Left Behind
The Great Depression is generally understood in outward terms: a time when economic and social structures collapsed, leaving millions struggling for daily survival. President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs provided work and social infrastructure for dignified living and hope. Nearly a century later, it’s difficult to access that period’s inner terrain of lived experience, barely suggested by its vocabulary of “crashes,” “panics,” “depression,” and dark humor of “Hoovervilles.” This page explores the 1930s’ public and private experience of abandonment, a fear (or realization) that some individual no longer mattered, had become invisible. How did the visual arts show this condition—besides the over-familiar photographs of destitution—and acknowledge that person with dignity?
The two prints shown here suggest that there were many different approaches. Gyula Zilzer’s Two Hoboes (1936) depicts an intimate, almost domestic setting. Two men are undertaking work that must already be long-familiar to them: chopping wood for a fire, cooking, finally sitting down to rest. While one persists in the small pleasures of music and reading newspapers to stay connected with the world, the other’s face shows a deep exhaustion. Whether his prosthetic leg is the consequence of war or a train accident, it evokes the daily effort required just to persist. Zilzer, himself a refugee from fascism in Europe, depicts abandonment most subtly in the scene’s composition: the shallow space of its foreground details daily life of the hobos; however, its background shows only the outline of trees and stylized “speed lines,” as if the two have fallen out of time. Mabel Dwight’s Lonely House (1938) doesn’t depict any human figures, instead leaving a trail of inferences that entangle a viewer’s attention. A small, sturdy house is showing signs of neglect: damaged shutters and chimneys; trees and plants overrunning its built features. A turbulent sky casts its pattern upon the landscape. The house still may be inhabited, for we see light in the small windows at left, but in some ways Dwight’s scene anticipates Virginia Wade Burton's children's book, The Little House (1942), which would teach readers to identify with an abandoned home.
A condition of abandonment, of being left behind, scales up from the interpersonal to the social to Calvinist eschatology: a condition of preterition; a passing-over of the non-elect (Rubenstein). The Gilded Age’s cruel economics, articulated by John D. Rockefeller as “merely a survival of the fittest...the working out of a law of nature and a law of God,” was countered by Roosevelt’s assertion of a universal “human rights” in his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech. In that vast space between the two visions, artists rendered the human consequences.
Works Consulted
-- Rockefeller, John D., Jr. Quoted in William J. Ghent, Our Benevolent Feudalism. 1902. Link
-- Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Annual Message (Four Freedoms) to Congress.” 1941. U.S. National Archives. Link
-- Rubenstein, Richard. “The Elect and the Preteriate.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 59.4 (Winter 1976): 357-373. Link