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Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee Volume 6 Issue 1 Article 18 April 2015 The Mysterious Case of Benton and Gould: America Today and Dick Tracy as Documents of the Great Depression Melinda Narro University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit Recommended Citation Narro, Melinda (2015) "The Mysterious Case of Benton and Gould: America Today and Dick Tracy as Documents of the Great Depression," Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 18. Available at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit/vol6/iss1/18 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Volunteer, Open Access, Library Journals (VOL Journals), published in partnership with The University of Tennessee (UT) University Libraries. This article has been accepted for inclusion in Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee by an authorized editor. For more information, please visit https://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit. Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee Copyright © The University of Tennessee PURSUIT trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit The Mysterious Case of Benton and Gould: America Today and Dick Tracy as Documents of the Great Depression MELINDA NARRO Advisor: Dr. Mary Campbell This paper explores the close connections that run between American Regionalist art and newspaper adventure comics during the 1930s using Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today mural (1930-31) and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy strip (1931). These concurrent popular movements each represent a seismic shift in the tone of their medium when compared to that of the 1920s. Within these two works, repeated patterns of form and content attest to a shared purpose rooted in the national malaise of the early Depression. Granted parity as valuable historic documents, both America Today and Dick Tracy speak clearly to the desires, frustrations, and fears of a country in crisis. Further critical reading reveals how Benton and Gould achieved similar levels of popular acclaim by ofering the public visual and narrative afrmations of American unity, ingenuity, and strength. The cultural insight gleaned in such an exercise argues for a more holistic approach to art history that eschews “high” and “low” artistic distinctions. 197 198 NARRO The world-weary Manhattanite brave enough to hazard a fip through the New York Times on the cold morning of January 15th 1931 could hardly be blamed for the impulse to dump his or her coffee down the sink and crawl right back under the covers. Even skipping over the fnancial section, he or she had little chance of evading the glut of bad news that had plagued the U.S. since the 1929 Stock Market crash. It was all there. In stories with titles like “Mrs. Eward On Stand Fights Bribe Charge,” “Census of Jobless Will Start Today,” and “Harlem Drive Asks $100,000 for Relief,” New Yorkers could read in unsparing detail about the moral, social, and fnancial quagmire the country found itself stuck in.1 Such revelations of the unscrupulous dealings of public offcials, ominous reports on the unemployment boom, and descriptions of indiscriminate economic hardship were certainly enough to inspire a deep sense of despondency about the future. The same day these stories ran also witnessed the unveiling of Thomas Hart Benton’s nine-panel America Today mural series at New York’s New School for Social Research. Benton’s six months of labor on the commission yielded a sequence of images that refected Benton’s self-proclaimed desire to create “a picture of America in its entirety.”2 Even more than his dedication to indigenous subject matter, the Paris-trained populist’s deep faith in America’s people permeated every aspect of America Today. The mural showed a country populated by hearty, hard-working individuals unbowed by the demands of physical toil and unfazed by the burgeoning economic and social problems lurking only a newsstand away from canvas’ edge. At a time when national confdence and sense of identity had plummeted from the giddy highs of the Roaring ‘20s into a deep trough of disillusionment and despair, Benton presented a decidedly affrmative view. Artistic circles were quick to trumpet the mural’s merits, and the coming days would see rotogravure images of America Today insistently wedge themselves within those same anxiety-producing pages of the New York Times.3 This critical success at the dawn on the ‘30s prefgured the rise of what would become the most dominant and popularly- acclaimed art of the Depression era: Regionalism. Benton’s boldly optimistic outlook notwithstanding, the national situation remained dire and a source of ever-present stress. Just over six months after America Today’s unveiling, the Chicago Tribune for October 4th could not offer much in the way of a rebuttal to the New York Times doom and gloom. The pope himself echoed the worries of many Americans when he released a statement from Rome urging charity for the growing numbers of jobless, saying, “The want of so many families and their children, if not provided for, threatens to push them…to the point of exasperation.”4 This oh-so-gingerly phrased concern about violent popular unrest joined fears provoked by the city’s ongoing crime epidemic, as the police and judicial system appeared increasingly impotent, if not outright corrupt. Criminals of even the highest, most visible stature not only regularly got away with their crimes scot-free, but also seemed to be living the high life while the rest of the law-abiding population suffered. With mob bosses free to play golf and root for the “home town boys” at football games while children fainted from hunger in the classroom, justice seemed nowhere to be found.5 Mercifully, sweet relief was making its dogged way onto the pages and into the public at the same time. October 4th saw the frst Dick Tracy comic strip appear in the Detroit Mirror and New York Daily News courtesy of newspaper titan the Chicago Tribune Syndicate.6 As Tracy’s frst full storyline played out through the remainder of October and into November, readers immersed themselves in an urban landscape not unlike many across the country. Looming large among these imperiled cities was Gould’s adopted Chicago, a shadowy world of gangsters and goons in which no one was safe and the police were all too quick to throw up their hands. Now tucked among the tallies of the day’s criminal exploits, however, New Yorkers and the people of Detroit could fnd a handsome, wholesome, all-American man of action and intellect dealing out vigilante justice with single-minded determination. The public’s rapid embrace of the strip spawned a wave of imitators and helped to usher in the reign of a new model of newspaper comics that defned the medium in the ‘30s. For the next ten years, ongoing narratives and Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee America Today and Dick Tracy 199 adventure were the order of the day. At frst glance, America Today and the inaugural narrative arc of Dick Tracy seem to share little else besides the year they both entered public consciousness. One was writ large upon the walls of a prestigious boardroom in a medium dating back to antiquity and drew stylistic inspiration from Classical friezes, the rhythm of the Baroque, the sensational color of the Neo- Impressionists, and Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera7. The other was printed in ink within small, black-rimmed squares on fimsy newsprint made for use and disposal and found its most immediate source in the tawdry pulp magazines of the past decade.8 In fact, Benton’s mural and Gould’s comic are linked in meaningful ways that make them a valuable tool for insight into the collective mind of a nation in crisis. While it is true that the Regionalist movement that Benton helped spearhead and the food of adventure comics Gould helped lead the charge for were in signifcant ways distinct and addressed to largely divergent audiences, when taken together these art forms form a comprehensive map of the troubled Depression-era American psyche. Examined in the context of the social and historical landscape that precipitated their birth, one can see that these works fourished in the 1930s by serving the common cause of feeding the American public’s hunger for release from the bleak realities and anxieties of the day. Mutually drawing on the ills especially plaguing the nation’s urban populace, Benton and Gould employ similar means of expressive visual language and storytelling to provide comfort to America’s beset city-dwellers. The America Today mural displays Benton’s desire to encapsulate the nation in its full breadth and scope. Its energetic vistas range from Deep South to Changing West and everywhere in between. Dominated by scenes of a United States transformed and transforming through the forward march of modernity, its industrious male citizens pepper the landscape as farmers, miners, welders, and lumberjacks to form a formidable mosaic of masculinity. Each of the nine distinct panels, inventively demarcated by the pictorial intrusions of a white Art Deco molding, courses with an overwhelming sense of dynamism, movement, and explosive upward growth. This dizzying, unrelenting intensity and restless activity offers no compositional oases for the viewer’s eye to rest and linger on. Instead, it captures their attention and holds them fast as they are swept from place to place across ultimately irrelevant spatial and temporal boundaries that the single unifying narrative of a powerful nation on the rise serves to tie together.

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