As historians, we all share a deep concern about what appears to be a growing ahistoricism among the American public. One way of counteracting this trend is for us to devote some of our creativity toward developing programs which, while generating interest and involvement on the part of the lay public, maintain a high level of scholarly integrity and content. Once the decision to undertake a public-oriented project is made, however, the perennial obstacle remains: how to obtain funding?
We would like to suggest that historians would do well to consider their state humanities councils as potential funding sources. The Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University and the Florida Center for the Book at the Broward County Library recently obtained funding from the Florida Endowment for the Humanities (FEH), one of the fifty-three state programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The result of this FEH-funded, collaborative effort was a highly successful one-day symposium at Fort Lauderdale last November about the Federal Writers’ Project.
The New Deal spawned a variety of artistic and cultural programs, an illustration of our national capacity for innovation and experimentation. The Federal Writers’ Project originated in the 1935 legislation formally designated as “Federal Number One” and, between the program’s inception and its demise in 1943, it employed 10,000 persons.
The Federal Writers’ Project offered employment to a remarkable number of talented writers, including Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, Conrad Aiken, and John Cheever. They and lesser luminaries turned out over 1,200 books and pamphlets, including the highly acclaimed “American Guide” series. Bernard A. Weisberger, in his introduction to a recently released anthology compiled from these state volumes, observed: “The guides marshaled enormous amounts of research into American ethnology, zoology, anthropology, sociology, and folklore, but they were as delightful to read as they were informative.”
The project left behind a staggering amount of unpublished materials, deposited in state and local libraries, as well as the National Archives and the Library of Congress. The fiftieth anniversary of the Writers’ Project seemed an opportune moment to consider a gathering of its living participants. Surprisingly, no previous symposium has been systematically dedicated to appraising the project’s legacy. Also, the Broward County Library had recently acquired a major collection of FWP publications and the facility’s handsome auditorium beckoned as a likely site for the November 1986 symposium.
The Florida Endowment for the Humanities agreed with both our timing and our plans and gave the symposium project vital financial support as well as some solid advice on organizing it. The FEH encouraged conference organizers to locate some of the FWP writers and urge their attendance. Friends and colleagues thus scoured the country, discovering veterans of the New Deal enterprise. Jerry Mangione, former National Coordinating Editor of the FWP and author of The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, agreed to participate and help with the agenda. Montana Lisle Reese, the director of the Writers’ Project in South Dakota, was located in retirement in Smyrna, Florida. Missouri’s former director, Charles Van Ravenswaay, turned up in Wilmington, Delaware, while poet David Ignatow, a participant in the New York project, was found to still be residing in the City. Stetson Kennedy, who took part in the Florida project in the thirties, had returned to the state to write his memoirs near Green Cove Springs. All of these veterans of the FWP experience agreed to participate in the Fort Lauderdale symposium.
It was the personal recollections of these writers that made the November gathering so memorable. Reese, for example, shared stories about his difficulties in finding writers during the Depression in South Dakota. “We ended up with an attorney without a voice, a senile physician, a banker whose bank had gone bankrupt, a football coach whose school had dropped its football program, and a defrocked priest,” he recalled and added: “Of course, we had the relative of a senator.” He also remembered the unemployed mailman who wished to join the project and argued that he, too, was a man of letters. Stetson Kennedy offered a moving sketch of his experience with the FWP. He began his presentation with an overview of Florida in 1935, a depressed state gripped by monumental problems. He vividly described the editorial battles between writers who favored social realism and those who preferred moonlight and orange blossoms. Manuscripts sent to Washington, he said, were intercepted and references deleted to such events as the Ocoee race riot of 1920. Kennedy crisscrossed Florida with Zora Neale Hurston, collecting and recording folklore by turpentiners, muleskinners, and “jook artists.”
The Fort Lauderdale symposium also featured some noteworthy academic panels that brought together specialists from several disciplines to assess the Writers’ Project. One, “The Heritage of the WPA and the Federal Writers’ Project,” was chaired by Ann Banks, the author of First Person America, who commented upon her experiences in culling through thousands of pages of life histories collected by Project workers. Another panel, “The Florida Project and the WPA Guide to Florida,” catalogued the enormous achievements of the FWP in compiling materials for detailed studies of Florida’s black and Seminole communities. During the same session, Robert Hemenway of the University of Oklahoma discussed the career of Zora Neale Hurston, a Florida native who canvassed the state as a FWP participant. “Zora,” he said, “had the map of Florida on her tongue.”
The day-long event received widespread coverage in the press. In fact, the Miami Herald was a cosponsor and provided free-standing blowups of the paper’s front pages from the 1930s. This eye-catching display was augmented by a considerable exhibition of published and nonpublished materials produced by the FWP writers. A videotape of the symposium can be obtained from the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University.
Margaret Gibbons Wilson was a codirector of the symposium project and is Director of Research at the FIU Center for Labor Research and Studies. Gary R. Mormino is the Executive Director of the Florida Historical Society and an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida.
