Living the 1930s
Banks, Ann
Living the 1930s FIRST-PERSON AMERICA edited and with an introduction by Ann Banks Alfred A. Knopf. 287 pp. $13.95. What did the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s really accomplish? First, it...
...In addition to all the information they impart, the narratives in First-Person America offer the sheer pleasure of settling into stories well told...
...You got to expect it when you work with granite...
...Judging by the selections from her discovery that Banks offers in First-Person America, it is clear that critics may soon have to revise their opinions of the New Deal effort to put writers to work...
...The Project writers, as it happens, took their notes in longhand...
...In each case, their conversations focused on "the everyday round of work and play, the details of survival," as Banks puts it...
...Joseph Barbato (Joseph Barbato is a free-lance writer and critic...
...If you do, don't tell nobody I was the one who told you...
...It published a series of much-acclaimed guidebooks...
...They claim us toby-sellers are running a racket, deceiving the people, that there ain't nothing to tobies...
...Julian, Oklahoma oilfield worker, who sold luck toby charms on the side: "If I tell you about tobies, I don't want you to be talking about them to nobody else...
...They constitute an invaluable documentary record of life among America's working poor of the period...
...Most miners is fools, and I'll bet you that for every dollar lifted off the bedrock in this country two was put back on it...
...First, it put some 6,500 writers and other white-collar workers to work...
...Arranging the narratives around common themes—"Immigrant Lives," "Tobacco People," "Troupers and Pitchmen," and so on—Banks in several instances takes us deep into ongoing controversies of the period...
...Or to Hank Sims, retired Oregon goldminer, reminiscing at eighty-six: "When I talk I am liable to do some tall running off at the mouth...
...But it won't be long...
...Best of all, Banks assures us, First-Person America is only a small portion of the Project's "forgotten legacy—one that is only now beginning to be appreciated...
...First-Person America is an occasion for celebration...
...Many of the books were inspired by the milieus of these narratives...
...It's against the laws of the state of Oklahoma, and lots of other states, to sell tobies...
...You can't call that very good mining...
...Indeed, had Studs Terkel roamed the nation in the late 1930s, it is doubtful that he could have done a better job...
...Since 1941, a cache of Project material sat—unindexed, little used, and badly neglected—in the Library of Congress, where Ann Banks found it several years ago...
...If you question a miner's word about his claim you might as well question his daughter's virtue...
...But what did it do to encourage literary creativity in America...
...Every one of them, they will die in their fifties, they are through before that, I am near fifty...
...Often, in reflecting on their past and present lives, people offered hard-earned advice on living ("I learned to do things well and it has stayed with me all my life," says one woman) or stumbled upon insights into their own lives...
...The Union's on the job...
...In Barre, Vermont, immigrant stone-workers relate lives amid deadly stone dust: "The life of a stonecutter is fifty years," says Anthony Tonelli...
...I expect it...
...The writers spoke to farmers, factory workers, miners, midwives, con men, musicians, fishermen—to people of diverse ethnic groups, regions, and walks of life...
...I am a miner and for forty, fifty years I have been traveling a shaft straight into this poor-house...
...They'll be coming in...
...No more...
...Miners is liars, too—honest liars...
...It evokes vividly the lives of average Americans, and it suggests that the New Deal's dabbling in literary life may have done far more to encourage creativity than many have suspected...
...For example, who can resist listening to J.C...
...Moreover, she notes, more than half of the forty-one writers whose work appears in First-Person America went on to publish books after leaving the Project...
...I would tell stories to get people going and then I'd sit back and try to get it down as accurately as I could," says Ralph Ellison, who collected some of the narratives here...
...Until now, it has been extremely difficult to answer such a question, for the Project was curtailed sharply in 1939, following attacks by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and much of its work has simply gone unpublished...
...In collecting these narratives from burlesque dancers and steelworkers, from store clerks and quiltmakers, from street vendors and railroad porters and textile workers, the Project writers produced "the largest body of first-person narratives" in this country, says Banks, a research associate at Boston College's American Studies Center...
...In all, Banks's discovery consisted of more than 10,000 first-person narratives^—"real people telling their own stories in their own words"—collected throughout the country by Project staff members in the final years of the Depression...
...I die soon...
...Packinghouse workers in Chicago's stockyards, for example, describe the beginning of the CIO...
...But I know better, and you ought to know better...
...In this extraordinary anthology, Banks offers eighty of these life-history narratives, as she calls them...
...They aren't very well organized yet where I am now," says Victoria Kramer, an Armour worker in 1939 (and the Stella Nowicki of the film Union Maids...
...And it provided a means of livelihood for John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, and several others whose names we now recognize...
Vol. 45 • April 1981 • No. 4
