Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

Almost half a million men, women, and children took to the road westward, hoping for a new beginning. The main artery for this great migration was the newly completed Route 66, running from Chicago to Santa Monica Pier in California.

In the best case, the Okies were portrayed as primitive, Bible-thumping hillbillies.

H. L. Mencken,

recommended that all Okies be sterilized.

The prejudice about simple-minded, indolent Okies of inferior stock was in part a revival of well-established attitudes toward blacks,

The new migrants were humiliated, and also surprised. They were, after all, white, of Anglo-Saxon stock, and strictly Protestant. They had anticipated that the going might be rough in their new home, but they had never expected to be treated as second-class human beings.

And perhaps the Okies were despised for another reason. They were the ragged, living embodiment of a great dream failing due to shortsighted greed, reckless exploitation of resources, and priorities dictated by profits. They were proof that the American dream could collapse not only due to bad luck or lack of ability or determination but also through a flaw in the vision itself, through the lure of the quick buck and the siren voice of untold fortunes just around the corner.

In the end, the tide of public opinion was turned by artists.

Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road

eclipsed in 1938 with the publication of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath,

Steinbeck blamed the Dust Bowl catastrophe on a system blinded by profits and estranged from nature.

Whereas many readers felt compassion for the characters and their plight, others were convinced that the author’s engagement with the dregs of humanity was nothing short of socialist and smacked of revolution.

But the task of creating the most complete and most iconic record of the hopeless misery of the Okies fell to the photographers.

Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Arthur Rothstein

film documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, Striker explained to the American public how intensive farming was partly to blame for the unfolding ecological disaster.

For all those wanting to come from the outside, things were harder still. Once the world’s premier goal for immigration, the United States had become progressively closed to new arrivals.

After the crash, as life grew ever harder for many of those just off the boats, America had for the first time in its history become a country of emigration.

Hitler’s Nazi Germany. It also triggered a wave of migration.

potential emigrants besieged embassies, desperate for the elusive visas.

In Paris, the languid and glamorous “lost generation” of American writers was replaced by another, less fashionable, more anxious group. A “Little Germany,” consisting of bookshops and delicatessens, arose there during the 1930s.

In the grip of the Depression and enduring often bloody warfare between the radical factions of the right and left, France was not a welcoming land for immigrants.

the scandal surrounding the Polish-born Jewish financier Alexandre Stavisky,

Emigration made people frighteningly vulnerable. Many of those coming to Paris were intellectuals who found themselves terribly reduced in their new home by the loss of their native language, their central professional asset as well as their most important social one.

Professionals such as doctors, engineers, and lawyers could not practice their professions without having passed the relevant French examinations; other skilled and unskilled workers were forced into the shadow economy, if they could find work at all. The nostalgic evocations of emigrant cafés filled with cultivated men and women who had nothing to do all day other than read the papers and debate politics contained some truth, but many of those reading and debating were in fact enduring the enforced idleness of unemployment

Some four hundred different German-language newspapers and magazines were published regularly (though not always for long) during the 1930s in Paris alone;

Amsterdam was another important destination for emigrants.

local bookseller and publisher Emanuel Querido established a branch of his firm to publish works written in German by exiles from the Nazis; he also founded Die Sammlung (The Collection), a journal for a wider group of literary exiles.

Among Querido’s contributors were stars such as Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, Lion Feuchtwanger, Aldous Huxley, and Jean Cocteau, as well as authors whose names had previously been known mainly in the German-speaking world, such as the poet Stefan Heym and the novelists Jakob Wasserman, Max Brod, and Joseph Roth,

Querido, himself Jewish, still managed to help many exiled writers. He would eventually die at the hands of the Nazis in the Polish concentration camp Sobibór in 1943.

The US immigration authorities,

were determined to deter and if necessary deport all immigrants who did not bring sufficient economic assets with them. Moreover, there was a clearly anti-Semitic set of priorities at work in the approval process for potential new citizens.

By 1933, however, most German immigrants were Jewish, and the US authorities became noticeably more reluctant to grant visas to German nationals.

FOR SOME GERMAN REFUGEES, the only help came through family connections, such as that of the Freudenheims to their distant American uncle. For others, it helped to be famous.

For actors, composers, directors, and others in the film industry, the only way of ensuring an American visa was an invitation from Hollywood, a document guaranteed to convince the immigration authorities. This was not easy to procure, but it did provide a way out for a great number of artists, sometimes on spurious contracts. Their careers, though, more often than not suffered serious interruptions, from which some never recovered.

Paul Henreid;

Casablanca.

The cast had been selected with authenticity in mind, particularly regarding the patrons’ appearance and accents. In this respect, the casting agents uncovered an embarrassment of riches, finding actors whose personal stories often matched those of the characters they played.

As the situation in Europe grew ever more dangerous, desperate would-be emigrants, unable to obtain visas for preferred destinations such as the United States, proved willing to go almost anywhere that seemed safe.

South America became an important emigrant destination.

Karl Popper fled as far as it was possible to flee,

New Zealand.

Perhaps the most extraordinary, because furthest removed culturally, of all places of exile was Shanghai, the legendary city of commerce, vice, and urban sophistication.

After 1918, through years of increasing nationalism, anti-Semitism, and strife, Palestine had come to be seen by many Jews as a viable option, or even as an absolute historical necessity; others rejected it with equal vehemence.

Especially for younger Jews in Europe, involvement in Zionist youth organizations and sports clubs had been an effective way of countering their progressive exclusion in societies increasingly preoccupied by their own respective national myths.

There were many different and often contradictory curren...

determinedly ...

Orthodox communities

pragmatic Socialists

far-right nationalists

The goal of Zionism was not only to establish a Jewish state in Palestine (indeed, there was a major, ongoing debate about both the necessity of a state and its possible location) but also to create a new kind of Jew.