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Wheeler, Mark (2016) Book Review : Graham Cassano, A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935-1948 (Boston: Brill, 2014, $28.00). Pp. 215. ISBN 978 9 0042 7519 5. Journal of American Studies, 50 (1). pp. 1-2. ISSN 0021-8758
Graham Cassano’s book contends that a new type of American audience was sought out by Hollywood filmmakers in the 1930s and 1940s. He argues that this reconfigured United States “public” had emerged from the governmental intervention of the New Deal, the inequities of the Great Depression and the radicalization of working-class consciousnesses. Most especially, the proletarian values of such a politically aware audience had been advanced by the anti-Fascist Popular Front movement and by the tectonic labour struggles that occurred between the US workforce and the reactionary capitalist elite. Therefore this radicalized public was receptive to a range of films that would critically investigate the causes of the Depression. Moreover, these filmic narratives, by propagating new types of political community, provided an alternative discourse to the mainstream representations of the economic calamity.
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