1930s – The Digital Past Course Blog

Looking Back: Mobility and the 1930s

Final Project: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/moving-on-up

Ever since we started learning about the different departments of the Cultural New Deal, I have been captivated by the idea of mobility. Throughout all of the New Deal, something was moving, something was happening and the people greatly benefitted from it. ¹People came together and got things done. What really tipped this off for me was when we watched “It Happened One Night” for homework. There are so many examples of mobility within that movie that even I got excited or had to dance along to the music.

To me, this project was reminiscent of a 5-paragraph essay, so I handled it that way. I focused my argument around mobility being a major theme and result of the New Deal. I wanted to study the Federal Art Project as well, but I mostly just kept it to the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Theatre Project. Each one of them provided movement in a unique way.

The Federal Writers Project focused on making the American Guides series to help establish what a new America would look like coming out of the Depression. The guides would be a tool to codify what the nation now is and be emblematic of American patriotism. ² To me, the tours got people moving and exploring and figuring out what America would be like. I focused on the touring aspects of the guides, specifically in Maine, discovering that some of the tours went through wilderness. I conveyed this through a story map, showing how the tours were not cyclical, but more linear, running predominantly in the cardinal directions. Using the map helps clarify the distance and vastness of the land covered.

The Federal Music Project, is, to me, the best project out of the four. I find it simply amazing all the songs they were able to collect and create. The way the FMP got people moving was through the gathering of folk songs. These became emblematic of American roots and where people came from, permitting a mixture of cultures. It provided entertainment for the American people and traveled with them when they eventually joined the war in 1945. It was able to thrive like this because it held no political partisanship. ³ There were not many high-profile figures in the FMP machine, just normal people wanting to make and collect music. For this project, the obvious choice was soundcite. With it, music and words can harmonize and good ideas can be generated. I mostly used it to show emotion that evoked movement or the desire to join in and sing.

The Federal Theater Project, complete opposite of the situation in the FMP, was very high-profile with the risk-taking Hallie Flannagan at the helm. Much of the movement the FTP brought came in the form of theater shows which shook up society. A great example of this is Orson Welles’s “Macbeth,” ⁴his debut stage play. It was a radical idea having African-Americans in major roles of Shakespeare as well as changing the location of the work. People gave it the connotation of “voodoo” thanks to this. The play got the gears moving for the FTP, bringing in lots of revenue. For this one, I used Omeka’s annotation feature to look at an image from Macbeth. I used it to explain how this was an up-and-coming time for various ethnicities, and African-Americans were finally being brought to the limelight of the stage. The movement here is the lifting up of others.

Much of the technology I used in this project is great. I feel that it can really help bring to light certain aspects of history we might be unable to see from just a cursory glance or reading. We, as digital historians, are able to look deeper into the subject and draw out new ideas to get a new perspective on things. Before this class, I barely knew much about the New Deal, but now I see the real breadwinner programs that helped solidify American culture. Trends like comics and social security still persists to this day, even the idea of popular “pop” music which resonates with the people. Ideas being remixed
⁵ for future use, like many of the songs Lomax collected are reused by modern day rap and hip-hop artists. ⁶ I hope to carry all this knowledge with me into future courses here at school.

Thinking about Mobility and Music

A lot of the music written during this time of the 1930s was gathered together from differing cultures. Together, these songs would come to make up the conception of the American folk tradition. These songs (passed down or home-grown) were sought after by the Federal Music Project’s Alan Lomax in order to not only preserve the culture, but its relevance as well as the songs could find new meaning in the future. ¹

What most interested me about these times is the focus on mobility which seems to become greatly apparent. People moving West for better lives, or people traveling the states in order to see what America has to offer in the form of scenery. Immediately, my mind went to the songs collected about travelling. The collecting of these audio clips makes these songs easier to access as well as make them live on through a digital world, making them accessible in the future.

“I’m Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad” ² is a song that focuses on this kind of movement in the states. The narrator mentions going to where the climate suits her clothes, bringing to mind the idea of travelling in loose-fitting clothes that someone might have to wear back then thanks to the Depression. Having to wander around in those clothes would not be great, especially in inclement weather. The narrator’s repetition of this notion in the song plays into that “bad feeling” that they have, not only having to walk around in poor clothes, but also having been pent up in prison for some reason.

A favorite of mine is “Back to Arkansas” recorded in the Arvin FSA camp in California. ³ The themes of the poem line up well with the idea of travelling West back in the thirties. ⁴ Many people were uprooted thanks in part to the Depression. Tag teaming with the Dust Bowl, it really hit the farmers hard. People from Oklahoma and Kansas and many other places packed up and started migrating around to find land suitable to work as well as good paying jobs. These same details can be found wrapped in the words of “Back to Arkansas.”

Themes of mobility being found within and around these songs and poems really shows how it played such a role at the time. People going out and looking for something new, be it because of their clothing or because of their lifestyle or someone going somewhere, be it for travel and touring or finding a better life.

Living it up in the 1930s

What really captivates me about the past is people’s lifestyles. This desire to get a glimpse at their lives back then led me to my historical question: What were lifestyles like then, and how were they recorded by the Federal writers. I was immediately greeted by a flurry of words. The problem was that they all seemed very simple. Home and work, like and folklore. These words caused me to think a little more about what my historical question could be.

https://voyant-tools.org/?stopList=keywords-f4547f893cb245720fcc371d1768e931&whiteList=&corpus=a0d1dfae2c29f39d7cde744e33a7eb3b&view=Cirrus

My thoughts moved on to consider World War II, so I shortened the class corpus to any document that was recorded between 1939-1945. What I learned was that our corpus stopped in the year 1941 which is when America joined the war. This date could imply that the government turned from focusing on these writings and recordings to focusing more on the war effort.

Voyant was pretty helpful in getting me to visualize these lifestyles before America joined the war. In the word cloud (Cirrus Tool) above, the words work, good, old, time, like, house and came recurred very frequently. This gave me the idea that a lot of these people’s lives were more centered around work as that was what the New Deal set out to do, provide jobs and relief for the people in this time of uncertainty. “Like” and “Old” are words very reminiscent of jargon typically used to describe locations (Old) and forming comparisons or statements of “ought to” or “should” do something. These words being prominent showed, to me, that the interviewers were most likely very relaxed when it came to discussing these topics with their interviewees. They carried the valence of narrative and really felt like stories painting the picture of family life in the past. ¹

The tool that helped me the most was the Links Tool. It really put these words into perspective by showing how they connected with words in similar documents. Using this, I could closely investigate the documents to see why the algorithm assigned these certain words to link. A good example was “family.” Links linked the word with “medicine,” “home,” and “Doughty” as the Doughty document discussed their life at home. This link conveys a sense of home being a place of healing and security as that was where the family was. A similar thing could be seen with “people” being connected to “folklore” as folklore was the story of the people which they passed down, holding meaning in their culture.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=a0d1dfae2c29f39d7cde744e33a7eb3b&stopList=keywords-f4547f893cb245720fcc371d1768e931&query=time&query=good&query=people&query=came&query=school&query=home&mode=corpus&context=3&view=CollocatesGraph

Distant Reading is a really fun tool for getting a broad sense of what a group of documents could possibly mean. I enjoyed getting to explore the tools and answer my historical question. During the time before America joined the war, they were very focused on home, doing good, working to support their families and trying to keep healthy. ²