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September 19 - October 22, 2009
Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story is a major documentary television program about the Federal Writers’ Project produced by Spark Media, Washington, D.C., and broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel HD. Soul of a People programs in libraries are sponsored by the American Library Association Public Programs Office with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life.
The Soul of a People series, comprising several special events and book discussions led by scholars and experts in their fields, is sponsored locally by: Central High School Theater Department, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library; Macalester College; Minnesota Historical Society; Saint Agnes Baking Company; and The Saint Paul Public Library.
Scroll down for details on the programs and events, or click here to download the series brochure (1.29 MB).
Background
The Great Depression was the most serious national crisis since the Civil War. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 spelled financial disaster for millions, reverberating for years and shaking Americans’ view of their country as a can-do culture. Nationwide, one out of four Americans had no job. Families often left town without a word to avoid debt collectors.
In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt created a series of make-work agencies, including the Federal Writers’ Project, to get the economy moving again. The purpose was emergency aid. Nobody expected that such an agency would create anything as meaningful as a snapshot of America at a critical moment: a time when old ways were breaking down and new American stories were just emerging.
A NATION BROKEN
A decade of soaring prosperity in the 1920s left Americans unprepared for the Depression. For three full years after the 1929 Crash, companies fired an average of 20,000 workers every working day. Banks collapsed. In Chicago, half of the working age population lost their jobs, and many lost their homes when they couldn’t pay the mortgage. Then-President Herbert Hoover, like many others, insisted that recovery was “just around the corner.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933 and quickly acknowledged that the economic and political system was on the brink of collapse. When told that history would judge him the greatest president if he got the country back on its feet and the worst if he didn’t, Roosevelt replied, “If I fail, I shall be the last one.”
A NEW DEAL
On Roosevelt’s ambitious raft of new agencies, the largest was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired millions of the unemployed to build roads, bridges and schools. This welfare-to-work effort became a lightning rod for debate. Newspapers published cartoons lampooning WPA workers for “boondoggling,” wasting time and taxpayer money. A nationwide poll in 1939 found that one in four Americans ranked the WPA as the worst part of FDR’s government, more than for any other issue. Yet the same poll found that roughly the same percentage ranked WPA relief as the Roosevelt administration’s greatest accomplishment.
A very small section of the WPA—the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP)—hired whitecollar workers: jobless artists, writers, musicians, and actors. Administrators of the FWP sometimes used a loose definition of “writer” to help applicants. For many workers, documenting American life in WPA travel guides was the first time they were paid to write anything.
![Poster publicizing “American Guide Week” Nov. 10–16 [1941]. Courtesy of Library of Congress](_images/FWP/Poster for American Guide Week.jpg)
A NATIONAL PORTRAIT IN TRAVEL GUIDES
The main purpose of WPA work, including the Federal Writers’ Project, was disaster relief, but Henry Alsberg, the agency’s director, also voiced higher goals. “These writers will get an education in the American scene,” he said. “A great deal of real American writing comes out of seeing what is really happening to the American people.” In the WPA guides and “life-history” interviews with ordinary citizens, the WPA writers assembled a portrait of America on an unprecedented scale.
A LEGION OF BIOGRAPHERS
The WPA state guides, containing tour routes and chapters on local history and features, revealed the many cultures in America and where they intersected. Interviews of individual Americans added to that picture. In Seattle, for example, WPA writers noted the city’s Asian communities and episodes of anti-immigrant backlash. In Chicago, they found that white musicians often learned the jazz musical vocabulary from black musicians (sometimes defying a 1920s racial ban on playing together). In Florida, Zora Neale Hurston led WPA workers in recording local versions of Spanish songs and Bahamian versions of old English folk tunes. And in Harlem, a young Ralph Ellison marveled at the unexpected intersections of race and culture, and recalled later that his “appreciation of American cultural possibility was vastly extended.”
B.A. Botkin, director of the WPA folklore division, urged every interviewer to focus on the interviewee’s “real feeling.” For Botkin, the Writers’ Project was a way to show “a living culture” and its meaning “in democratic society as a whole.” When WPA writers delved into uncomfortable issues such as slavery and its legacy, local scandals, and episodes of corruption, the New Deal’s opponents complained. Congress created a committee to investigate Un-American Activities in 1938, and it criticized some sections of WPA guides as propaganda. Amid the furor and belt-tightening as another world war approached, President Roosevelt slashed the WPA budget. Nonetheless, all the WPA state guides were completed, funded mainly by the states.
LEGACIES
Generations of travelers have been surprised by the portraits of American culture in the WPA guides. Journalist Alistair Cooke gathered a large collection of the guides and used them to map a cross-country trip in the early 1940s. Later John Steinbeck used WPA guides as he crossed the continent in the early 1960s, a journey he described in Travels with Charley. Some writers from the Federal Writers’ Project went on to make remarkable contributions to American culture. Richard Wright wrote Native Son, a novel that marked a new era in social realist fiction, while he was a WPA writer. Zora Neale Hurston published her most ambitious work, Moses, Man of the Mountain, soon afterward.
By the 1950s, books by former WPA writers had won a string of National Book Awards, including Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Other prominent writers in the WPA included novelists Eudora Welty, John Cheever, and Jim Thompson; poets Conrad Aiken, May Swenson, Weldon Kees, and Kenneth Rexroth; and nonfiction authors Loren Eiseley and Juanita Brooks. Still, the stigma of working in the WPA, arising from the earlier “boondoggling” innuendo and Un-American Activities investigation, lasted for decades.
Pictured left to right, top to bottom: John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Meridel LeSueur and Ralph Ellison.
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Special Events
Saturday, September 19, 2 p.m.
Riverview Branch Library
The West Side Theater Project
Oral histories come to life with The West Side Theater Project, based on stories from the people of the West Side of Saint Paul. Professional theater artists gather stories from neighborhood residents, create a script with community input, and produce and perform in the neighborhood.
Tuesday, September 22, 7 p.m.
Minnesota History Center - 345 West Kellogg Boulevard
The Ah-Gwah-Ching Collection at MHS
Brian Szott, curator at the MN Historical Society, talks about the Ah-Gwah-Ching collection of Work Projects Administration (WPA) art. A display in the Minnesota Historical Society Library will feature selections from the Federal Writers’ Project held in the collection. The exhibit opens September 14; please call 651-259-3252 for further information.
Wednesday, September 23, 7 p.m.
Macalester College, Weyerhaeuser Chapel - 1600 Grand Avenue
Professor John Edgar Tidwell, Sterling Brown and the Slave Narratives
Professor Tidwell, editor of Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South, discusses Brown’s work on the Slave Narratives as a part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP).
Thursday, September 24, 7 p.m.
Rondo Community Outreach Library
Film Screening: "Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story"
Watch "Soul of a People," a major documentary about the FWP produced by Spark Media and broadcast by Smithsonian Channel HD. Afterwards, Professor Peter Rachleff of Macalester College leads a discussion on the film and other aspects of the WPA.
Saturday, September 26, 2 p.m.
Rondo Community Outreach Library
Slave Narratives
Nothando Zulu, of the Black Storytellers Alliance, will share selections from the FWP Slave Narratives and excerpts of work by Zora Neale Hurston.
Sunday, September 27, 2 p.m.
Highland Park Library Auditorium
Tales of the Road: Highway 61 and the WPA in Minnesota
Host of TPT’s Almanac, Cathy Wurzer is the author of Tales of the Road–Highway 61. She’ll discuss her new book, a modern variation on the original WPA state guides, and some WPA projects in Minnesota.
Monday, September 28, 7 p.m.
Central High School Black Box Theater
Regina Marie Williams in “Jump at the Sun”
Acclaimed actress and vocalist Regina Marie Williams presents“Jump at the Sun” a one-woman show based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston, produced by the Jungle Theater. A collaborative event with the Central Touring Theater, which will perform a brief selection at the beginning of the program.
Wednesday, September 30, 4 p.m.
Saint Paul City Hall - 15 West Kellogg Boulevard (entrance on 4th Street)
Art and Architecture of City Hall
Tour and learn about the 1930s art and architecture of Saint Paul’s City Hall.
Please call 651-222-3242 to register.
Thursday, October 8, 7 p.m.
Rondo Community Outreach Library
Film Screening: The People Are My Home
Neala Schleuning, author of America, Song We Sang Without Knowing: The Life and Ideas of Meridel Le Sueur, introduces the film "The People Are My Home," about Meridel LeSueur, a Minnesota writer, and leads a post-film discussion.
Book Discussions
Travels with Charley
by John Steinbeck
September 22, 7 p.m. •
Merriam Park Branch Library
The Actual
by Saul Bellow
September 23, 7 p.m. • Merriam Park Branch Library
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II
by Studs Terkel
September 24, Noon • Central Library
The Man with the Golden Arm
by Nelson Algren
October 1, 7 p.m. • Highland Park Branch Library
Native Son
by Richard Wright
October 7, 7 p.m. • St. Anthony Park Branch Library
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
October 8, 10:30 a.m. • Central Library
North Star Country
by Meridel LeSueur
October 22, Noon • Central Library
