Radical Romance in the Piedmont: Olive Tilford Dargan's Gastonia Novels
In 1929, the National Textile Workers Union led a violent strike in Gastonia, North Carolina that caught the attention of the national and international media. At that time, the Piedmont region was particularly resistant to union organizing and the Communist-led NTWU pushed boundaries even further by attempting to unionize across racial divides. Increased violence on the picket line led to the murders of Police Chief Orville F. Anderholt and a popular strike leader named Ella May Wiggins. When NTWU leaders Fred Beal and Vera Buch were accused of Anderholt's murder, the liberal media quickly connected this southern trial to that of anarchists Sacco and Venzetti, two Italian immigrants whose trial and execution solidified their place as labor heroes. The Labor Defender and New Masses featured Wiggins's plight as a single mother, raising her children on her meager salary; her death at the hands of management thugs quickly captured the imagination of the American public. Because women like Ella May Wiggins and Vera Buch became instant heroines, the Gastonia labor struggle became a symbol of the strength, courage, and tenacity of women workers in America. These dramatic events in Gastonia inspired at least six novels, four written by women and two by men. (1) In this article, I will focus on two novels by Olive Tilford Dargan in order to investigate the ways in which Dargan addresses both the political and personal dramas of these uncompromising southern women in the development of her heroine, Ishma Waycaster. (2) The narrative in Dargan's first novel, Call Home the Heart 0932), climaxes during the events of the Gastonia strike, but Dargan continues to focus on labor rebellion in the sequel, A Stone Came Rolling (1935), a novel that affirms Ishma Waycaster's role as leader of her working-class community. While Call Home the Heart has received some critical attention thus far, most critics focus on Ishma's failure to triumph over her latent racism. For example, in her recent assessment of Dargan's literary contributions to proletarian literature, Anna Shannon Elfenbein points to Ishma's regression to base instincts at the end of Call Home the Heart as representative of her failure as a radical heroine. However, I believe that Dargan made important revisions to the standard proletarian conversion narrative in her construction of Ishma Waycaster, revisions which become clearer when her Gastonia novels are read as one continuous narrative. Moreover, I will focus primarily on the events in Ishma's life as they evolve into what I will call "radical romance," a narrative strategy in direct contrast to those employed by male authors in the 1930s. A careful analysis of the literary texts written in response to the Gastonia strike reveals a gendered difference around the issue of sexuality: male authors view the sexual undercurrent of a workers' strike as a threat to masculine agency in the contest between management and workers, while female authors view expressions of female sexuality as a site of potential resistance and political strength. In making this argument, I do not ignore the decidedly masculine tone set by critics like Mike Gold, whose 1928 call to "Go Left" was directed at the "wild (male) youth, at work in the coalmines" (Folsom 188). As the newly minted editor of New Masses, Gold was in the position to set the ideological and theoretical pace for left-leaning writers of the 1930s. His views reflect what feminist critics have since noted about leftist ideologues: though they gave lip service to issues involving gender, they often downplayed or ignored the "woman question." According to Alice KesslerHarris and Paul Lauter, "though leftist ideology in the 1930S recognized the 'special oppression' of women and formally espoused sexual equality, in practice, the Left tended to subordinate problems of gender to the overwhelming tasks of organizing the working class and fighting fascism" ("Introduction" ix). …
Doubled Plots: Romance and History
Doubled Plots: Romance and History edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, with essays by Susan L. Blake, Stephanie Burley, Mary Paniccia Carden, Rita B. Dandridge, Janet Dean, Charles H. Hinnant, Rita Keresztesi, Huining Ouyang, Susan Strehle, and Karin E. Westman. An examination of how two diverse genres parallel and reflect each other. In art, myth, and popular culture, romance is connected with the realm of emotions, private thought, and sentimentality. History, its counterpart, is the seemingly objective compendium of public fact. In theory, the two genres are diametrically opposed, offering widely divergent views of human experience. In this collection of essays, however, the writers challenge these basic assumptions and consider the two as parallel and as reflections of each other. Looking closely at specific narratives, they argue that romance and history share expectations and purposes and create the metaphors that can either hold cultures and institutions together or drive them apart. The writers explore the internal contradictions of both genres, as seen in works in which the elements of both romance and history are present. The theme that flows throughout this collection is that romance literature and art frequently engage with or comment on actual historical events or histories. Included among the contributions are discussions of romance and race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the Rudolph Valentino film classic The Sheik, the series of English "Regency Romance" novels, the constructs of love and history in two of Alice McDermott's novels, and a feminist reading of African American women's historical romances. Moreover, the essays approach romance and history from a variety of critical and political perspectives and examine a wide selection of romances from the 1800s to contemporary times. They look at bestsellers and literary classics, at texts by and for white audiences, and at works created by writers on the margins of Western culture. The anthology is a radical approach to romance, a genre often dismissed as diversionary and reactionary. It explores how well this genre serves for critical examinations of history. Susan Strehle is a professor of English at Binghamton University. Mary Paniccia Carden is an assistant professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project
yet symbolic. At a time when European modernists integrated primitive art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas into their own oeuvre—viewing sculpture as the most primitive of art forms—critics quickly discerned an affinity between the formal qualities of Barela’s art and an evolving Western modernist aesthetic.29 FAP itself became imbued with this impulse through National Director Holger Cahill, who organized MoMA’s American Primitives (1930) and American Sources of Modern Art (1933) exhibitions, which connected U.S. art with preColumbian influences.30 Barela constituted a “link” to modernism rather than a modernist per se because his art was deemed primitive not simply in form but also in context. Although Hunter viewed santero art as a product of “exchange” between the “Christian and the pagan Indian,” with the passage of time, santos became distanced from “tradition,” and in turn, “primitive in feeling as well as in technique.” Moreover, when santos were “not made for religious purposes,” as in Barela’s case, “they became entirely primitive,” concluded Hunter.31 Divorced from academic training and ecclesiastical tradition (Barela rarely attended church), Barela became the timeless “primitive” whose lack of formal training encouraged the image of an artist moved by nature and intuition rather than by the modern trappings of status and materialism. Hunter’s own vision of his protégé as “child-like,” and in need of “guidance” and “protection” from tourists and “autograph seekers,” simply reinforced this image.32 As Hunter declared, “school means an unlimited observation of natural phenomena. . . . With the inherent adaptability of his realistic race, [Barela] takes things as they are with a fatalism not less than oriental, but he meets them with unconquerable idealism and fortitude. Knowing little of life’s tangible complications . . . he is free from our national passion for accumulating things. But of natural philosophy, of timeless wisdom, he knows more than most persons gain through formal degrees . . . faith is axiomatic and life has reason.”33 Barela’s work, being untrained, was considered a vital expression of spirituality. As Hunter repeatedly claimed, Barela was not like other santeros who were merely “copyists.”34 While Barela deployed a familiar religious iconography, his art bordered on ritual performance. Rooting Barela’s art so deeply within the world of Hispano religion simply affirmed the sense of the primitive for critics because the Anglo-American vision of Hispano Catholicism was already that of a faith lost in time, superstition, and the so-called archaic rites of confraternities such as the Order of 48 ✜ Journal of the Southwest the Penitent Brothers. Barela himself drew inspiration from the moradas (chapels) and death carts used by the Penitent Brothers in Holy Week processions. Although Anglo artists employed Hispano religious motifs in their own work, they invariably viewed this faith as “mystical, naïve, and primitive,” and as the very essence of Hispano life itself.35 Thus, for Barela too, art, faith, and creativity became manifestations of ritual. It did not matter that Barela was “not an orthodox Christian”: in the eyes of New Deal sponsors he remained “essentially religious.”36 Mestizaje, pan-americanism, and the universal In evaluating Barela’s art, critic Douglas Hale noted that “others have seen various cultural origins in Barela’s carvings: Moorish, Mayan, Aztec, Penitente, Navajo sand painting, Easter Island, early Christian.”37 Thus, despite the search for the authentic and the noted affinities between Barela and so-called “tribal art” from other parts of the world, Barela’s work was also distinctly hybrid: it was forged from a unique cultural synthesis over time, and as Wendell Anderson later observed, “out of the duality of Old and New World forms.”38 Most significantly, Barela’s synthesis was rooted firmly in the Americas. Contemporaries certainly viewed Barela’s work—and New Mexico itself—as lying at the intersection of the Americas. If Barela’s art was perceived as uniquely American in its everyday, popular appeal, it was also American by way of its cultural hybridity, which distanced it in time and space from European influences. Barela’s art became part of a cultural nationalism but also of a wider, hemispheric nationalism—panAmericanism. The connection between Latin American art, Native American art, and cultural diplomacy during the late 1930s and early 1940s has been acknowledged.39 But few scholars have explored the relationship between Hispano art and pan-Americanism. The call for hemispheric solidarity through artistic expression derived momentum at the regional level from the historical specificities of New Mexico’s ethnic and cultural landscapes. New Mexico lay at the center of a transnational relationship in reform and cultural policy during the 1920s and 1930s. As Suzanne Forrest notes, the Hispanic New Deal in New Mexico became entwined with the revival of Native American arts and with Mexico’s cultural revolution and sponsorship of the popular arts. In Mexico, Anglo patrons and Modernity and Mestizaje ✜ 49 reformers found a perfect model for the preservation of Hispano and Native American culture.40 These links become more apparent when we consider that there was not simply an overlap in ideology but in personnel too. New Deal Indian Policy under John Collier developed from existing links with New Mexico and patrons in Santa Fe. Collier also looked to Mexican folk art when creating the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Collier brought folk art specialist René d’Harnoncourt north from Mexico to work on the board after d’Harnoncourt organized several key exhibitions of Mexican art in the USA during 1930.41 And it was d’Harnoncourt’s exhibition of Mexican art that was deployed to improve intercultural relations in New Mexico. During 1931, d’Harnoncourt’s Mexican art exhibit traveled to Albuquerque and Santa Fe with the support of the Mexican consulate and with the aim of acknowledging the state’s Hispano population and stimulating the preservation of Hispano arts through community art centers and vocational education. Writing to d’Harnoncourt, New Mexico Governor Arthur Seligman promoted Santa Fe in particular as “the largest center of this character in the United States,” while the Albuquerque Morning Journal declared the city “the historic contact point between America and Mexico.”42 Nina Perea Collier, a FAP state official and daughter-in-law of John Collier, worked for the Indian Bureau and later for the Office for Inter-American Affairs. Perea Collier noted the obvious connections between Latin American and Hispano arts but conceded that more effort could have been made to integrate Hispano culture into the government’s pan-American initiative.43 Hunter and Cahill did however arrange for a traveling exhibition of Mexican children’s artwork to be sent to New Mexico’s Hispano community art centers, and in return, sent the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design for display across Latin America.44 New Mexico remained an important testing ground for intercultural relations into the 1940s. For Mexican American scholar J. Manuel Espinosa, the state’s “harmonious combination” of indigenous, Spanish, and Anglo peoples made New Mexico “a significant laboratory of the Good Neighbor Policy.”45 Although there are few direct references to Barela in terms of cultural diplomacy, Barela’s art represented Espinosa’s “true synthesis of the Americas.” This perhaps explains Barela’s position as one of the few sculptors to exhibit at the New York’s World’s Fair American Art Today show (1939). Barela’s hybrid art forms complemented the intercultural emphasis of the fair perfectly. Designed to 50 ✜ Journal of the Southwest establish connections between old and contemporary cultural expression in much the same way that critics perceived affinities between primitive and modern art, the fair planned as one of its key themes and expositions the “cultural evolution and development of man in the three Americas” with the aim of “bringing the peoples of the Three Americas into a relationship of closer understanding.”46 Indeed, conceived within this transnational perspective, the link between mestizaje and modernism becomes much more than incidental. As Tace Hedrick demonstrates, in Latin America a specific form of mestizo modernism was formulated between 1900 and 1940, a modernism that considered “how to fuse, or hybridize, modernity and indigenous tradition” and how to blend regionalism, locality, and the vernacular with “a continental sense of ‘Americanism.’” Mirroring the interest shown in Barela’s art, Latin America’s mestizo modernism derived inspiration from rural, folk, and indigenous traditions: in this way, the “un-modern” would soothe the contradictions of modernity while being inserted into a forwardand future-thinking nation. According to Hedrick, Diego Rivera’s pan-American hybrid aesthetic typified mestizo modernism in its bid to transcend the “seeming antinomies of modern life: the North and the South, the mechanical with the organic, the agrarian with the modern, and of course, the Indian with the Hispanic.”47 If this modernism involved biological and cultural mestizaje, it also reflected the assumption of MoMA’s American Sources and American Primitives exhibitions: that the modern and the un-modern could coexist in one hemispheric space across time (albeit on an unequal footing). Barela must be understood within this framework of mestizo modernism, because it too impacted the United States as a distinctive form of modernism, one intimately tied to and resistant of the hegemonic forces of U.S. and European modernism. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, Rivera’s mestizo modernism filtered northwards through the “Mexican art invasion,” described by Helen Delpar, to coincide with the U.S. desire for art that was both “untainted by academic [and European] modernism and