Creating A Hoosier Self-Portrait

The Federal Writers' Project in Indiana, 1935–1942

George T. Blakey

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780253345691
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253023544
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The story of the New Deal program that helped to preserve the history and cultural heritage of Indiana during the Great Depression.
From 1935 to 1942, the Indiana office of the Federal Writers' Program hired unemployed writers as "field workers" to create a portrait in words of the land, the people, and the culture of the Hoosier state. This book tells the story of the project and its valuable legacy. Beginning work under the guidance of Ross Lockridge, whose son would later burst onto the American literary scene with his novel Raintree County, the group would eventually produce Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State, Hoosier Tall Stories, and other publications. Though many projects were never brought to completion, the Program's work remains a useful and rarely tapped storehouse of information on the history and culture of the state.
"An important history of the Indiana state Federal Writers' Project . . . straightforward . . . persuasive . . . impassioned. This is an important social history of Depression-era Indiana and a guide for future research." —A. B. Audant, CUNY Kingsborough Community College

NOTES

Introduction

1. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1942), 489.

2. Bernard A. Weisberger, WPA Guide to America: The Best of 1930s America as Seen by the Federal Writers’ Project (New York: Pantheon, 1985), xi–xii.

3. Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (Boston, 1972); Monty N. Penkower, The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Paul Sporn, Against Itself: The Federal Theater and Writers’ Projects in the Midwest (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995); Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill, 2003).

4. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 114.

1. The National Context

1. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1975), 135.

2. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 8; George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll, 1935–1971 (New York, 1972), 1:5.

3. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Press, 1955), 97.

4. Richard B. Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1961), 337, 340.

5. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, chap. 8; and William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), chap. 5.

6. Lincoln Steffens, The Letters of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 1:463.

7. See Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 226; Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

8. Leo Gurko, The Angry Decade: American Literature and Thought from 1929 to Pearl Harbor (New York: Harper, 1968) 180.

9. Works Projects Administration, Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935–1943 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 30 and 124.

10. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 57.

11. Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 435.

12. See Jane D. Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).

13. See Kenneth J. Bindas, All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).

14. See Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).

15. Kathleen O’Conner McKinzie, “Writers on Relief, 1935–1942” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1970); Mangione, The Dream and the Deal; Penkower, Federal Writers’ Project.

16. Robert E. Spiller et al., eds., Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 2:1264; McKinzie, “Writers on Relief,” 3–4.

17. Edward Weeks, “Hard Times and the Author,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1935, 554–57.

18. Penkower, Federal Writers’ Project, 4.

19. Charles E. Rush, “The Book Buyer Speaks Out,” Saturday Review of Literature, January 30, 1932, 485.

20. Spiller, Literary History of the United States, 2:1265.

21. William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969), 650–52.

22. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 34.

23. McKinzie, “Writers on Relie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One The National Context
• Two The Hoosier Situation
• Three The Indiana Guide
• Four Other Publications
• Five Oral History
• Six Almost Finished Projects
• Seven Incomplete Projects
• Eight Research Inventories
• Nine Conclusions and Legacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index