The central thesis of Marcus’s book is that for those seeking political transformation and social justice, the American post–Civil War era and the new century that followed unfolded as a series of such moments: windows of revolutionary promise that were abruptly, painfully closed. Reconstruction fell to Jim Crow; Third Period Communism yielded to the Popular Front; the classical phase of the civil rights movement faced persistent white terror; and so on. Wherever hope was raised, disappointment followed. Yet what is most striking about Marcus’s account is not so much her historical narrative but her implicit argument, mostly through the book’s methodology, about where these disappointments went and where the response to them can now be found: in the minute details of cultural expression.
While each of Marcus’s chapters sets the scene of political disappointment by providing historical context, her analysis takes the form of a series of intricate—and ingenious—close readings of works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Sheppard, Tillie Olsen, Audre Lorde, David Wojnarowicz, and others. It is in the details of cultural production that Marcus locates the afterlife of disappointment, seeing in these details both grief for what was lost and the persistent desire for some ongoing, if reconfigured, version of it. If Political Disappointment makes an explicit case for recasting the 20th century as a century of disappointment, the real work of the book is to quietly build a case, through its method of analysis, for where grief and, ultimately, hope migrated: into the “fleeting and overlooked moments” of culture. Marcus illuminates these texts as repositories of political sentiment, where grief is processed and new solidarities are proposed.
In her chapter on 1930s Communism, for example, Marcus zeroes in on the work songs of Huddie Ledbetter, better known by his stage name Leadbelly. She notices a new, distinct vocalization that cropped up in his work songs in the late 1930s: a breathy huh added to the end of each line, a sonic representation of work, of axes falling, and of workers’ exhalations. This huh represented the cadence of labor. She pinpoints 1937 as the first recorded instance of Leadbelly’s enactment of this sound, in his recording of “Julie Ann Johnson” for the Library of Congress, and she observes that the sound grew more distinctly voiced in Leadbelly’s recordings over the next three years. Marcus sets this evolving huh in biographical context—by 1937, Leadbelly had moved to New York, where he became a favorite of leftist folk enthusiasts—and in the larger context of the shifting sands of revolutionary Communist discourse. To Marcus, it is no wonder that Leadbelly recorded his first huh in 1937, in the wake of the Third Period and the disappointments, especially when it came to the party’s “antiracist priorities,” of the Popular Front. For Leadbelly’s huh invoked the disappointment of the Popular Front and the very figure being lost from the party’s shifting priorities: the Black worker.