Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 33

Journalism of the 193(ys

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Since World War I, Wilson observed, the United States had
immersed itself in mass production and "the game of money-making."
The result was a people who had lost sight of the humanistic goals of
America:
What we had lost, it seemed, was not merely our way
in the economic jungle but our conviction of the value of
what we were doing. Money-making and the kind of
advantages which a money-making society supplies for
money to buy are not enough to satisfy humanity—
neither is a social system like our own where everyone
is out for himself and devil take the hindmost, with no
common purpose and little culture to give life stability
and sense (pp. 300-301).
Although Wilson's reportage recorded a general collapse of
morale due to the deflation of capitalist ideals, he found many
Depression-era Americans clinging to a bourgeois ideology. Still,
Wilson expressed hope that the economic emergency of the Thirties
would result in a proletarian revolt. The longer hard times con tinued,
he noted, the greater the likelihood of class conflict. Ultimately, the
America that unfolded before Wilson was one of Marxist
inevitability, with proletarian revolt the catalyst for change. The
irony of Wilson's perception of Depression-torn America was that
conditions would not improve until they had worsened (pp. 309-311).
To make sense of the America he had discovered in his
travels, Dreiser also used a Marxist, structural approach by labeling
"decadent" capitalism as the cancer crippling the nation. Like
Wilson, Dreiser suggested collectivist solutions to alleviate the
maldistribution of wealth and power. "The rich are too rich; the poor
are too poor," Dreiser wrote. "And the hour has come when some form
of equitable sharing in the means of living—shall not only have to be
considered but wisely and truly enforced" (Dreiser, 1931, p. 84).
Dreiser emerged from his cross-country travels convinced that
capitalism was a failure. "I mean by that that equity of consumption
does not exist here," he said. "America can produce but is unable, for
want of money, to buy what it makes. In other words, the people
create a wealth which in the field of consumption is denied them" (p.
408). Thus, corporations made large profits by selling goods at high