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

Although the movement for shorter working hours continued to the end of the Depression, it never regained the momentum it had had in the early 1930s, prior to its co-opting by the NRA. The fortyhour work week has now been enshrined as a sacrosanct tenet of business, and there is not much likelihood that a move to shorter hours—the chief component of Lovecraft’s (and others’) plans for full employment—will ever be carried out.

Roosevelt, of course, realized that unemployment was the major problem to be dealt with in the short term (at least twelve million were unemployed in 1932—nearly a quarter of the work force), and one of the first things he did upon gaining office was to establish various emergency measures in an attempt to relieve it. Among these was the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), which would enlist young men from the ages of seventeen to twenty-four for the reforestation of parks, flood control, power development, and the like.

Some have wondered why Lovecraft himself never made an attempt to sign on to some such programme. But he was never strictly speaking unemployed: he always had revision work and very sporadic sales of original fiction, and perhaps he feared that he would lose even these modest sources of income if he joined a government-sponsored work programme. What of the WPA (Works Progress Administration), instituted in the summer of 1935? This mostly generated blue-collar construction jobs obviously unsuited for Lovecraft, but the Federal Writers’ Project was an important subdivision of the WPA and resulted in the production of a number of significant works of art and scholarship. Lovecraft could perhaps have worked on the guide to Rhode Island published in 1937, but he never made any effort to do so.

One perhaps unintended effect of the economic crisis was to deflect Lovecraft’s attention from other social evils. The 18th Amendment was repealed on 6 December 1933. A year and a half earlier Lovecraft had already announced that his enthusiasm for prohibition was a thing of the past,⁴ but he made it clear that this was only because he realized that the law against liquor was essentially unenforceable. Lovecraft was surely not pleased at the repeal, but his reference to alcoholism as a ‘relatively insignificant rat’⁵ certainly contrasts with his fulminations against drinking a decade and a half earlier.

Where Lovecraft departed most radically from the Roosevelt administration itself as well as from the main stream of American opinion was in his suggestions for political reform. He saw economics and politics as quite separate phenomena requiring separate solutions. While proposing the spreading of economic wealth to the many, he concurrently advocated the restricting of political power to the few. This should come as no surprise, given Lovecraft’s early (and romanticized) support for the English aristocracy and monarchy, his later readings in Nietzsche, and his own intellectual superiority. And yet, because Lovecraft enunciated his view somewhat misleadingly—or, perhaps, in a deliberately provocative way—he has taken some criticism from later commentators.

In the first place, Lovecraft’s ‘oligarchy of intelligence and education’ (as he terms it in ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’) is not actually an aristocracy or even an oligarchy in the strictest sense. It is indeed a democracy—but merely a democracy that recognizes the ill effects of universal suffrage if the electorate consists (as in fact it does today) largely of the uneducated or the politically naive. Lovecraft’s argument is a very simple one, and is again an outgrowth of his realization of the socioeconomic complexities brought on by the machine age: governmental decisions are now too complex for anyone other than a sophisticated specialist to understand. He discusses the matter cynically with Robert E. Howard:

Democracy—as distinguished from universal opportunity and good treatment—is today a fallacy and impossibility so great that any serious attempt to apply it cannot be considered as other than a mockery and a jest … Government ‘by popular vote’ means merely the nomination of doubtfully qualified men by doubtfully authorised and seldom competent cliques of professional politicians representing hidden interests, followed by a sardonic farce of emotional persuasion in which the orators with the glibbest tongues and flashiest catch-words herd on their side a numerical majority of blindly impressionable dolts and gulls who have for the most part no idea of what the whole circus is about.⁶ How little things have changed.