The dream and the deal: the Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943 9780815604150, 9780316545006

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THE DREAM AND THE DEAL

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Copyright © 1996 by Syracuse University Press , Syracuse, New York 13244-5160 All Rights Reserved

First Syracuse University Press Edition 1996

96 97 98 99 00 O01 654321 Originally published in 1972 by Little, Brown and Company.

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following sources: “The Inquiry” by Weldon Kees from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees edited by Donald Justice. Copyright 1943 by Weldon Kees. Copyright © 1960 by John A. Kees. First published in Poetry in July, 1938. Reprinted by permission by Poetry and the University of Nebraska Press; Orphans in Gethsemane by Vardis Fisher. Copyright © 1960 by Vardis Fisher. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Vardis Fisher; “Thinking of Russia” by H. H. Lewis is reprinted by permission of B. C. Hagglund, publisher of the pamphlet, Thinking of Russia, in 1931; “The Liberal” by H. H. Lewis first appeared in Jack Conroy’s magazine, Rebel Poet, published in October-December, 1931. It is reprinted here by permission of Mr. Conroy.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. 0)"

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mangione, Jerre Gerlando, 1909The dream and the deal : the Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943 / by Jerre Mangione.

p. cm.

Originally published: Little, Brown, c1972. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. “Selected publications of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project and the Writers’ Program” : p. ISBN 0-8156-0415-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Federal Writers’ Project—History. 2. Writers’ Program (U.S.)—

History. I. Title. E175.4.W9M3 1996

973.917—dc20 96-31893 Manufactured in the United States of America

For all my friends, dead and alive, who were part of the Federal Writers’ Project

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Acknowledgments

This book tells for the first time the comprehensive story of an extraordinary governmental enterprise —the Federal Writers’ Project (19351943 ).* In attempting to breathe life into a saga that has almost passed into the desiccating realm of history, I interviewed some seventy former members of the Writers’ Project in different parts of the country (see pages

403-404 for a list of their names), and corresponded with others. The extent to which this book succeeds in recapturing the atmosphere and drama of the Project experience should be largely attributed to the information and impressions transmitted to me by these men and women. It was my good fortune to reach in time two men, now dead, who were key figures in the Project’s history: Henry G. Alsberg, the Project’s national director until 1939, on whose staff I served; and Vardis Fisher, the

novelist, who directed the Writers’ Project in Idaho. Alsberg died in November 1970, at the age of eighty-nine; Fisher, age seventy-three, died in July 1968, barely a month after I had interviewed him in Boise, Idaho.

Unfortunately, some of the others who had played major roles in the Project story (Jacob Baker, George W. Cronyn, Joseph Gaer, Clair Laning,

John Newsom, Lyle Saxon, and Richard Wright, among others) were either dead or on the verge of death by the time I began gathering material for this book.

As for the survivors, I am deeply indebted to Dora Thea Hettwer of * After July 1939 the Writers’ Project was conducted under state sponsorship and was known as the WPA Writers’ Program.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

New York City, a member of the Project’s Central Office from its first day to the last, who was Alsberg’s executive secretary through most of his directorship. Miss Hettwer was able to provide me with many valuable records, and with personal reminiscences that helped to revive my own memories of the Project. I also owe special thanks to Katharine Kellock, the Project’s tours editor, for permission to quote from her personal papers in the Library of Congress, and for helping me locate some of the basic data for this work.

| Other former members of the Project who supplied me with useful records were Benjamin A. Botkin of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.; Jack Conroy of Moberly, Mo.; Stella B. Hanau of New York City; Reed Harris of Washington, D.C.; Marion Knoblauch Franc of Chicago; Bert James Loewenberg of Bronxville, N.Y.; Carl Malmberg of Warner, N.H.; Lisle Reese of

Winter Park, Fla.; Ellen Tarry of New York City; Donald Thompson of New York City; Rudolph Umland of Prairie City, Kans.; Charles van Ravenswaay of Winterthur, Del. The following ex-Project members were also especially helpful: Jack Balch, the late Josef Berger (Jeremiah Digges), Sterling A. Brown, John

Cheever, Earl Conrad, Paul Corey, Miriam Allen deFord, Leon (Bill) Dorais, Ralph Ellison, Lawrence Estavan, Mary Lloyd, James McGraw, Vincent McHugh, Lawrence Morris, Harold Rosenberg, Harry Roskolenko, Morton W. Royse, and George F. Willison.

I also wish to express gratitude for illuminating letters that arrived during the years 1967-1970 from these former members of the Project: Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Allan Angoff, Saul Bellow, Howard McKinley Corning, Harold Coy, Alexander Crosby, Edward Dahlberg, Billie S. Jensen, Leon Srabian Herald, Norman Macleod, Frank Mead, George McMillan, Sam Ross, Arthur M. Saxe, Basi] Vaerlen, Marguerite Yancey. A number of friends who were not members of the Project were able

to add to my knowledge of it, among them Daniel Aaron, Benjamin Appel, Whitfield Bell, Millen Brand, Nina Collier, Julius Davidson, Arthur

and Elizabeth Goldschmidt, the late Josephine Herbst, Alfred Kazin, James Michener, Harvey O’Connor, Evanell Powell, Richard Powell. By correspondence or interview, I obtained indispensable information about the Project’s activities around the country from sixteen men and women who had once served as Project state directors: Ray A. Billington, Carita D. Corse, the late Vardis Fisher, John T. Frederick, Irene Fuhl-

bruegge, J. Harris Gable, Muriel E. Hawks, Dorris Westall Isaacson, x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Curtis D. MacDougall, Harold G. Merriam, Dale Morgan, Ethel Schlasinger Overby, Lisle Reese, Harry Shaw, Charles van Ravenswaay, Agnes Wright Spring.

Elsewhere in this book is a listing of the sources I consulted. Here | would like to single out four secondary sources that I found particularly valuable: Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left, which helped me understand more fully the effect of the Depression on the political attitudes of American writers; William F. McDonald’s Federal Relief Administration

and the Arts, which provided me with essential information about the origins and operations of the Writers’ Project; and two Ph.D. theses, Kathleen O’Connor McKinzie’s “Writers on Relief, 1935-1942,” which helped me unsnar] the knotty adventures of the New York City Writers’ Project; and Ronald Warren Taber's “The Federal Writers’ Project in the Pacific Northwest: A Case Study,” which added significantly to my knowledge of how the Project operated in the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. My research eftorts were made easier by the kindness and diligence of

librarians and archivists in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York City, Berkeley, San Francisco, Denver, Lincoln (Nebraska), Salt Lake City, Columbia ( Missouri), Boston, and Seattle. My thanks to the manuscript division of the University of Washington library for permitting me to examine correspondence in the Mary Farquharson Collec-

tion. I am grateful to Robert Kvasnicka and his staff at the National Archives, and to Linda Kosmin of Drexel University, whose generous bibliographical assistance lightened my labors considerably. Special thanks

are due to Arthur Scharf of Pittsburgh, who compiled the checklist of selected Project books and pamphlets that supplements my history; and who loaned me his scrapbook containing book reviews of the major Project publications. I also want to express my appreciation for the encouragement and support I received throughout this undertaking from Kenneth Burke, Thomas C. Cochran, George W. Corner, Malcolm Cowley, Loren Eiseley, Gerald Freund, Edward P. Hutchinson, Robert M. Lumiansky, Ralph M. Sargent, Harry Sions, Robert E. Spiller, and J. Kellum Smith, Jr. Financial support

came chiefly from the Rockefeller Foundation; the research grant it awarded me in 1968 enabled me to gather material for this book on a broader geographic scale than would have been possible otherwise. I am also grateful to the American Philosophical Society for a 1970 supxi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

plementary research grant; and to the University of Pennsylvania, which granted me a year’s leave of absence, 1968-1969, for travel and research. My most heartfelt thanks are for Patricia Mangione, an unfailing source of strength, who often took time out from her painting to counsel me and

to help with the variety of chores that inevitably grow out of a project as involved as this one. J.M.

xit

Contents

One. The Death of a Dream 3

Two. In the Beginning 29 Three. A Time of Overlapping Crises 53

Four. Writers and Would-Be Writers Q7

Five. Manhattan Hotbed 155

Six. The Dream and the Action 193

Seven. Varieties of American Stuff 241

Eight. Congress Sees Red 289

Nine. The Last Years 329 Ten. The Legacy 351 Selected Publications of the WPA Federal Writers’

| Project and the Writers’ Program, by Arthur Scharf 375

Sources Consulted 397 Illustration Credits 405

Index 407

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Illustrations

Dora Thea Hettwer 25 Leon Srabian Herald 35

Henry G. Alsberg and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt 7

Jacob Baker 41

Writers Union picket line 38

Henry G. Alsberg 67

Henry G. Alsberg with some of his staff 64 Katharine Kellock with W. K. Van Olinda 67

George W. Cronyn 67 The Writers’ Project first (and last) headquarters 71

Lyle Saxon 82 Orrick Johns 85 Dorris May Westall go

The Writers’ Project in the McLean mansion 71

Conrad Aiken in 1937 104 “They ve all transferred to the Federal Writers’ Project.” 107 Weldon Kees in 1941 110 Rudolph Umland 114

Sam Ross 118 Nelson Algren friends 122 120 Saul Bellow in with his twenties Richard Wright in 1933 125

Motley 126

Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, Emmet Dedmon, and Willard

xv

Frank Yerby 129 Studs Terkel in 1938 130

ILLUSTRATIONS

Katherine Dunham in 1938 130

Kenneth Rexroth in 1935 133 Miriam Allen deFord in the thirties 139

Portrait of Samuel Putnam by Alice Neel 142

Paul Comly French and staff 145

Paul Corey and Henry Christman 151 Maxwell Bodenheim before he joined the Writers Project 162

Vincent McHugh in 1937 171 Ralph Ellison as photographed by Richard Wright in 1939 171 Harry Roskolenko in 1937 174. Portrait of Kenneth Fearing by Alice Neel 179

Norman Macleod with his second wife 180

Portrait of Joe Gould by Alice Neel 183

Some of the New York City Writers’ Project staff 185

Vardis Fisher in 1937 202 Joseph Berger (Jeremiah Digges) with his wife in 1938 214

Josef Berger interviewing Portuguese fishermen 214

Dudley Harwer 219 Jerre Mangione and Frances Kendrick 231 Ray A. Billington with Robert Linscott, Henry G. Alsberg and

George F. Willison 231 Harold Coy and Frances Kendrick 233

Clair Laning and Dora Thea Hettwer 233

Reed Harris 234

Merle Colby, Joseph Gaer, and Jean Lee 233

Wright | 246 Jack Conroy with Joe Jones 274 Some staff members of the South Dakota Writers’ Project 236

Maxwell Bodenheim, Willard Maas, Sol Funaroff and Richard

Benjamin A. Botkin and Agnes Martin 271

Morton W. Royse 279 Edwin P. Banta 295

Mrs. Ellen S. Woodward 311 Congressman Martin Dies 311 John Newsom with Clair Laning and Lyle Saxon 332 A group of the state guidebooks in the American Guide Series 365 xvi

THE DREAM AND THE DEAL

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One.

Four months before my job as coordinating editor of the Federal Writers’

Project came to an end, I received the following note from the White House: May 7, 1939 My dear Mr. Mangione:

Mrs. Roosevelt has heard through Mrs. Fayerweather that you are in Washington at present, and she hopes you can come to supper on Sunday, May 14th, at 7:30 o'clock.

She is not sure that the President will be there, but she hopes that you can come. She has asked me to say that these suppers are most informal, and that the President usually wears a business suit. Sincerely yours,

Edith Helm Secretary to Mrs. Roosevelt

Still at an age when exhilaration came easily, I could not help spreading the news among friends and colleagues. Henry G. Alsberg, my chief and director of the Federal Writers’ Project, heard about it and summoned me to his office to find out how it happened that one of his assistants had been

asked to dine at the White House and he had not. I explained that the invitation had nothing to do with my Writers’ Project job; it had been issued in deference to Mrs. Roosevelt’s close friendship with Mrs. Charles S. Fayerweather, a writer of juvenile books then in her sixties, who as a 3

THE DEATH OF A DREAM , child had played with Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Franklin. Mrs. Fayerweather and I had become friends through her books; she was one of the authors assigned to my care in the publishing house where, until a

few years before, I had been an editor.

Alsberg seemed relieved to learn that the invitation could not be interpreted as a slight to him, and I thought he was finished with the matter. But on considering it further, he decided there was no reason why my visit to the White House need be exclusively social; he became convinced that it offered a perfect opportunity to enlist Mrs. Roosevelt’s help in saving the Federal Writers’ Project from what appeared to be its imminent fate, the congressional block.

It was not the first time that the Project had been in jeopardy, but never before had it been as close to the knife. The attacks from Congress and the press began four years before when the Roosevelt administration first announced its intention to sponsor four projects that would hire needy writers, actors, artists, and musicians. To the noisy criticism that followed the announcement Harry Hopkins, overlord of the Works Progress Adminis-

tration that would directly supervise the projects, had a bland retort: “Hell, they've got to eat just like other people.” That was in 1935 when the Roosevelt administration could easily afford

to be nonchalant about its adversaries. With the national economy depending on New Deal efforts to rescue it from the paralysis of the Depres-

sion, the Roosevelt administration was then at the height of its powers, and its critics could do little more than groan and grumble. But now, in the spring of 1939, the opposition was far stronger, and some twenty-five thousand employees of Federal One (the common official name for the WPA’s four arts projects ) were in immediate danger of losing their jobs. The hostility toward the arts projects had been concretized in the House of Representatives the previous fall by Congressman Martin Dies and his newly formed Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. A free-

swinging Texan with a passion for headlines, Dies had quickly endeared himself to the adversaries of the New Deal by selecting the Writers’ and Theater projects as his prime targets. His melodramatic charges of Communist activity and propaganda put his committee on the front page of every American newspaper and gained him the support of every Republican, conservative Democrat, and philistine who had long been outraged by the New Deal’s propensity for experimental ventures.

The Dies Committee had a field day pillorying the two projects. Its 4

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

technique, which was to be emulated a decade later by Senator Joseph McCarthy with even more monstrous success, was simple enough: rules of

evidence and due process went by the board; witnesses with personal or political axes to grind were permitted to incriminate members of the projects without being confronted by them. President Roosevelt called the Dies procedure “sordid,” and a number of legislators publicly shared his disgust, but the public opinion polls indicated that most Americans considered Dies a fine patriot.

No sooner had the Dies Committee held its final hearings on the projects than a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, headed by Congressman Clifton A. Woodrum of Virginia, resumed the attack. Unfortunately for both projects, Harry Hopkins, who had fathered Federal One from its infancy, was no longer WPA administrator. Early in 1939 he had been succeeded by Colonel Francis C. Harrington, a nononsense army engineer, who had little patience with the vagaries of the arts projects. The attacks by the two congressional committees encouraged other con-

gressmen to proclaim their antagonisms. A few weeks before my White House invitation came, Congressman Keefe of Wisconsin had spent thirty minutes on the floor of the House lambasting the Writers’ Project for saying in its 1937 guidebook, Washington: City and Capital, that George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson of George Washington and his son by adoption, had bequeathed a tract of land “to his colored daughter, Maria Syphax.” The congressman’s indignation was compounded by the discovery that the Writers’ Project source of information for the statement was a black historian. Other congressmen joined in the protest, but they were finally silenced by the Project’s documented proof that Mr. Custis had indeed fathered a daughter whose mother was a Negro slave in the service of Martha Washington.

However effective the enemies of the Writers’ Project were in their smear campaign, they were unable to discredit the excellent quality of the state and city guidebooks that the Project had begun to produce in large numbers. Alsberg’s files were stuffed with reviews and letters from the nation’s literary critics, lavishly praising the books in the Project’s American Guide Series. Van Wyck Brooks had recently written him: “Tt is grand to see that the country in general is waking up to the work you are doing. As one who has watched it from the beginning, I can't tell you how grateful I am to you. Every college in the country should give you a Ph.D. Of 5

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

all the impossibly difficult jobs, this one has been carried out with a skill, taste and judgment that seems to be astounding. The reviewer was certainly right who said the other day that the American Guide Series will still be going strong when most of our current books are dead and forgotten.” In a postscript Brooks added, “. . . and when people have forgotten the rubbish about ‘Red propaganda.’ ”

Despite such accolades, Alsberg realized that the enthusiasts of the American Guide Series consisted of a small minority of Americans who read the book review sections or wrote for them. The majority of Americans were inclined to believe the front-page headlines created by Dies. Sensing that the Project’s troubles would worsen, on January 28, 1939, a

few weeks after he had testified before the Dies Committee, Alsberg transferred his personal files to his home. When investigators from the Woodrum Committee barged into his office the following month to demand access to his safe, apparently expecting to find incriminating documents, all they found were an extra pair of suspenders and a quantity of Bisodol, the medication Alsberg’s doctor prescribed for his nervous stomach. The episode caused a good deal of chortling around the office, but the prevailing mood was deep anxiety over the fate of the Project. Already the Washington newspapers were hinting that it would not live out the fiscal year.

Secretly, Alsberg was doing what he could to change the situation. He wrote personal letters to his most trusted field workers warning them that the life of the Project was in danger and suggesting they persuade leading

citizens to write their congressmen and senators in its behalf. He also wrote to Benjamin Cohen, a high official in the New Deal who was said to have the ear of the President, presenting detailed reasons why it would be advisable to divorce the arts projects from the WPA relief setup and establish them as a permanent government activity within an old-line agency

, like the Department of the Interior. The proposal was an intelligent one, yet it must have struck Cohen, a canny New Dealer, as a pathetically naive plea, the last-ditch effort of an overly anxious general to save himself and his troops. Alsberg was not lacking in shrewdness but often it was vitiated by a relentless optimism streaked with naiveté. Yet to work with him was to come under the spell of his faith in the future, a kind of dogged if somewhat doleful conviction that somehow complex problems could be solved, virtue could triumph, Without this late-nineteenth-century spirit, which 6

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THE DEATH OF A DREAM

must have been ingrained in him as a child, he might not have been able to cope with the tumult and chaos of the Project as long as he had. Although there was an air of gloom about him as he spoke to me about my impending visit to the White House, he almost convinced me that some-

how I might be able to induce Mrs. Roosevelt to exercise her responsibility as the official godmother of the arts projects, a role she had been neglecting of late, and thus prevent their demise. In his slow and heavy drawl Alsberg recalled instances of Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal involvement with the Writers’ Project. At one point during its planning stage she had sent a limousine around to his office with the invitation that Alsberg and his aides join her at the White House to de-

scribe the program they had in mind. Later, at a crucial time when it appeared that the federal arts program might be placed under state control, Mrs. Roosevelt had interceded in behalf of the four angry Project directors, with the result that Jacob Baker, the administrator of Federal One, who advocated state control, was replaced by a staunch federalist, Ellen S. Woodward, a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt.

It was Alsberg’s belief that Mrs. Roosevelt had not lost interest in the Writers’ Project but that of late she had become too preoccupied with other matters to keep track of its accomplishments. He was confident that once I impressed her with their quality and quantity she would use her influence to rescue the Project. Not knowing Mrs. Roosevelt, except by reputation, I had no reason to dispute this happy theory. The main problem, as I told Alsberg, would be to find the right moment to introduce the subject. It was after all a social occasion, Mother’s Day in fact. “You'll find

it,” Alsberg said with a trace of weariness, and then proceeded with the help of his chief assistant, Clair Laning, to fill me with information about the Project’s achievements which they expected me to pour into Mrs. Roosevelt’s good ear.

In less than four years the Project had produced some three hundred twenty publications, of which about one hundred were full-sized books. Besides state, city, small town, and highway guides, the list included

works on subjects as diverse as ethnic studies, place names, folklore, and , zoology. More than six hundred other books were in various stages of completion. It made quite an impressive record, especially when one considered the difficulties of conducting a project made up largely of workers with little or no writing experience, most of whom had to qualify as paupers before they could be employed. The nationwide scope of the Project 8

THE DEATH OF A DREAM added to its problems; there were offices in each of the forty-eight states as well as in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The Project had hit its peak of employment in April 1936 with 6,686 men and women on its rolls. By 1939 it was down to 3,500 employees but its goals were as big and diverse as ever, and it was operating more effi-

ciently than it had at any other time. Only a few months before, Pathfinder had called the Project’s program “the biggest, fastest, most original research job in the history of the world.” While reminding me of all this, Alsberg and Laning stuffed me with more data than I could possibly remember about the hundreds of sponsors and publishers underwriting the cost of Project publications (a total expenditure estimated at more than a million and a half dollars) and the twelve thousand volunteer consultants (most of them college professors ) who were checking or helping with the preparation of Project manuscripts. They even quoted me excerpts from articles and book reviews, written by prominent critics, which attested to the importance and the quality of the published books. But there was no need to do that. Some of the statements were forever etched in the memories of all of us who, working for the glory of the Writers’ Project, felt we had never done anything of more value in our lifetime and suspected that it would be difficult if not impossible to ever find again a method of earning a living that could involve us as wholly and selflessly. Notwithstanding the dismaying confusion that

attended nearly everything we did, we had the sense of being part of a significant historical event. In a literal sense, we were making history, for

nothing like the Writers’ Project or the other three federal arts projects had ever been tried by any nation anywhere. Alsberg’s recital of achievement left me dejected, more conscious of his worry that the Project might come to an end before it could complete its

main work. By the time I was ready to go to the White House in my business suit, the sense of euphoria the invitation had evoked was gone, and I was in the throes of a new fear: that once [ set foot in the White House I would become hopelessly tongue-tied. Only as I was ushered into the second-floor living room of the Roosevelts did I begin to breathe more easily. The warmth of Mrs. Roosevelt’s greeting, along with the friendly landscape of the room, with its sprawl of pillows, books, and Sunday newspapers, quieted my nerves. There were only four other guests, all of them old acquaintances of the Roosevelts who were spending the weekend there. With the exception of 9

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

Marguerite LeHand, the President’s private secretary, their names were unfamiliar to me. To my disappointment, there was no sign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but while we were taking our places at the table—I found myself on Mrs. Roosevelt’s left, next to her good ear — the President was rolled down the dining room ramp and steered to the head of the table. It was startling to see him for the first time, and imprisoned in a wheelchair, but only for a moment did I feel any pity; the astonishing vitality of the man at once filled the room like a burst of song. As if the guests were responding to it, from the start of the supper there

was a general hubbub around the table which smacked of a family freefor-all, with everyone competing for attention, except when F.D.R., with his dominating voice, chose to engage in a monologue. Before I was able to succumb to the conversational informality, I spoke only to Mrs. Roosevelt, chiefly about Merle Colby, a colleague on the Writers’ Project, who had recently returned from an assignment in Puerto Rico with some observations about the growing fascist movement there. Colby had brought back with him a snapshot of a San Juan bus bearing the sign: VIA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT. Then and there I presented it to her with Colby’s compliments, thinking it might provide me with a cue to talk

about the Writers’ Project. But Mrs. Roosevelt appeared to be less impressed by the fact that a street in San Juan had been named after her than she was by the report of fascist activity there. She urged me to tell the President about it, and when I had failed to find an opening in his flow

of talk, she stopped him in the middle of a sentence, announcing in a rather peremptory tone of voice: “Franklin, Mr. Mangione has something to say to you.”

Later, when it was too late, I realized that with sufficient cunning | could have used Merle Colby’s name to effect a rapid transition from the subject of fascism in Puerto Rico to that of the Writers’ Project in jeopardy. But at the time I was so carried away with my ability to deliver to the President of the United States a two-minute discourse on the Puerto Rican situation without a single stutter that, in a moment of treacherous self-congratulation, I came to an abrupt end, relinquishing the floor to the President.

There was no other opportunity to talk about the Project during the supper. Some of the topics discussed seemed far more trivial, others so important that the fate of the Project seemed puny by comparison. The administration’s foreign policy as it related to the possibility of a second 10

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world war was the topic that commanded the most sustained attention, which was not surprising considering that it was the spring of 1939, four months before the Nazi army was to march into Poland. The imminence of the war had created a turning point in the evolution of the New Deal: the end of radical social reforms, the beginning of a heavy concern with military defense problems. For the first time since he entered office, the President, in his New Year message to Congress, had proposed a national defense budget larger than the one requested for the administration’s public works program, and had strongly urged that provisions be made for national defense on a wartime scale.

Throughout the supper I had been struck by the President’s buoyant optimism — it seemed to generate from him as naturally as heat from fire. But as he dwelled on the necessity of alerting the American people about the dangers of clinging to an isolationist point of view, he sounded worried. Acknowledging that he had “a long way to go” before he could convince enough Americans that his administration’s policy of giving all possible aid to England and France made good sense, he wondered if the tide of isolationist public opinion could be turned with a blunt presentation of the European situation, expressed in three short sentences that might provoke a realistic awareness of the pressing issues: 1. There was a fifty-fifty chance that there would be a general war.

2. There was a fifty-fifty chance that Nazi Germany and Italy would join forces and win the war. 3. What would happen then? While he speculated on the answer to the last sentence, we finished the

scrambled eggs Mrs. Roosevelt had prepared in a chafing dish. The subject of the Writers’ Project seemed doomed to remain on my conscience, at

least during the supper; I realized I would not be able to bring it up, partly out of deference to the monumental concerns the President had been expressing, and partly out of fear that, with his somewhat alarming propensity for generalizations, he might demolish the subject with one sharp statement, or perhaps joke about it, as he had when, on being given the Project’s Washington: City and Capital, a five and a half pound tome, he had asked: “Where is the steamer trunk that goes with it?” The supper suddenly came to an end, moments after the President had been talking about the current economic boom in France, and praising the French people for their confidence in the future. Comparing the French situation with our own, he wished that Americans could feel as confident 11

THE DEATH OF A DREAM about the future, for only then would the nation’s economy move forward. more rapidly. “Americans,” he observed in a puzzled voice, “seem to be afraid of something . . .”

During the intense pause that followed, Mrs. Roosevelt rose from the table to end the supper and to display an unexpected talent for expressing the last word. Addressing herself to her husband with a mischievous smile, she said: “Darling, I know exactly what they are afraid of. They're afraid of you.”

The remark, with its bull’s-eye precision, produced a thunderbolt of laughter. The President joined in with a gusto far beyond the call of hus-

bandly duty.

A little later, after he had bade his weekend guests goodnight and me goodbye, he was wheeled away to his study, and Mrs. Roosevelt led her company to a nearby sitting room whose walls were almost solidly covered

with family photographs. This was obviously her private domain. She picked up some knitting needles, and while her hands moved in a steady _ rhythm chatted with the guests. Still determined to bring up the subject of the Writers’ Project, I waited until there was an opening in the conversa- | tion, and then plunged in with the observation that she, Mrs. Roosevelt, was generally regarded as the godmother of the Project. As we discussed the Project, it became quite clear that she was as well informed about the subject as I was. She spoke admiringly about the city and state guides she

had read, and was enthusiastic about the newest of the Project publications, These Are Our Lives, a collection of spoken autobiographies by black and white workers of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia.* When I mentioned the destructive effects of the Dies and Woodrum committees on the Project, Mrs. Roosevelt nodded sympathetically, and noted that the Theater Project had also been sharply attacked by the two committees. The affection with which she spoke of all the arts projects was reminiscent of the special kind of tenderness that people are likely to ex-

press for a dying friend. I sensed how futile, and in what bad taste, it would be for me to pursue the role of lobbyist, and now knew for certain * In an advance comment on These Are Our Lives Charles Beard, the historian, declared that as literature the book was “more powerful than anything I have read in fiction.” The. New York Times review called it “a remarkable book” and said that it presented history “of a new and peculiarly honest kind.” Time magazine hailed it as “something new in sociological writing,” adding that it was the Writers’ Project's “strongest claim to literary distinction.” 12

THE DEATH OF A DREAM what I had been suspecting for a number of weeks: the oncoming war was

already taking its toll; federal control of the arts program was doomed. The bad news was implicit in the obituary style with which she recited, for the benefit of the other guests, some of the Project’s accomplishments. Tempted though I was to ask Mrs. Roosevelt if there was any hope that the arts program would continue under state sponsorship, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the classic worry of the guest who does not know when to take his leave. Fortunately, as if by telepathy, one of the guests became aware of my predicament, and turned to Mrs. Roosevelt to ask if she was

still planning to be aboard the ten o'clock plane to New York. Without losing a stitch of her knitting, she replied: “Yes. But I have plenty of time. I have ten minutes.” Five minutes later I was out of the White House. I walked home all the way, thinking how disappointed Alsberg and my colleagues would be to hear that the Project’s fate was beyond the power of its godmother, and

hearing the cultivated voice of the President resounding above all the others as it ruminated on the next world war.

May was a grim month for everyone on the Washington staff of the Project, most of all for Henry Alsberg. Not only was he subjected to new assaults from the Woodrum Committee, which he patiently tried to refute with a detailed brief, but he also found himself under attack by some of his own staff members, a group of palace revolutionists who believed that only by deposing Alsberg could the Project and their jobs be saved. Since they worked in secret, they were more difficult to deal with than the congressmen. Their main strategy was to supply Colonel Harrington’s office with documented complaints which would bolster the colonel’s impression that Alsberg was too poor an administrator to continue in his position. No one, not even Alsberg, had ever contended he was a talented administrator. His chief value as a director was his intuitive understanding of what the Project was capable of doing, within the limitations of its per-

sonnel, and his steadfast devotion to the high editorial standards that made the American Guide Series a treat instead of a bore. Among his associates Alsberg’s fumbling administrative style had long been a standard subject of amusement. One editor came away from the director’s office with a description of Alsberg “tangled in a maze of telephone cords, crying “Get me Florida, and ‘Get me Ohio, rumpling papers, fingering his 13

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

long locks of hair, tossing essays and tour manuscripts toward the ceiling, and presently talking to Oregon under the impression he was in communication with South Carolina.” The anti-Alsberg feeling among staff members, which was fairly recent in origin, had not developed so much from his lack as an administrator but

from his loss of standing as the respected leader of the Project. It had begun to crystallize shortly after his performance before the Dies Commit-

tee in December, an admixture of deference and candor which led the committee chairman to compliment him lavishly in public for his “cooper-

ative attitude.” The liberals on the staff were appalled that Alsberg had | treated the Dies Committee as though it were deserving of the deepest respect, and predicted, quite accurately, that Dies would use Alsberg’s testimony to damage the Project further. _ The feeling against the director grew stronger in March when Alsberg offended some of his close friends on the staff by appointing Clair Laning to the post of assistant director. Their public objection to Laning, who had been a field supervisor for the past two years, was that he lacked experience both as an editor and as a writer. But their private reason for protesting Laning’s elevation was made of baser stuff. For four years they had enjoyed Alsberg’s confidence and had come to regard themselves as his

brain trust. Now they were being ignored, usurped by a younger man whom Alsberg obviously favored above everyone else, and they were angry. “Trouble over Clair — plots and counterplots,” wrote Dora Thea Hettwer, Alsberg’s secretary, in her private diary shortly after the Laning appointment. Meanwhile, the administration itself had quietly begun to scuttle Federal One and attempt to replace it with a sharply reduced arts program that would be under state control. Unaware of this development, the liberal press kept blasting the Dies and Woodrum committees for their destructive tactics and praising Alsberg’s contribution to the Writers’ Project. Within the WPA, however, Alsberg’s supporters were rapidly diminishing. Harrington’s office was broadly hinting that he should resign, and his own colleagues were treating him as though he had a highly infectious disease.

Even those who had not plotted against him prudently refrained from doing or saying anything that might suggest past or present friendship for the director. “Economic determinism,” Alsberg sadly explained to Dora Thea Hettwer. Although he had already been virtually deposed by gossip and rumor, 14

THE DEATH OF A DREAM Alsberg continued to fight for his job and for the continuation of the Project. For four years he had been pouring all of his energies into the mam-

moth task of organizing a motley crew of writers and nonwriters into a nationwide staff capable of producing publishable books. Now that the Project was finally operating with a fair amount of efficiency, Alsberg could not bear the frustration of leaving his post. He was further tormented by the possibility that, if Congress succeeded in killing the Writers Project, hundreds of manuscripts that were either completed or on the verge of completion would never be published. His fear was shared by the publishing industry. In a letter to the chair-

man of a House subcommittee investigating WPA, forty-four publishers contradicted the charges that the Project was guilty of waste, inefficiency, and Red propaganda. Declaring the work of the WPA writers to be “a

genuine, valuable and objective contribution to the understanding of American life,” it denied that the books were instruments of propaganda. “We believe that these books contain far less personal bias than is usually found in books dealing with the American scene.” As for the charge of waste and inefficiency, it was their opinion that “it is remarkable — in view of the fact that the Project has been operating on a short-term basis — that it has been able to produce in so short a time some three hundred volumes . . . and has been able to maintain throughout a uniformly high level.”

The signers made it clear that their petition was not wholly altruistic in its intent. No single publishing firm, they pointed out, had the resources to collect the extensive materials contained in the guidebooks. Moreover, their publication had provided “a most timely impetus” to all the industries related to the manufacturing and marketing of books. The publishers insisted that far from being a subversive agency hell-bent on disrupting capitalism (as various congressional committees would have had the nation believe) the Project was actually strengthening the nation’s fabric. Possibly because publishers seldom collaborate on controversial issues, the press gave the letter wide publicity. Alsberg made certain, of course, that a copy of it went to every important WPA administrative officer and to Colonel Harrington himself. Subsequent events suggested that while the publishers’ statement may have improved Harrington’s attitude toward the Project, it did not change his opinion of Alsberg or weaken his resolution to get rid of him as quickly as possible. Everything about Alsberg must have been an affront to Harrington’s military mind. While the 15

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

colonel was the essence of impeccable orderliness, Alsberg resembled some shaggy bear dressed in rumpled clothes, and when he spoke, his meandering thought sequences filled a room like a smoke screen. Yet behind the slipshod demeanor, as Harrington was to learn, was a compact powerhouse of tenacity.

When Harrington became annoyed with Alsberg for not turning in his resignation, he had a talk with him and bluntly informed Alsberg of his intention to appoint a new Project director. Alsberg, no less blunt, let him know that he had no intention of resigning until he had made certain that all of the unpublished state guides were completed. This, he explained, was an obligation he owed the Project as well as the publishers who had contracted for the books. Reluctantly, Harrington agreed to let him defer the resignation for a period of two months, until August 1. For the colonel all four of the arts projects were an administrative nuisance; they created more problems for him than the rest of the WPA agen-

cies put together.* Although he dutifully defended them against some of the congressional attacks, he had little sympathy for their aims and was temperamentally incapable of appreciating their worth. During the crucial month of June when the fate of the arts projects was to be determined, his testimony for Senate and House investigating committees was dry and factual and often lacking in important information. Undoubtedly acting on orders from above, he conveyed the impression that the administration was prepared to sacrifice federal control of the arts projects in exchange for a large enough WPA appropriation to keep millions of blue collar workers employed beyond July 1. When Woodrum and his fellow committee members told him they were determined “to get the government out of the theater business,” he offered

no objection; nor did he see any point in warning Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Theater Project. His indifference to the danger confronting her project incensed her, but it came as no surprise. During the six months since Harrington had succeeded Hopkins as WPA administrator she had not been given a single opportunity to confer with him about the project which he was expected to defend before the congressional committees. Consequently, he was so badly informed about the Theater Project as to be unable to cope with some of the questions put to him at the hearings. His knowledge of the Writers’ Project was also scanty. Appearing before * Before succeeding Harry Hopkins as WPA administrator, Colonel Harrington had been in charge of the WPA manual program for four years. 16

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

a Senate appropriations subcommittee on June 21, Harrington pleaded ignorance when asked what books the writers expected to produce once the state guides were completed. “Well,” replied the colonel, “they have an ambitious program, Senator, and I am sorry to say that I cannot give you any details about it. I have not really had an opportunity to get very much into the Writers’ Project . . .”

Karlier in the same hearing, however, the colonel had made a strong statement favoring the Project. When asked by Senator Tydings which of the four art projects had provided “the greatest percentage of return,” Harrington, without any hesitation, named the Federal Writers’ Project, pointing out that a large group of commercial publishers and co-sponsors had guaranteed printing and publishing costs “in considerable amounts.” Although it was generally assumed that most of the enemies of Federal One were members of the House of Representatives, this particular Senate hearing suggested that even some of the senators were thinking of killing off all of the arts projects. “Now in the event that these projects were all eliminated, would it be possible to integrate any of those in Federal One in any other line?” asked Senator Tydings. The colonel had little or no knowledge about the personnel of Federal One, but he had a ready answer. “A certain portion of them could be put in some other line. Many of these people are not physically fit for manual labor.”

Having elicited this smidgen of contempt for the members of the arts projects, the senators rapidly moved into another area of WPA activity — grasshopper and beetle control—a subject in which the colonel obviously felt much more at home.

While the Senate and the House chewed over the WPA appropriation bill that would insure jobs to two and a half million workers (of which less

than twenty-five thousand were employees of Federal One), various members of the arts projects, by now certain they could expect no support for federal control from the administration, began to search for ways and means of bringing pressures on Congress. Although it was against WPA

rules for employees to engage in any form of lobbying, the rules were ignored by many who, like myself, felt duty-bound to help preserve the principle of federal control of the arts program.

A Sunday afternoon cocktail party I attended in Washington during June soon became conspiratorial as the guests took turns trying to suggest some spectacular and newsworthy means of demonstrating to Congress 17

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

that the nation’s leading intellectuals were opposed to the abolition of Federal One. There was an imaginative assortment of wondrous schemes proposed, but the only one approved generally was that of organizing a march to Washington by the most prominent figures in the world of arts and letters. The guests unanimously decided that Heywood Broun would be the ideal person to organize and lead such a march. Despite his recent and unexpected conversion to Catholicism, this beloved columnist was still regarded as a popular spokesman for the nation’s liberals. Since I was the only one present who had met Broun, I was delegated to form a committee that would visit him at his Stamford, Connecticut, home. Hallie Flanagan, the only federal director who was openly fighting for the continuation of Federal One, was to have been part of the delegation, but at the last moment she sent word that she was unable to make the trip. That left only myself and Mildred Holtzhauer, an assistant to the director of the Art Project. At Stamford we were met at the train station by Broun and his son Woody with an ancient jalopy that looked as bedraggled as Broun himself. It was some time before we could discuss our mission. For

more than an hour after we were ensconced in a big living room and served drinks, Broun sipped on a Scotch-and-cream concoction while he entertained us with his experiences as a newly converted Catholic. Suspecting perhaps that I, as a lapsed Catholic, was one of the many liberals to be shocked by the news of his conversion, he seemed intent on demonstrating that he was still the same old Broun, with his sense of humor still intact. The story he told that evoked the loudest hilarity, even from his young Catholic-born wife, concerned the efforts of a half dozen of the nation’s top magazines to solicit an article from him which would give his reasons for becoming a Catholic. Without exception, Broun recalled, each of the editors who telephoned was extremely apologetic for requesting an article of such a personal nature, each one offered a huge sum for the article, and each one graciously accepted his refusal without any argument. The last editor to telephone, however, was quite unlike them. He was the editor of a small Catholic monthly which was unknown to Broun. Without any preliminaries, he said: “Mr. Broun, we want an article from you which is to be two thousand words long, explaining why you became a Catholic, and we want it within the next two weeks. We'll pay you one hundred dollars for the piece.” Broun, with a sheepish grin, confessed to us that he had accepted the assignment. 18

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Later it occurred to me that had Mildred Holtzhauer or I spoken to Broun as authoritatively as the Catholic editor, we might have fared differently. Broun liked the idea of a march on Washington, but did not feel he was the person to lead it, having been too closely identified with leftwing causes for too many years. If the march was to make any impression on Congress, it should, in his opinion, be led by some well-known literary figure who had no political label pinned to him. The writer he proposed for the role was Alexander Woollcott, whose career spanned both the world of letters and that of the theater, and whose politics were generally unknown. Broun was certain that once we explained our plan to Woollcott, he would gladly organize and lead the march. Before I could express my doubts about Woollcott, Broun had gone to the telephone and

called his friend in New York to fix an appointment for us. When he learned that Woollcott was not expected back to his hotel until later that afternoon, Broun, urging us to see Woollcott the same day, promised to telephone him again after we left. A heavy rain was falling as we were leaving Broun’s home. Our host, noting that Mildred, dressed in a thin summer dress, could not get to his car without getting soaked, removed his suit jacket and placed it around her shoulders. It was the instinctive gesture of an innately considerate man, and it was the first image of him that came to me when I read of his death a month later. That Woollcott, who was notorious for his waspish disposition, should be a good friend of Broun puzzled me almost as much as Broun’s insistence that he was our man for the march. I had never encountered Wooll-

cott socially, but I was quite familiar with his writings and his public personality. A few years before I had written a long review of his bestknown book, While Rome Burns. Everything I knew about him suggested

a hedonistic character, a man more interested in private causes than public ones, who had a following because of his sharp wit and his marvelous flair for storytelling. Now, as I faced him in his hotel suite, I tried in

vain to imagine what aspect of him had led Broun to believe that he would have any desire to help Federal One survive. There were three of us trying to interest Woollcott in leading the march to Washington. On arriving in New York, we had been joined by a mild and middle-aged assistant of Hallie Flanagan who was an ex-playwright. Woollcott, with his squat, obese body and flamboyant vest, resembled a turkey as he strutted and performed, mainly for the entertainment of the 19

THE DEATH OF A DREAM young homosexuals who formed his entourage. Our first few minutes with him convinced me we were wasting our time. He denied having received a

telephone call from Broun, and when I introduced him to the explaywright, he glared at him for a moment, then announced: “I remember you. You were the perpetrator of an awful play I once had to review.” He sneered at our proposal, assuring us he did not care what happened

to the arts projects, and bragged that he was a far more liberal person than many of the “so-called liberals” who were pumping for the continuation of the Theater Project. He then turned to our ex-playwright delegate, and began quoting devastating comments he had written in the review of his play. Before he finished, I rose in disgust and, taking Mildred by the | arm, headed for the door. But the ex-playwright, a monument of patience, appeared to be undaunted by Woollcott’s insults. In a last-ditch attempt to establish some dialogue with him, he informed Woollcott that I had written an unusually long and favorable review of his last book for the New York Sun. The sudden change of attitude in the man was appalling. He said he remembered the review very well, shook my hand, apologized for his “foul mood,” which he attributed to some dentistry committed on him earlier in the day, and promised that within a few months, when he would have more time, he would be willing to help the arts projects in any way we wished. That would be too late, I told him, and quickly led my companions out of the place. There was no march on Washington, but Hallie Flanagan, fighting desperately for her project, which the House had now publicly singled out for assassination, organized a mighty chorus of actors and writers (Heywood

Broun among them) that sang out its praise of the Theater Project and protested the congressional charges of Red propaganda. Enough senators listened — and were sufficiently impressed — to vote for the continuation

of the Theater Project. However, when the $17 billion WPA Relief Bill went to the Senate-House conference committee the next day, the adver-

saries of the Project triumphed, and its life was snuffed out forever. | In signing the bill, President Roosevelt said he had no objection to the provision which stipulated that henceforth the Writers’, Music, and Art projects must function through state sponsors that would furnish a share of the operating expenses, but he sharply criticized the liquidation of the Theater Project, calling it “discrimination of the worst type.” But it was

too late for him or for anyone else to do anything about it; unless he 20

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

signed the bill then and there, the jobs of two and a half million WPA workers would expire the next day.

In New York that evening, where a Theater Project unit was staging Pinnochio for the last time, the actors and crew members left the theater bearing placards which read: WANTED — REPRESENTATIVE CLIFTON A.

woopruM for the Murder of Pinnochio. Few persons realized at the time that Colonel Harrington, deliberately or not, had been an accessory to the crime.

The new law gave the three surviving arts projects only two months in which to line up sponsors in the individual states who would be willing to assume responsibility for at least 25 percent of their maintenance cost. Despite the bad press the Writers’ Project had been receiving from congressional committee hearings, enough sponsorship was found — within the time limit — in forty-six of the forty-eight states. The continuation of the Project, now called the Writers’ Program, was assured, but it could

never be the same again. With the elimination of federal control, state sponsors, who were little experienced in editorial matters, acquired more

influence than was healthy for the Project. The Washington staff, no longer able to enforce creative leadership to the extent that it had, was reduced in status to that of a technical advisory service. Fortunately for the quality of the state guidebooks that remained to be published, the Washington staff retained one of its most important prerogatives — that of giving or withholding final permission to publish manuscripts prepared in the field offices.

The reorganization of August 1939 cut the Washington staff almost in half, even though the volume of material being submitted from the field did not diminish. Clair Laning, for reasons of diplomacy best known to the federal administration, was permitted to remain on the staff, with a change of duties that was never defined. Many of Alsberg’s other appointees were dismissed with a month's notice, among them an editor he had known since the days of his youth who had led the palace revolution against him. I was among those dropped, but the dismissal notice came as no surprise since my main work for the Project, finding publishers for the American Guide Series, was virtually finished by then. During the turmoil of reorganization, little or no progress was made in

completing the manuscripts for the rest of the books in the state guidebook series. Alsberg, who had been busy helping to line up state sponsors, decided that the special circumstances of the past two months gave him a 21

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legitimate reason for postponing his resignation beyond the August 1 deadline given to him by Colonel Harrington. When Harrington refused to see him, he wrote the colonel a letter, reiterating his wish to remain on the Project until all of the state guides were delivered to their publishers, and asking that Harrington cite his “specific reasons” for requesting his resignation.

Out of patience with Alsberg, the colonel did not even bother to acknowledge the letter. Instead he ordered his personnel director to fire Alsberg by mail. He also directed Alsberg’s successor, John D. Newsom, an exarmy man who had been directing the Michigan Writers’ Project, to come to Washington and take charge of the Writing Program.

The zeal with which Alsberg had campaigned to keep his job led the administration to expect that his dismissal would be followed by an embit-

tered backlash of public recrimination. But Alsberg, a fatalist at heart, conducted himself with exemplary decorum. In his statement to the press,

prepared with the help of Clair Laning, he explained in mild language ! that his dismissal had followed a disagreement with Colonel Harrington, who had insisted that the Project was not being well administered. Harrington, he pointed out, had failed to indicate any specific examples of poor administration. “Maybe,” speculated Alsberg with the grace of a philosopher, “the colonel wanted to spare my feelings.” In a farewell letter to Harrington, Alsberg, as worried as a parent about

to leave his children behind, asked that special care be taken to maintain the quality of the Project publications. So far they had won the unstinted praise of many literary critics and scholars, but he feared that the literary prestige of the Project would decline if the Washington staff were deprived of its key editors, “all of whom were largely responsible for the high standards set and adhered to in our publications.” The liberal press was furious over Alsberg’s dismissal. The Nation demanded a full explanation. “Vague charges of inefficiency were rumored, but not proffered or officially admitted. A considerable public would like to have the facts and have them straight. The dismissal looks too much

, like a living sacrifice on the altar of Messrs. Dies and Woodrum and the Red-baiting they represent. Henry Alsberg is no Communist . . .” The New Republic, no less angry, called Colonel Harrington’s career “a disas-

ter” and pointed to the firing of Alsberg as “the latest item in his bad record.” Characterizing the colonel’s action as unjust and destructive, it declared that under Alsberg’s direction the Project had “a magnificent rec22

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

ord of achievement, all the more remarkable when one considers the fact that his rank-and-file workers were without exception drawn from the unemployed.”

The indignation was echoed in the publishing trade journals and in the dozens of condoling letters sent to Alsberg. Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, asked if there was anything his friends could do, and assured him he had made “a real contribution” to American culture “which petty minds do not have the capacity to understand or appreciate.” Hallie Flanagan, writing to Alsberg with the empathy of one deposed leader to another, said: “In the years to come when miles of asphalt will be broken up, and my clippings about the Theater Project will crumble, your books will survive.” During his last days on the Project Alsberg continued to be shunned by many of his remaining colleagues. Those who had not schemed against him were embarrassed that they had watched their leader of four years being ejected without a single protest on their part. At the farewell garden party given in his honor by Clinch Calkins, a poet friend of his who was not associated with the Project, the attendance was sparse, the atmosphere uneasy. The presentation of the proverbial gold watch by an official of the administration only accentuated the stiffness of the occasion. Only two members of Alsberg’s Washington staff were plainly distressed

by his enforced departure: Dora Thea Hettwer, his secretary, and his friend Laning. In a letter to Reed Harris, whom he had succeeded as Alsberg’s chief administrative assistant, Laning expressed some of the bitterness that Alsberg must have secretly felt. “The whole affair was handled in a pretty disreputable and disorganized fashion,” he wrote. “Weeks ago

Alsberg told Larry Morris that he would be glad to retire and recommended that someone who could handle the job, like John T. Frederick, be brought in to help the reorganization — and that when that was completed he would be glad to withdraw gradually from the picture.* In the meantime, a reorganization could have been accomplished and the state guides been pushed along at the same time. As it is, there is complete and

utter chaos... . “It is evident,” continued Laning, “that Harrington didn’t like Henry because of his more or less radical notions, and it is evident also that they intend to kill off the Writers’ Project by silent treatment. At the present * Lawrence Morris was the WPA’s administrative supervisor for the four arts programs. John T. Frederick was state director of the Illinois Writers’ Project.

23

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

moment WPA is probably the most anti-New Deal agency going.’ In a postscript, which referred to Alsberg’s experiences as a journalist in Soviet Russia shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, Laning added: “Henry says

that getting out of the WPA gave him the same feeling he had when he got out of Russia.” Miss Hettwer, Alsberg’s secretary from the day the Project began, wrote

her former chief a personal letter in which she addressed him by his first name for the first time in their four-year association. “Of course, the new director may try to do his best,” she said, “but how can he compare with you? You were the guiding star of our project. You inspired us to do our best, to do the almost impossible by showing us the way. You were, as Hamlet said: A combination and a form, indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a man. Look you now, what follows . . .” So closely was Alsberg identified with the fortunes of the Writers’ Project that it was generally assumed the venture would not survive his departure. Shortly before his dismissal became official, the London Times Wash-

ington correspondent wrote what amounted to an obituary of the Project.* After praising its accomplishments and the writing abilities of its

members as “staggeringly high,” he announced: “The Federal Writers’ Project is doomed to die . . . the Federal Writers, as a group or school, are no more. But they have left in print several million words of penetrating and humane documentation, possessing which some future American generation may well marvel at the civilization recorded by a small library of Government sponsored volumes in those turbulent years between 1935 and 1939.”

The obituary proved to be premature. Although maimed by severe cuts and harrowing reorganization headaches, the Project did not die. The momentum of the work initiated during Alsberg’s rule was strong enough to keep it alive until the nation’s participation in World War II took precedence over everything else. * Alistair Cooke, who wrote the unsigned article, sent a copy to Alsberg with a note saying: “I hope if you see any spare copies lying around of further State guides, you will not lose sleep wondering where to send them. I hope to buy, beg, steal, annex, or ‘protect’ a complete library of the guides before I die.”

24

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Al Al b ° ti e ecretary

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

The drama of the Writers’ Project during and after federal control has fascinated this writer for several decades. Increasingly, it has become apparent to him that the series of overlapping crises which marked its existence, reflected the dreams as well as the deals of the momentous Depression era that became fused into the nation’s personality,

26

It was a time when all America was an Appalachia on the brink of war, when Fascism was not a page in history but a living terror, when Communism was the utopia to many American writers . . . — Benjamin Appel, Carleton Review, Winter 1965

Sometimes I look back on that period and I just can’t imagine how I could have been damn fool enough to support the Communist party. In other moods, I look back on that period and it seems to me that it was exactly the thing I had to do at that particular time. — Granville Hicks, in a symposium on “The First American Writers’ Congress (1935),” American Scholar, Summer 1966

There were certain enormous ideas working through the 1930s, and one was the idea of comradeship, that you were no longer alone, isolated, helpless, but if you took the side of the working class you were one of a large body of people marching toward something. — Malcolm Cowley, in the same symposium Writers are pretty stupid about politics, and that includes me, too. We're always making mistakes, we're joining the wrong movements or signing the wrong petitions, or making the wrong predictions. — William Phillips, in the same symposium

The writers were always a problem . . . — Arthur Goldschmidt, one of the New Deal architects of Federal One, in an interview with the author, March 1969

BLANK PAGE

Two.

In the Beginning

The official birthday of the Federal Writers’ Project was July 27, 1935, but its period of gestation began some five years earlier with the arrival of the

nation’s worst economic calamity, the Great Depression. To appreciate how so bold an enterprise as the Project could have been fathered under governmental auspices, one needs to understand the desperate circumstances of the era. More than one third of the country’s labor force was thrown out of work, and millions of Americans began to worry about going hungry. Far more telling than the statistics on the sharp decline of the Gross Nationa] Product were the breadlines, the shantytowns called Hoovervilles, the thousands of homeless men and women sleeping in subway stations and public parks, the anarchistic reactions of conservative farmers to the loss of their lands. These were but a part of the gross evidence that underlined the black anxiety permeating the American people. Contributing to the anxiety during the early years of the decade was the fear that the radical left would gain enough adherents to spark a revolution. In the burgeoning leftwing press there was more talk than ever about the urgent necessity of exterminating the capitalist system and replacing it with a socialist form of government, and all over the land were demonstrations by the jobless and the dispossessed that seemed to support the revolutionary assertions of the radicals, According to at least one historian, the

threat from the left was taken seriously enough to account for the vigor with which the army dispersed the Bonus Marchers in Washington during the closing months of the Hoover administration. So widespread was the 29

IN THE BEGINNING

notion that the country might be revolutionary-prone that Harper's felt obliged to published an article by George Soule assuring its readers there would be no revolution. “Revolutions are not made by the weak, the unsuccessful, or the ignorant,” wrote Soule, “but by the strong and the informed.” To what extent the possibility of revolution influenced the actions of the Roosevelt administration is, of course, a matter of speculation. However, it

must have acted as something of a prod for New Dealers to initiate programs like the Federal Writers’ Project, which in any other era would have been considered too radical for government sponsorship. And undoubtedly, it was not without reason that Communist party leaders, before the advent of the Popular Front, branded the early efforts of the New Deal as counterrevolutionary. Rejecting the suggestion that the Roosevelt administration was largely motivated by humanitarian considerations, they flatly declared that an enterprise like Federal One was a purely Machiavellian device for subduing the revolutionary tendencies of American intellectuals by giving them jobs that would feed their bellies and their egos. George Soule’s assurances notwithstanding, the revolutionary ardor abroad in the land was a glaring fact, especially noticeable among intellectuals. Never before in American history had so many of them been drawn into the orbit of leftwing activity. The Communist party was attracting so many members that it could afford to turn away applicants who were not considered qualified. The Marxist-Leninist doctrine, as presented by the

| Communist party, which was bolstered by the expectation that the Soviet Union would soon develop into a model of socialism for the rest of the world to emulate, was being embraced with a religious fervor that sometimes amounted to fanaticism. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later pointed out, the doctrine, with its promise of a classless society and a collective utopia, “offered light at the end of the dark cave.”

As a group, writers were among the earliest and most deeply affected converts to the new faith. They expressed their devotion with a stream of proletarian novels (eleven of them as early as 1932), short stories, poems, and manifestos. A year before Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected to _ the presidency, some of the nation’s foremost writers became part of a group of fifty-three intellectuals who signed a statement denouncing the Democratic and Republican parties as hopelessly corrupt, rejecting the

Socialist party as a do-nothing group, and declaring their support for | the Communist party on the grounds that it sought to help all dispossessed 30

IN THE BEGINNING classes and establish a society of equality for all. In supplementary articles of faith published in liberal and radical magazines, the writers urged all artists to find “true fulfillment” in the socialist struggle against capitalism by accepting the workers’ cause as their own. While the emphasis on “proletarian” themes grew heavier, the “art-forart’s-sake” faith of the twenties waned into an inglorious mist. The symbol of the ivory tower was replaced by that of the barricade. An early casualty of the new literary order was James Branch Cabell, whose novelistic concoctions of ironic fantasy were quickly buried in the debris of the stock market crash; any mention of Cabell after that was greeted with the kind of embarrassment that might attend the presence of a clown at a funeral.

Another casualty was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night, which was published at the height of the proletarian literature cult in 1934, and dismissed by the book reviewers as socially insignificant because instead of dealing with workers and the class struggle it dealt with “superficial Americans living on the Riviera.” Writing which did not reflect the class struggle or the dangers of fascism

was often attacked by the radical press as escapist literature, as were authors who paid more attention to form and style than to their message. To Jack Conroy, a young novelist and editor who was to be associated with the Writers’ Project, a strike bulletin or an impassioned leaflet was “of more moment than three hundred pretty and faultlessly written pages about the private woes of a gigolo or the biological ferment of a society ‘dame as useful to society as the buck brush that infests Missouri cow pastures and takes all the sustenance out of the soil.”

Conroy, the son of a coal miner killed in a mining accident, was the author of one of the few notable proletarian novels of the thirties, The Disinherited. A veritable Johnny Appleseed of the proletarian literary movement, he was the founder and editor of three leftwing literary magazines: Rebel Poet, the Anvil, and the New Anvil, all of which published the earliest writings of contemporaries who later became well-known authors.* Although Conroy and his contributors were not always in agreement with the Communist party line, they were of one mind in their repudiation of the capitalist system. H. H. Lewis, a prolific writer of doggerel

whose work frequently appeared in Conroy’s publications, roughly expressed the attitude of many a leftwing writer: * Among them were Nelson Algren, Josephine Johnson, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Edward Newhouse, Louis Zara, Benjamin Appel, August Derleth, Paul Corey. 31

IN THE BEGINNING I'm always thinking of Russia; Can't get her out of my head. I dont give a damn for Uncle Sham I'm a leftwing radical red.

Then, as now, an inevitable aspect of the radical’s thinking was the contempt he felt for the average liberal, a feeling which led Lewis to write: When Social tremblors rock the scene And sift us, man from man, He rides the bounding fence between As only a eunuch can.

Not all young writers had the capacity or the inclination to react as strongly to the “social tremblors,” but a surprising number of them found themselves in agreement with Mike Gold, the Communist writer, who insisted that the writer “must decide now between two worlds — cooperative or competitive, proletariat or capitalist.” To the young intellectual of the period whose life had been severely affected by the collapse of a system based on competition, the desirable alternatives were clear enough.

Moreover, he found that the Marxists were the only ones who seemed capable of answering the troubled questions about the present and the future that he and members of his generation were asking. No matter how little knowledge he had of Marxism, it was not difficult for him to become convinced that socialism represented the only constructive goal for society, and to feel that his place was on the Communist bandwagon. To provide young intellectuals with easy access to the bandwagon, the Communist party in the early thirties began organizing John Reed clubs in cities across the country. Named after the American journalist whom the Communists had adopted as a revolutionary hero for his participation in the Bolshevik revolution, the clubs provided a forum for discussions of

Marxist-Leninist doctrine as it applied to art and literature. They also launched literary magazines to publish the work of young radicals,* * The Partisan Review was a 1934 offspring of the John Reed Club in New York City. Later it was published in conjunction with Jack Conroy’s Anvil. When Philip Rahv and William Phillips, the main editors of the magazine, broke with the Com-

32

IN THE BEGINNING

offered public lectures on cultural topics and, in New York, even conducted courses dealing with the craft of leftwing writing. By 1934, thirty John Reed clubs were in operation, with a membership or attendance (one could attend without joining ) that included many future employees of the Federal Writers’ Project, among them Richard Wright, who served as secretary of the John Reed Club in Chicago.

The meetings of the John Reed clubs often resounded with the fierce debates of its members as they argued about the nuances of Marxist dialectics. As a young man attending some of the meetings of New York's John Reed Club, IJ listened to poets and critics orate with an eloquence more characteristic of barristers than writers, which alternately impressed and bewildered less erudite members of their audience like myself. Yet while the general tenor of the discussions was heavily intellectual, there was also practical talk concerning such matters as distributing leaflets, performing on public soapboxes, taking part in picketing and antifascist demonstrations and, inevitably, agitating for a government-sponsored agency that would give jobs to needy artists and writers.

That the Roosevelt administration might create such a project was no extravagant dream. It had already demonstrated its willingness to help artists on a national scale. Less than a year after the New Deal came into power, the Treasury Department, with funds from the Civil Works Administration and with the benediction of the White House, established the Public Works of Art Project, which hired painters and sculptors in fortyeight states to embellish government buildings at salaries ranging up to $46.50 a week. The brainchild of George Biddle, an artist and a personal friend of the Roosevelts, PWAP gave jobs to thirty-six hundred artists during its eighteen months of existence and produced sixteen thousand pieces of art.

The project was intelligently administered in Washington by Edward Bruce, but it was an unpopular operation. Because it employed artists on the basis of recognized competence rather than economic need, its critics attacked it for paying salaries to affluent artists who were not in need of work, In large cities, like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, where John Reed clubs and leftwing artists’ and writers’ unions were most active, munist party, they established the Partisan Review as an independent periodical in 1937.

33

IN THE BEGINNING

PWAP became the target of bitter demonstrations. Within its own ranks, the project experienced some of the censorship headaches that were to

plague the WPA arts projects later on. In San Francisco, for example, thirty-five artists who were working on a mural about contemporary America in the Coit Memorial Tower angered the local establishment by painting leftwing symbols into the mural. The brunt of official wrath fell on the work of Clifford Wight, who had painted three small decorative

panels, one of which depicted the Soviet hammer and sickle with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite.”

PWAP represented a historical breakthrough, for it was the first time the government had subsidized an art project of national dimension. But it was not the only project of a cultural nature operated by the New Deal during its early months of power. Under the auspices of the two big jobmaking agencies that preceded WPA, the Civil Works Administration and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a number of small projects for needy writers and musicians were functioning in several states, including California, Connecticut and New York. PWAP, together with these state-sponsored experiments, which were initiated by politically sensitive New Dealers like Harry Hopkins and Jacob Baker, cleared the way for a federally controlled program that would provide jobs for jobless writers, artists, musicians, and actors in every part of the country. Yet without the prolonged insistence of professional artists’ and writers’ organizations and leftwing activity, Federal One, as it was finally conceived, might never have come into being.

The recently formed Newspaper Guild, led by its first president, Heywood Broun, was among the first of the professional groups to demand that the administration create a job program of national scope for unemployed writers. In Los Angeles Hugh Harlan, a Grinnell College classmate of Harry Hopkins, who had set up a local project for unemployed newspapermen under the auspices of FERA, echoed the same demand. Pointing to the success of his Los Angeles project, Harlan in a letter to Hopkins asked: “Why can’t this thing be established on a national scale?” Two new leftwing groups were organized specifically for the purpose of

bringing pressure to bear on Washington for the establishment of a national project that would give jobs to creative writers. These were the Writers Union and the Unemployed Writers Association, both of which drew heavily on John Reed Club membership for support. Robert Whitcomb, the aggressive secretary of the second group, used the tough lan34

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A TIME OF OVERLAPPING CRISES

the Project as if it were a new religion charged with a sacred trust and, at

times, as if she were its high priestess, endowed by fate with a set of commandments decreeing that the American Guide Series should be cre-

ated in the image of the Baedeker guides — an image that was to be bitterly disputed by some of her colleagues. From the start, she did not hesitate to speak her mind. Two weeks after she had been appointed field supervisor, she wrote Alsberg a confidential memorandum expressing her scorn for the stupendous “American Guide Manual” (eventually it was to include eighteen supplements ) which she considered unworkable except

perhaps in the large cities. The writer of the manual, she insisted, had overlooked the fact that 75 percent of the Project workers would be located in communities that had only the most elementary reference libraries. She was especially critical of the instruction in the manual which stipulated that each writer was to produce an average of fifteen hundred words per week, “a perfectly absurd standard that invites dawdling and padding.”

In South Carolina she instructed the writers to forget the fifteenhundred-word assignment and concentrate on turning in information, then wrote her husband: “What those dreamers in Washington did was to assign a wide range of topics from history to paleontology and anthropology and appraisals of local architecture, and bid all ‘writers’ turn in fifteen hundred words a week. That’s a hell of a way to make up a guidebook.” She told Alsberg that at that rate the American Guide Series would not be

completed until 1990, and as if to justify her defiance of the manual, quoted one Project worker to the effect that “the manual is like the Bible. Anyone can interpret it any way.” As an afterthought she added, “Please

don’t think I am sabotaging . . . As you know, I care very much about getting decent guidebooks.” Her reports from the field bristled with complaints — the elderly North

| Carolina state director was incapable of delegating responsibility and was always in a hurry to get back to Asheville and his very young wife; many

of the editors she encountered were incompetent; the director in one of the states was not spending Project funds properly, etc. The reports disturbed Alsberg’s duodenum but he read them carefully, knowing Katharine Kellock well enough (she was the wife of one of his oldest friends) to realize that the quality of the guidebooks was, indeed, her chief consideration.

“I care only about results and we simply are not getting them so far as I 65

A TIME OF OVERLAPPING CRISES

have been able to see,” she wrote from Raleigh, North Carolina. “In each state I have been able to stir up some lively stuff to be forwarded to you; it

is my regret that in each place I cannot stay on and stir up more. . .” Trying to diagnose the reason that so much of the material sent to Washington from the southeastern states was of poor quality, she reported that each state director she encountered felt uncertain about what the “government” really wanted. “There is a lurking fear — in spite of interpolations to the contrary in the manual — that the product on which they will be judged is the usual kind of dull government publication full of statistics. They feel they have to leave out the juices in order to cover the dry-as-

dust content. I’ve had to make them feel that ‘National Director Dr. Henry Alsberg’ is not a mixture of state archivist, Chamber of Commerce

director and Chicago city magistrate, and that you want initiative and imagination. .. .-

Her career as a field supervisor was abruptly cut short after a few months by a Hearst newspaper accusation that she was a Red (an accusation based largely on the fact that her husband, Harold Kellock, was then the Washington representative of the Soviet news agency, Tass). The accusation was not taken seriously in Washington but because it diminished

her effectiveness in the field, Alsberg recalled her and made her tours editor, a giant responsibility which was to entail the close supervision of more than half of the total wordage in all the state guidebooks. No one on the staff, with the possible exception of Alsberg, then realized the depth of

her capacity, the intensity of her determination. She may not have known | herself, this small tornado of a woman whose voice seemed to alternate between the sounds of scolding and laughter. She often rubbed her colleagues the wrong way with her demands and complaints, clashing with them more often than she herself realized. But she was as honest as she was zealous and her devotion to her task emanated a pervasive aura of dedication that seeped into the bones of the rest of the staff. “Sometimes tactless to a grating degree,” recalls a former Project associ-

ate of hers, “given to encroaching on the domain of Essays, reluctant to surrender a City, but possessed of demon vitality, she added more than we liked to concede at the time to the guidebooks. Her range of interests was wide, and it was due to her insistence that thousands of sites of battles, — feuds, significant events and curious happenings appear along the highways and byways. She had a healthy hunger for the economy of a region: when avocados are picked, how automobiles came to be made in Michi66

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“The novel was never published,” Ross wrote many years later, “but writing it gave me a chance to develop whatever talent I had.” * Nelson Algren was one of the few writers on the Illinois Project who had already published a novel. Ross recalled him as “sandy-haired, looking

half starved, the Madison Street Dostoievsky with Somebody in Boots [1935] already under his belt, striking the grimy streets of Chicago among the freaks, the drunks, the derelicts.” Algren had joined the Project as a relief worker, then quickly advanced to the position of supervisor. Working alongside him was Richard Wright, who had been a post office employee until a friend suggested he apply for a Project job. Although he had published a few short things in leftwing little magazines, it was not until he became a Project writer that he began to produce the fiction that was to be the mark of his career. “The writer whom the [linois Writers’ Project helped the most was Dick Wright,” according to Algren. “He was more alert to its advantages and more diligent than most of us. He used the time it gave him to write Big Boy Leaves Home and Native Son. Whether he would have been able to write Native Son if he had had to go on working

at the post office is problematical. Surely it would have been a much harder grind.”

“Everybody used the Project,” Algren added, “to the extent that you could report at ten in the morning and leave at two and then you had the rest of the day to yourself.” Algren too found the Project useful for improving his economic status. The salary he eventually received of $125 a month was the most money he had ever made. However, neither Frederick nor he was overly impressed with his job performance. Although he wrote most of the Galena Guide, one of the best of the small-town guidebooks in the American Guide Series, he did not become involved with the writing of the Illinois state guidebook nor with any other major book project; he developed a cynical view of his role on the Project, regarding it, in retrospect, as a training period for acquiring the “goldbricking” skills that were to serve him in good stead as a soldier in the army.

“I used to get fired every six weeks regularly by John T. Frederick,” Algren recalled. “He kept assuring me I'd be happier off the Project and hand me a 403. Then Id find I was happier on it. So ’'d go down to the relief station again, register as a pauper, receive a sack of moldy potatoes; * The best-known published novels by Sam Ross include He Ran All the Way (1947), Someday, Boy (1948), The Sidewalks Are Free (1950). All three novels were published by Farrar, Straus. 121

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WRITERS AND WOULD-BE WRITERS

was a steady preoccupation; Chicago could offer it in abundance all dur-

ing the thirties. Most of the parties they attended were usually for the purpose of raising money for some leftwing cause; for several years the main cause was that of the Spanish loyalists and their war against the forces of Franco. At all times sex was fairly free and active, according to Ross. “You'd go to the parties and dances and meet the girls. They knew you and you felt comfortable . . .”

A high percentage of the Project members, particularly the young, dreamed of writing short stories, poems, or novels; but they talked more than they wrote. “Some of us did find a way of telling stories, of writing nonfiction books and articles,” observed Ross, “but very few. The Project helped those who did. Some of us became famous like Dick Wright, silver-

voiced, clearheaded, who wrote about the black man like nobody before him — or like Algren, soft-voiced, moody, hardly articulate except when he wrote. Most were never heard of and went about their ways. But the Project helped a lot of people all over the country, and the talent it did help develop was immeasurable.”

The California Writers’ Project had its share of bright young writers but it failed to be as fertile a spawning ground for literary talent as the Chi-

cago Project. None of its alumni achieved the kind of recognition that came to writers like Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Frank Yerby and Willard Motley, possibly because there was no John T. Frederick in charge to spot and encourage young writers. During most of its years the California Project suffered from poor direction and excessive deadwood. Yet thanks to a small nucleus of diligent young writers led by Walter McElroy and Leon Dorais, who headed the Los Angeles office, the California Project managed to produce a larger number of major publications than any other writers’ project, among them the encyclopedic California state guidebook (713 pages) and book-length guides to San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, the Monterey Peninsula and Death Valley.

The most prominent writer on the California Project was James Hopper, its second director, who had already published several novels and

more than four hundred short stories, many of which appeared in such magazines as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, Other published fiction writers on the staff included Carl Wilhelmson, an ex-sailor who had written several novels but published only one, Midsummernight; Nahum

131

WRITERS AND WOULD-BE WRITERS

Sabsay, a Russian refugee who was the author of The Hurricane and had

contributed short stories to the Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's; and Eluard Luchell McDaniel, a Negro who was that rare species of a literary artist — a primitive writer unhindered by rules of grammar. McDaniel quit the Project in order to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, saying to his colleagues, “I’m going to join up and get myself one of those Moors.” In Spain he cut a dashing figure as a courageous soldier and be-

came known as El Fantastico. |

There were also a number of published poets, among them Madeline Gleason, Dorothy Van Ghent, who had published under the name of Dor-

visor. |

othy Bendon, Cornel Lengyel, and Raymond E. F. Larsson, a well-known

Catholic poet. Larsson suffered a nervous breakdown while on the San Francisco Project and escaped to a retreat in the backwoods of Georgia, where Alsberg finally found him and reinstated him on the government payroll with the assurance that he need never report to any office or super-

The poet who dominated the atmosphere of the San Francisco office

with his volatile personality and compulsive storytelling was Kenneth Rex-

roth, who had been a mural painter on the San Francisco FERA art project before joining the Writers’ Project. A philosopher with an inclination for experimentation, Rexroth had been a postulant in an Anglican monastery and a member of the Friends Service Committee. In the early thirties he cast himself in the role of a Marxist and helped give birth to the San Francisco -Artists and Writers Union, which agitated for the creation of the Writers’ Project. Rexroth’s peculiar relationship with the Communists was neatly summarized in a statement he liked to show his friends which

was signed by the Communist leader Earl Browder: “This man is a valuable comrade but an incorrigible anarchist.” On the San Francisco Project Rexroth delighted his colleagues with his displays of erudition and endless stories about his experiences in Chicago,

which later became the substance of an autobiographical work. In the early days of the Project when the workers had little to do, Rexroth’s sizable audience included Leon Dorais, who felt that “listening to Rexroth was like extending one’s liberal arts education.” There were times, Dorais remembered, when he and his colleagues would also listen to William Saroyan who, though not a member of the Project, would drop in between his bouts with the typewriter and talk about the success he was beginning to know; but it was Rexroth who held the floor most of the time. When at 132

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s , uid OK, son Id rse gel 26 » 3

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es >. Pp J ) 317 irgini S guid >

Sweet] Finns r.,Je367 Guie€, idebook Swen and,and Reyno of New Ven ia: 81, 259358n. 101N.

3 May, 2 S A., 367 y, 277 Vor ? Joseph 0, 263N. 3e0ns Proj Tabe 7 se, Mary Fleate 248, 270, ject,

arr dW , 211— 7

T Y,eM Ronal eatonxi O,w 270-272 tn arren, 212 Tax. % Ellen x ae » xi, 203, 206 Wate Ma 288 Ci in eral enriosece, 131Pro} Profe 1, 262 ashington, 126, ashin nDG. Ca °pital office: riters’ » 12; ° Proj Nn, D.C »>248 253 gton: Ci247 Washi

, 268 ton: Cit20 Washi roject ject: . Se ute Fed 4, 209—yingand C g 211, 220 > apital 22 4 5,291i 4; 238, 201, 2,,356n.

415

INDEX

Washington Post, 48, 146 Workers Alliance, 135-136, 163, 166-167,

Washington State: Guide, 337, 338, 340- 169, 175, 187, 198, 291, 293, 322, 324;

342; Project, xi, 77-78, 340 City Projects Council, 168, 184 Weatherby, William J., 262n. Works Progress Administration (WPA),

Weaver, Robert, 255 4, 6, 15-17, 20-21, 24, 39-42, 47-48, Wecter, Dixon, 51 88, 89, 117-119, 135, 143, 157, 159, Weinrebe, Baruch A., 251 164, 167, 173, 288, 289, 292, 307-308,

West Virginia Guide, 337, 3410. 313, 329-330, 347, 347n.; conflict with Westall, Dorris May (Dorris A. Isaacson), arts program, 63, 68, 73-74, 77-79, 84,

X, 91-92, 366n. 92, 97-99, 193-195, 329-330; shame of

Western Range: The Story of the Grass- employment, 119; policy on political

lands, 346 affiliations, 135, 289-290, 313, 324;

Whitcomb, Robert, 34, 36 blacks in, 255, 258; Joint Committee on

White, Walter, 23 Folk Arts, 276; cost, 369n. See also Who’s Who in the Zoo, 172, 296n. Federal One; Federal Writers’ Project; Widen, Ruth, 251 Reporters Project; Writers’ Program Wilder, Charlotte, 103, 244n., 245, 253 World War II, 11, 13, 24, 268, 328-329,

Wilhelmson, Carl, 131, 244n. 347-348, 365

Wilkins, Margaret, 137, 242n. WPA. See Works Progress Administration William Penn Association, 143, 145, 222 Wright, Richard, ix, 31n., 33, 52, 100, Williams, Aubrey, 38, 168, 169, 189, 298 103, 121-126, 131, 159, 159N., 244nN.,

Williams, Cal, 266 245, 245N., 252, 255-256, 309, 324,

Williamson, Simon, 262 3597. 7

. roject

Willison, George F., x, 211-212, 211n., Writer, definition of, 36, 45

229, 224N., 338, 347N. Writers aa ixn., 21-22, 330-348, _ 351, 366,so368-370 ve 9 Lowry Charles, 109-111, 113, Writers Project. See Federal Writers’

Windhusen, Anne, 340 Writers Union, 34-36, 147, 163, 164, 166, inner, Helen, 296

Wirth, Nicholas, 270 169, , 84, 195; 198, 245, 248, 250 Wisconsin »Cui de341 Writers Unitofofthe theWPA, War Services Sub337, division 348

Woodrum, Congressman Clifton A., 5, 6, Wyoming Project, 77, 116-117, 266 12, 14, 16, 21, 155, 321-326, 333 Woodward, Ellen, S., 8, 63, 112, 167-168, Yancey, Marguerite, x

216-217, 220, 225, 287, 294, 302, 306, Yates, Ted, 262

306n., 308-314, 320 Yerby, Frank, 31n., 126

Woollcott, Alexander, 19-20 Yezierska, Anzia, 155-158

416