Retracing Architecture in the Magnolia State

Interesting post today on a blog about historic preservation in Mississippi, on the evolving understanding of the state's architectural roots. The WPA guide held one of the first attempts to wrestle that history onto the page; this annotated discussion and the back-and-forth that follows it takes it forward.

Juanita Brooks, Courageous Historian of the Southwest

Last Friday marked the 112^th anniversary of the birth of Juanita Brooks, premier Utah historian. Brooks was born January 15, 1898. This year also marks 60 years since the publication of her investigative masterpiece, The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

    That 1950 book gave America a nuanced investigation into the hidden story of a slaughter by Mormon settlers in southwestern Utah of a group of migrants bound for California in 1857. In it, Brooks wrote penetratingly about Utah and the people who lived there.

    A Mormon herself, Brooks uncovered long-hidden pioneer diaries while on the Writers’ Project in Utah in the 1930s. Working late at night on a typewriter in her kitchen, she continued to explore the episode for years, as recounted in her remarkable memoir, Quicksand and Cactus. Her persistence and publication defied church elders, who tried to keep the massacre hidden. Every epic about Utah from that time up to the HBO series Big Love has had to reckon with that episode of mass murder and cover-up.

    Jon Krakauer called Mountain Meadows Massacre “groundbreaking … an extraordinary work of history.” With it, noted the Salt Lake Tribune just over a year ago, Brooks provided a “painful reminder that the propensity for unspeakable violence resides in every human heart," and began a journey that concluded recently with the Mormon church finally issuing its own report on the massacre. An example of brave exposure for this Martin Luther King Day.

Seeing the Shadow City: Anniversary for the WPA Guide to New York City

Seventy years ago this week, the WPA Guide to New York City came out amid a campaign blitz of jingles and quiz games. In 1939, as America emerged from the worst of the Depression, the “working press” that remained after a decade of contraction of the publishing industry assessed the work of people holding “welfare jobs” on the WPA. A job on the WPA Writers’ Project carried “a stigma of the lowest order,” as a former WPA editor observed, “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.” John Cheever and others felt that sting, and for decades nobody wanted to revisit it.

At the time, they hoped that the guide would speak for itself. In 1938, Richard Wright had whetted the appetites of New York radio listeners for the WPA guide, promising that the guidebook would “go behind the scenes and show that phase of Harlem which the casual visitor or tourist does not see.” When the guide came out on June 24,1939 English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner gave an interview during a visit to the WPA offices on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, where she proclaimed the Writers’ Project “the most exciting experiment that has ever been carried out.”  The New York Times reviewer called the guidebook “a dictionary to the city” sprinkled with engaging history and contemporary stories; it “should find a place in every New York household.”

For decades, the guide was passed among people curious about that changing landscape. Michael Chabon used the New York guide as a walking companion for months as he prowled the streets and subway lines while researching The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Grace Paley, having grown up in the Bronx in the 1940s, understood how the WPA connected its writers to the city. The Writers’ Project, she said, was “marvelous at helping people to find their own ears” and getting people “talking about what their lives were really like.” And the legendary Times editor R.W. Apple, Jr. used the WPA guides often in his travels, having been a fan since he came across the Virginia volume during a stint in the Army in the late 1950s and it led him to ruined plantation homes that had fallen off other maps.

When I came upon the New York City guide, its short list of the editorial staff, with Wright and Cheever nestled amid less-remembered names, intrigued me. I loved the cinematic capsules of life in the neighborhood essays. But beyond the stylistic turns, it was often simple facts that made me pause: the catalog of radio call letters, subway routes, and accounts of sidewalk hawkers and preachers.

Many of the WPA writers found the experience of producing the book an opportunity for interpreting their own histories. At a panel held at the New York Public Library in 1983, Ralph Ellison defended the WPA regional and ethnic histories. “One of the things that the WPA did,” he said, “was to allow that intermixture between the formal and the folk -- the real experience of people as they feel it.” The WPA books filled gaps that “official” history had left blank, including African-American history. “Let’s face it,” he said, “you couldn’t find the truth about my background in that history.”

With the invocations of the Great Depression today, the most striking parallel may be the searching and sifting process itself, the effort to make sense of things in hard times after years when there was little will to question the status quo. That kind of sifting may appear to be a process of restating simple facts about our lives and then finding something new.

“We are a country which improvises,” Ellison said that evening at the library. “We are creating American history ... We must still improvise our culture and we do that best when we make use of all that is at hand.”

Personal Efforts for Democracy

In an article about life in China today you wouldn't expect to find a reminder of 1930s America and the Writers' Project, but yesterday's New York Times had this article, about a 75-year-old retired professor, Sun Wenguang, who was beaten while making a private visit to a cemetery to commemorate a sympathizer of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiannamen Square (not a student leader of the protests but a Communist Party leader sympathetic to them). Mr. Sun's action wasn't a public statement, so the brutality of thugs who didn't want him to remember that episode -- who wanted to erase the memory of pro-democracy sympathizers 20 years ago -- took him by surprise. "I didn't expect this," he admitted. "It was just a personal visit to a cemetery."

It can be easy to underestimate the power of private actions and seemingly apolitical thoughts. But in the 1930s when many Americans felt beaten down, the WPA guides and "life histories" documented ordinary people's experiences to show that they mattered. Benjamin Botkin, who led the effort to collect those life histories (or "oral histories") called them the country's living culture, and said that they show how a democracy functions. Soul of a People is a testimonial to that power of telling people's stories.

"In order to fight for democracy," said Mr. Sun from his hospital bed the other day, "we need to make personal efforts."