The pandemic has brought us levels of unemployment that rival that of the Great Depression.
A recession at the very least seems inevitable, given the persistence of the COVID-19 virus.
So, I have found myself reading about the Great Depression, in particular, rereading parts of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans.
Agee, fresh out of Harvard, was an aspiring young writer for Fortune Magazine, and Evans was an accomplished photographer documenting the Depression for the Farm Security Administration.
The editor dispatched Agee and Evans to do an article on the plight of southern sharecroppers.
The summer of 1936 found them living with three poor, white, cotton sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama.
The article turned into that book, now considered a classic and read largely by students of literature, anthropology, sociology, political science and communication.
In one particularly graphic and pointed passage, Agee seems to capture some of the angst of today’s Human Family, faced as it is, with our own Great Uncertainty.
“All over the whole round earth and in the settlements, the towns, and the great ironstones of cities, people are drawn inward within their little shells of rooms, and are to be seen in their wondrous and pitiful actions through the surfaces of their lighted windows by thousands, by millions, little golden aquariums, in chairs, reading, setting table, sewing, playing cards, not talking, talking, laughing inaudibly, mixing drinks, at radio dials, eating, in shirtsleeves, carefully dressed, courting, teasing, . . . and none can care, beyond that room; and none can be cared for, by any beyond that room: . . .”
Agee’s experience in that neglected corner of Alabama clearly had him pondering the lives of all those other people who were also trapped in the claws of a failed world economy.
They were, as he put it, “drawn inward within their little shells of rooms” caring not at all for those outside their walls and yet feeling abandoned by those same ones.
In the midst of a Great Uncertainty not unlike ours today, Agee saw Americans turning inward, caring only for their own.
God forbid that we let our lives imitate Agee’s art—describing, as he saw it, the state of the Human Family in America’s Great Uncertainty of 84 years ago.
Thankfully, we have seen the Human Family at its best recently. The outpouring of aid for victims of the recent tornadoes shouts loudly that we are not “drawn inward within [our] little shells of rooms” where “none can . . . be cared for, by any beyond that room.”
Rather, the Human Family is quite intact across “the settlements, the towns, and the great ironstones of cities.”
The outpouring of appreciation and aid for front-line medical professionals roars the same message. And more than merely intact, the fabric of our Human Family is strong.
It is badly torn—true—and its threads of civic responsibility, religious commitment, family ties and community traditions invite skillful mending.
So, hold fast to those threads, pull them to your heart, and you will feel the tug of your neighbors by your side. weaving them together.
Conville is a retired college professor and long-time resident of Hattiesburg
