Author: Rose Stewart

Coping With Great Depression: Exhibit

I thought that I had my plans for my final exhibit so organized, until it was time to put them all down. Originally, the only topic that I had planned to focus on was religion and the role that the Depression played in aiding the rise of Conservatism within America, with a focus on which areas of the country remain to some extent still seized in that grip. Studying the greater pop culture movements, and unique art and storytelling mediums, that emerged out of the 1930s and reactions to the Depression made me realize, though: religion was only one fold of a much bigger picture.

The Great Depression was a societal tipping point for America, and had the call for massive social reform of “financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage”[1] not been heeded, I don’t believe it an exaggeration to say that it could have been the beginning of the end for America. But even as the people and the government both struggled to find their footing after the upheavals of the stock market crash and the Dust Bowl, it’s not as though everyone was content to just make that existence their lives. They found refuge not just in religion, but in music, stories, film, and one another. Nobody wanted to spend their spare night out or free time stewing in their own misery. They set to work, to improve not only their own lives, but affecting the lives of those around them as well. Country preachers set out to call more sheep to their flocks. Ordinary Americans and displaced migrants used the music of their upbringings to spread the stories of what had happened to them. What was coming out of the film studios and the publishing houses brought about not only entertainment, but impactful social movement, as “when our society was most unstable and insecure, we somehow, as if by a law of compensation, produced the most buoyant popular culture that Americans had ever seen”[2].

What was I doing, thinking I was going to be able to categorize any of that, reducing it down to a cultural spreadsheet and not the lifeblood of a nation? True to the words of Trevor Owens, my data required “choices about what and how to collect and how to encode the information”[3]. The best that I could do was track patterns and pin down locations, although the preservation of that information would likely not have been thought possible at the time of its origin. Digital history is about more than just calling up dates, but examining how the evolution of media goes hand-in-hand with the hindsight of studying these events which happened over 80 years ago in the context of the present day, like finding out exactly how “a folk song collector wound up as the legal co-author of a Jay-Z diss track”[4]. Could the first audiences to watch Snow White in theaters have known that they were witnessing the origins of what is today the biggest entertainment company in the world? Could Bonnie and Clyde have known that their names would become an idea, an archetype, and for some even a goal? Could a Jewish man walking the streets of New York City in 1939 have known how much further reaching his fears of fascism would extend beyond the next decade?

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/coping-with-great-depression–

Sources Cited: [1] Boyle, Kevin. “The President Proposes . . .” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Apr. 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html.

[2] Dickstein, Morris. “Facing the Music.” The American Scholar, 11 Dec. 2014, https://theamericanscholar.org/facing-the-music/.

[3] Owens, Trevor. “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?” Journal of Digital Humanities, 15 Dec. 2011, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/.

[4] Hein, Ethan. “Jay-Z and Alan Lomax.” The Ethan Hein Blog, 7 Feb. 2015, http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2011/jay-z-and-alan-lomax/.

Who Can Claim “Folk”?

The 1930s were marked by a multitude of struggles for America and its people, but perhaps one of the most all-encompassing was the question of what it now meant to be an American. It was certainly much harder to sell the former American identity of prosperity and success that marked the industry of the Gilded Age and the 1920s when a grand majority of the country’s working class was now facing unemployment, homelessness, and even starvation. Environmental disasters such as the Dust Bowl, stacked on top of often total financial loss, only exacerbated the desperation of the decade as “farms literally dried up and blew away”[1] with the old promises of the American Dream. The solution of turning to the arts, via government programs such as the Federal Music Project, helped to craft a narrative that still resonates in American society today – taking such hardships and rebranding what came of them as the fruit of American culture.

Take the FMP’s extensive efforts to record the folk music of the decade. The very nature of “folk” music, regardless of the discourse that later arose over what qualified, necessitated looking to the rural populations of America – in particular, to the large groups of migrant workers who were striking out west with their families in hopes of better fortunes. It might have been unintentional, but this undertaking still helped to prove how many different cultures formed together to make “American” folk culture. Many of the songs and instrumentations that were recorded as such, in actuality traced their roots back to listen genres that were brought to America by immigrants. Even the most straightforward “folk” music, thought of today to be the earliest predecessor of the “all-American genre” that is contemporary country music, shared many stylistic similarities with the rhythm-and-blues music that evolved from the work songs listenof enslaved African Americans.

In a sense, this did help to prove the FMP’s ideal that “all of this music belongs to the nation”[2]. But it also raises the issue of appropriation – because of this music’s source diversity, is it truly accurate to lump all of it together under a label as broad as “American”? And who has the right to decide what art belongs to a nation that continues to often reject said art’s human creators?

Sources Cited:
[1] Bindas, Kenneth J. All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: the Federal Music Project of the WPA and American Cultural Nationalism, 1935-1939. UMI, 1989.
[2] “The Migrant Experience  :  Articles and Essays  :  Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941  :  Digital Collections  :  Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/articles-and-essays/the-migrant-experience/.
[3] “The Dark cloud and a Caucasian folk song”, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017702005/
[4] “We Hab a Jest Gawd”, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/flwpa000069/

Archiving the FTP

The issue of archival has always been contentious within the theater community. Not only does there persist the question of how one goes about archiving theater (especially when centuries of iconic productions have already been lost to the ages), there are individuals who believe that theater isn’t meant to be preserved. The script is written down, they argue, and to leave future directors and actors any more traces of previous productions interferes in the creation of new art. To which a counterpoint is presented of, how else can the evolution of theatrical practices be examined? With this context, it isn’t a wonder why the Federal Theater Project became such a large target for controversy.

What these arguments come to a head on more than anything else is public accessibility. Theater is haunted by an air of elitism that doesn’t hang as heavy over art forms like music or film. The FTP wasn’t immune, even as certain projects sought to bridge this gap, thanks to internal conflicts of interest among the people running the show. Some wanted everything to remain within the professional circuit, while others insisted that rural American theater needed to experience its own revival. Archiving is much the same. There are those who believe the general public won’t appreciate the effort that went into both the productions themselves and the act of preserving them, classist issues of locking archived materials behind paywalls, and discourse over what “deserves” to be archived in the first place. All this dictates the way that future generations interact with what winds up preserved.

Interestingly, FTP productions like “the voodoo Macbeth” that won over the public were the ones which polarized critics and controversy. Efforts to revive community theater were similarly mixed – the infamous beaver communism play, for example, was being put on in schools. These were preserved, arguably to the best technological abilities of the late 1930s, through photographs, books, and other primary sources. But was all that able, or positioned, to survive the jump to digital archives? The cost-benefit of preserving authenticity or extending longevity isn’t a clear-cut issue. You can type a transcript of a news article, but that’s not the same experience as seeing the original newspaper, even if said newspaper is in very real danger of falling apart should it ever leave its climate-controlled glass box.

The FTP wasn’t the only project to dissent over what was “worth” preserving, and even what outlasts its creators doesn’t always fall into the hands of archivists eager to share. The controversies which surrounded the FTP are just as important a part of its legacy as the works that came from it, though. History is its own archive, and the FTP was a product as much as it was a producer. If all we tried to preserve of it were the “good” parts, would we really be doing it justice?

Depression-Era Religion

My historical question was: “How did the role of religion within American society shape and be shaped by the social climate of the 1930s, and were peoples’ religious beliefs strengthened or weakened by the hardships of the Depression?”

Going into this assignment, I already knew that the late 1920s saw a rise in conservatism, especially with the advent of the radio paving the way for pre-televangelism. This took societal hold even further in the 1930s, and I always assumed that was owed to people seeking a higher power to turn to during the Depression.

When selecting my sources, I knew that I wanted to focus on religion: prayer, church, priests. But when one of my sources wound up being a man speaking of his discussion with a Jew on the rise of fascism in Europe, that got me interested in Judaic aspects as well, instead of keeping the question fully focused on Christian reactions to the Depression.

This got even more interesting with Voyant: ‘church’ and ‘god’ are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common terms out of my searches. But ‘jew’ far surpasses ‘priest’, ‘jesus’, and ‘christian’. I can think of an explanation for ‘christian’ being so low – almost all the speakers from the sources that I read ensured to emphasize their denomination of Christianity, while that isn’t as much of an issue in Judaism. But even after I tried to filter for terms like ‘catholic’, ‘protestant’, or ‘evangelical’, the numbers were still much lower.

Out of curiosity, I came back to the source that inspired me to include Judaism, and I searched for the term ‘fascism’. It appears eight times – six of which come from that source. The Jewish man within it speaks of how he fears that only other Jews cared about what was happening to Europe in 1939. I don’t think this is unfounded. American goyim either didn’t seem to care or were convinced that it wouldn’t spread. ‘Fascism’ only overlaps with one document containing the Christianity-related terms that I searched for, and the word is scarce in mention across the rest of the corpus. True, America was dealing with its own problems, but nothing happens in a vacuum.

In this vein, I might choose to revise my question into, “How did religious beliefs and differences affect the concerns of America during the Depression?” Many of the Christian sources speak of attempts to convert more sheep to the flock, or prescribed prayer in the hopes of a divine remedy for domestic strife. Christianity seems to have been confined to two spheres: home and church. Judaism, while more centralized in urban/immigrant-heavy places like New York City, takes to the streets and gathering places like cafes. As someone who comes from both Catholic and Jewish backgrounds, I definitely find it fitting that the Christian sources are actively attempting to solve what they perceive as “problems”, while the Jewish sources pose more questions.

Algorithmic Criticism

Algorithmic criticism is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like. Algorithms in theory make the sorting of information easier, but human operators must take caution to not assume that they are immune to both accidental and intentionally programmed bias. One of the simplest ways to counter this is to continuously monitor what content algorithms not only take in, but produce as a result. The larger problem comes in once we begin to face the societal issues: algorithms do not suggest content such as “women should not have rights” (Noble, 15) or present black girls as “the fodder of porn sites” (Noble, 18) if nobody is searching such things.

The concept of tools intended to help people from all walks of life being corrupted by prejudice is nothing new. Multiple New Deal programs from the 1930s intended to help Americans find employment amidst the Great Depression were, at best, failing to take into account the presence of women and people of color, and at work, actively working against giving them aid. Early feminist and civil rights movements put a great deal of work into attempting to counter this, much like the way modern technological movements like Black Girls Code (Noble, 28) attempt to fill the room with more diverse voices. But the 1930s were a troubling time of paradox. Even as a woman was appointed to President Roosevelt’s inner circle, which was a massive political victory, women found themselves being shut out of many of the fields that they pioneered, such as early coding and filmmaking. In the South, black men who sought work right alongside white men became victims of lynching and other hate crimes. The repercussions of gatekeeping and hate crimes have followed America into the 21st Century, but so have efforts to counter them. Every feminist movement has evolved out of the last, including that of the early 20th Century from proto-feminist writings of the 19th. Scholars such as Jennifer Ritterhouse and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall propose the term of a Long Civil Rights Movement, as a remedy to the narrative that the struggle for racial equality began and ended in the 1960s.

The Digital Age will continue to grow and shift alongside what grows from it. It would be inaccurate to say that no attempts are being made to ensure that it remains safe and indiscriminatory. Remaining vigilant is the best that contemporary techno-critics can do, alongside implementing plans to counter reactionary indoctrination.

Formatting for the Digital Age

On the surface, text searching engines have undeniably changed the game of academic research. Information on just about any topic you might be interested in is at your disposal with a stroke of your fingertips, and with the entire internet available, you’re not confined to just the interests of whatever journals or encyclopedias are locally available. Search engines like Google aren’t just purposed for the classroom, either. I know that I probably look something up online at least two or three times a day, and if I’m not writing an essay, I can guarantee it’s usually not questions of an academic nature. In a way, these engines function much like the FAP, with their core philosophy that art (or information) “should belong to the people as a whole” (Bindas, xii).

The search engine and the greater internet go back hand-in-hand for decades. What were both, after all, if not some of the first digital projects? One of the most common dismissals of internet-era technology is that we got by without it for far longer than we’ve had it, but how many strides forward have been achieved by the instantaneous global connection which the internet and its thousands, if not millions, of digital projects provides? Take the digital archive of early 20th Century writings by African American women that I researched earlier. How many of those writings might have been lost to the ages if someone hadn’t taken the time to immortalize them digitally? Without the arts, there is no culture, and culture is something that constantly evolves out of reaction to what came before. These writings were an important cornerstone for black feminist history, and their online preservation is just one example of something that can benefit a greater social movement.

Of course, the transition of physical media to digital media is an innate compromise of form. While your standard-issue poem or book might look and read about the same online, the person only able to process the information through a digital format loses the experience of holding it in their hands. Things such as physical covers and textual layout aren’t always thought to be carried over, when as much thought might have been put into them by the original publisher as their actual “content”. Printing errors are also often corrected for the well-intentioned purpose of making it easier for them to be read, but these errors can also tell us about what the circumstances surrounding the publication might have been like.

Blog Post #1

I’ve never taken part in a course this wholly integrated with technology before, so while the learning curve has been a little steep for me so far, I think it will be a good experience. I didn’t really know what the history portion of this course would be entailing when I registered for it, but I am excited for the time period. I’ve always had a lot of interest in the culture of and surrounding the 1920s, which of course led directly into the culture of the 1930s. I knew of the New Deal and of its goals upon its implementation, but not that it was encouraging artistic growth in America alongside industrial. My arts background led me to do some independent research in high school on early American theater, but I have a feeling it was not on the same level as some of the sources this class will be covering. The other part of the Depression era that has always intrigued me is the Dust Bowl, and its impact on larger American society at the time.

Tying into this, the digital project I was assigned was an online archive of works written by African American women throughout the first two decades of the 20th Century. Its sources are almost entirely compiled of primary source documents, be that poetry, drama, or fiction. These are often accompanied by images of the women who wrote them, who in many cases seem to have been “with the times” of popular culture, so to speak, in terms of appearance. Biographies on the featured authors also hep to contextualize the environments that both might have helped to create the piece, and what sort of world the piece was emerging into. While on their own, both the individual pieces and their backgrounds would make for intriguing reading, the combination they’re presented as within the digital archive greatly helps to enhance their meaning. It is of course also worth mentioning that the opportunity to keep them on an easy to access digital plane makes the pieces much more available to scholarly analysis. A visualization on the archive’s home page also helps tie together which pieces muse on common themes, making the goal of the project both easier to interact with and helping to map for the viewer which ideas are likely to be recurring in their research.

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