What Happened to the Left?

In Michael Kazin’s recent essay in the New York Times, he pointed out that measures that became institutionalized during the New Deal – Social Security, minimum wage, occupational health -- didn’t come simply from popular outrage at the Great Depression; the issues had percolated through decades of steady work and clarification.
    It's ironic, Kazin says, that in many ways the great American middle class of the 1950s and 60s was built with the help of these programs, such as Social Security and Truman’s G.I. Bill, that many Americans deemed radical when they were first proposed.
    Conservatives took the lesson. When they were out of power in the 1970s, they responded by organizing and developing their own voice and infrastructure, including much of talk radio now.
    Now the tide has changed again, Kazin argues, and progressives need to fortify institutions and create a coherent movement that articulates anew how they propose to improve Americans’ lives. They cannot assume their programs are transparent in their benefits to Americans; they must organize.
   Yesterday Kazin was on National Public Radio discussing his argument with listeners and The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, who insisted that there are progressive movements that are demonstrating for changes in America. She blamed the media in part for not reporting on these movements, including the American Dream Movement.
    A final note: this week we say farewell to our friend Stetson Kennedy, who died last month. We say farewell with a celebration of his life tomorrow afternoon at his beloved home of many years, Beluthahatchee (the name means ‘place of peace’). If you’re near Jacksonville, turn out for what will be a remarkable party. Details at www.stetsonkennedy.com.

Stetson Kennedy Delved into Florida Life

Stetson Kennedy records his wife Edith in 1939.

Stetson Kennedy, who died on Saturday as Hurricane Irene stormed up the East Coast, had a love of justice and relished how people faced life and its challenges. He was a few weeks short of his 95^th birthday.

    As a teenager in Jacksonville, Florida, Kennedy worked for his father’s furniture store, sometimes collecting payments and other times having to repossess items people could no longer afford as the Great Depression worsened. A stove might still be hot from the last meal cooked on it when he hauled it off, he recalled in interviews for Soul of a People.

    Even then, Kennedy was struck by how Floridians spoke, black and white. He knew he was “hearing a subculture, or two subcultures really, that had significance and flavor.”

    As a student during the Great Depression, he studied natural science before leaving college and becoming a student of human nature. He started gathering folklore and sayings in the varied communities of Key West, where he met his first wife. He found it remarkable how the island’s Cuban community, despite poverty, “were really enjoying life in a way that I’d never seen anybody enjoying life.” Even in hard times, people made time for song, dance, and food.

    Kennedy joined the Florida Writers’ Project in December 1937 and worked on it as editor and folklorist for several years. He worked with Zora Neale Hurston on Florida folklore for the WPA Guide to Florida, and corresponded with Richard Wright about Wright’s essays on how to depict black culture. (He later visited with Wright in France when both were expatriates in the 1950s.) In 1939 Kennedy led one leg of a recording expedition that used portable sound equipment from the Library of Congress to record the stories and songs of a richly varied southern Florida. He interviewed his first wife Edith and her Cuban relatives in Ybor City and recorded the life stories of Bahamian midwives further south.

    Having grown up privileged by a culture of segregation, Kennedy felt a responsibility to fight its injustices, and help expose those who exploited them in groups like the Ku Klux Klan. His undercover work led to him broadcast silly ritual codes in episodes of the Superman radio series in the late 1940s, and lay bare the brutal facts of their intimidation and terror. He ran for the U.S. Senate with a write-in candidacy in 1950, aided by a campaign song by Woody Guthrie. In his later years in Florida, he also championed environmental and labor causes. Kennedy’s life is the subject of a forthcoming film by Andrea Kalin. To learn more, visit the Stetson Kennedy website maintained by his grandson.

Jobs and the WPA Guide to Florida

The WPA Guide to Florida, which marks its 70^th anniversary this week, is unlike other travel guides, as I wrote in yesterday’s Florida Times-Union. The guide tells stories from the ground up, with little gloss. The entry for Belle Glade in one breath praises the area’s lush fertility and, in the next, acknowledges that African-Americans working the harvest had to be, by law, “off the streets by 10:30 p.m.” As Stetson Kennedy, one Florida WPA writer, recently told a St. Augustine blog, “We wanted to show the warts, like the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and Jim Crow laws,” not just palms and bathing beauties. 

    The WPA guide came out amid an anxious campaign blitz. In December 1939, as America emerged from the worst of the Depression, a divide remained between many skeptics of the New Deal and the WPA scribblers. A WPA job, as a former WPA worker says in Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever, was “a stigma of the lowest order, a dark and embarrassing symbol of a time of their lives when circumstances beyond their control compelled them to admit, on public record, personal defeat.”

    Zora Neale Hurston felt that sting. For decades she didn’t want to mark any WPA anniversary. Yet the WPA job saw Hurston through a hard time, and for the Florida guide she wrote up heartbreaking episodes and rich folk tales that people on the Gulf Coast told each other. (There's more on Hurston and Kennedy in Soul of a People.)

    Then as now, any federal job program was a hot-button issue. A Gallup poll in 1939 found that in the run-up to a presidential election, more voters ranked WPA relief as the worst part of FDR’s government than any other — far ahead of farm subsidies, foreign policy or even packing the Supreme Court. Yet, the same poll also found that more respondents (28 percent) ranked WPA relief as his greatest accomplishment.

    Some WPA writers found the experience of producing the WPA books an education. I mentioned in an earlier post an event in 1983 where Ralph Ellison, who began writing fiction while on the WPA, defended it as more than make-work. The WPA, he said, ushered people’s history into official history, and allowed an “intermixture between the formal and the folk — the real experience of people as they feel it.”

    Now as the unemployment rate hovers in double digits and we consider the recent jobs summit, we might open the WPA Guide to Florida for more than landmarks and customs. It might inspire the kind of employment that brings future benefits and a clearer view of where we are.

Hearing a Culture Change in Florida

Seventy years ago this month, Zora Neale Hurston began a landmark field recording tour, traveling down through Florida’s hot coastal towns and turpentine camps, gathering songs that people sang to each other: hard songs and mythic stories, with all the power and struggle of life.

Hurston had mapped out the Florida tour in her head, with stops chosen to get Spanish-influenced songs, African-flavored songs, and tunes harking back to Old English. Then she wrote up her plan in a memo and sent it to Washington.

As her younger white colleague Stetson Kennedy remembered, Hurston called folklore the “boiled down pot liquor of human living,” and prized it dearly. She knew the world was changing and that cultures would continue to collide and make new things in those collisions, but she aimed to capture the essence of what had come down to her.

Her plan finally got support with the loan of a state-of-the-art recording machine – a massive beast that required two men to carry – from the Library of Congress.

Just weeks before the end of her time on the WPA, the recording tour she proposed came about and the converted ambulance hauling the recording machine rolled into Jacksonville. She began at a soup kitchen there, recording gospel songs across town from the state office of the WPA Writers’ Project where the white WPA writers worked. Because of Jim Crow segregation, the half dozen African-Americans on the Florida staff worked from another office near the soup kitchen. Hurston herself worked mostly from her hometown of Eatonville.

Songs that she and her WPA coworkers recorded that summer (and again that winter) would roil through American popular culture for decades. “The Sloop John B,” for example: the WPA recordings capture Bahamian and Dixieland versions of the song, which dates back to 1900. It would later have incarnations in folk music, then rock and roll, ending up on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Ninety-nine and Half Won't Do," a gospel song, would get a soul version from Wilson Pickett.