Constitutional Debates in American Popular Culture from the Turn of the Twentieth Century to the New Deal

Kimber Charles Pearce

Maxwell H. Bloomfield. Peaceful Revolution: Constitutional Change and American Culture from Progressivism to the New Deal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ix + 209 pages. Notes and index. $35.00.

Maxwell Bloomfield’s study of constitutional development from the Progressive era to the coming of the New Deal concentrates on the Constitution’s impact on popular culture and the broader appeal that constitutional idealism has made to the American imagination. As a secondary theme, the book also considers how alternative publications by members of racial and ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups have functioned as carriers of constitutional discourse forms. Legal scholars and historians occasionally assess public reaction to Supreme Court decisions and other constitutional issues by studying media messages. Few cover the range of materials that Bloomfield does in his study, including poems, plays, novels, magazine articles, and films. His cultural history of how the idea of “peaceful revolution,” as an article of constitutional faith in the United States, was communicated to the public during the first three decades of the twentieth century illuminates the reactions of ordinary Americans to constitutional change. Yet, the rationale for Bloomfield’s choices of cultural materials and constitutional developments covered in his book is not entirely clear, which makes his study seem somewhat random and selective.

Bloomfield begins with a retrospective look at how Americans turned to the law to define the United States as a modern republic during the period after the American Revolution. Chapter 1 traces the rise of a “cult of the Constitution” during the late eighteenth century, following the work of the Philadelphia Convention, which brought about the new federal government in 1789. Bloomfield argues that the interstate oratorical, literary, and press coverage of Shays Rebellion in the fall of 1786 favored the cause of constitutional revision at the Philadelphia Convention and, with the adoption of the new Constitution, the idea that populist violence was no longer an acceptable method of political transformation. This public fondness for the idea of “peaceful revolution” was short-lived however, as a host of national issues from the 1790s to the Civil War led different groups of constitutional commentators to rekindle the debates of the Federalists and Antifederalists. What follows in Bloomfield’s book is a cultural analysis of various manifestations of this debate over the Constitution between Americans who favored an expansive regulatory state and those who remained suspicious of federal authority and longed for the decentralized Republic of the Founders.

Chapters 2 and 3 carry the reader from the 1870s to the 1920s, a period when reformers, such as Grangers, Populists, and Progressive idealists of various stripes urged the expansion of government power to control the economy. Bloomfield captures the Progressive vision in chapter 2 with a discussion of how constitutional commentators addressed the general public through utopian fiction, topical novels and poems, plays, cartoons, and the newest medium, the movies. In chapter 3, he demonstrates how the tenets of Progressivism were only briefly and partially realized during World War I, when the federal government assumed an unprecedented centralization of power to mobilize the military and the resources of the nation.

High points of Bloomfield’s analysis of the Progressive era come when he analyzes the utopian fiction of Samuel Merwin in The Citadel and Edward M. House in Philip Dru: Administrator—two novels that reflected the philosophy and paradoxes of Progressivism at the height of the movement’s popularity in 1912. The account of Merwin’s and House’s efforts to project a new constitutional universe to the American public transitions effectively into a discussion of how other writers used fiction to argue for and against the suppression of minority rights. Of particular note is Bloomfield’s examination of the literary advocacy of Cleveland attorney Charles W. Chestnutt and Baptist preacher Sutton E. Griggs, whose works “describe a caste society in which whites wield dominant political and economic power and ruthlessly suppress all efforts by blacks to claim the rights of American citizens” (34). A brief discussion of how suffrage organizations used and ultimately abandoned movies as a medium to maximize publicity for the enfranchisement of women also appears in chapter 2, along with coverage of the turn-of-the-century efforts of proponents of a federal income tax amendment and a constitutional amendment to bring about the popular election of U.S. senators. The reader may find the randomness of the topics disconcerting and lacking in depth of analysis, but Bloomfield reminds us, in reference to the advocacy of the suffragists, that “fictional narrative and constitutional law seldom interact in any clear-cut fashion” (41).

Bloomfield’s analysis of the selling of Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism” in chapter 3 begins with a fairly conventional critique of the efforts of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information to mobilize popular support for conscription, Liberty Bonds, and wartime controls of various sorts. The climax of the chapter occurs in the second half with an analysis of how wartime dissidents fought to resist government control of channels of mass communication and to discover new ways to reach their audiences. Bloomfield’s discussion of the struggles of the African-American Press corps, Wobblies, and socialists to make their antiwar arguments to the American public demonstrates how the Progressive vision of a majoritarian constitutional utopia led to the stigmatization of dissenting voices during and for nearly a decade after World War I. The portion of chapter 3 devoted to wartime dissent is thoughtful in its presentation of the strategies of anti-war publishers and, as Bloomfield points out, the surviving wartime publications “offer a valuable corrective to the mainstream propaganda of the Wilson administration” (62).

In chapters 4 and 5, Bloomfield examines the rise and fall of the constitutional counter-revolution of the 1920s against the expanded federal regulatory power brought on by World War I. In chapter 4, he approaches the decade of 1918 to 1929 as a revival of constitutional worship in the United States aimed at reaffirming constitutional limitations on federal power in the face of a “Red Menace,” Prohibition, the rise of consumer society, and seething national issues concerning race and immigration. In chapter 5, he discusses how the laissez-faire constitutionalism of the 1920s came under attack in America after the Wall Street crash of October 1929. The two chapters follow the swing of the pendulum of constitutional criticism from the post-war desire for a constitutional government, which would protect the personal rights of all citizens against invasion by the state, to the Depression-era renewal of Progressive themes of a constitutional utopia.

Bloomfield argues in chapter 4 that the “constitutional fiction of the Progressive era found no echo in the postwar decade, as popular novelists again celebrated the virtues of rugged individualism and private control of the economy” (82). Following the lead of American historians, such as Charles F. Horne, who revamped courses in American history and the social sciences to promote private property, personal liberty, and private enterprise, novelists celebrated the virtues of free market ideology. Representations of archetypal self-made men were typical in the constitutional fiction of the early 1920s, as in Garet Garrett’s 1922 novel written for the Saturday Evening Post, The Driver, about an entrepreneur who transforms a bankrupt railroad into a successful business. Bloomfield’s analyses of such fiction, which condemned all government interference in the marketplace, is supplemented by an examination of the failed efforts of the NAACP to launch an all-out drive in support of a federal anti-lynching law during 1921-1922. By juxtaposing his discussion of the New Era culture of postwar materialism with that of the reality of racial injustice in America, Bloomfield provides a useful view of the opposing tendencies of the 1920s with regard to possibilities for constitutional reform.

The collapsing economy of the 1930s motivated creative writers to put Herbert Hoover’s New Era policies on trial and revisit ways to correct the Constitution that had been imagined by novelists, playwrights, and other authors before World War I. Chapter 5 begins with an examination of reactionary messages that criticized the recovery efforts launched by Hoover and members of Congress during the Depression and, in particular, the president’s reluctance to engage federal measures that would “undermine individual initiative and destroy the traditional balance between state and federal authority” (102). The highlights of the chapter are Bloomfield’s discussions of reactionary dramas produced in Hollywood and for the stage, as part of the chorus of disapproval of the policies of Hoover and other politicians. Especially intriguing is his coverage of two films released in 1932 before the national elections, Washington Masquerade (MGM) and Washington Merry-Go-Round (MGM). The movies sent mixed messages to viewers by arguing for the need to elect honest reformers to Congress, but at the same time they contended that constitutional procedures and existing institutions are not adequate to protect Americans in times of crisis. Bloomfield concludes that the paradoxical nature of the messages in such films and other protest literature “recalled the Progressive tendency to blame individuals for the failure of the system” (123), while simultaneously envisioning a utopian reshaping of the Constitution. Nevertheless, Progressive themes in fiction from the Depression era, Bloomfield argues, were ones that Franklin D. Roosevelt would draw upon to frame the rhetoric of his New Deal in 1933.

Chapter 6 examines a number of Progressive messages suggesting political and constitutional change that were prevalent in pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and other media in 1931 and 1932, and which Bloomfield argues Roosevelt alluded to in his address to the nation on Inauguration Day, 1933–the focus of chapter 7. Bloomfield demonstrates how, as the 1932 elections approached, utopian visions of a revitalized government, and even fantasies of a presidential dictatorship, appeared with an increasing frequency and paved the way in the popular imagination for the coming of the New Deal. In the context of hunger marches, rent strikes, taxpayer revolts, foreclosure riots, and other disturbances, writers prescribed an extraconstitutional dictatorship to launch a new utopian system.

The most remarkable of these visions, Bloomfield contends, was the novel, Gabriel Over the White House, anonymously published in 1933, and later revealed to be the work of Englishman Thomas Fredric Tweed. Tweed’s book appeared just as President-elect Roosevelt promised the American people a “new deal,” and it became popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Judson (Jud) Hammond, Roosevelt’s fictional counterpart in the novel, establishes a “New Order” – a constitutional reconstruction that ends the economic crisis. William Randolph Hearst bought the rights to Tweed’s novel and made changes to the narrative in a movie version of Gabriel that reflected his own program for ending the Depression, which involved an authoritarianism that some reviewers regarded as fascistic. After the Hays Office demanded that references to “revolution” be removed from the film, Gabriel was released to critical acclaim in 1933, and became one of the top six box office attractions of April of that year. Bloomfield notes that Roosevelt screened the film several times at the White House and that the authoritarian rhetoric of his inaugural address several weeks before the release of the picture coincided with the movie’s themes of presidential rule. He devotes chapter 7 to an explanation of how Roosevelt’s speech, “one of the greatest ever delivered by an American president, drew upon familiar Progressive themes and stereotypes, but added some radical rhetoric hitherto found mainly in works of fiction” (160). In the end, Bloomfield observes, Roosevelt’s rhetoric posed no threat to the existing order, but rather directed popular anger toward individual wrongdoers, which was typical of earlier Progressive polemics. However, Roosevelt’s words were particularly well received by government spokesmen abroad, such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who found in his speech affirmations of their own authoritarian ideologies.

Bloomfield’s book does an exemplary job of reconstructing popular culture from both dominant and marginalized sources that sought to persuade the American public that even the most radical of constitutional reforms could be achieved through orderly procedures of “peaceful revolution.” The study supplies scholars with a useful model of cultural-historical analysis by maintaining a clean chronological organization in which to explain how competing ideas of constitutional idealism were communicated to reinforce a powerful constitutional tradition during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The single flaw in Bloomfield’s book, though some might see it as a strong point, is the way he approaches the varied events and materials he turns to make his case that the popular media contributed greatly to Americans’ faith in the Constitution. Bloomfield’s book could have been twice its current length to allow for a more thorough critique of the texts he selects to support his arguments, and the quality of the arguments, as they are, would have made the extra effort worthwhile. In the end, however, his choices of unconventional sources, in Bloomfield’s own words, do “help us to achieve a deeper understanding of the fears and expectations aroused in ordinary American by the prospect of constitutional change” (171).

Kimber Charles Pearce is associate professor of English and Director of the Communication Certificate Program at St. Anselm College.