He Liked America: Granville Hicks and a Political Economy for the Popular Front

Abstract

If any period seemed the hour of the American worker, it was the 1930s. The development of industrial unionism and the rise of working-class activism stand as landmarks of this pivotal period. Yet from the perspective of the early 21st century, one might be inclined to question the conventional view which equates industrial workers with the ‘labor question’. This was not only a moment when factory and farm workers questioned capitalism. It was also a period when growing numbers of white-collar employees discovered the existence of class itself. Another way of putting it might be: the 1930s was indeed the moment of the working class, but it was a new class, one that now included those white-collar workers who could no longer shield themselves from the caprices of industrial capitalism. Literary critic Granville Hicks was the most prominent expositor of this development. The tenuous status of middle-class privilege in the United States was never more perceptively investigated than in his 1938 I Like America. This combination of reportage and polemic directly addressed the predicament facing white-collar workers. A graduate of Harvard University and the author of The Great Tradition, a Marxian interpretation of American literature since the Civil War, Hicks joined the Communist Party in 1935,