Popular-culture research neglects the 1930s because it lacked a militant working-class culture

Evidence

I select this period—the 1880s–1920s—because it is one of the real test cases for the revived interest in popular culture. Without in any way casting aspersions on the important historical work which has been done and remains to do on earlier periods, I do believe that many of the real difficulties (theoretical as well as empirical) will only be confronted when we begin to examine closely popular culture in a period which begins to resemble our own, which poses the same kind of interpretive problems as our own, and which is informed by our own sense of contemporary questions. I am dubious about that kind of interest in “popular culture” which comes to a sudden and unexpected halt at roughly the same point as the decline of Chartism. It isn’t by chance that very few of us are working in popular culture in the 1930s. I suspect there is something peculiarly awkward, especially for socialists, in the non-appearance of a militant, radical mature culture of the working class in the 1930s when—to tell you the truth—most of us would have expected it to appear. From the viewpoint of a purely “heroic” or “autonomous” popular culture, the 1930s is a pretty barren period. This “barrenness”—like the earlier unexpected richness and diversity—cannot be explained from within popular culture alone. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1000

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: what did working-class culture actually look like in the 1930s, and why did socialist researchers avoid it?
• XREF: Relates to the ‘heroic’ vs materialist approach to labor history Hall criticizes, and to the historiographical debate about Chartism’s end.

Related

• The 1930s lacked a militant radical working-class culture despite socialist expectation (similarity 0.82)
• Modern popular culture assumes its traditional forms between 1880 and 1920 (similarity 0.81)
• British working-class culture was fundamentally remade between the 1880s and 1920s (similarity 0.81)
• No popular culture history is valid that ignores dominant cultural machinery (similarity 0.78)