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 and the American people through uncovering and promoting the country’s past, character, culture, and traditions. Its objectives were to produce art that focused on the individual, promoted local and regional history, served practical purposes, and reached the broader American public. These objectives aligned with the broader New Deal sentiment, and were nationalistic in nature.7 To comply with these objectives, the Project carefully selected undertakings that documented the lives of the individual, produced local and regional histories, 6 Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 373. 7 National Archives and Records Administration, “A New Deal for the Arts,” accessed at www.archives.gov/exhibits/new_deal_for_the_arts/index.html. 4 commissioned utilitarian projects such as travel guides, and generated products that made America easily accessible to the broader public. These undertakings, primarily the Guidebook and Oral History Projects, redefined and transformed the cultural and historical landscapes for future generations. To analyze the Writers’ Project’s contributions to American culture and its impact on 1930s America, this thesis explores the Project and its activities in Alabama. Although the Federal Project originated in Washington, DC, state-level staffers were responsible for carrying out Project programs and for following the guidelines set forth by the national office. These men and women formed the backbone of the Writers’ Project, as it was the state offices that administered daily operations. Shifting the focus from the typical national perspective to a more intimate look at how the project operated within Alabama contributes to a greater understanding of how local realities often impeded or altered the plans and goals of the federally led project. Similarly, analyzing the Alabama Project provides insight into how, through carrying out state-wide Project programs, state staffers were able to create a more inclusive history of the state. By including diverse populations in the narrative, these state-level employees most familiar with Alabama’s characteristics produced a story more representative of the people living in Alabama then previous histories. Through surveying and evaluating the government’s efforts at the Alabama level, this thesis demonstrates how the federal government carried out its goals of uncovering what made America, “America,” and highlights the importance the Project placed on the individual. Using the Alabama Writers’ Project as a case study, it examines the Project’s formation and organization; decisions behind the Guidebook and Oral History Projects; 5 Project guidelines and the administrative constraints placed on Project staff; balance between state and federal editorial offices; and materials produced by the Alabama Project. The thesis reveals how Project staff captured the characteristics that made the state distinctly “Alabama,” and assesses how the Project enriched and informed the lives of Alabamians. By demonstrating the enduring value of Alabama’s material and exploring the Project at the state-level, this analysis provides context to the larger national Project’s efforts, rendering insight into the Federal Writers’ Project’s legacy. The Alabama Project is important because it represents and highlights larger national goals and reflects issues many state offices encountered, particularly in the South. The Project demonstrates a wide range of activities as it participated in all of the national assignments, including the guidebook, life histories, slave narratives, and folklore, as well as creating pamphlets and brochures about the state’s natural resources, offering a comprehensive representation of the Federal Writers’ Project. Additionally, the Alabama Project faced its share of adversity, such as difficulty hiring experienced authors, office disputes, and battles for control between the state and local editorial offices. More importantly, previous historical narratives of the state defined Alabama’s past according to the “great white male” interpretations, a narrative that the Alabama Writers’ Project fought to transform. This thesis examines two of Alabama’s influential undertakings, the Guidebook Project and Oral History Projects, to determine how the Alabama Project accomplished providing a more inclusive history of its state. This thesis argues that the Writers’ Project programs in the state had both immediate and long-term effects on Alabama’s culture and history. Through their efforts, the Project writers successfully recorded the histories and 6 cultures of groups within the state that had previously received only minor attention in state histories. The stories collected and preserved by the Alabama Writers’ Project illuminated the contributions of these marginalized segments of Alabamian society, long overshadowed by more traditional narratives. Through the staff’s work, no longer would Alabama’s history remain the domain of the rich and white. Instead, the Project ensured that future researchers would have the means to integrate the perspectives of every group that called Alabama home. Though Project administrators found audiences unreceptive of their work at the time and years passed before the materials gained recognition, scholars and the public would come to value these rich repositories of historical data decades later. Amid the rise of the new social history and renewed popularity of local history in later decades, the Project found a new audience more receptive to its publications. Since the 1970s, scholars have become increasingly interested in the Federal Writers’ Project and publications on the subject increased; however, prior to this decade the public generally neglected the arts programs in their works after the Great Depression. As the nation recovered and enjoyed a healthier economy following World War II, the economic crisis became a distant memory as Americans avoided thinking about hard times and the remaining scars of destitution. By the 1970s, the arts programs and their accomplishments reemerged in the public and scholarly world, as scholars began discussing them as an innate part of the 1930s. Additionally, with the bicentennial on the horizon publishers revised and reissued the guidebooks for public use.8 In 1969 a team of scholars, led by William F. McDonald, published a detailed study of the origins 8 Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 372. 7