When Oral History Changed Storytelling

Every week on NPR you might hear pieces from StoryCorps. Nearly as often you might catch firsthand glimpses of history in "oral histories" without knowing what that term means. The Library of Congress connects some of these dots with an event on May 15 in its "Beyond the Book" series. The event marks the 75th anniversary of These Are Our Lives, a ground-breaking collection of life histories, what would today be called oral histories, produced by the government but intended to reflect the most individual elements of American life, from some of its most unsung citizens.
   While researching my book on the Federal Writers’ Project, I learned of the nationwide effort to gather these histories (These Are Our Lives contains stories from the South but there are thousands more) from Ann Banks, author of First-Person America. Her book delivers more selections from that rich oral history material gathered by the Project, which she found gathering dust in the Library of Congress 40 years ago.

    Banks was suggested to me by one of the Project’s famous survivors, Studs Terkel, who championed oral history in many forms – from radio interview to his own books (which sometimes morphed into other forms like the musical Working) -- as a way to get history from real people.
    In 1939 Terkel was working in the Project’s radio division, where he researched and wrote profiles for a weekly one-hour broadcast. He wasn’t doing oral history, as he admitted; his job was to write scripts about artists like Daumier, Van Gogh, Eakins, and George Bellows. But he absorbed the Project’s ethos of getting people’s stories to the public. Sometimes Terkel slipped out back with Nelson Algren, one of the life history interviewers, to a nearby bowling alley.
    Sam Ross, who worked with Terkel in the radio division but also conducted life history interviews, summed up the atmosphere later: “Everybody felt alive,” Ross said. “We were linked to the community.”

Nelson Algren

    Ross, a former college athlete, knew his way around Chicago’s nightclubs - a skill that earned him the job of escorting Benjamin Botkin, the Project’s national folklore director and a jazz fan, around clubs on the city’s South Side during his visit to Chicago. Botkin was thrilled to hear such wonderful music, and later gave Ross the task of interviewing the older Chicago jazzmen for their life stories. They included Muggsy Spanier, Richard Voynow (who had managed the legendary Bix Beiderbecke) and clarinetist Bud Jacobson. Ross would go listen to the musicians play and talk with them afterward.
    Through the life stories he gathered came a little-known picture of how segregation affected musicians. Despite the rules, styles crossed the color line and white musicians learned from African American musicians like Coleman Hawkins. “Hawkins was the guy,” Jacobson said. “Up till then nobody knew what to do with the sax in the orchestra.”
    In the 1920s, jazz musicians had to abide racial segregation enforced by union rules. Some, like Spanier, learned by getting around those rules. Spanier started as a teenager on drums and switched to cornet, he told Ross, inspired by Joe "King" Oliver, who let a young Spanier sit in with his band. “That was unheard of in those days up North here, a white person playing with Negroes,” Spanier said. “I learned how to play from listening to Joe Oliver…”
    In his Chicago interviews, Ross documented a firsthand history of jazz while it was still young, and felt lucky for the chance to hone his storytelling skills at the same time. He later wrote scripts in Hollywood. “I learned my dramatic craft there,” he told Banks for First-Person America.
    Notes from a 1939 staff meeting of the Chicago’s folklore group give us a glimpse into how what we now call oral history was changing even then. Botkin had people like them gathering thousands of life histories across the country, and in his way was radically taking folklore out of the halls of academia. As Chicago folklore supervisor, Nelson Algren announced a new tack in collecting industrial folklore, saying that headquarters was planning a volume of urban stories along the lines of the just-published These Are Our Lives. Algren was excited by a new style of documenting urban stories that allowed for even more direct quotations, more direct expression of character from the people themselves. He held up a recent example that Ross read aloud. The examples “reveal a new way of writing,” Algren said, “which we'll attempt here.”
    They debated the role of the interviewer, and whether the aim should be a narrative that readers find engaging, or one driven by the interviewee, which might uncover a potentially “truer” and more surprising story than the interviewer could anticipate.

Margaret Walker

    Algren, who would later win the first National Book Award for a novel loaded with Chicago voice, was clear about his preference: “Sometime if you just let them ramble, they might say more than if they feel you've got an idea” about what you want to hear.
    Margaret Walker agreed: “If they have [your] one thing in their mind,” she said, “they'll just go back to it and keep repeating it.” Walker, too, would later hone her storytelling based on what she learned there. The focus was taking contemporary folklore into modern storytelling, a long way from the traditional tall tale prized by academic folklorists of the time.
    At the Library of Congress event on May 15, Banks and Virginia Millington from StoryCorps will help put these innovations in storytelling from 75 years ago in the context of stories we hear today. Please come join us. It's free!

Young People, Passions, and a WGA Screenplay Reading

In the 1930s young people with little experience, like Margaret Walker, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, got on their feet with jobs as WPA writers. Working for the government on the American Guides, they got a firsthand sense of what creatives can contribute to society.
    Walker was just out of college when she applied to the Writers’ Project. She had grown up in segregated Alabama, a minister’s daughter, and after college she prepared to follow her mother’s path and marry a young minister. But her mother urged her to chart a new course. So Margaret lied about her age and got a spot as a WPA writer, meeting up with other young writers Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.
    Wright, too, came from the South, moving with his mother from Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago where he  found work with the post office despite having just seven years of school. In time he would become the poet of the Great Migration, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns (the title comes from Wright).
    What struck me in their letters and writings as I researched Soul of a People was how that moment in Chicago allowed them to connect with other writers across conventional divides of race, gender, age and education.
    The Chicago office, Walker wrote later in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, fostered “what nobody believed was possible at that time -- a renaissance of the arts and American culture… and some of the most valued friendships in the literary history of the period.” She said in that moment she saw an end to the “long isolation of the Negro artist.”
    Wright mapped his move from Chicago to New York in 1937 as his road to a literary career. “When I go tonight, I will have forty dollars in my pocket,” he told Walker as they rode the El his last night in Chicago, after leaving the WPA office. Wright planned to get a transfer to the agency’s office in Manhattan, but there were no guarantees. “I hope I’m not making a mistake, going this way,” he told Walker.
    It wasn't a mistake. And after he burst on the scene with Uncle Tom’s Children and followed it with the bestseller Native Son (which benefitted from Walker’s research on a murder trial in Chicago), Wright remembered his friends in Chicago. He kept up a lively dialogue with Nelson Algren for years (see this piece in the American Scholar), and mentored other young writers. But Wright was a complex and conflicted personality, and no relationship was easy.
    Their story unfolds against a backdrop of suspicion and controversy that swirled around the Writers’ Project, as Texas congressman Martin Dies led a congressional investigation by the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities. In 1939 he brought his investigation to Chicago, interrogating witnesses and raiding offices across the city. When Dies brandished what he claimed was a list of suspected un-Americans in Chicago, it included 514 milkmen, 144 newspaper reporters, 112 lawyers, and 161 radio workers – people just as likely to be on a list of interviews by the WPA writers for publication in the American Guides.
    These creative, political and personal tensions and vitality lie at the heart of My People, which gets a stage reading in the WGA Screenplay Reading series on January 9, 2013 at the Players Club in New York. I’m thrilled that the screenplay, co-written with veteran screenwriter Jim McGrath, will bring the little-known story of these taut relationships involving Walker, Algren and Wright to a new audience.

Happy Birthday, Margaret Walker

This month there are several chances to see Soul of a People: Writing America's Story on the Smithsonian Channel. (Check here for times.)
    Today would be the 96th birthday of Margaret Walker, who was just out of college when she applied for a spot on the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago. She had grown up in the oppressive segregation of Alabama, and turned to the books of her father, a minister, to escape. After college she almost married a young minister herself, but her mother urged her to make another path for her life. With few options for jobs in depressed Chicago, she lied about her age and got work as a WPA writer, meeting up very soon with other writers like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. It was there, she later said, that she found her voice as a poet.
    "I changed from the very romantic and sentimental type of poetry to a very realistic and factual type of poetry," she said. "I was very conscious of making that change."
    She became willing to explore characters hit hard by their circumstances. She submitted her collection For My People to the Yale Younger Poets competition three years in a row. In 1942 it won. She went on to publish many more collections as well as a bestselling novel, Jubilee.

New Deal Arts After the Election

Last month I joined a group at the FDR Memorial Library in Hyde Park, NY, which hosted a discussion of the New Deal’s Enduring Legacy, focused on the arts programs. In the wake of the mid-term election, it was a chance to assess how Americans dealt with unemployment crises and culture. The Poughkeepsie Journal covered it in this article.
    People noted today's parallels with 1938, another mid-term election when Republicans reclaimed seats in Congress, that time a backlash against the New Deal. In the debate leading up to those elections, the WPA projects were a lightning rod.
    In his overview, Nick Taylor, author of American-Made, observed that government support for the arts is always a tough sell to the American public. He noted that federal contracts officers, too, weren’t used to dealing with artists. For instance, why couldn’t WPA artists all use the same type of paint, so they could order by the barrel? Peggy Bulger from the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center added to the picture of how music and folklore got preserved at a critical juncture.

    I made several points about the Writers’ Project and how it helped innovate in the wake of the newspaper closures of the 1930s. College kids with short resumés like Jim Thompson, Margaret Walker and Ralph Ellison got on their feet with WPA writing jobs, plus a firsthand sense of what writers contributed to society. The older jobless got a life raft, short term. My main point, though, was that the arts programs left a long-tailed creative connection to American life for decades afterward. FDR said at the time, "One hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not its relief.”
    Susan Quinn, author of Furious Improvisation, about the WPA Theater Project, told the story of Orson Welles’ time with the WPA and how the play The Cradle Will Rock, staged in Manhattan amid a wave of strikes, brought drama down Broadway as cast, crew and audience all paraded from the theater where they were shut out to another space. The show went on. (See the 1999 film, Cradle Will Rock.)
    Cynthia Koch, director of the FDR Library, discussed the WPA arts legacy in the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, including NEA battles of the 1980s and the resurgent culture wars now. Good points from the live audience and from others, emailed in. C-SPAN3 will air the Arts & History event December 26 and again January 1 and 2.
    And still we have an unemployment rate hovering above 9%.

Richard Wright, 50 Years On

Fifty years ago today, Richard Wright died in Paris, just over 50 years old. From a poor sharecropping family in Mississippi, he grew up in a single-parent household and made his way in Chicago toward stability and into his life as an author. He became the poet, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns, of the Great Migration (the title of her book comes from Wright).

    What I found in exploring Wright’s letters and work in research for Soul of a People was, first, how much the Writers’ Project connected young writers and helped shape Wright’s own path. He charted his move from Chicago to New York in 1937 as a way to get to the heart of American publishing, and his instrument for that was the Project. “When I go tonight, I will have forty dollars in my pocket,” he told his friend Margaret Walker as they rode the El his last night in Chicago. Wright hoped he could swing a transfer to the Writers’ Project office in Manhattan. He confided, “I hope I’m not making a mistake, going this way.”

    Even after he burst on the New York literary scene with Uncle Tom’s Children and later with the bestseller Native Son (which benefitted from Walker’s research in Chicago), Wright remembered friends from his WPA days. He kept up a startling and often funny dialogue with Nelson Algren for years (see Algren's postcard above, and this piece in the American Scholar), and mentored younger writers. Wright was a complex and charged personality, and no loyalty was easy. Yet in a Town Hall radio debate about the New Deal projects in April 1939, Wright spoke up for the increasingly unpopular arts programs. As a young black writer, he said, the WPA’s cultural programs served “to keep alive in the hearts of youth the dream of a free and equal mankind, a dream which, if allowed to die, will open the gates to a ruthless and brutal tide of fascism…”
    Today, in honor of Wright, the teachers’ seminar at the University of Kansas known as The Wright Connection, asks people to share impressions about Wright as they have come to know him, through reading, teaching, and otherwise. Says director Maryemma Graham, “We want to use the 50th anniversary to promote further readings and rereadings, to locate new avenues to and from Wright for our students, and engage Wright through contemporary forms of scholarly inquiry.” She points to their website for postings, where you’ll find her own reflections along with those of Wright's daughter Julia and others.

WPA Guides and Cities of the Imagination - Part 1

The WPA guides track fine-grained details of 1930s America, from the call signals of long lost radio stations to stories of tenement families. But what does that have to do with creativity? The main purpose of WPA work was a paycheck for the unemployed, after all. Yet Margaret Walker later wrote that the WPA fostered "what nobody believed was possible at that time -- a renaissance of the arts and American culture, and some of the most valued friendships in the literary history of the period."
    For years after Congress shut down the WPA writers’ budget in 1939, the only signs of any creative legacy rested on a few bestsellers, mainly Richard Wright’s Native Son, Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning, and a mostly-forgotten novel by Vincent McHugh, I Am Thinking of My Darling, which made the New York Times bestseller list and was optioned by RKO with Cary Grant. (You could argue for Zora Neale Hurston’s books Moses, Man of the Mountain and Dust Tracks on a Road, but neither got big sales, and Walker’s For My People -- poetry a bestseller?)
    Henry Alsberg, the national director of the Writers’ Project, did want to do more than put people to work. He wanted to gather up mid-century America and its cultures in mini encyclopedias for each state before it was all swept away. And he wanted people working on those guides to be creatively enriched. Eventually, you could say, the results bear him out: Looking down the roster of his staff in New York City alone is like reading a fortune cookie for American letters in the 20^th century: John Cheever, Wright, and Ralph Ellison (his first writing job), along with poet May Swenson. Nationally the project rolls included Hurston, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Kenneth Rexroth, Meridel LeSueur, pulp writer Jim Thompson, western novelist Louis L’Amour, Arna Bontemps, Harry Partch, choreographer Katherine Dunham, and poet and painter Weldon Kees. Maybe more important are writers who gave voice to their regions, including Juanita Brooks and Vardis Fisher in the West, and Lorin Brown in the Southwest.
    But could you say in the mid-1940s that the Writers’ Project opened up the imaginations of even its successful writers? Here we look at the answer in terms of Vincent McHugh. He grew up in blue-collar Rhode Island in the 1920s, moved to New York, and wrote several novels and pieces for The New Yorker. Then in late 1936 the WPA called. The WPA guide to New York City had stalled under about eight million words of hodgepodge, a polarized staff, sit-in strikes, and a director who had to be sacked after an affair with an employee. Alsberg asked McHugh to take the job – a dubious personnel choice. Novelist as manager? McHugh accepted the challenge. He visited Washington for guidance but left quickly.
    "I never wanted to move to Washington," McHugh said later. "HQ was middle class and since I came from a working-class family I felt much more comfortable with the New York crowd."
    Back in New York, McHugh retrieved the only copy of the guidebook manuscript from the mayor’s office, where it was being held hostage. Mayor La Guardia was so worried by the warts-and-all portrait of the city that he threatened to pulp the manuscript. McHugh managed to pry the draft free but within a day it was stolen by one of the staff, who were bitterly divided between Trotskyites and Stalinists. After recovering the draft again, McHugh set about improving it. Eventually he got it on track toward publication as two volumes.
    As New York director, McHugh subverted Alsberg’s more arcane encyclopedic tendencies and refocused on the human details his staff found at the neighborhood level. In his 1943 novel, he would embrace the city through a science-fiction conceit: a pandemic of happiness and promiscuity breaks over everyone in New York. In a world consumed by fear and war, Manhattan becomes a beachhead of desire. Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls I Am Thinking of My Darling "one of those key forgotten novels that so acutely articulates a certain pre-World War II sensibility."
    McHugh himself got caught up in the hunt for the city’s stories and hit the pavement for fact-checking. Darling shows an intimacy with nooks and crannies of the city’s inner mechanisms, including the Weather Bureau on top of the Whitehall Building (see page 66 of the WPA guide). Against the sleepy, bureaucratic desks (“rather like the offices of an old-line shipping firm in the 1890s”) the windows reveal a thrilling seascape:
I looked out the high windows … There was no land in sight under us. Like the view from a clipper’s main truck. Governors Island in its eighteenth-century neatness of a fortified place, the Brooklyn shore, the hump of Staten Island in the blue. A quarter mile off the Battery, a middle-sized liner was being pushed in circles by three merry tugs, her siren going like a wounded bull.

McHugh helmed a staff of 500, including a young John Cheever. A high-school dropout from Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever grumbled about his re-write work but was absorbing everything from waitresses’ conversation to Russian novels to the hyperreal world of European surrealists who had sought asylum in New York. Cheever’s stories later show those currents: “The Enormous Radio” channels the unkempt desires and frustrations of an apartment building’s residents through the frequencies of an errant home console, a “powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensibility to discord.”
    After McHugh left the WPA job in 1938, Cheever and a few others worked the guide into final shape for the printer. Cheever wrote several section introductions, including one for Manhattan. Michael Chabon, a fan of the guide, also found Cheever’s fingerprints in the guide’s description of a day at Coney Island.
    The late Grace Paley, who grew up in the East Bronx, saw how the WPA connected writers to the city. The Writers’ Project, Paley said, was “marvelous at helping people to find their own ears by getting them talking about what their lives were really like.”
    The WPA Guide to New York City came out in June 1939. McHugh had helped infuse it with what Chabon calls “the democratic, all-encompassing impulse that people have been using to look at New York City at least since the time of Walt Whitman.” In turn McHugh, notes Mark Singer, had become “enthralled by the whole business: tunnels, bridges, subways, public utilities, emergency services, harbor management, health care delivery…” and threw it into his next novel along with a highball of sex.
    Before starting his novel, though, McHugh proposed a nonfiction book called New York Underground, devoted to the subterranean labyrinth of entrails and subway lines. Publishers nixed the proposal because by then, wartime security concerns put the project off limits -- too much potential as a map for terrorists.

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.