Un-American, the Label

Here we mark the release of a new DVD box set of Humphrey Bogart films, including his memorable angry man in Black Legion (watch a trailer here), about a clandestine fascist KKK-like group during the Depression. Fascist groups in America? That’s un-American.
    But what is un-American anyway? Joseph McCarthy kicked up dust with the term with his anti-Communist hunt in the 1950s, but the concept goes back much further. (Are Americans unique in our outraged determination to define what we aren’t? Do you hear about un-French activities, or un-Chinese?) Other countries might use the term ‘traitorous,’ but that’s not quite the same thing.
    The OED finds the first use of un-American in 1818, barely a generation after the United States became a nation. Later Theodore Roosevelt tried to define the term as simple extremism. He wrote, “Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob.”
    Maybe that’s what Rand Paul meant in May when he called the Obama administration’s efforts to make BP responsible for the Gulf clean-up un-American. Or maybe it was just a handy word for lighting a fire.

    The first Congressional attempt to uproot un-American-ness began in 1938 as war clouds gathered overseas. Texas congressman Martin Dies chaired the House Committee on Un-American Activities, known popularly as HUAC, with considerable public support. In Gallup polls at the time, Americans placed Dies above FDR on a list of patriots. Dies had his own criteria for un-American, but they were elusive.
    Martin Dies said he found potentially un-American content about labor history in the WPA guides, and about race in an essay by Richard Wright on “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” that appeared in a 1937 anthology by WPA writers called American Stuff. (American Stuff also included songs from inmates in Southern prisons gathered by John Lomax, Jim Thompson’s short story about an oil-worker who runs amok on a rampage of rape and murder, and a Kenneth Rexroth poem.)
    As historian Douglas Brinkley said about Dies in an interview for Soul of a People, “When he’s talking about un-American, it’s people that have funny last names.”
    That echoes Frank Taylor, Bogart’s embittered auto worker in Black Legion: “No matter what it is or who commenced it, I’m against it,” Frank growls. “Especially if they’re after my job and have an unpronounceable last name.” Bogart himself held more progressive views.
    Un-American has often been used to refer to deeply ingrained aspects of American life that the speaker would like to amputate: Racism, greed and class strife have been as likely to get labeled un-American as Communism, hedonism and any other -ism. In this sense, the un-American label is like a tourniquet someone uses to isolate a limb that they think is causing trauma to the body politic. What's really causing the trauma is another story.
    When the cry of "Un-American!" makes a resurgence - often with an election coming - it's worth figuring out what it says about the person who wields it before looking at who they’re attacking.

Documenting the Lone Star State

The Texas WPA writers came up against some of the most virulent anti-WPA sentiment anywhere, and it was stoked by a Texas congressman Martin Dies from Beaumont. That didn't stop them from producing a clear-eyed view of the state, including hot-button topics like labor history and poverty, such as this recap of the violence between unions and union busters:

Longshoremen on Houston's cotton docks

In the early 1930s the longshoremen at Houston and in the chief shipping centers of southeast Texas, although organized along craft lines, developed a strong militant unit… In 1934 striking longshoremen, strikebreaker guards, and non-union workers clashed frequently and violently for four months. On one occasion three men were killed. The oil workers are the largest group of the Texas membership of the CIO…

And this look at culture, poverty and housing problems in cities like San Antonio:

In west San Antonio are odd shops, women wrapped in black rebozos huddling over baskets of freshly made tortillas, and brilliant paper flowers… The poorer section covers about 25 blocks… The very poor live in housing conditions devoid of comfort… In 1936 a slum clearance program was begun by the city… more than 2,300 houses were razed or closed… The necessities of the very poor have been exploited by various interests… In 1934, the average piece work wage for a 54-hour week was $1.56.

These excerpts appear in honor of their work on the guidebook, published 70 years ago yesterday (Sept. 7, 1940). Don't mess with Texas.

WPA Guides and Cities of the Imagination - Part 2

Across the country, WPA guides were coming out to a publicity blitz. The guide to California was considered strong enough to become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. A young artist and poet emigré from Chicago, Kenneth Rexroth, worked an editor for the California guide in its San Francisco office, and typed up hiking routes for the guide on the Sierras. (More on this in the book.)

    Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Martin Dies, a Texas congressman, led the first House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of the WPA and branded several WPA guides as enemy propaganda for what he considered leftist commentary on labor and race issues. The political tide was turning against the WPA as the federal budget tightened for war. In time, FDR repositioned the WPA guides as patriotic; by 1942 when troops were shipping out for Europe and the Pacific, each G.I. received a copy of the WPA guide to his home state to remind him of the home he was fighting for.
    By that point, Vincent McHugh, who had led the WPA guide work in New York,  shipped out to the Pacific with the merchant marines.
    The WPA experience created a bond among its survivors in later years, although often tinged with bitterness. By the 1960s McHugh was on the West Coast, scraping out a living as a freelancer and occasional teacher. He told fellow WPA survivor Jerre Mangione, “The whole WPA experience seems to have gone uselessly down the drain.”
    Yet its creative imprint on McHugh’s work received a revival. His novel inspired by the WPA experience, I Am Thinking of My Darling, got its Hollywood moment in 1968 when a veteran of Marx Brothers films adapted it as What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? The film opens with an aerial over lower Manhattan, descending for closer views of jackhammer operators, traffic, shoppers and businessmen in bars, to the harbor and a freighter from Greece. Instead of the novel’s city planner, George Peppard plays an ad executive-turned-beatnik involved with Mary Tyler Moore, a disenchanted radical.
    Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to know McHugh in San Francisco, when McHugh would gather with others at Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore along with the Beats’ mentor... Kenneth Rexroth.
    McHugh, working with Ferlinghetti and a young Chinese poet named C.H. Kwock, set out to translate classical Chinese poems in a series of chapbooks. They enlisted a former spy and nightclub singer who had done translations for the American consulate in Hong Kong. McHugh and Kwock would visit Mr. Yao, the singer-translator, in a decrepit boardinghouse on the city’s former Barbary Coast, yelling up from an alley to get entry. Yao helped them produce an anthology that a Berkeley professor said had “an architectural beauty that no other translations of Chinese poetry ever did have.”
    City Lights distributed the first in the series, Why I Live on the Mountain. In that 1958 collection (reprinted in 1980), McHugh brought one poem from the T’ang dynasty into English with the title, “To Someone Far Away.” The poet recalls a lover he addresses as “pretty darling” and whose fragrance still lingers in his bed. “Pretty darling,” he ends wistfully, “never came back.”
    It’s as if McHugh were uniting his Pacific-facing life with the Manhattan he had immortalized in the WPA guide and in his own Darling, a kiss blown to his first-loved city from across the continent, from his last.

Talking Books in the Texas Legislature

The recent Texas Book Festival featured, once again, authors discussing their books in the halls of the state capitol building, from literary biography in the House to novelists in the Senate. In one annex room, an SRO crowd reassessed the Writers’ Project and whether its members were un-American (as Congressman Martin Dies, of East Texas, had deemed as first chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities) or very American (as Jim Thompson, sometime-resident of Ft. Worth and the West Texas oil fields, had insisted).
Others in the Austin fray this year included Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, John Pipkin on Thoreau’s misdemeanors, and Douglas Brinkley on Teddy Roosevelt.

Looking at History a New Way

On the National Mall last weekend, the National Book Festival brought out more than 100,000 readers and book lovers, an encouraging sight. In the History tent, we discussed the Federal Writers' Project and its democratic experiment, and the challenged posed to it in 1938 by the House Un-American Activities Committee under Martin Dies. Douglas Brinkley affirmed the influence of the FWP across decades and literary careers. And we noted the recent passing of Milton Meltzer, a WPA author who went on to write nearly 100 ground-breaking history books and receive the ALA Laura Ingalls Wilder medal in 2001. Meltzer invigorated history books for children with a new sense of America. Meltzer once asked, “What is the relevance of all this history to the young?” And he answered: “Ours is not a past of sweetness and light, no matter what the textbook tells us.”
This weekend Soul of a People events continue in Baltimore and Fairfax, Virginia.

Illinois Guide Anniversary and a Voice Against Intolerance

Seventy years ago today, the WPA guide to Illinois came out as controversy swirled around the Federal Writers’ Project. Texas congressman Martin Dies was deep in the investigations of his House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, better known as HUAC, and within weeks he would bring his investigation to Chicago, interrogating witnesses and launching raids on offices across the city. In Chicago, his list of suspected un-Americans included 514 milkmen, 144 newspaper reporters, 112 lawyers, and 161 radio workers.

Meanwhile in the Writers’ Project office, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Sam Ross, Hilda Polacheck and others had shifted from work on the guide (Algren had written much of the text on Galena, among other tasks) to documenting interviews with a cross-section of the city’s residents – jazz musicians, barflies, aldermen, fishmongers, prostitutes, and meatpackers. Their first-hand accounts are on the Library of Congress American Memory site (searchable by key word like ‘Chicago’) and make a vivid complement to the Illinois guidebook.

Studs Terkel worked in the creative radio division (Chicago was one of the rare cities that had such a unit), writing scripts for weekly programs -- many of them researched with curators at the Art Institute, in a series titled Men of Art -- along with Sam Ross and others. Ross later wrote scripts in Hollywood, and Terkel later conducted interviews for radio and Pulitzer-winning books that he called oral histories. In the Soul of a People film interview (and in the book) he credits the WPA with getting him started as a writer, and with giving many people the sense that their voice counted.

Not long after Martin Dies left Chicago, a radio play that Terkel wrote for the WPA was broadcast, on the nineteenth-century French satirist Honoré Daumier. In words that spoke to the air of fear stirred by HUAC, Terkel’s Daumier responds to the concern that he mocked France with his satirical cartoons about the king:

I love France with all my heart… It’s not ridiculing France, it’s not mocking France. I’m fighting the enemy of France within its gates: greed, intolerance, ignorance.’

Last week Soul of a People screened, appropriately, in Chicago at the Newberry Library, and in the coming month Chicago State University and the Maywood Public Library are hosting more events and celebrations in Chicagoland. Check details at http://library.csu.edu/presentations/soap.html.