Federal government programs designed to provide employment during the 1930s,
creating the first national effort to document and present American folk culture and arts.
As a reaction to the desperate economic circumstances of the Great Depression in the
United States during the 1930s, President Franklin D.Roosevelt established his “New
Deal” for the people, which created many work projects that documented and preserved
the folk heritage of the nation and set a precedent for public folklore.
The years of the New Deal comprised a revolutionary era in American thinking. An
unprecedented rise in nationalism during the 1930s was coupled with a search for the
values that made America great. At the same time, there arose an antiintellectual
movement as the “common man” was pitted against the scholar. The desperate
circumstances of the American economy during the 1930s fostered a watershed in
intellectual thinking that set the stage for the first experiment in government-sponsored
documentation of American heritage and folk culture.
This new interest in American folklore was felt along the entire political spectrum and
created a folk revival. The political Right championed a nationalist agenda that extolled
the virtues of all things American. Among progressive circles, the Congress of American
Writers in 1935 called for literature that was based on folklore and myth to “create an
intuitive sense of community among all Americans” and to replace the “proletarian”
literature of the past. Among the Communist Left, the impulse toward grass-roots
expression within American heritage led to the establishment of the American Music
League, formed in 1936 to “collect, study, and popularize American folk music and its
traditions.” The Roosevelt administration seized upon this infatuation with folk culture
and used it to garner support for its program of economic and social self-help, the New
Deal. The New Deal embraced the concept of cultural diversity and advocated the value
of the common man, two impulses that brought folk culture to the forefront of the
American imagination. Nearly all programs of the New Deal administration were
influenced by this tidal wave of interest in American folk culture. A notable example is
the body of documentary photographs that were taken for the Farm Security
Administration (FSA) that captured vividly life during the Great Depression. However,
folklore would find its most powerful outlet within the arts programs of the Works
Progress Administration (WPA), collectively known as “Federal One.”
In an effort to overcome economic and political disaster, Roosevelt, through the WPA
arts programs, would seize upon folk culture as the obvious channel to recover a glorious,
multifaceted heritage and instill national loyalty. In a 1938 speech, he expressed his
feeling that cultural unity could be achieved by using folklore, which “has the elements
from which to weave a culture.” The theme of “unity through diversity” would become a
guiding principle for the New Deal administrators, especially those involved in the WPA
Federal One programs.
Federal One consisted of four projects: the Federal Music Project (FMP), the Federal
Arts Project (FAP), the Federal Theater Project (FTP), and the Federal Writers’ Project
(FWP). All four were developed and shaped with the help of folklorists. Herbert Halpert
worked for the Federal Theater Project and conducted extensive fieldwork under its
auspices. Holger Cahill, a noted authority on American folk art, was named as the director of the Federal Arts Project in 1935. Under his guidance, the FAP
created a national program of civic art that provided public murals and sculpture in cities
across the nation. Cahill also conceived of and produced the Index of American Design.
The Index, with more than 20,000 watercolor drawings of folk and popular material
culture, continues to serve as an invaluable tool in American folk studies.
Ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger was instrumental in emphasizing traditional
American music through his work with the Federal Music Project. In an address to the
teachers of the FMP on March 21, 1939, Seeger berated the project for lagging behind the
other three arts projects in “interpreting America to Americans.” He went on to state that
“the oral tradition is usually supposed to be dead. On the contrary, America has one of
the most vigorous collections of folk music of the day.” His early exhortations would
bring folk music into the curriculum of the FMP.
Of the four Federal One projects, the Federal Writers’ Project was undeniably the
most significant to the history of folk studies in America. Created in August 1935, the
FWP proposed to put unemployed writers to work, collaborating on publications that
would benefit the American people. During its seven-year tenure, the FWP would employ more than 6,500 writers who would produce more than 276 books, 701 pamphlets and
340 “issuances.” Most important, the FWP created special work units for folklore, social
and eth nic studies, and life histories. All three units demanded that workers conduct
fieldwork and document the folk culture and heritage of the nation.
The lasting value of the Federal Writers’ Project to the field of folklore is less in the
production of the American Guide Series and other publications, but in the raw data that
was collected in every state of the nation. This fieldwork yielded information on the
folklife and traditions of a myriad of cultural groups and regional cultures in the United
States. Many folklorists made lasting contributions as employees of the FWP, including
Zora Neale Hurston, Herbert Halpert, Alan Lomax, and Stetson Kennedy among others,
but a few key people were responsible for the scope and direction of the folklife
collection that was accomplished through the Federal Writers’ Project.
Morton Royce, as director of the social and ethnic studies unit of the FWP, supervised
workers in collecting immigrant and occupational narratives in an interdisciplinary
approach to the study of culture. This unit responded to the public’s new fascination with
America’s multicultural roots and published booklets on the ethnic cultures to be found in
each state and major city. New Deal historian Ann Banks has suggested that Royce was
largely responsible for changing the notion of American culture as a melting pot, into a
view of America as a mosaic—each culture retaining a distinct identity, yet contributing
to the whole.
The FWP life-histories unit was directed by Southern writer W.T.Couch. As director
of the University of North Carolina Press, Couch actively solicited manuscripts that
included direct expressions of Southern folk culture, such as songs, tales, idiom, and the
like. In his own book, Culture in the South (1934), he shaped his commentary around the
traditional Southern values that pervaded everyday life in the region. Couch may have
had a lasting effect upon the writers working in his unit in that he insisted upon
documentary truth, letting people speak for themselves. In 1936 Sterling Brown was
appointed national editor of Negro affairs for the FWP. As such, he was in charge of
directing the collection of narratives and life histories from ex-slaves living in Georgia,
Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia. This unprecedented research has given us hundreds
of firsthand accounts of the institution of American slavery and has provided folklorists
with valuable data for contemporary studies.
Also in 1936, John Lomax, at the time serving as curator of the Archive of American
Folk Song at the Library of Congress, was appointed as the first national adviser on
folklore and folkways for the FWP. Lomax brought to the FWP his combined interests in
the rural South, the Negro, and folksong. He worked in cooperation with Brown to
establish the Slave Narrative Project and encouraged the collection of folksongs from
across the United States.
Lomax resigned as head of the FWP folklore unit in October 1937, but his impact was
both lasting and profound. He established the initial interview approach and instructions
to fieldworkers (cautioning against editing and using dialect spellings), and he left a
legacy of solid work widi Southern and rural materials.
At the fiftieth anniversary of the American Folklore Society, held December 27–30,
1937, at Yale University, Federal Writers’ Project Director Henry G.Alsberg sought the
support of the society to create a permanent folklore unit of the FWP After presenting his case, Alsberg believed that all he had achieved was a lukewarm resolution that the FWP
materials could be put to much better use by professional folklorists.
When Benjamin A.Botkin took over as director of the FWP folklore unit in May 1938,
a significant rapprochement occurred. The appointment of Botkin, an academically
trained folklorist, brought the academy and the American Folklore Society (AFS) into a
dialogue and acceptance of the folklore work of the Federal Writers’ Project. Stith
Thompson, in his AFS presidential address that year, admitted that the FWP material
might prove to be useful, and the society as a whole was relieved to see a “professional”
take over.
It was Botkin who, in addition to directing his own unit, had the foresight to forge a
fortuitous alliance within the various programs and projects of the New Deal. He
established the Joint Committee on the Folk Arts, which brought interested professionals
and lay persons together from all four Federal One programs, as well as other
government-sponsored mmatives.
Botkin, through his New Deal position, redefined the concept of folklore to embrace
previously discounted sources (urban, printed, recorded) and proposed the concept of
folklore as “living lore.” Botkin himself was influenced by sociolo gist Howard
W.Odum; he would take Odum’s notion of society as a biological entity and expand it to
develop his own ideas concerning folk culture as a renewable, changeable resource—a
functional approach to folk culture. This approach was outlined and defined in Botkins
new FWP handbook, Instructions to Fieldworkers, which was given to all folklore-unit
supervisors in 1939. Fieldworkers were told to “look everywhere for material,” and
Botkin emphasized occupational and ethnic materials. He explained and set limits for the
parameters of folklore collection to hundreds of FWP employees and subsequently
influenced an entire generation of folklorists through this first government-sponsored
folklore program. In doing so, he brought his own popular, public perspective to the field
of folklore.
Perhaps the most revolutionary notion Botkin proposed was his commitment to help
“the folk understand their lore and regain possession of it.” Ultimately, Botkin, the
humanitarian, was calling for an “applied folklore,” in which folklore materials could be
used to create understanding and improve the condition of human society. In this
thinking, Botkin was a consummate New Dealer—dedicated to bringing about social,
political, and economic change through his folklore work with the government.
In addition to the government-sponsored projects of the New Deal, other trends were
influencing the course of folk culture and folk studies during the 1930s. Protest as a
distinct genre grew out of the Great Depression and was linked with the struggle for labor
rights and economic recovery and an emerging struggle for racial equality. Among other
impulses, the folk tradition of group singing and ballad making was incorporated into the
struggle with the advent of topical songs composed to address specific issues. On a
national scale, “folksinging” was now viewed as a universal tool to move people to
action. Folklore collectors such as Lawrence Gellert and Alan Lomax were collecting and
publishing traditional African American songs that reflected the struggle for freedom,
while artists such as Woody Guthrie, Lee Hayes, and Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly)
were first coming to prominence.
Whether working for the government or struggling from an independent position,
folklorists during the New Deal brought their desire for sweeping social and economic reform into the realm of folk-cultural studies. The New Deal era was a time when applied
folklore was used as a tool for national recovery and when the public interest in
American heritage fueled an unprecedented experiment in government programs to
document and preserve the folklore and culture of all Americans. As such, the New Deal
was an unparalleled forerunner of the public folklife programs that would emerge in the
1970s.
Peggy A.Bulger
References
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Billington, RayAllen. 1961. Government and the Arts: The WPA Experience. American Quarterly
13:466–479.
Botkin, Benjamin A.1939. The WPA and Folklore Research: Bread and Song. Southern Folklore
Quarterly 3: 7–14.
——. 1958. We Called It “Living Lore.” New York Folklore Quarterly 14:189–201.
Dwyer-Shick, Susan A. 1975. The Development of Folklore and Folklife Research in the Federal
Writers’ Project, 1935–1943. Keystone Folklore Quarterfy 20:5–31.
Halpert, Herbert. 1938. Federal Theater and Folksong. Southern Folklore Quarterly 2:81–85.
Hamby, Alonzo L., ed. 1981. The New Deal: Analysis and Interpretation. New York: Longman.
Hirsch, Jerrold. 1988. Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folklore: The New Deal Precedent. In The
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Lash, Joseph P. 1988. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal. New York:
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