaller arenas. The games were the first to exist televised, and radio broadcasts reached 41 countries. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a favorite of Adolf Hitler, was commissioned by the German Olympic Committee to film the Games for $seven million. Her moving picture, entitled Olympia, pioneered many of the techniques now common in the filming of sports.

Hitler saw the games as an opportunity to promote his regime and its ethics of racial supremacy. The United States considered boycotting the games, as to participate in the festivity might exist considered a sign of support for the Nazi government and its anti-Semitic policies. However, others argued that the Olympic Games should not reverberate political views, but rather exist strictly a contest of the greatest athletes. The 1936 Summer Olympics ultimately boasted the largest number of participating nations of whatsoever Olympics to that point. However, some individual athletes, including Jewish Americans Milton Light-green and Norman Cahners, chose to cold-shoulder the games.

Jesse Owens: American track and field star Jesse Owens on the podium after winning the long spring at the 1936 Summer Olympics.  He was the most successful athlete at the games and, as blackness man, was credited with disrupting Hitler's white supremacist vision and message.

Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/culture-in-the-thirties/

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