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CHAPTER 1
Putting Writers to Work
When the Works Progress Administration was created in 1935, replacing the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), Nebraska along with other Plains states had seen three consecutive years of drought and dust storms. Hit with mortgages they could not pay and falling grain and livestock prices that declined 56 percent between 1929 and 1933, some farmers were forced off their land. Day laborers relying on farm work were left on their own, and nonagricultural workers saw employment drop by 30 percent in the industrial sector and 21 percent in retail trades. In towns and cities, companies and businesses sharply scaled back or closed for lack of customers. Initially Governor Charles W. Bryan was unwilling to seek federal aid or to work with federal agencies partly because taking out loans through the New Deal's Reconstruction Finance Corporation would violate the state constitution's prohibition against the state going into debt. By mid-1933, however, Bryan accepted that the state had to act, and the FERA provided the means to provide monetary relief and work projects. When it ended and the WPA was established, 212,291 Nebraskans, or just over 15 percent of the population, were on the state's roll for federal relief. The "head of household" listed on the rolls — but most often representing whole families needing support — received an average of $25.33 per month; in the pre-Depression years of the 1920s, that amount was a typical weekly salary. However, not everyone needing aid applied. Some people refused to go on relief because they regarded it as charity, a hated word for many. Others were ashamed to admit to friends or relatives that they were "on the dole." As a result in both Nebraska and the country as a whole, no one really knew how many people had lost their means of support and were looking for jobs. WPA building projects would put millions of Americans to work. Smaller, less visible WPA projects would employ thousands more. Within the larger scheme of things, the Federal Writers' Project in Nebraska was minuscule, but it provided a livelihood to a few and in the process left a legacy of Nebraska literature and preserved history.
Plans for the Federal Writer's Project began even before the WPA was officially established. In late 1934 meetings were held to define the project. Among those involved in these discussions were Harry Hopkins, the head of FERA and later the director of the WPA; Jacob Baker, who was Hopkins's chief assistant in the Civil Works Administration, a component of FERA; Henry Alsberg, Baker's assistant and the recent editor of America Fights the Depression, a book promoting the Civil Works Administration; Clair Laning, also with FERA; and Katharine Kellock, who had contributed to the Dictionary of American Biography and had written for scholarly publications.
These meetings were partly the result of the participants' real interest in establishing a program for out-of-work writers, but they were also in response to the pressure being exerted by the unemployed and to the lobbying efforts of writers' groups such as the Newspaper Guild, the Author's League of America, the League of American Writers, and the Unemployed Writers' Association. As with every facet of the U.S. economy, the national depression had also affected the publishing industry, with a ripple effect on newspapers and magazines. Fewer businesses purchased advertising space, and less money coming in led these publications either to downsize or to fold, leaving writers, journalists, and editors out of a job. Book publishing slowed. By 1935 established authors who normally expected to sell at least ten thousand copies a year saw their numbers drop and their royalties decrease by at least 50 percent from pre-Depression days. As sales of non-textbooks dropped by half between 1929 and 1933, book publishers felt the pinch, and it became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for less-well-known writers to find a publishing house willing to take a chance on someone without name recognition.
Out of the organizational meetings of 1934, the Federal Writers' Project emerged as a program to employ "all needy persons in the writing field." For a cohesive focus, planners agreed that each state and territory would produce a guidebook for their respective areas. Other types of publications would be encouraged, but the guidebooks would be the FWP's primary objective. When finished, they would represent the FWP's American Guide Series. Henry Alsberg was named FWP director. A graduate of Columbia University with postgraduate work at Harvard, Alsberg brought a mixed résumé to the job. He had been a lawyer, a theater director, a foreign correspondent in Europe after World War I covering the Bolshevik Revolution, the private secretary to the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, and a book editor. The people around Alsberg were just as diverse in their experience and backgrounds. Reed Harris, who had the distinction of being expelled from Columbia for the anti-administration "discourtesies and innuendos" written when he was editor in chief of the school newspaper, had published one novel and had been a newspaperman before becoming Alsberg's assistant at FERA. Reed followed Alsberg to the FWP as assistant director, shouldering the administrative duties Alsberg either would not or could not handle. The associate FWP director was George Cronyn. A graduate of the University of Montana and Columbia, Cronyn had worked as a journalist, a magazine editor, a college English professor, and a novelist. Katharine Kellock agreed to take on the job of tours editor for the American Guide Series. Kellock had writing credentials, but she brought other experiences to the FWP. She went to Europe after the war and worked as a nurse in a relief program for Eastern Europe, was once a visiting nurse at a settlement house in New York City, and had worked for the U.S. Indian Service in New Mexico. At the time she was asked to join the FWP, she was employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Resettlement Administration.
Alsberg gathered an eclectic group of personalities for the national office. Stella Bloch Hanau, a friend from childhood, had been a publicity agent for experimental theaters in New York City during the 1920s. She had also worked as an editor, had coauthored one book, and, just before joining the FWP, had been employed as a publicity agent for birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Lawrence Morris was a former assistant editor for the New Republic, and Waldo Browne had been an editor for the Nation and the one-time editor in chief for Dial, a journal of literary criticism. Jerre Mangione, a graduate of Syracuse University, had briefly worked for Time magazine. Alsberg saw the American Guide Series as telling the stories of all segments of the population. To achieve that, he brought in sociologist Morton Royse, African American folklorist and writer Sterling Brown, and folklorist John A. Lomax. The latter's appointment was not popular, however, with some American Folklore Society (AFS) members who believed that Lomax, twice a president of the society, had commercialized folklore with his popular public tours of cowboy songs and his recording work with folk-blues singer Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter). When Lomax left the FWP in 1938 and was replaced with Benjamin A. Botkin, who had degrees from Harvard and Columbia and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska, AFS purists who demanded noncommercial "authentic" folklore believed that Botkin was the sort of professional who would keep folklore out of the hands of quasi-trained nonacademics. As it turned out, this assumption was mistaken since most FWP fieldworkers gathering folklore were not academics. In fact, most had little training beyond the written directions they received from the FWP's national office. When Botkin first came onboard, however, the AFS supported Botkin and the FWP's folklore activities.
Members of the national staff wrote how-to manuals for state fieldworkers conducting interviews and for the workers compiling the guidebooks. Consistency in format was important, as was the mandate to represent the minority and ethnic groups that otherwise might be overlooked. And they decided early on that research and factual historical writing — not creative writing — should be emphasized. Others in the national office reviewed and edited draft manuscripts submitted by state offices for their guidebooks. States needed approval before the guides went to print, and finding publishers was the national FWP's responsibility. On the face of it, the objective seemed relatively simple. Draft manuscripts for the guides, and any other publications the state projects created, went to Washington for approval. When that was achieved, the books went to press. Multiple problems arose, however, when trying to direct state and territorial projects with their own quirks and diverse personalities. Regional supervisors monitored projects and tried to deal with problems as they occurred, but Alsberg and his assistants spent considerable time trying to keep some projects on track while coping with dissension in the ranks and extreme situations that threatened to shut down a state project. As with the other Federal One programs, the FWP kept state projects under its control. State WPA directors were routinely told about FWP activities, but state WPA administrators had no authority to hire and fire FWP employees or to interfere with what was written or deemed worthy of research.
Finding and hiring state directors was a priority as the FWP began operations, but just what sort of qualifications the FWP was looking for was uncertain. Of one thing Henry Alsberg was sure: He wanted state directors to have some sort of literary experience. He envisioned "an editor, or journalist or someone who has written novels, somebody with some reputation and somebody not entirely helpless or whom you would have to nurse along." In the opinion of Mari Sandoz, two of the best state directors meeting Alsberg's criteria were the successful and respected authors Vardis Fisher, who headed the Idaho project, and Lyle Saxon in Mississippi. Other state directors had viable résumés, of course, but not all. As Alsberg and his staff searched for state directors, they quickly learned that state WPA directors, who were unable to directly hire federal writer supervisors, could be less than cooperative when asked to recommend someone. The most troublesome, however, were those politicians who saw the project as an opportunity to spread around a little patronage. Politicians at both the state and the national levels brought forth their own candidates. Newly elected senator George L. P. Radcliffe (D-MD) demanded that the state'sFWP office be run by a historian whose only qualification was an edited history of Maryland's contributions during the Great War in Europe — a publication that took the man fifteen years to complete. In one southern state the aunt of an incumbent U.S. senator became state director and promptly ignored the FWP, spending every day, along with her selected staff, writing pages and pages of poetry. And in Missouri, Tom Pendergast's political machine would accept no one but society matron Geraldine Parker, an amateur writer of folk stories who proved so inept that Washington temporarily shut down the Missouri project.
A similar situation existed in Nebraska, where a number of writers met Alsberg's expectations for state director. Willa Cather and Bess Streeter Aldrich were already well-established authors, Louise Pound was a nationally recognized linguist and folklorist, Mari Sandoz had recently published Old Jules, John G. Neihardt was Nebraska's poet laureate, and Lowry Charles Wimberly at the University of Nebraska was not only a published author but also a founder of and a contributor to the literary magazine Prairie Schooner, which he also edited. For any of these potential candidates to be selected, however, they had to be unemployed and unable to support themselves. None fit that criteria, and neither Pound nor Wimberly would have likely left their teaching posts at the University of Nebraska to take on a job that lacked permanence. Neihardt, Wimberly, and Sandoz, who had earlier supervised FERA workers at the Nebraska State Historical Society, agreed to be project consultants but no more. Nevertheless, a number of emerging Nebraska writers, journalists, and poets needed employment. The abilities that any one of several could have brought to the director's position were immaterial, however, when political pressure favored former schoolteacher Elizabeth Sheehan for the job.
In a passing comment, Mari Sandoz once mentioned Sheehan's "writing in years past" but did not elaborate on what that entailed. It is unclear if Sheehan had ever been published, but what she lacked in writing or editing qualifications was compensated for by one powerful political connection — James E. Lawrence, editor of the Lincoln (NE) Star. More than one source on the nature of the Sheehan-Lawrence relationship states that she was once Lawrence's mistress. Perhaps that was the case, despite Sheehan's being Lawrence's senior by more than ten years. (She was born in 1876; he in 1889.) Rudolph Umland, who joined the project in 1936 as an editorial assistant, later said that "Miss Sheehan's chief qualification for the position appeared to have been her need for employment." If Elizabeth needed a job, Lawrence would see that she had one. He turned to Senator George Norris (R-NE), a close friend and a politician for whom Lawrence ardently campaigned. For his part, Norris had been elected to the U.S. House and then the Senate as a Republican, but in 1936 Norris, known as the "father" of the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority, ran and won as an independent. His support for New Deal programs included the FWP, and his influence helped secure Sheehan the post of Nebraska's state director in October 1935.
As a teacher, Sheehan had managed a classroom of students, organized lessons, and graded papers, some of which were presumably essays. On the face of it, she possessed skills needed for the project despite not being an author. Nonetheless, she proved to be a disaster. Early on there was confusion. Partly this was the fault of the Washington office, which kept changing policies as it found its footing, but Sheehan provided little direction to her staff, optimistically expecting the Nebraska state guidebook to be completed in six months. Ethel Ruth Schaible, who worked on FERA projects at the Nebraska State Historical Society before joining the NFWP, said quite simply of Sheehan, "[She] didn't know what the project was all about." When workers complained, Sheehan tried to have them fired. Rudolph Umland became one of her prime targets. Hoping to throw him off the project, Sheehan accused him of being a communist sympathizer after she discovered that Umland and his brother had participated in the 1933 Farmers' March on the state capitol. Umland, who at that time was working on his father's farm, which was "experiencing drouth [sic], black blizzards [dust storms], and depression," never denied that he was at the march, but so were four thousand to five thousand others who came to demand relief for farmers and an end to foreclosures. Nor did Umland deny that there were communists at the march. After all, it was generally known that the protest was organized by the Madison County, Nebraska, Farmers' Holiday Association, which had close ties to the American Communist Party. This protest, however, was not the "great Communist plot" Sheehan claimed it to be, and few at the march were actually aligned with communist activism. Most of the participants simply attended because they or rural people they knew were in dire straits. Rather than being ignored, the protesters got the result they wanted. The protest, as well as court rulings favoring a foreclosure moratorium, brought legislative action, and Nebraska became one of twenty-five states to pass moratorium legislation.
The situation worsened at the Nebraska project. Mari Sandoz worried that Nebraska would be unable to "make the best possible showing" with its state guidebook. That would ultimately reflect badly upon the Nebraska writers and the state as a whole. In a February 1936 letter to James Lawrence, Sandoz wrote: "I should like Nebraska's contribution to be something that we need not regret too much five or ten years from now." Sandoz was also losing patience with Sheehan's repeated calls for aid and advice. In the same letter to Lawrence, Sandoz wrote: "Unfortunately I haven't the leisure to give Miss Sheehan the help she seems to think I could and should." Finally, in early March, Sandoz simply told Sheehan that she planned a trip to the East and would be unable to work on material for the state guide. Sandoz wanted to be closer to the publishing world to protect her interests and the integrity of her work. In writing to Sheehan, Sandoz also asked that her name be removed from the list of consultants because "I won't be able to give any time to the work at all and I don't care to be a figurehead."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nebraska during the New Deal"
by .
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