How did technological breakthroughs help shape our sense of national identity during the Depression?
DICKSTEIN: One of the most famous critical essays of the 1930s, an essay by the German critic Walter Benjamin called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” highlights the dramatic change in culture that occurred with the introduction of cinema, radio, and so on. The difference between those and older styles of stage production, or vaudeville, or various forms of pulp publication is very important because it meant that a single film or radio program could reach a very large number of people at the same time, while freeing art from its cultic “aura.” At the beginning of the thirties, movies and radio didn’t fully reach rural America. Many small towns had a movie theater, but most homes, especially farms, had no electricity. One of the less remembered but most important programs of the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Administration, which eventually brought the number of people who had electricity from 10 percent of rural inhabitants to 90 percent. And that meant
