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Using Literature in the AP U.S. History Classroom
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by Jeff House
Presentation High School
San Jose, California
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| | Using Art to Learn Facts
Arguing that history is merely what happens, while poetry posits universals, Aristotle insisted that "poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history." In other words, art trumps facts. It's a line literature teachers trot out on occasion, and it is not without validity. Like most fiction, history is a narrative constructed from primary sources, awash in anecdotes and characters. Conversely, literature personalizes history, individualizing events so as to make them emotionally accessible. It is one thing to study the creation of Hoovervilles in 1930s America; it is another to follow Steinbeck's Joads into one.
Historical literature is imagination applied to facts, the dramatizing of interpretation so that motive becomes clear. When Jurgis Rudkus in The Jungle stumbles into a Socialist meeting after some 400 pages of a downward spiral, the reader, taken by the injustice of his immigrant experience, understands his renewed hope. Similarly, the courtroom machinations in Arthur Miller's The Crucible illuminate the Puritan mindset of the Salem witch trials as well as the zeitgeist of the McCarthy era. Relying on character, literature gives us the personal, so that we understand not just the import but also the impact of events. We do not personalize dates, but we identify with behavior, and by connecting students to the lives of literary characters, we help them make sense of the cultural, social, and historical conditions those characters live in.
Another important reason to utilize literature in the history classroom is that many fictional works have had historical impacts to be studied in their own right. To take one popular example, sections of The Jungle will help students understand better than any textbook account exactly how the muckraking style of "yellow journalism" could spur popular discussion of important social problems.
Teaching Strategically
The one drawback to incorporating literature into a course is the increased instructional time. Teachers who despair at doing justice to American history in nine months find it daunting to add additional reading. This is, in part, an issue of selection. Historical fiction should supplement, not supplant, course material, and some texts meet that goal better than others. For instance, Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller's manic tale of military operations during World War II -- operates more as allegory than as history. By contrast, Frank Norris's The Octopus dramatizes the killing of settlers by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880 over a land dispute. Thus Catch-22 uses history to illuminate generalities, while The Octopus intends to make sense of particulars.
Norris's work, then, is more easily integrated into the curriculum, its factual specificity enabling teachers to discuss the events of a historical occurrence. Similarly, for The Book of Daniel, E. L. Doctorow fictionalized the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and teaching the novel dovetails nicely with a study of the cold war. Such historically based fiction becomes less a detour than an addition, providing a focus for specific units of study. The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, is easily integrated into a study of America between the wars, despite its length. The narrative of the Joads' flight to California touches on a number of events a typical course would discuss: Hoovervilles, the Dust Bowl, unionizing, unemployment, government work camps, Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, the banking system, and land use. The book also dramatizes themes that are standard in American history course work: economic systems, class structure, the role of government in social issues, and law and justice. My instruction, then, focuses less on discussing the literary treatment of historical events than on using the book to introduce those events.
Shorter but still effective works of historical fiction include Stephen Crane's Civil War study, The Red Badge of Courage; Horace McCoy's examination of Depression-era Los Angeles, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; Mark Twain's commentary on the burgeoning West, Roughing It; Tim O'Brien's psychological analysis of the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried; and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, a study of mining culture. A number of authors examined American culture in short story formats, including Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Washington Cable, and Alice Walker. Additionally, the work of a slew of American poets addresses historical themes, from the Puritan observations of Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet to the democratic themes and Civil War ruminations of Walt Whitman, the small town commentaries of Edgar Lee Masters, and the Beat ramblings of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Teachers can use each of these sources to illuminate the significance of events to contemporary observers.
Art in the Depression Era
Effective teachers can use these sources in tandem to provide insight into several layers of historical experience. The Depression era of the 1930s lends itself particularly well to this approach.
John Steinbeck composed his novel The Grapes of Wrath as the result of a seven-article series he wrote for the San Francisco News in 1936, tracking the migration of dispossessed midwestern farmers to the Hoovervilles of California. The collection -- later gathered into the text The Harvest Gypsies -- is a factual counterpoint to the fictionalized novel, underscoring the novelist's belief that only the dramatized rendition could have a national impact. It did, generating censure from mainstream America up to and including Congress. The Grapes of Wrath is a hard-boiled attack on the excesses of capitalism, from the abuse of eastern banks to the generating of farm profits via the destruction of surplus produce while starving families stood by. Hence, Steinbeck's fictionalized journalism is important not for the tale alone, but also for the fiery cultural dialogue it engendered.
An excerpt from The Harvest Gypsies, therefore, is an effective introduction to the period and the dark side of the 1930s (an online portion is available via the link below). Segueing from The Harvest Gypsies to The Grapes of Wrath encourages a classroom debate about the effectiveness of reportage versus fiction. It is worth adding that the novel itself interposes chapters that address the cultural conditions of the Joads' world, providing commentary on the banking system, law enforcement, used car salesmen, Route 66, and absentee farmers. Very quickly, then, students can view the Great Depression from several vantage points and evaluate the efficacy or truth of those perspectives.
 New Deal Network: The Harvest Gypsies
The book's opening segments on the Dust Bowl allow me to introduce a variety of primary documents from Dust Bowl survivors. The PBS Web site for the documentary Surviving the Dust Bowl (itself a terrific source for video footage) links to a number of audio diaries. I have also, on occasion, invited students to record accounts (video, audio, or written) of friends or family members who have similar memories.
Surviving the Dust Bowl: The Film & More -- Reference
The arrival of the Joads in California begins with a stay at a Hooverville. Thanks to Roosevelt's programs, much of the experiences of these tin-and-wood-shack communities were captured on film. The Library of Congress has an extensive sample online.
Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 -- Americans React to the Great Depression: Hoovervilles -- Photographic Collage
In this context, I also introduce the work of Dorothea Lange and Roy Stryker, whose work for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) between 1935 and 1943 paralleled Steinbeck's own studies of California's migrant dilemma.
The History PlaceTM: Dorothea Lange
Intriguingly, Lange herself has endured criticism that she manipulated her subject matter to get the most emotive images. An examination of this is available online, where students can view the series around the well-known "Migrant Mother" to see how Lange "created" her photo-realism.
Dorothea Lange: The Migrant Mother Sequence
Noting the similar ways Lange and Steinbeck treated their subject matter brings students back to the debate between the effectiveness of fact and fiction; moreover, it zeros in on the foundational question for all historians: in what ways are primary documents themselves affected by subjectivity?
Steinbeck's anger shows in his depiction of unbridled capitalism's abuse of labor, and the book's passages detailing the brutal treatment of union organizers allow corollary discussions on labor unrest, from the 1934 battles on the wharves of San Francisco to the strife in 1937 at Republic Steel where workers, with their wives and children, were attacked by police and beaten, killing four and mortally wounding six others. Roosevelt's Wagner Act legitimized union organizing in 1935, the first time the government gave such power to laborers, but Steinbeck documents the violence that subsequently grew as laborers struck. A&E's four-part video, The Great Depression, contains in volume 3 a video history of labor battles during the thirties.
Amidst the unrelieved misery of much of The Grapes of Wrath, the students find a brief rest when the Joads enter the government work camp, Steinbeck's argument for federal intervention. Treated with decency, formerly displaced migrants build their own democratic system within the safety of the camp, complete with rotating leadership. As with the Wagner Act, Roosevelt brought the government into the lives of the socially and economically marginalized, creating the debate that has come down to us today in discussions on welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Roosevelt so fully believed in the need for the latter that he instituted the Federal Writers Project (whose ranks included a young Arthur Miller), the collecting of oral histories (most famously showcased in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men), and the documentation of the rural poor (as in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men).
Adding Multimedia Sources
Excerpts from any of these both expand students' cultural knowledge of the 1930s and underscore Steinbeck's argument that America gained when the government took an interest in the welfare of its least powerful. In this context, I introduce images of the WPA's mural projects, whose themes invariably stress the life of the laborer. Though online sites featuring extant examples are plentiful, I find the images at San Francisco's Coit Tower particularly vibrant. A discussion of these images and themes makes clear that Steinbeck was not a lone voice, that for all the opposition to his work, a nation experiencing over 30 percent unemployment found The Grapes of Wrath an eloquent defense of their plight.
Tour San Francisco: Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco
It is also instructive to bring in the work of Woody Guthrie, who, like Steinbeck, followed Okies and Arkies to California. As Steinbeck documented the great migration in prose, and Lange did on film, Guthrie wrote his accounts of the struggle in song. Offended by Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," Guthrie penned "This Land Is Your Land," whose subversive verses rarely make it into the classroom, but should. Guthrie shared Steinbeck's belief in organizing ("Union Maid"), anger at the law ("Vigilante Man"), and despair for the unnamed victims ("Deportee"). The Library of Congress provides a Web site on Guthrie, who is also the subject of Haskell Wexler's 1976 biopic, Bound for Glory.
Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940-1950
These, of course, are only some of the supplements and themes available in an instructor's treatment of Steinbeck's work. Thirties filmmaker King Vidor preceded Steinbeck with his own cinematic rant, Our Daily Bread, which is available on a DVD of the same name containing other thirties curiosities, including the Los Angeles Times's cinematic attacks on Upton Sinclair (author of the muckraking The Jungle) in his 1934 run for governor of California. When discussing the culture of the time, I've shown excerpts from Shirley Temple films to illustrate the escapist fare of the Depression that made rags-to-riches musicals, amidst the economic despair, a favorite of the masses. Horace McCoy's damning commentary of just this disparity between escape and reality, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, became a terrific film in 1969 that captures the desperation of the Depression-era dance marathons.
Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney's 1931 "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?" was just one of a number of theatrical works that also challenged the superficiality of escapism. In the same year, the musical stage yielded George and Ira Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing, a savage satire on presidential politics, and in 1937, the Federal Theater Project produced Marc Blitzstein's devastating attack on politics, labor thugs, the press, and corporate America in The Cradle Will Rock (the 1999 film of the same name wonderfully captures the story behind this controversial work). Finally, in a more contemporary vein, folk guitarist Peter Rowan's Dust Bowl Children is both a tribute to and evocation of the 1930s Oklahoma/Texas/Arkansas landscape, and in 1995 Bruce Springsteen released his own ode to Steinbeck's classic, The Ghost of Tom Joad, an album of spare tunes that turns The Grapes of Wrath into a metaphor for America's disenfranchised.
Clearly, as with much historical fiction, The Grapes of Wrath is a doorway to a smorgasbord of cultural examples and historical themes. Much as Steinbeck's novel gives depth to the human experience of thirties America, the cultural items and primary documents listed above flesh out classroom understanding that much more.
Poet Wallace Stevens once wrote of 13 ways of looking at a blackbird; when we invite the artistic experience into a social studies discussion, we increase the ways we can see an era, most certainly complicating, and enriching, our knowledge of it.
A Sample Bibliography
What follows is a list of longer works, arranged chronologically, that address specific historical events or cultures in the AP U.S. History classroom.
- The Last of the Mohicans. James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series was the first American historical fiction, and The Last of the Mohicans returned to the battle of Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War.
- Two Years Before the Mast. Richard Henry Dana's travelogue documents the era of sailing in antebellum America.
- Roughing It. Considered by many the first American travelogue, Mark Twain's humorous account of America from Nevada to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands is both analysis and commentary.
- The Rise of Silas Lapham. As an editor for Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells influenced American literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century, his own fiction a reflection of the culture's shift to realism as urbanization developed. Silas Lapham is a Boston businessman whose fortunes fall and rise on the economic tides of Gilded Age America.
- The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton wrote about what she knew, the lifestyles of the rich and famous in Old and New New York. This novel is an intense examination of the era of the Astors, Vanderbilts, and New York's fashionable "400."
- The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane's naturalistic writing found fruitful subject matter in this cynical examination of Civil War heroics. The work reflects his journalistic endeavors, something writers increasingly drew from in the twentieth century.
- The Marrow of Tradition. Charles W. Chesnutt based his novel on the racial strife in Wilmington, North Carolina, that led to the Massacre of 1898, a race riot inflamed by white Democrats angered by the political success of the Republican Party.
- The Jungle. Considered by many the ultimate muckraking novel of the Progressive Era, Upton Sinclair's journalistic fiction is less about the meatpacking industry than it is about the displacement and exploitation of the increasing immigrant class.
- The Octopus. Inspired by the Southern Pacific Railroad's killing of ranchers at the Mussel Slough Massacre of 1880, Frank Norris wrote a scathing commentary on California politics and an indictment of the Big Four: Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins.
- They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Horace McCoy's brief work is a devastating peek beneath the facade of Southern California culture during the Depression. Taking the era's dance marathons as a metaphor for the desperation of America in the 1930s, McCoy skewers the culture that produced Shirley Temple for a disillusioned country.
- The Dollmaker. Among the forgotten American migrations is the movement of Appalachian communities to Northern cities. Drawing from her own experiences, Harriette Arnow tells of a family's dissolution as it leaves the hills for work in the car economy of Depression-era Detroit.
- The Grapes of Wrath. Like the muckrakers that preceded him, John Steinbeck turned a journalistic investigation into a novel, his research made clear in historical details that surround the Joad family's disintegration as they flee the Midwest for California dreamin'.
- Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison's one novel is an allegorical, nearly surrealistic telling, but it's peopled with references to actual persons and events. This travelogue of a young black man's move from the South to the North is a devastating critique of the American dream.
- Black Boy. Richard Wright's fictionalized memoir captures the experiences of African Americans migrating from rural to urban America.
- The Book of Daniel. Both commenting on the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and exploring it as a cold war metaphor, E. L. Doctorow's book is a fascinating investigation of radicalism, class conflict, and the struggles of liberalism.
- The Things They Carried. Though less historically specific than other works on this list, Tim O'Brien's novel nevertheless references the experiences of soldier and vets, drawn from his tour of duty in Vietnam.
Jeff House teaches at Presentation High School in San Jose, California. A Reader of the AP U.S. History Exam, he has won several National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants and written for such publications as the English Journal.
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