A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Lovecraft knew that Roosevelt was trying to steer a middle course between right- and left-wing extremism; and on the whole he approved that course. Just after the 1932 election he remarks that a vote for the socialist Norman Thomas ‘would have been simply thrown away’.¹⁰ Nevertheless, although he yearned for Roosevelt to progress still farther and faster with reform, it quickly became obvious to him that the New Deal was the only series of measures that had any real hope of actually passing, given the violent resistance on both sides of the political spectrum. He referred to Coughlin, Long, and other radicals as ‘salutary irritants’¹¹ who would help push Roosevelt more to the left (something that in fact happened following the midterm elections of 1934, which gave Congress a more liberal slant). But in early 1935 he was announcing that he wanted something ‘considerably to the left of the New Deal’,

¹² although he did not think it was practicable; and by the summer of 1936 he expressed a naive irritation that the administration was ‘too subservient to capitalism’¹³—as if Roosevelt had any intention of ushering in real socialism (even of a liberal, non-Marxist variety) instead of merely shoring up capitalism!

The death-knell of capitalism was indeed being rung by many political thinkers of the day, as was entirely natural in the wake of the Depression, capitalism’s most signal disaster. John Dewey’s thunderous declaration—’Capitalism must be destroyed’—is prototypical. Some of Lovecraft’s younger colleagues—Frank Long, R. H. Barlow, Kenneth Sterling—were wholeheartedly espousing Communism, to the point that at the very end of his life Lovecraft expostulated in mock horror, ‘Damme, but are all you kids going bolshevik on grandpa?’¹⁴

And yet, as time went on Lovecraft increasingly lost patience with the social and political conservatism of the middle-class milieu in which he found himself. He came to understand the temperament that led fiery youths like Long and Barlow to Communism without being himself entirely inclined in that direction. He knew that this leftward swing on the part of youths was a natural response to the increasing stodginess and reactionary tendencies of the other side:

As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’ …) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.¹⁵

How little things have changed.

When the election actually occurred—with another landslide for Roosevelt against the hapless Alf Landon and a third-party candidate, William Lemke, a stooge of Coughlin and Francis E. Townsend, the proponent of old age pensions—Lovecraft was of course delighted. His last few months were perhaps spent in satisfaction, with the thought that Roosevelt could now continue his reforms and achieve a genuine moderate socialist state; it must have been a comforting thought as he lay dying.

As the 1930s advanced Lovecraft became more and more concerned with the place of art in modern society. As he matured he became convinced that art could not retreat unthinkingly into the past but must—as he himself had done on an intellectual level—come to some sort of terms with the machine age if it were to survive and remain a living force in society.

The central issue Lovecraft was facing was how to steer a middle course between ‘high’ culture, which in its radicalism was consciously being addressed to an increasingly small coterie of devotees, and ‘popular’ culture—notably the pulps—which was adhering to false, superficial, and outmoded standards through the inevitable moral conservatism such forms of culture have always displayed. This may be the primary reason for Lovecraft’s lack of commercial success in his lifetime: his work was not conventional enough for the pulps but not daring enough (or daring enough in the right way) for the modernists. Lovecraft correctly recognized that capitalism and democracy gave rise to this split in the nineteenth century: