Art and Entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s  | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945  | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline  | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress  | Library of Congress (2024)

Even during hard times and wartime, people need to be entertained. The American people in the 1930s and 1940s were no exception. They enjoyed many forms of entertainment, particularly if they could do so inexpensively.

With the addition of sound, movies became increasingly popular. Comedies, gangster movies, and musicals helped people forget their troubles. In the early 1940s, some of the great dramas of American film reached theaters. Radio was also wildly popular, offering many kinds of programs, from sermons to soap operas.

In the 1930s, big bands and swing music were popular, with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller popular bandleaders. In the 1940s, the bands started to break up, and band singers like Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan went out on their own. War songs became popular.

Among the unemployed in the Depression were artists and performers of many types. Government programs to assist these people resulted in production of plays and artworks for all to enjoy.

As you examine the documents in this section, compare arts and entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s with arts and entertainment as you know them today. What similarities do you see? What differences? How might you explain the continuity you see, as well as the change?

To find additional sources on this topic, use the names of specific forms of art or entertainment to search the collections; for example, you might use such words asmusic,dance, ortheaterin your search.

Documents

• The Federal Theatre Project
• A Good Show
  • C.M. Deal
  • A.F. Kehr
• An Interview with the Town Mail Clerk and Philosopher
• Perennial Contestant
• Walker Evans Photographs
  • Negro children. Tupelo, Mississippi
  • Farmyard covered with flood waters near Ridgeley, Tennessee
  • Hitchhikers near Vicksburg, Mississippi
  • William Fields, Hale County, Alabama
  • Dorothea Lange Photographs
    • Corn, drought-stricken and eaten off by grasshoppers. Near Russelville, Arkansas
    • Eighteen year-old mother from Oklahoma, now a California migrant
    • People living in miserable poverty. Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma
    • The only home of a depression-routed family of nine from Iowa
  • Portraits by Carl Van Vechten
    • Portrait of Ethel Waters
    • Portrait of Laurence Olivier
    • Portrait of Clare Boothe Luce
    • Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York
    • Portrait of Countee Cullen, in Central Park
    • Portrait of Alicia Markova, "Giselle," Act 1
    • Portrait of Carlos Chavez
    • Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston
    • Portrait of Langston Hughes
    • Portrait of Tallulah Bankhead