yeah. That's one of the things Kurlansky is writing about in this introduction, how the FWP sustained writers and artists some of whom he says would have literally starved. The list of names that I know, people who worked on the project is fascinating, as is the list of names that I do not know but who produced novels partly because they had a steady income. Zora Neale Hurston, who was published before employment with the FWP was given a low level position but the work helped her make in income to write a second. Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Claude McKay all sustained by the FWP. Hurston was actually paid at a few bucks under the lowest pay level b/c they claimed it would cost so little to live in Florida. The Florida staff, though, was put out at having to deal with her "airs":
"Zore Neale Hurston, the Florida Negro novelist, has signed onto the project and will be paying us a visit. Zora has been feted by New York literary circles, and is given to putting on airs, including the smoking of cigarettes in the presence of white people. So, we must all make allowances for Zora."
The shame! Smoking in front of white people.
It reminds me of the canon busting that went on in the 70s. For a course, I had to read through a lot of this mimeographed compilations, unearthing writers who'd once been 'feted' or who had been popular and widely read, but who were excised from the canon of great u.s. literature. I found it all rather fascinating to learn that there'd been a white woman author, far more popular than Twain. But I'd never heard of her until feminist revived her work and the processes by which her work was marginalized and deemed, somehow, not good enough for inclusion in literature courses.
another thing I'm reminded of is that the FWP guidebook all had guidelines for documenting black history and culture -- and at a time when this was nearly unheard of. We wouldn't have had to bust canons, etc. if it was common to include the histories of people beside the fat dead white guys. And yet, as Miles has argued, the federal government pushed for guidelines that, at least for me, have been important in a number of ways as I've used those histories, the photos, etc. in my own work. E.g., when I built a web site for a labor project, I went through photo after photo of life among blacks, mexicans, puerto ricans, etc. that wouldn't have been covered otherwise.
Anyway, maybe Kurlansky (who has a socialist background IIRC) is romanticizing the era but it is rather amazing that they pulled this one off:
"At its height the Federal Art Project employed 5,300 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jaco Lawrence, and Marsden Harlety, and staffed one hundred art centers in twenty-two states. The Federal Music Project, directed by former Cleveland Symphony conductor Nikolia Zokoloff, gave 5,000 perfomances. The Federal Theatre Project employed 32,700 people, including Oson Welles, John Houseman, Burt Lancaster, Joseph Cotten, Will Geer, Virgil Thomson, Nicholas Ray, E.G. Marshall, and Sidney Lumet, produced more than 1,20 plays in four years, mostly free of charge , and introduced one hundred new playwrights."
Imagine that happening today, were there another Great Depression. I honestly can't imagine that getting slipped in there, support for such a project, the way it got slipped inthe Emergency Relief Act. I've never paid attention to much about Roosevelt, but Kurlansky writes (someone sanity check me on this: is he overly enthusiastic?) the following about Roosevelt, which is a little disconcerting b/c I'm reading about Reconstruction in N. Carolina reading Gerald Grant's book:
"Roosevelt's mandate was derived from bringing this Democratic party back to power in 1932 while the gross national product was in precipitous decline, a third of the American labor force was out of work, and millions were facing the possibility of real starvation. It was also perhaps the only moment in history in which the United States had a large leftist intelligentsia -- so large, in fact, that the Communist Party of America, besieged by membership applications, was actually rejecting some."
reallY? wow. I never heard that one. Kurlansky continues:
"Roosevelt's secret weapon, his powerful political tactic, was his unstoppable and unreasoning optimism. He was so exuberant, so irritatingly frothy, that he was the perfect antidote to an age known as the Great Depression." (pp 5-6 of The Food of a Younger Land)
I can't wait to read this because, personally, I think that the cookbook is a genre of literature and, if I had my druthers, I would establish it as such and do literary criticism and sociological research using _just_ cookbooks.
This book is just filled with awesome little pieces -- recipes, food writing, etc. It should be fascinating to get a glimpse of u.s. food culture that we've talked about on the list. people have said here that we have none. This books reveals that to be a mistaken belief, I think.
shag