FWP – 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.

Going off the Road

Beginning this assignment, I immediately knew what state I wanted to look at. Maine has always interested me, so I thought this would be the perfect time to get my feet wet. The tour I chose was Tour #4, From Fort Kent to Mattawamkeag. Now the focus of these tours was mobility and creating a good sense of the state for tourists. This tour intrigued me because it sounded mostly “off-road.” Trails and canoeing down rivers were always mentioned at some point along the way. This tour was not for the faint of heart; rather, it was for those seeking sport. There was no road to simply drive down and sightsee, this route went through the woods and often junction with State Route 11 at certain points. I interpreted this as the writers wanting to show off the wilderness of the state, show what fun it has to offer in lush scenery and hard-working people.

The interesting thing about the tour is that it runs north to south almost in a straight line. Marguerite Shaffer’s See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 states that the federal workers wanted the tours to not be cyclical, but to go in the cardinal directions from state border to state border. ¹

This tour offered many surprises when compared to the Negro’s Green Book project which compiles data about trips blacks took to safe spots for them in the past. Being that this tour was organized by the government and carried out by the state and local governments, this tour was mostly in the hands of White Americans. This image, screenshotted from Google Maps shows the general path of the Fort Kent-Mattawamkeag Tour. While traversable today, White Americans would most likely have enjoyed the thrill of the sporting events (hunting game and fishing) and taking to the wooded trails and canoeing. This map, created from The Green Book‘s data in the year 1947, shows a path that does not line up with the tour. What I feel this shows is that they (the Blacks at the time) would not travel through the forest trail or down State Route 11 to get to Bangor. This shows that these small towns might not have held the same importance to White Americans as it did to Blacks. Here, I think a historical bias could be drawn, but something else needs to be looked at first.

Heat Map (Density Map) showing the prominence of safe spaces for Blacks in the year 1946. This view is specifically of the East Coast and Midwest.

Using this heat map, it is easy to see that Blacks in Maine was not a common occurrence. There was only one rest stop available for them in the city of Bangor and not much else. No matter how I planned the trip, everything always ended back up at Bangor. So, concerning the historical bias ² of the tour, nothing really reflects a racist attitude towards blacks as they were not a heavy presence. A lot of the major cities like New York, Chicago, and Atlanta are more densely populated by such locations that it makes sense as Blacks were more common to those regions.

By taking these tours and analyzing them both digitally and spatially, the goals of the FWP in writing the guides become apparent. Maine is rich in wildlife and game, making it a choice place to visit for hunting, fishing or for beginning a lumbering industry. The concept of wanting quasi-linear tours is also apparent. Maine has it all to get tourists coming to its forested frontiers. In a similar vein, The Green Book shows the racism of the times and the places blacks could go. It evinces a sense of a broken nation that really clashes with the goals the New Deal Administration wanted to bring in.

Depictions of African Americans in the Federal Writers Project

My historical question focused on how the Federal Writer’s Project depicted the experience and culture of African Americans during the 1930s. How did the Federal Writers Project depict African Americans? I did not go into this assignment with any specific ideas regarding the question, but I had two possible trains of thoughts. Both depended on the interview subjects that were chosen as part of the Federal Writer Project. I thought that non-white subjects would discuss a more realistic view of African Americans, with a focus on the specific hardships that were endured. I thought that white subjects may have a different depiction. They may focus more on the cultural and folk contributions of African Americans at the time. Especially regarding the construction of identity in the Southern United States, I thought that there could be a great deal of disparity, with some sources focusing on the dialect and culture, with others discussing the continued oppression experienced by African Americans¹ .

Together, the ideas and depictions provided by the different interview subjects would start to build a fuller picture regarding depictions of African Americans in the United States during this time.

For the sources that I contributed to the class’s corpus, I searched for interviews that discussed famous African Americans of the period, such as Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, and Jesse Owens. Based on previous readings, I understood the role that culture, escapism, and transportation played during the Great Depression². It was likely that many of these people may choose to speak about some of the iconic figures of the day as opposed to the negatives of their own life.

I was particularly drawn to the visualization tools that linked and emphasized particular words within the corpus. For example, the word cloud option provided a practical overview of some of the more common themes present within the texts.

However, this tool is just an overview, and doesn’t show any connections between particular ideas or themes, which is a necessity for my question. So, I used the link tool to observe the common words associated with words such as “negro,” “black,” and “colored.” With the use of these three terms in conjunction, I was able to see some of the more interesting concepts associated with African Americans in the time period.

Many of the links focused on locations, of where different people were centered. While there were links to folklore, culture, and dialect as I expected, I was surprised to see a connection to workers, audience, and the like. With links to the word black, I received the adjective as opposed to the ethnicity, but I was surprised some of the negative and derogatory terms attached to it, such as the n-word, “sonofabitch,” and “bastard.” Without further close reading, its unclear whether these instances are individuals describing the words that were used against them, or something else.

For reference, I also looked at the links for “white,” in an attempt to better understand how white people were better depicted in the project.

I thought it was interested to see the tone of words that were associated with white people, such as “appealed,” “discouraged,” “creatives,” and “friends.” The role of white people in the interviews appears different than African Americans.

The tools helped me to determine that there were a number of ways that African Americans were depicted in the Federal Writers Project. They were shown as audience members, hard workers, mothers, fathers, and children, in addition to bastards or other derogatory terms. This is likely in line with how people of color existed in the 1930s. While they attempted to continue their existence during the economic downturn, they were still faced with prejudice and racist attitudes.