Ian Afflerbach

In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her pregnancy that year—does not fit neatly into the rhetoric that surrounds our ongoing political and legal debate over women’s reproductive rights. During the Great Depression, economic scarcity meant that abortion, if still illegal, was not policed or stigmatized as bitterly as it would be in earlier or later decades. Neither simply “pro” nor “anti,” Slesinger’s tale instead explores the psychological afterlives of this experience for one woman, trying to reconcile her decision with the feelings that linger after, with her identity as an intellectual, and with her husband’s own intellectual insecurities.

From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, founded just the year before, gained widespread notoriety for not only correctly predicting the election’s outcome using only 50,000 respondents, but also estimating the Digest poll’s error in advance of their publication, with a sample of just 3,000. Gallup took the technique of the questionnaire, made politically potent by mass print culture, yet still employed as a blunt instrument, and infused it with a newfound statistical rigor. Gallup’s confrontation with the Digest at once exemplified and accelerated the growing influence that questionnaires had in American culture in the 1930s, and particularly highlighted how modern periodicals might thrive—or wither—by using this technique to actively engage national political debates. The Literary Digest, founded in 1890, endured its shame only briefly, being sold in 1938 and shortly thereafter dissolved into Henry Luce’s Time. Gallup’s Institute, meanwhile, became a leading authority in evaluating public opinion, his name soon treated as metonymic for the use of modern, quantitative polling. Not all questionnaires from this transformative era in America culture, however, sought out quantitative consensus. Partisan Review, generally considered the most influential modernist “little magazine” in the United States from the 1930s through the 1950s, consistently employed questionnaires as a means to prompt its impressive network of authors and intellectuals into debating philosophical ideals, artistic movements, and political struggles. These questionnaires, or “symposia” as they were interchangeably called by Partisan Review’s editors, evince the magazine’s evolving commitments across its decades of cultural influence, from its early years as an organ of the Communist Party, signaled by “What is Americanism? A Symposium on Marxism and the American Tradition” in 1936, to its gradual turn towards a postwar liberal anticommunism, signaled by “Our Country and Our Culture” in 1952. For many critics, Partisan Review’s shift from the radicalism of the 1930s to the liberalism of the 1950s has served as an index for the growing aesthetic orthodoxy, and thus dwindling cultural vitality, of literary modernism, for which Partisan Review served as a leading institutional champion in the United States during these years. Even the preeminent, multivolume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2012) neatly recapitulates this tragic narrative, proposing that “something had been lost or forgotten” as the “bohemian left intellectual environment of the 1910s and Masses had morphed through a period of Marxist position-taking into the emerging hegemony of the New York intellectuals, accompanied by a stable, conservative literary modernism.”