Worn, Damaged Bodies in Literature and Photography of the Great Depression

After seven years of unprecedented prosperity, the stock market crashed in late October 1929, precipitating the collapse of America's unstable economic system and the pervasive instability of the world economy. As unemployment grew, so did the lines for soup kitchens. People frantically withdrew money from local banks, causing thousands to close within a few years. Inflated prices and farming speculation created a surplus of agricultural goods that could not be sold at home or abroad. In short, chaos ensued. Out of this dust and despair emerged a figure whose charisma, eloquence, courage, and disability galvanized a destitute public. Paraplegic Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose disabling bout with poliomyelitis occurred eleven years before his presidency in 1932, possessed an unflagging optimism and strength that the public needed. Social responses to the disabled body were complicated by Roosevelt's illness and the Depression. Disability had typically been treated as something shameful, to be hidden away or stared at as a spectacle in carnival sideshows and the freak exhibits of Coney Island. Throughout the national crisis of the 1930s, however, the public readily interpreted Roosevelt's battle with paralysis as ennobling. During the 1928 Democratic National Convention, he was described as "a figure tall and proud even in suffering; a face of classic profile; pale with years of struggle against paralysis; [...] most obviously a gentleman and a scholar. [...] This is a civilized man" ("Franklin'' 12). This interpretation was possible in part because Roosevelt masked his disability, and his gubernatorial campaign marked the beginning of a tacit agreement with the public and press about his body: "No movies of me getting out of the machine, boys" (Gunther 239). Remarkably, the press obliged. Within a few years, the public would need to see their leader as having the strength to lift America out of the Depression, and they could believe this more easily if Roosevelt appeared healthy. Though much was done to minimize his disability, the public also found comfort in it, believing that Roosevelt's experiences with paralysis enabled him to empathize with their suffering. As historian Michael Parrish explains, "his withered legs also gave the aristocratic Roosevelt something in common with those many Americans who saw themselves as outcast or marginal people because of physical handicaps, economic deprivation, or racial and religious prejudice" (278). Part of his appeal as a leader, in other words, came from his own experiences with physical hardships, and for millions of Americans, his ability to overcome great adversity buttressed their own struggles. Roosevelt's paralysis may have made disability a slightly more public issue, but his need to appear healthy also reinforced widespread attitudes about disability as something shameful. In fact, freak shows, which had been popular since P. T. Barnum opened the American Museum in 1841, seemed to provide the only language for discussing the damaged body. As the physical and psychological costs of the Depression became increasingly visible on the body through illness, starvation, and physical injuries, the need to interpret the damaged body- to distinguish it from the freakish- intensified. In much of 1930s literature, for example, injured or ill characters often sought reassurance through a discourse of freakishness (such as labeling one a "freak"). They used this term to establish a self-serving distinction between injury and spectacle- between being born with a disability and coming by one through honest labor. Yet in the fiction of John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, and Nathanael West, these distinctions ultimately break down as individual hardships lead not to success and security, but to freakishness. Like Gregor in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, working-class families in the 1930s were waking up to find that they had become monstrous- dehumanized by the economic and social crises of the Depression. …