Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke- White, and the Popular Front (Moscow 1941) Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Caldwell, Jay E. Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 05/10/2021 10:56:28 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/316913 ERSKINE CALDWELL, MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE, AND THE POPULAR FRONT (MOSCOW 1941) by Jay E. Caldwell __________________________ Copyright © Jay E. Caldwell 2014 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2014 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Jay E. Caldwell, titled “Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White, and the Popular Front (Moscow 1941),” and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________________________ Date: 11 February 2014 Dissertation Director: Jerrold E. Hogle _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 11 February 2014 Daniel F. Cooper Alarcon _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 11 February 2014 Jennifer L. Jenkins _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 11 February 2014 Robert L. McDonald _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 11 February 2014 Charles W. Scruggs Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: (11 February 2014) Dissertation Director: Jerrold E. Hogle 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Jay E. Caldwell 3 Acknowledgments Having lived in the world of science for a half-century, I entered humanities a cheechako. As result, the amount of guidance, support, and encouragement I required to complete this project has been immense. I hope that my notes have been sufficient that I can recall most of these contributions. First, I am grateful to many on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s Department of English, particularly to my dissertation director, Jerrold Hogle, who good-naturedly redirected me when I strayed off course, and to Jennifer Jenkins, who took me under her wing during the revision stage of this work. I am also appreciative of the contributions of the other members of my dissertation committee: Daniel Cooper Alarcon, “Robb” McDonald (from VMI), and Charlie Scruggs; and those of Edgar Dryden and Gerald Monsman, who were members of my comprehensive examination committee. But many other English faculty members have offered graduate seminars or independent study opportunities that have informed this dissertation, including (at the risk of omitting some): Peter Medine, William Epstein, Roger Bowen, Linda Waugh, Maribel Alvarez, Lynda Zwinger, and Barbara Babcock. David Christenson of the Department of Classics has been instrumental in shaping this document from its outset into its preliminary and final forms, and has offered friendly if spirited and challenging criticism along the way. This project took form under the leadership of two Directors of Graduate Studies: first Tenney Nathanson, who insisted I stop being a tourist in the department and get my act together, and Meg Lota Brown, who not only supported my project enthusiastically, but also directed me toward a pair of funding sources: two University of Arizona Graduate Tuition Awards (2010 and 2013) and a Arizona Board of Regents Dissertation Research Grant in 2012. These generous 4 awards allowed me to travel to important archives where Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White documents and ephemera are cached. I twice visited the Special Collections Research Center at the Syracuse University Library, where extensive collections of Bourke-White and Caldwell material from 1936-42 are maintained and superbly archived. There I am indebted to Nicolette A. Dobrowolski, Reference Librarian and Head of Public Services, who proved to be both kind and patient. I also twice visited the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, where a vast collection of Caldwell-related material has been gathered. Jay Satterfield, the Special Collections Librarian there, proved especially knowledgeable and accommodating; Josh Lascell, the Manuscripts Supervisor, and Chrishuana “Shan” Williams, a Special Collections Intern who was undertaking a complete re-archiving of Caldwell’s correspondence, were helpful as well. Chuck Barber, the Manuscript Librarian at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, was especially kind in directing me to several unexpected troves of Caldwell family letters as well as retrieving the “Herbst” helmet that had been the spark for this entire investigation. Several other archives yielded smaller amounts of useful material. Margaret Downs Hrabe, the Reference Coordinator in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, assisted me in searching for material relevant to the 1941- 42 period. Emily Walhout, a Reference Assistant in the Houghton Reading Room at the Harvard University Library, tracked down several letters from Caldwell to Alfred Morang that helped me to piece together the denouement of Caldwell’s Russian venture. In Tempe I visited the Archives and Special Collections at the Arizona State University Library, where Rob Spindler, the Head University Archivist, helped me access the A.T. Steele archives. 5 By contrast, I was unable to penetrate the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow. A friend and recently retired American diplomat, Charles Blitzer, put in me in contact with Sarah J. Ziebell, the Information Resource Officer for Russia and Belarus at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Although Ms. Ziebell approached this task with initial enthusiasm, she warned me insightfully: “research in Russian libraries and archives (even when language is not an issue) is no simple undertaking.” She worked diligently on my project, even putting me in touch with Larissa Rogovaya, a librarian at GARF, but it all came to naught. Such work remains for the future. I also wish to thank those not already mentioned who have taken the time to read and comment upon portions of this dissertation including my mother, June C. Martin (who married my father in December 1942 following his Mission to Moscow stint in Hollywood), Tim Rawson (Alaska Pacific University), David H. Culbert (LSU), and Boris Shoshitaishvili, a former Classics graduate student at the University of Arizona, now in the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program at Stanford. One of the most serendipitous contacts I had was Gary Johnson in the Newspaper & Current Periodical Room of the Library of Congress. Not only was he able to locate, retrieve, scan, and electronically forward to me articles from the New York Post, London Daily Mail, London News Chronicle, New York World-Telegram, International Herald Tribune, Soviet Russia Today, and Redbook magazine, but he turned out to be an Erskine Caldwell enthusiast. On his own time he scouted out material of which I had been previously unaware. It is unexpected surprises like this that re-invigorate a researcher spending interminable hours at a computer keyboard. 6 I also was able to contact and converse with several scholars in the fields of Soviet culture, military history, biography, and photography: Michael David-Fox (Russian cultural history expert, now at Georgetown University), Vicki Goldberg (Bourke-White’s biographer, now in New Hampshire), Jason Hill (scholar of PM newspaper, now at École Normale Supérieure, Paris), Harvey Klevar (Caldwell’s biographer, now at Luther College), Robert McDonald (VMI), Dan Miller (Caldwell’s biographer, now Head of Wheeler School, Providence RI), Sheila Webb (cultural historian, now at Western Washington University), and Erika Wolf (scholar of Soviet photography, now at University of Otago in New Zealand). I even tracked down Herman Wouk who had mined the Caldwell and Bourke-White books for his own World War II novels. He was gracious enough to respond to a query from me and to offer his own encouragement. I also appreciate the contributions made by my two families. The Raven Society, since 1995 a reading group in Anchorage, Alaska, has been a valuable sounding board for my thoughts as this work evolved.