This chapter addresses Sterling A. Brown’s essays and blues-based poems, particularly those appearing in his 1932 collection Southern Road, to raise questions of commodification in the context of the technologized recording and dissemination of African American musical forms, especially the blues. The chapter claims that in Brown’s work (and that of other commentators), the folksong collector emerges as a figure antithetical to the commodification of folk forms suggested by the phonograph. Brown’s attitude toward the phonograph was ambivalent: He embraced it at times, and at others dismissed it as an emblem of commodification and cultural appropriation. The phonograph, however, emerged within a shifting set of cultural practices in which the boundaries between live performance and recorded sound, as well as bodies and recording apparatuses, became permeable and negotiable. Thus, even when Brown’s poems celebrate the blues as an uncommodified oral cultural form indissociable from its social and material milieu in the folk community, as in his iconic poem “Ma Rainey,” the phonograph becomes a kind of vanishing mediator between the poem and its vernacular sources, as Brown’s poems’ constructions of orality are underwritten by its inescapable technologized presence.

This chapter analyzes the debates over inclusion of parents in the survivor benefit program under the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act and the design and implementation of dependency standards for parents. Definitions and measures of dependency varied between different eligible groups. Qualifying for benefits proved difficult for aged Americans under administrative practices which privileged dependency centered on the nuclear family model. These benefits mirrored the occupational exclusions found in Old Age and Survivors Insurance, thus limiting access based on race, gender, and citizenship. Survivor benefits for parents are in a middle ground between means-tested and contributory systems in the spectrum of American social policy. While initially facing a means test, parent recipients were then presumed to be dependent for their lifetime, thus avoiding the continued investigations in OAA. Once dependency was established, the program’s administration placed recipients in the contributory track of social policy.

The book’s coda addresses an economic and cultural shift in national focus from production toward consumption that took place in response to the theory that the Depression was a “crisis of underconsumption.” According to this logic, capitalism could best be salvaged by stimulating consumer buying power, and thus by bolstering demand for the emerging commodities associated with what Rita Barnard has called the “culture of abundance.” This book thus concludes by proposing that a Depression-era gravitational shift from a producerist model associated with Fordist industrialism toward the mass consumption that would define the postwar period was paralleled by a displacement of the notion of the writer (or poet) as a producer toward one of the writer (or poet) as consumer. This poetics of mass consumerism can be seen in its offing in the Depression-era work of George Oppen and Mina Loy, but it reaches its fullest expression in the postwar poetry of John Ashbery, as well as the work of more recent poets such as Robert Fitterman and Juliana Spahr.

This chapter focuses on Charles Reznikoff’s 1934 version of his long poem Testimony, which consists almost entirely of collaged-together excerpts from nineteenth-century trial transcripts. The chapter proposes that Testimony utilizes these materials to suggest a link between past and present violence and social fragmentation, rejecting narratives of progress associated with the modern American nation and tacitly embracing the “debunking” imperative animating the work of interwar historians such as Caroline Ware. Reznikoff’s text is organized around the spectacle of the body in pain as a galvanizing scene within the modern public sphere, where public affect and social belonging were generated through collective acts of witnessing (and often perpetrating) violence and disaster. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the final subsection of Testimony, titled “Depression,” draws its subject matter from the aftermath of the “Depression” of 1873, as the text proposes this earlier period as a parallel to the crisis of the 1930s. In recalling this earlier period, the chapter claims further, Testimony proposes a negative vision of economic and technological modernity by revealing its human collateral, as well as the cyclical nature of modern social and economic crisis.

The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

This chapter argues that responsible relative laws were one strategy states employed to contest federal efforts to modernize relief programs and limit state and local authority. Fiscal control and home rule were central to states’ resistance. Conflicts often arose between officials and agencies at all levels of government: local, state, and federal. In the post–World War II years, states strengthened requirements for relatives, especially adult children, to provide support in Old Age Assistance; they established or strengthened provisions to recoup OAA costs from recipients’ estates or required property liens as a condition of eligibility. States’ commitment to support requirements in the post–World War II era were part of the larger backlash against escalating public assistance costs, and OAA is a central target of this backlash. The goal was to ensure that family resources were exhausted before public support was provided in the name of fiscal control.

The expansion of responsible relative laws, including property lien and recovery laws, generated significant opposition and activism against these provisions. This chapter addresses the key critiques of those provisions, relying in part on the voices of recipients of Old Age Assistance and their families. Opponents contested the administration of these laws and the family norms underscoring support obligations. Advocacy organizations fought these provisions’ enforcement and pushed for their repeal. The organized response to responsible relative laws, as well as protests by individual recipients via fair hearings and court challenges, represent an early version of the welfare rights movement. While the efforts yielded limited success until the 1970s, they did bring attention to administrative practices in public assistance administration and offered a voice to the elderly relying on public benefits and the families required to provide support.

This chapter proposes that Louis Zukofsky’s ongoing work on his long poem “A” was animated by a strong investment in restoring a sense of language’s historical and material situatedness – its social ontology – as a means of combatting what Zukofsky and other contemporary writers saw as its vulgarization within an emerging commodity culture. I argue that in the eighth and ninth sections of “A,” written between mid 1935 and early 1940, Zukofsky equates labor and language, revealing both to be historically contingent and socially produced. I begin the chapter by returning to the debate between Zukofsky and Ezra Pound over the concept of the commodity to reveal an under-discussed aspect of their quarrel, namely its basis in the two poets’ attitudes concerning language’s relation to materiality. I then move on to align the treatment of the commodity in “A”-8 and (the first half of) “A”-9, an often-discussed aspect of these sections, with their seldom noted but equally important thematization of language. Focusing on the equivalences the poem draws between labor and language, I claim that the project of restoring both to their concrete historical conditions of social production furnishes a key to reading Zukofsky’s long poem.

This chapter examines the seldom-discussed poetry and editorial activities of Norman Macleod, a Southwest-based poet who had strong ties to both influential modernists of an earlier generation such as Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, and the younger generation of communist-affiliated writers gathered around the little magazine New Masses. Macleod was an internationally visible figure during the Depression decade, when he published in many prominent venues and released two collections of poetry, Horizons of Death (1934) and Thanksgiving before November (1936). The chapter analyzes Macleod’s poems alongside his editorial activities to argue that Macleod challenged modernity’s developmentalist logic as he cultivated a regionalist aesthetics that positioned the Southwest – particularly its Chicanx and Indigenous cultures – as holistic, vital, and integrated, in contrast to the alienation and destruction he associated with the cities of the East. The chapter also scrutinizes the tendency of Macleod’s work toward cultural appropriation in its quasi-ethnographic relationship with the cultures of the Southwest.