By Fred H. Lawson
Shortlisted for ΦBK’s 2024 Christian Gauss Award
“The story of the twentieth century in America is a story of disappointment,” declares this aptly titled monograph. Such an interpretation of recent American history clashes with the notions of progress and prosperity that permeate standard accounts of the last hundred years. It seems hard on its face to square with the irrepressible cheerfulness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt leading the country out of the Great Depression. Or with the boom in factory production that energized Dayton, Ohio, during the 1950s. Or even with the civil rights statutes of the mid-1960s.
Political Disappointment addresses the ways in which America has not lived up to its ideals. Beginning with Reconstruction in the 1860s, the expressed objectives of most government programs have never come close to being achieved. The comprehensive program of social justice championed by the Communist Party of the USA was eclipsed by the marginal reforms of the New Deal. Things looked bleak for the civil rights movement in the summer of 1966. Black women had a hard time breaking into the feminist movement. And AIDS continues to ravage minority communities, despite breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment.
Sara Marcus makes two crucial stipulations at the outset, which color the subsequent narrative. First, she claims that disappointment with respect to “representational politics” constitutes the persistence of a desire for change. One might imagine that disappointment could reflect despair or regret, but for Marcus the desire for change lives on even after it has been stymied. Second, disappointment engenders renewed, and even more strenuous, collective efforts to reach the original goal. “Disappointment,” she asserts, “allows us to recognize thwarted desire as grounds for solidarity.” Again one could imagine that failure would engender hopelessness and precipitate the break-up of the movement. By framing the topic in overtly optimistic terms, Marcus assures the reader that history will continue to march in a progressive direction.
Heroic resilience in the face of defeat is illustrated through the music that political activists deployed and inspired at the moment their causes ground to a halt. Following the example of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus reclaims the so-called “Sorrow Songs” that were despised by most Black leaders at the turn of the twentieth century as embarrassing vestiges of slavery. Particular attention is devoted to the transcriptions of these songs, which had never before been committed to paper. Not only the words, but the tunes as well were straightened up for a general audience. Adding a fermata to a particular note carried deep significance: “The fermata, especially when thought of as a hold, can offer possibilities for cutting through the binary formulations of temporality that identify linear time as always oppressive and nonlinear time as always aligned with freedom, formulations that miss the ways multiple temporalities operate and coexist.” Furthermore, the fermata-as-hold “calls to mind Hortense Spiller’s insight about the holds of slaving ships, the captive human flesh ‘literally suspended in the oceanic’.” The book is not light reading.
A central figure among musicians associated with the Communist Party during the 1930s was the Louisiana-born bluesman Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly. At a time when the party was abandoning its campaign to forge a multiracial labor movement, Ledbetter transplanted to New York City and began performing for gatherings of leftists. One particular song, “Julie Ann Johnson”, captured listeners’ fancy, due to its stark depiction of unity among workers. Ledbetter started injecting rhythmic puffs of air, “something like a huh,” into the verses. These “percussive exhalations of breath,” Marcus reports, “represented manual labor and its power—the repressed voice of the Black worker.” Putting the innovation down on paper proved particularly difficult— “work sounds, unpitched, created by tools and breath, inhabiting the border between music and noise, are especially resistant to transcription, potentially enabling a song to escape incarceration and death” at the hands of the transcriptionist. Alert critics appreciated the inclusion of “tool and exhalation sounds” in the transcripts, however, since they showed that the “songs are rough, homespun workers’ products…born out of the rhythms of their labor.”
To what extent Ledbetter’s unexpected incorporation of work-sounds into his music illustrates or explicates disappointment is left vague. Marcus suddenly sees the problem, and remarks almost in passing that the new addition “is not just a sound of disappointment. …Here we find an acknowledgement and performance of a collective political desire, combined with an act of signifying that communicates, at least to a careful listener, a critique of the way such desire puts some people in a compromised, marginal, or overly symbolized role.” She speculates that “some of Ledbetter’s disappointed audiences heard it too.”
Political Disappointment closes with the sweeping pronouncement that disappointment “shaped the [twentieth] century’s literature and art.” But of course no more than a tiny sliver of the country’s entire literary and artistic output during those ten decades receives mention here. Staying hopeful for the future is all well and good, particularly for people on the Left at the present moment, as Marcus details in a rather self-indulgent Coda. Yet just how the material that does get covered actually expressed disappointment, wrestled with its implications, and found a way to move forward anyway remains hard to decipher.
Fred H. Lawson (ΦBK Indiana University) is Professor of Government Emeritus of Northeastern University and Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia.