The Alabama Writers' Project and Its Contributions to American History
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A New Deal for Writers: The Alabama Writers’ Project and Its Contributions to American History by Hesper Eileen Montford A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Auburn, Alabama December 14, 2013 Keywords: Federal Writers’ Project, Alabama, Guidebook, Oral History, Works Progress Administration Copyright 2013 by Hesper Eileen Montford Approved by David C. Carter, Chair, Associate Professor of History Reagan Grimsley, Assistant Professor of History Eden Knudsen McLean, Assistant Professor of History Abstract At the height of the Great Depression and the New Deal, administrators and staff of the Federal Writers’ Project embarked on a series of literary undertakings to uncover and restore the nation’s cultural and historical landscape. Amongst the most popular and significant of these assignments were the American Guide Series and Oral History Projects. Under these projects, staff produced guidebooks for every state, conducted and transcribed thousands of interviews with former slaves and ordinary Americans, and documented America’s folk traditions. This thesis serves to fill a gap in the historiography of the Federal Writers’ Project by examining its efforts at the state level in Alabama. It analyzes Alabama’s contribution to the Guidebook and Oral History Projects by exploring and evaluating the Alabama Project, its staff, and its accomplishments. It traces the background and organization of the Alabama Writers’ Project, reviews the guidelines and constraints placed upon administrators and workers, examines Alabama’s personnel and their achievements, and assesses materials it produced. Although scholars and the public neglected the Project’s materials for decades, this thesis claims that the guidebook and oral histories reshaped perceptions of the state’s culture and history. In later years, scholars and the public rediscovered these materials and deemed them valuable sources of historical information, incorporating the guidebook and oral histories into their own projects. ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Mirror to America: Alabama’s Guidebook Project .....................................22 Chapter Two: In Their Own Words: Alabama’s Oral History Projects .............................52 Chapter Three: Legacy of the Federal Writers’ Project: Transforming American Historical Perspective ..........................................................................................105 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................142 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................147 iii INTRODUCTION “The Arts Project of WPA was, perhaps, one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state. Noblest because no other state has ever cared whether its artists as a group lived or died… Yet absurd, because a state can only function bureaucratically and impersonally.” – W. H. Auden, introduction to Red Ribbon on a White Horse, 1950 In the midst of the economic crises of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Instituted in 1935, the Federal Writers’ Project was one of several relief programs under the WPA aimed at providing work to those in the arts. The Writers’ Project’s payroll included writers, editors, researchers and other professionals, who, through the Project, would achieve many literary, historical, and cultural accomplishments. The Roosevelt administration launched the New Deal initiative to restore the United State’s economy following the stock market crash of 1929 that subsequently led to one of the worst depressions in history. By 1933, the year Roosevelt assumed office, unemployment affected a quarter of the nation’s workforce, leaving 34 million Americans without means to support themselves.1 The New Deal consisted of numerous federal relief programs for the unemployed, as well as reforms to the financial system in 1 Nick Taylor, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008), 1. 1 order to prevent such an event from happening again. The WPA was its largest program, and employed a total of 8.5 million workers between 1935 and 1943. Roosevelt proposed a $1.5 billion budget in its first year, and over eight years spent roughly $10.5 billion.2 Designed to generate jobs, stimulate the economy, and restore morale, WPA jobs were primarily for workers without specific skill sets, or blue-collar workers. It funded practical projects that restored the country’s infrastructure, and over the course of eight years constructed or repaired 651,087 miles of highways, roads and streets, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 public parks, 853 airports, and roughly 700 miles of airport runways.3 Although this manual labor transformed or repaired some of the nation’s most significant physical landscapes, one division of the WPA was dedicated to restoring the nation’s creative and cultural landscapes by providing jobs for artists, musicians, actors, and writers. This division, termed Federal One, consisted of five arts programs that furnished artists with jobs in their field, allowing them to utilize their talents and preserve their particular trade. By utilizing and preserving these skills, Federal One restored confidence to artists in deep poverty and despair while creating and promoting American art and culture, giving Americans access to what President Roosevelt called a more “abundant life.”4 Federal One consisted of the Federal Music Project, Federal Art 2 Ibid., 3. 3 T.H. Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930s (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 249; Taylor, 523-524. 4 In response to the hardships many Americans faced during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt challenged the people to find “a more abundant life” and attempted to improve the quality of living through increasing cultural opportunities along with economic opportunities. The United States National Archives and Records Administration, “A New Deal of the Arts,” accessed July 14, 2010 at http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/new_deal_for_the_arts/index.html. 2 Project, Federal Theatre Project, Federal Writers’ Project, and the Historical Records Survey. While the Music, Art, and Theatre Projects produced great American masterpieces that defined the era and the Historical Records Survey assessed and indexed important American archival collections, the Federal Writers’ Project documented the nation’s history and mapped the cultural landscape for future generations. Project employees and administrators composed some of the nation’s greatest literary works and left behind numerous cultural records. These literary works and records remain an important contribution to the New Deal era and American history. Throughout its eight years of activity, the Writers’ Project employed between 3,500 and 6,700 total personnel, amounting to approximately two percent of the WPA workforce, and received less than one percent of the total WPA budget. Although the government allotted a mere fraction of the overall WPA staff and appropriations, the Writers’ Project produced more than 276 books, 701 pamphlets, and 340 “issuances” (articles, leaflets, radio scripts).5 Among the most popular and significant of the Writers’ Project’s literary endeavors were the Guidebook Project and the Oral History Projects. Guidebook Project personnel researched and wrote travel guides for every state, region, and major city in the country, culminating in the publication of the American Guide Series, while Oral History Project personnel conducted and transcribed thousands of oral histories with former slaves and ordinary Americans, and documented countless folklore traditions. 5 William Stott, introduction to Remembering America: A Sampler of the WPA American Guide Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-2. 3 During its tenure, many Americans appreciated the Federal Writers’ Project for its ability to provide work of substance that took their minds off the economic situation. Writers gained the satisfaction of maintaining their craft while receiving a paycheck, while others, who remained the majority throughout the Project, learned about writing and the literary industry. Numerous Project workers, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, went on to become some of America’s most notable writers after gaining experience with the Project. Additionally, in absorbing “genetic information about their country and its people,” the social framework of America, writers obtained new material to work with and changed the American literary scene.6 Furthermore, by using modified interview techniques to record American’s stories, the Oral History Projects improved ways of documenting history. Although many of the writing staff enjoyed these more immediate benefits, it took decades for academics and the broader public to realize the full extent of the Project’s cultural and historical contributions. The Federal Arts Programs celebrated America