The Food of a Younger Land (3 page)

 

 

 

A
ll this happened, we see in retrospect, because Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a politician of extremely rare gifts. He was one of the few U.S. presidents who understood how to use an electoral mandate, what to do in that rare moment of goodwill in the American political process when, having handily won a presidential election, there is an opportunity to accomplish politically dubious things while your party is still celebrating and the opposition can only hope that, given enough rope, the new leader will surely hang himself.

Roosevelt’s mandate was derived from bringing his Democratic party back to power in 1932 while the gross national product was in precipitous decline, a third of the American labor force was out of work, and millions were facing the possibility of real starvation. It was also perhaps the only moment in history in which the United States had a large leftist intelligentsia—so large, in fact, that the Communist Party of America, besieged by membership applications, was actually rejecting some.

Roosevelt’s secret weapon, his powerful political tactic, was unstoppable and unreasoning optimism. He was so exuberant, so irritatingly frothy, that he was the perfect antidote to an age known as the Great Depression.

Triumphantly, electoral mandate in hand, Roosevelt declared that the government should “quit this business of relief.” It was the new president’s contention that in this moment of crisis, when so large a portion of the population was unemployed, it was vital to “not only sustain these people but to preserve their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage, and determination.” His idea was to let the unemployed earn money by working for the federal government. Despite considerable controversy, by April 1935, fifteen months after Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Emergency Relief Act of 1935 was passed. This law gave the president the power to decree work relief programs. A few weeks later, on May 6, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration, the WPA.

Roosevelt was proceeding with skill and caution. The WPA was a public works program that would put blue-collar laborers to work building government projects, a program that was only slightly controversial. There was the issue of whether a country with a rapidly shrinking GNP should be spending like this. But many argued that they should, in order to stimulate the economy. The WPA, both to simplify its tasks and to draw less controversy, tended toward many small, easily launched projects rather than a few massive ones. The executive order had called for “small useful projects.”

But the Emergency Relief Act had also called for “assistance to educational and clerical persons; a nation-wide program for useful employment for artists, musicians, actors, entertainers, writers . . .” By the summer of 1935 Federal Project Number 1, popularly known as Federal One, was under way. It included the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Writers’ Project, all mandated by law in that one barely noticed phrase in the Emergency Relief Act.

At its height the Federal Art Project employed 5,300 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jacob Lawrence, and Marsden Hartley, and staffed one hundred art centers in twenty-two states. The Federal Music Project, directed by former Cleveland Symphony conductor Nikolai Sokoloff, gave 5,000 performances. The Federal Theatre Project employed 12,700 people, including Orson Welles, John Houseman, Burt Lancaster, Joseph Cotten, Will Geer, Virgil Thomson, Nicholas Ray, E. G. Marshall, and Sidney Lumet, produced more than 1,200 plays in four years, mostly free of charge, and introduced one hundred new playwrights.

 

 

 

W
riters, too, were in desperate need of work. Newspapers and magazines were folding as declining advertising revenue was being increasingly diverted to radio. Book sales were decreasing every year, even for established writers. The Federal Writers’ Project directed pools of writers in each of the forty-eight states. New York City had its own project in addition to the New York State Writers’ Project, and California was divided into Northern and Southern. In all there were fifty local projects answering to the FWP.

The poet W. H. Auden called the Federal Writers’ Project “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state.” The idea was received by the public with predictable cynicism. Subsidizing art has never been popular with Americans. Subsidizing anything in America comes under attack. The workers of the WPA were called “shovel leaners.” Now the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project were labeled “pencil leaners.” Editorials argued that poverty and adversity, not government subsidies, produced great writing.

The writers were constantly under suspicion of boondoggling. When the New York City Writers’ Project produced a translation of the biblical
Song of Songs
from the original Hebrew into Yiddish, one perennial critic of the program looked at the translation and noticed that Yiddish, a High German language, is written with Hebrew letters. He charged, as though he had at last found a smoking gun, that they were both the same language. Others denounced the FWP as an encroachment on states’ rights. Congressional criticism culminated in hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee under Texas Democrat Martin Dies in late 1938 on alleged Communist ties, which caused considerable difficulties because, in fact, many of the better-known writers in the FWP had at one time or another had Communist affiliations. But the real goal was to attempt to show a Communist underpinning to Roosevelt’s New Deal, ironic since many historians today credit the New Deal with stopping the growth of Communism in the United States.

 

 

 

W
hen Henry Alsberg, a native New Yorker, was appointed director of the FWP at the age of fifty-seven, he had been a newspaper journalist, off-Broadway director, and writer, but was little known outside of New York. He had graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of twenty and had worked as a foreign correspondent, covering the tumultuous early days of the Soviet Union. He had experienced numerous adventures as a correspondent and later as director of the American Joint Distribution Committee. For a long time he contemplated an autobiography but could never finish it and went to work for Roosevelt’s New Deal. As director of the FWP, a chain-smoker chronically in search of something on his ash-strewn desk, he quickly earned a reputation for his inept administrative style and his high editorial standards. Alsberg was constantly at odds with the administration over the conflict between his goal of producing good books and theirs of simply providing relief work.

The first problem of the FWP was deciding who was eligible. If it was to be only writers, what was the definition of a writer? Did it have to be a published writer? In the end, in keeping with the initial intention of the WPA, almost anyone who was reasonably literate and needed a job qualified. This included secretaries who had worked on the many local newspapers that had now folded. In fact, people who could type were especially valued. Advertising copywriters qualified, as did technical writers and out-of-work teachers. So did published poets and the authors of well-received novels.

 

 

 

S
tetson Kennedy, then an inexperienced young aspiring writer, recalled his work for the Florida Writers’ Project: “To work for the FWP you had to take an oath that you had no money, no job, and no property. I was eminently qualified.” He, along with Zora Neale Hurston, the only published novelist of the two hundred people hired for the Florida project, were taken on as junior interviewers for $37.50 every two weeks. “I remember going window shopping with my wife trying to decide what we would do with all the money,” said Kennedy.

The wage scale varied from state to state. A New York writer received $103 a month, and Georgia and Mississippi paid $39. Cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco had a concentration of talented writers. The project would have liked to move some of those writers to other states where there was a shortage, but the pay difference made these writers unwilling to move. In some of the hard-hit prairie states where there were few professional writers, employment in the Federal Writers’ Project saved unqualified people and their families from literal starvation. That, too, was a goal of the WPA.

In Chicago, the Illinois Writers’ Project, directed by John T. Frederick, an English professor with an eye for emerging midwestern talent, had Nelson Algren. Algren was one of the few writers on the project who already had a published novel to his credit. Other writers in Chicago included Saul Bellow, who had recently graduated from college; Jack Conroy, who was born in a mining camp and had earned praise for two novels of working-class life; and Richard Wright, who had worked in a post office until he found employment with the Writers’ Project, working on guidebooks while he wrote
Native Son
in his spare time. Arna Bontemps published his third novel,
Drums at Dusk
, while working as a supervisor. Other members of the Chicago group included oral historian Studs Terkel, who wrote radio scripts for the project, and dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham.

Conrad Aiken and Josef Berger were among the noted writers on the Massachusetts Project. The New York City Project had Maxwell Bodenheim, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, and Claude McKay, who in the 1920s had written the first bestseller in America by a black writer. John Cheever worked for the New York State Project. Kenneth Rexroth, the influential Beat poet, worked for the Northern California Writers’ Project.

Ralph Ellison and Claude McKay were among the prominent writers who gathered material for novels while working for the FWP. In Florida Zora Neale Hurston, though kept at the lowest position, already had to her credit three books, including her best novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, and was working on a second novel. It is not by chance that African-American literature—Wright, Ellison, McKay, Hurston—made such advances under the FWP. Starting in 1936, one of the major projects under folklore editor John A. Lomax was to interview the remaining blacks in America who had memories of slavery. Every WPA guidebook included a section on black history and culture at a time when this subject was almost never taken on. Several directors felt that blacks should be working on these projects. But a February 1937 report showed that of 4,500 workers on the FWP only 106 were black.

 

 

 

I
n truth, blacks often were not treated well in the southern projects. Hurston, despite her literary accomplishment, was placed on the bottom rung of Florida workers, paid even a few dollars less than the bottom salary because allegedly it would cost her so little to live in a rural black township. When she joined the Florida Writers’ Project in 1938, the Florida editorial staff was called together and told, “Zora Neale Hurston, the Florida Negro novelist, has signed onto the project and will soon be paying us a visit. Zora has been feted by New York literary circles, and is given to putting on airs, including the smoking of cigarettes in the presence of white people. So we must all make allowances for Zora.”

The talented writers, both veteran and promising, were rare. Yes, Frederick worked in Chicago with Bellow, Wright, and Algren. But he also had on the staff a calligrapher who, for lack of anything else to do, produced handsome business cards for the other writers. Challenged on the competence of FWP writers, director Henry Alsberg could produce the names of only 29 established writers out of 4,500 on the project. In mid-1938 a survey of the FWP staff showed that 82 were recognized writers and another 97 had held major editorial positions. According to the report, 238 had at some time sold something to a newspaper or magazine and 161 were labeled “beginning writers of promise.” This left only another 3,893 “writers” to explain.

Working with such an uneven staff limited them to projects to which everyone could contribute and then one or two “real writers” could rework. It was Katherine Kellock, a writer who worked for Roosevelt’s New Deal, who came up with an idea. She said that the Federal Writers’ Project ought to “put them to work writing Baedekers,” the leading English-language guidebooks of the time. This was the birth of the American Guide Series.

Katherine Kellock had given up a higher-paying job to move to the FWP and work on her idea, the guidebooks. She both talked and worked at a feverish rate. There were many jokes about the verbose Mrs. Kellock. She took on the guidebooks as a personal mission, criticizing and cajoling the various state organizations in visits and letters. After she became plagued by an accusation in the Hearst newspapers that she was a Communist, Alsberg called her in from the field and gave her a job supervising from Washington. The accusation was largely based on the fact that her husband was a correspondent for the Soviet news agency, TASS.