The Green Depression

American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s

Matthew M. Lambert

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496830425
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Dust storms. Flooding. The fear of nuclear fallout. While literary critics associate authors of the 1930s and '40s with leftist political and economic thought, they often ignore concern in the period's literary and cultural works with major environmental crises. To fill this gap in scholarship, author Matthew M. Lambert argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmentalist thought in a variety of ways. Writers of the time provided a better understanding of the devastating effects that humans can have on the environment. They also depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman nature, including animal "predators" and "pests." Finally, they laid the groundwork for "environmental justice" by focusing on the social effects of environmental exploitation. To show the reach of environmentalist thought during the period, the first three chapters of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wild, rural, and urban. The fourth and final chapter shifts to debates over the social and environmental effects of technology during the period. In identifying modern environmental ideas and concerns in American literary and cultural works of the 1930s and '40s, The Green Depression highlights the importance of depression-era literature in understanding the development of environmentalist thought over the twentieth century. This book also builds upon a growing body of scholarship in ecocriticism that describes the unique contributions African American and other nonwhite authors have made to the environmental justice movement and to our understanding of the natural world.

Chapter 1

The Last Frontier

Of the different geographical environments discussed in The Green Depression, perhaps none is as fraught with different meanings as wilderness. While the Wilderness Act of 1964 would define the term as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” debates over the function of such spaces became particularly contentious during the 1930s and ’40s. Some wilderness enthusiasts of the period pointed towards the importance of such areas to American economic, aesthetic, and recreational interests, a view perhaps best illustrated by the Civilian Conservationist Corps (CCC). Franklin Roosevelt’s extremely popular New Deal program employed over three million American young men for almost a decade “planting 2 billion trees … and developing 800 new state parks” (Maher 4). The latter included building “campgrounds, picnic areas, hiking trails, and … motor roads” to expand recreational access to wilderness (or wilderness-like) areas to more Americans (8). According to historian Neil Maher, the CCC not only “transformed conservation during the Great Depression in ways that helped environmentalism to blossom after World War II,” particularly by expanding conservation from an “efficient use of natural resources” to include “concern for human health through outdoor recreation, for wilderness preservation, and for ecological balance” (10), it also introduced the importance of conservation to working-class Americans, who often had little access to wilderness areas or conservation ideas (11). More radical social thinkers like Robert Marshall saw the subsistence-based lifestyle required by living in harsh, undeveloped, and sparsely populated environments as offering an alternative to the economic depravity and racial intolerance he associates with American capitalism. In Arctic Village (1933), Marshall describes his fifteen-month-long experience living among “the happiest folk I had ever encountered” in and around the towns of Wiseman and Needles, located in the Upper Koyukuk region of Alaska (3).

On the other hand, Marshall, Leopold, and others warned against the effects that a larger human presence in wilderness areas would have and rallied against roads and other development projects that would modernize these regions and make them more accessible (9). This isn’t to say that Marshall and Leopold, as well as other wilderness enthusiasts associated with the Wilderness Society, co-created by Marshall in 1935, believed that humans should avoid wilderness spaces altogether. Instead, they argued that “wildness,” rather than modern human convenience, should dominate these spaces (Sutter 14).¹ Closely related to debates over wilderness, the legacy of the frontier still loomed large in the cultural imagination of Americans, even as its devastating social and environmental effects became better understood. Frontier practices and policies, including the unregulated expansion and agricultural development of land opened by western expansion, led to the onset of severe drought and dust storms in the Great Plains. As Worster argues, the Dust Bowl was a product of frontier settlement that began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (4, 82–84).

In the following chapter, I argue that depression-era authors and (to some degree) filmmakers contributed to transformations in conservationist thought during the period by emphasizing the importance of protecting wilderness spaces, wildlife, and the rights and autonomy of indigenous human populations in maintaining healthy human and nonhuman communities. In the first section of the chapter, I examine the effect of Walt Disney’s animated feature Bambi (1942) on attitudes towards wilderness and hunting after its release. In creating characters that combine anthropomorphic characterizations with realistic physical detail, the film uses the animated film medium to encourage filmgoers to identify with the nonhuman species it depicts. Despite its effectiveness in creating non-anthropocentric forms of identification, the film’s reliance on normative middle-class values and cute nonhuman animal characters leads it to omit species that may threaten human physical safety and economic interests but play important roles in maintaining ecosystems. In the second section of the chapter, I argue that authors William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Aldo Leopold depict hunting in ways that attempt to highlight the ecological and cultural importance of animal predators often ignored in idyllic depictions of wilderness like Bambi. I particularly focus the chapter on Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935), arguing that his depiction of hunting in East Africa during the 1930s restages the legacy of the American frontier experience to critique overhunting, predator eradication, and, to some extent, imperial practices towards indigenous populations. While Hemingway’s critique of Western imperialism is perhaps less pronounced than his concern for overhunting, Salish author D’Arcy McNickle creates a more indigenous-informed understanding of the frontier’s environmental and social legacy in his first novel The Surrounded (1936). In the third section of the chapter, I argue that McNickle appropriates Frederick Jackson Turner’s “palimpsest” in the novel to uncover the social, cultural, and environmental scars that frontier practices and policies have left on indigenous groups and lands in the West. The understanding of Native American experiences he works out in The Surrounded would also inform his position as a writer and field agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) during the agency’s brief attempts under the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) to reverse a half-century of federal assimilation policies.

Together, the authors discussed in this chapter helped set the stage for the kind of environmental thinking that would develop in the second half of the twentieth century. In arguing for the non-anthropocentric value of wilderness areas, resources, and nonhuman inhabitants, they contributed to the expansion of conservationism beyond its earlier more utilitarian focus. Their depictions of animal predators as ecologically and culturally important to the American landscape also challenged dominant assumptions concerning these species that fueled environmentally devastating predator eradication programs in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, they contributed to a growing awareness of ways in which the destruction of wilderness spaces affects human populations, particularly by depicting the physical and economic danger of human-influenced flooding and dust storms. And their more inclusive depictions of indigenous populations offered a critical alternative to the dominant racial discourses of the period, particularly by identifying the environmental and social effects of expansionist and colonial practices.

Walt Disney’s Middle-Class Wilderness

Disney’s 1941 animated feature, Bambi, depicts a forest where wild animals live in harmony in a kingdom ruled by a benevolent stag (Bambi’s father). The primary danger to this animal utopia is man, whose hunting activities and carelessness with fire threatens the lives of the animals and the health of the forest. Based on Felix Salten’s 1924 Austrian novel, Bambi: A Life in the Forest, Disney’s film became a highly influential critique of hunting and model for later nature films (Cartmill 185).² Though the film has been critiqued for its simplistic depiction of hunters as well as for “its pervasive and repellant cuteness” (178), its depictions of animals in wilderness spaces introduced ensuing generations to the value of nonhuman life beyond human consumption and use. While its pungent if often exaggerated critique of human hunters certainly played a part in creating forms of identification and empathy with forest animals, other factors also helped create these responses in audiences. The film combines realistic anatomical detail with familial, middle-class values to illustrate the innate value of forest animals. But in projecting normative values onto select animals, Bambi contributes as much to segregating nonhuman animal species as to protecting them. If the largely sanitized, cute, and noble animals depicted in the film are worth saving, what about the less cuddly species that roam the forest? In a period in which conservationists like Aldo Leopold and Rosalie Edge were arguing against entrenched attitudes towards animal predators like wolves, coyotes, and hawks in conservationist thought, Bambi ends up supporting environmentally destructive predator-prey binaries that distinguish between killable and non-killable animals. By the same token, the normative, middle-class values expressed in the film code the absent species as social and, to some degree, racial others. While other animal-focused Disney films of and after the period often directly depicted animals in racialized ways, using stereotypical speech and mannerisms in crows, apes, hyenas, and other less admired animals, Bambi’s omission of such species obscures their place altogether.

In terms of its legacy, Bambi is best remembered for its anti-hunting sentiments. Walt Disney was an animal lover and anti-hunter advocate, particularly after witnessing his older brother shoot a male rabbit mating on his family’s farm in Missouri. As Matt Cartmill describes the experience, “Walt dissolved in tears when Roy [his brother] broke the thrashing rabbit’s neck, and he refused to touch the rabbit stew their mother served that evening” (166–67). The film would emphasize the cruelty Disney saw hunters inflicting on animal populations by portraying sportsmen as faceless killers, indiscriminately shooting animals of all species, ages, and genders. Furthermore, the hunters in the film are either careless or malicious with their use of fire, causing severe damage to the forest and its inhabitants. In the final hunting sequence in the film, the human characters use fire to chase animals from their hiding spots. In response to its portrayal of hunting, the film came under attack by sportsman clubs and magazines, which called it everything from an unfair caricature of modern hunters to an example of left-wing, Marxist propaganda. Early critiques of the film by sportsmen organizations focused on its depictions of practices they argued were not used by most hunters, including shooting doe, hunting in the spring, and using dogs and fire to force animals out into the open (179).³

But the film’s real power occurs in its novel depiction of forest animals. Its first and most important innovation lies in the animation techniques used to more realistically capture the physical detail and body language of nonhuman animals. Earlier animated films and shorts relied on animal characters drawn with “rounded outlines, rubbery consistency, and quasi-human form” to make them easier to animate, more humorous, and anthropomorphically identifiable. But as Cartmill points out, the subject matter of Salten’s narrative “could not be put in the mouth of a cartoon deer that looked like Clarabelle Cow with antlers” (168–69). While Disney allowed animators to express the characters’ emotions through human facial expressions, he forbid the use of “human body language” (169). Instead, he had his animators spend months studying and sketching live and filmed deer (169). The final product, according to Cartmill, gives the animals and forest a presence and “unique beauty” missing in the “staccato rhythm” of previous animated films.⁴

If the animation techniques used for the film helped create more anatomically accurate and aesthetically pleasing forest animals, the inclusion of the period’s dominant American values in their characterizations helped make them highly identifiable, particularly for “white middle-class audiences” (Thomas 43). As Brennan M. Thomas notes, “The creatures of Bambi’s world … are governed by a complex social order which promotes civility and amiability and recognizes species, gender, and familial bonds as linked substructures of that order” (44). This includes socializing young animals like Bambi and Thumper, the fawn’s young rabbit friend, into the social roles they will play in the residing hierarchical structure. The film particularly uses Thumper, Thomas points out, to model the transition from “a fourlegged embodiment of an American child’s underdeveloped sense of etiquette,” where “immediate gratification supersedes politeness,” to a functioning member of forest society (44). The socialization aspect of the film includes supporting dominant gender roles in which female animals are the primary caretakers of the young and males are typically absent or protect the family from a distance (48). Bambi’s father only shows up in the film during times when the young buck is in trouble—as when hunters shoot and kill his mother or, later, when they shoot Bambi while he tries to flee from the fire. For Thomas, the film “naturalizes” the above-mentioned middle-class values and social roles “by superimposing them upon humanized depictions of nature” (48). But the film also naturalizes the forest animals it depicts by endowing them with these valued behaviors and roles. In doing so, it helped support distinctions between acceptable and nonacceptable wilderness animals. The latter are depicted in later Disney films as outcasts, schemers, and bullies and often racialized by using darker colors and stereotypical mannerisms and speech patterns.⁵ Bambi largely omits such animals, with the exception of Friend Owl, whose predatory instincts are not acknowledged, and the hunters’ dogs, whose ferocity seems a product of human influence and training. The hunters’ influence on the dogs is one of the primary remaining direct influences of Salten’s source novel on the film. As Cartmill notes, “[T]he dogs and other … domesticated animals [in the novel] … pass their lives in a psychopathic tumult of worshipful adoration, hatred, and fear of man and detestation of themselves” (165). Other than the dogs, the film leaves out the animal predators present in Salten’s novel.⁶

One reason Disney may have omitted animal predators from the film was that their presence undermines his critique of human hunters. If violence is already a daily part of the natural world, then why critique humans for participating in that violence? As addressed in the next section, hunters like Hemingway even saw themselves as offering their prey a less painful and prolonged death than animal predators. Disney may have also left out animal predators in the film in order to highlight the more devastating effects humans have on wilderness forests and their inhabitants. His inclusion of fire in the final hunting sequence lends support for this concern in the film. For Thomas, this use of fire alludes “to the devastating impact technologies can have when perverted into weapons” (56). Though it’s unclear whether the fire is set deliberately or accidently, it becomes a tool for hunters to drive game out into the open more easily. In its uncontrollability and destructiveness, the fire gives the final hunting sequence in the film a nightmarish and apocalyptic tone, creating dark shadows and hues that distort the wounded Bambi, his father, and the other animals as they flee the burning forest. While they eventually find safety on a small river island, the apocalyptic danger lingers on as they watch the forest burn around them. This all-engulfing aspect of the fire distinguishes it from earlier dangers faced by the animals, whether from human bullets or spring storms. The lightning and thunder of a spring storm at the beginning of the film, interrupting the forest idyll with a similar sense of danger, is portrayed as a brief and necessary disturbance accompanying the life-giving rains brought by the arrival of spring.

But in omitting predators from its forests, the film ends up defining wilderness spaces by the non-predators that appear to live in harmony with each other. In doing so, the film supports a view of predators coming under question by conservationists, including hunters, during the period. These proto-environmentalists began critiquing early twentieth-century federal programs in the US that targeted species like coyotes and wolves known for feeding on livestock. As environmental historian Donald Worster describes it, the “utilitarian conservationism” of the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture led to the extermination of “two million coyote” between 1915 and 1957 (260).⁷ For ranchers, foresters, and government officials, Worster continues, coyotes and other predators represented “an outrageous defiance of man’s righteous empire over nature” (260).⁸ But if Bambi misses an opportunity to use aspects of animation to depict predator animals in unique and innovative ways, authors William Faulkner, Aldo Leopold, and Ernest Hemingway move beyond the film in their depictions of these species.⁹ Each of these authors depict animal predators in ways that highlight a growing understanding of these species’ importance to wilderness and human landscapes.

Hunting with Leopold, Faulkner, and Hemingway

While Bambi ignores the role hunters played in the development of conservationist and environmental thinking, Leopold, Faulkner, and Hemingway use hunting encounters with nonhuman predators to emphasize the latter’s ecological and cultural value.¹⁰ In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Aldo Leopold describes one such encounter that eventually led to his break with predator eradication programs. After shooting at a wolf and her pups, Leopold recounts gazing into the dying mother’s eyes and realizing the mistaken thinking behind such programs. He writes, “[T]here was something new to me in those eye—something known only to her and to the mountain … I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view” (130). As Leopold comes to realize, predators like wolves play an integral part in limiting the effects of deer on the mountain range. In removing the predator’s role, humankind upsets a balance necessary for both predator and prey to survive. Not only was Leopold able to recognize the ecological effects that overhunting animal predators caused, he also recognized its effects on human populations.¹¹ For Leopold, violently contorting nature to human uses results in “dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea” (132).

Like Leopold, William Faulkner also embodies early forms of environmentalist thought centered around the importance of nonhuman predators.¹² In the hunting stories of Go Down, Moses (1942)— particularly “The Bear” and “Delta Autumn”—Faulkner depicts the timber industry’s destruction of the primeval Mississippi forests and floodplains and its subsequent effect on human well-being. For Susan Scott Parrish, these stories provide a back story for understanding the causes of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (35). At the end of “Delta Autumn,” Ike McCaslin concludes that a “land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations” to create the wealth and prejudices produced by cotton in the South will use “[t]he people who have destroyed it … [to] accomplish its revenge” (italics in original, 347). As Parrish points out, Ike is referring to “a complex set of anthropogenic changes such as wetlands drainage, cotton monoculture, massive deforestation by the timber industry, and the building of ever-higher levees to manage the Mississippi and its tributaries by straightening and containing the sources” (34). These changes to the land, she continues, would help turn the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River into a massive environmental disaster (40). Like the severe dust storms in the following decade, the Mississippi Flood of 1927 and other flooding across the US during the period was a consequence of human industry. In disrupting the ability of bottomland forests and floodplains to slow down and absorb running water during hard rains and relying on a “levees-only” solution to flooding, southerners created the conditions for the retribution that Ike alludes to in his lament for the wilderness (Barry 91, Saikku 36). By the end of the flooding, “water covered 27,000 square miles, land in seven states where almost a million people lived; 13 major crevasses occurred; roughly 637,000 people became homeless; 154 refugee camps were run by the Red Cross, where a mostly African-American population lived for months … [and an] estimated … 1,000 were killed in the Delta region alone; 50% of all animals in the flooded areas drowned. And financially, there were at least one billion dollars in losses” (Parrish 40).¹³

Published fifteen years after the flood and describing events well before it, Go Down, Moses ascribes the disappearance of Mississippi forests to shifting ways of understanding wilderness. As the primeval forest and its inhabitants lose their mythic quality for the characters in the stories, the land becomes “deswamped and denud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Last Frontier
• Chapter 2 Back to the Land
• Chapter 3 The Postpastoral City
• Chapter 4 Futuramas and Atom Bombs
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author