Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2008
Writing Race: The Florida Federal Writers'
Project and Racial Identity, 1935-1943
Angela E. Tomlinson
Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact lib-ir@fsu.edu
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
WRITING RACE: THE FLORIDA FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT
AND RACIAL IDENTITY, 1935-1943
By
ANGELA E. TOMLINSON
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of History
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2008
Copyright © 2008
Angela E. Tomlinson
All Rights Reserved
The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Angela E. Tomlinson defended on March
28, 2008.
Elna Green
Professor Directing Thesis
Maxine Jones
Committee Member
Jennifer Koslow
Committee Member
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Although for me writing has always been a very solitary endeavor, completion of this
thesis entailed so much more than writing and depended upon so many more people than myself.
I thus take great pleasure in acknowledging those who have supported and encouraged me over
the past four years. I am deeply grateful to my major professor, Elna C. Green, who not only
introduced me to the Federal Writers' Project, but also patiently guided me through the process
of research and writing. As a student in Dr. Green's classes, I also learned so much about the
people, places, and events addressed in the following pages that it would be impossible to
overstate her influence on Writing Race.
I am similarly indebted to the other members of my committee, Maxine D. Jones and
Jennifer Koslow, both of whom were always ready to lend a supportive ear and, like Dr. Green,
offered courses that enriched my understanding of America and the South from Reconstruction
through the New Deal. A special thank you goes to Dr. Jones, who graciously loaned me
multiple books from her personal collection and gave me access to her own research on the
Florida Federal Writers' Project. Perhaps more importantly, I could always count on her to ask,
with genuine interest and concern, "How's your thesis coming?" and then patiently listen to my
usual list of complaints and frustrations.
But it has not all been complaints. This thesis benefited greatly from the assistance of
current and former members of the reference staff of the Florida State Archives. Not only did
they help me navigate my way through numerous collections, they alleviated the tedium of
months spent pouring over documents with many a jovial conversation. The able staff of the
History Department Advising Office—Debbie Perry, Anne Kozar, and Chris Pignatiello—also
deserve much gratitude for assisting me with many a scheduling and paperwork hiccup and
encouraging me to hurry up and finish.
I also could not have made it through this process without the support of the best group of
friends a person could ask for. Annie, Denise, Grandage, Holly, Jackie, Jon, Jonathan, Joyce,
Kendra, Laura, Max, Michelle, Nate, Paul, Sheppard, Sherri, Stacy, Teri, Tiffany, Vin—they all
laughed with me, listened to me, and encouraged me, and I could not have done it without them.
Two people in particular, however, deserve special credit for helping me bring this chapter to a
successful close. Daniel Hutchinson read and commented on multiple drafts of parts of this
iii
thesis, but more than that, he has provided me with a daily example of what a good friend and
student should be. He truly is a scholar and a gentleman. More than anyone, though, Meghan
Martinez has shared the ups and downs of "thesis-ing" with me. During all those 48-hour study
sessions, early-morning coffee dates, and spur-of-the-moment weekend study retreats I came to
rely upon her unfailing generosity of spirit, keen sense of humor, and unflagging support. I can
only hope that I have been the kind of omnicompetent friend to her that she has been to me.
And lastly, I must thank my family, without whose unwavering love and support none of
my accomplishments, academic or otherwise, would have been possible. I love you all.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................vi
INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1
1. "WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?": CONCEPTIONS OF CULTURE AND
IDENTITY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY ............................................. 17
2. THE FLORIDA FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT AND
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN ...................................................................................... 34
3. THE FLORIDA FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT AND
CONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL IDENTITIES ............................................................ 58
CONCLUSION......................................................................................................................... 77
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................................. 81
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... 84
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .................................................................................................... 90
v
ABSTRACT
In the late 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration
employed thousands of out-of-work writers and other white-collar professionals. Although
publication of a comprehensive guidebook for each state was the main task of the FWP, project
writers also traveled their respective states collecting life histories, interviewing former slaves,
and compiling local histories and ethnographic studies. As a result, the work of the FWP
entailed much more than preparation of travel books, for taken as a whole, its writings
represented an attempt to craft a new portrait of America and its people.
Like many other New Deal programs, the FWP was a product of the liberal, progressive
intellectual community that had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, this
community, influenced by concepts of cultural pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural
relativism, was engaged in an ongoing discourse on redefining American identity and culture to
include a broader spectrum of the American people. These concepts also influenced many of the
national officers of the FWP, who wanted the project to present a more inclusive depiction of
America that celebrated the country's diversity.
As this thesis demonstrates, however, this goal broke down at the state level, particularly in
the South, which was deeply committed to Jim Crow segregation in the 1930s. An examination
of both published and unpublished writings of the Florida Federal Writers' Project, including
Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State and The Florida Negro, reveals that where race was
concerned, traditional biases and prejudices trumped the national office's more liberal ideology.
As a result, despite the efforts of liberal members of the Florida staff, such as Zora Neale
Hurston and Stetson Kennedy, and the editorial oversight of the national office, the Florida FWP
ultimately failed to provide three-dimensional, unbiased portraits of the state's African-American
and mixed-race populations.
vi
INTRODUCTION
The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration employed thousands
of jobless writers and other white-collar professionals between 1935 and 1943.1 Although the
main project of the FWP was the American Guide Series, each state office produced numerous
publications on local history, industry, and culture. Florida writers alone published works on the
cotton industry, the fruit industry, the Seminole Indians, and Spanish missions, as well as
Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State. In addition, the FWP's Folklore Project collected
"life histories" of ordinary Americans in an attempt to create a "composite and comprehensive
portrait of various groups of people in America."2 Florida, with its long history and diverse
population, would eventually undertake 160 separate studies of the state's various nationality,
occupational, and ethnic groups.3 Although the Florida FWP never published most of these
studies, much of the information collected by its workers remains in the scattered archives of the
FWP.4 These field notes and unpublished manuscripts provide valuable insight into not only the
cultures of long-forgotten communities, but also the contemporary cultural context of the project,
including the class and racial biases that influenced the work of the FWP in the South.
1
Pursuant to the Emergency Relief Act of 1939, the FWP moved from federal to combined state
and federal sponsorship in July 1939 and was thereafter known as the WPA Writers' Program.
After that time, state programs were required to obtain state sponsors to fund twenty-five percent
of their operating costs. Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers'
Project, 1935-1943 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 330. The Florida Writers'
Program continued to function until 1943, turning out small projects under the aegis of
organizations like the University of Florida, the Florida State Planning Board, the Florida
Department of Agriculture, the Florida Department of State, and the Florida State Defense
Council. Pamela G. Bordelon, "The Federal Writers' Project's Mirror to America: The Florida
Reflection" (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1991), 244-247.
2
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940,
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpalife.html.
3
Stetson Kennedy, "Florida Folklife and the WPA, an Introduction," The Florida Memory
Project, http://floridamemory.com/OnlineClassroom/zora_hurston/guide.cfm.
4
Although Florida FWP director Dr. Carita Doggett Corse deposited the Florida project’s
unpublished manuscripts at the University of Florida, librarians apparently broke up the
collection and destroyed some of the materials while sorting through it. Bordelon, "Florida
Reflection," 253-54.
1
The FWP was established in 1935 as part of a truly unique episode in American history—
direct government sponsorship and subsidization of the American arts. It was just one
component of Federal Project Number One (known as Federal One) of the Works Progress
Administration. Through its Theatre Project, Arts Project, Music Project, and Writers' Project,
Federal One provided a living for unemployed writers, artists, musicians, and actors, who
suffered the same deprivations of the Great Depression faced by all Americans.
The FWP was set up with a two-tiered structure. Each state and territory (and some
principal cities like New York) had its own FWP office that reported to the national office in
Washington, D.C.5 The national office, headed by Henry G. Alsberg, selected state directors and
generally oversaw all aspects of state activities, including editing state copy before publication.6
At fifty-seven, Alsberg's background included undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia,
three years of postgraduate study in literature at Harvard, positions at the New York Evening
Post, the Nation, the New York World, and the London Daily Herald, minor success as a
playwright and theater director, and after 1934, editorship of two magazines sponsored by the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration. As fellow FWP national office staff member Jerre
Mangione would later write in his history of the project, this varied experience equipped Alsberg
to handle the very disparate types of people—"from Greenwich Village freaks to proud
executives"—who would eventually make up the FWP's staff.7
Once its organizational structure was established, the FWP had to resolve two issues:
who was a "writer," and what would FWP writers actually write. Because the WPA could not
simply support writers' own creative projects (which had the potential to be subversive and
damaging to the Roosevelt administration), the FWP settled on the American Guide Series as its
main project. The series would include a travel guide for each state and some cities that, taken as
a whole, would be a sort of Baedeker for the entire United States. This type of project would
employ the resources of a range of professional workers, including writers, editors, historians,
5
William S. Cramer, "The Federal Writers' Project: Work Relief that Preserved a National
Resource," Publishing History 18 (1985): 53.
6
Cramer, "National Resource," 55.
7
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 54-58; quote on 58.
2
researchers, architects, archeologists, cartographers, and geologists.8 The guides followed a set
format with three major sections: (i) introductory essays on various historical and cultural
aspects of the state, (ii) city studies providing general information, history, and points of interest,
and (iii) detailed highway tours covering every part of the state.9
In addition to employing thousands of citizens across the country, national FWP officials
hoped that the guides would promote national unity by presenting a more egalitarian, democratic,
and inclusive portrait of America that celebrated the country's diversity.10 Thus, the guides also
would serve the useful purpose of educating Americans about America at a time when, in the
words of a contemporary reviewer, they had "abandoned Europe as the goal for each summer
vacation and were driven by sheer economic necessity to divert their curiosity to what lay across
their own State line."11 FWP Director Alsberg also acknowledged the guides' connection to the
tourist trade:
The American Guide and the subsidiary local guides are designed by the U.S.
government to teach both our travelers and traveling foreigners that we have many
things worth seeing on this side of the Atlantic. If the guides keep some of the
American millions, normally spent abroad, right here and add to them some of the
European millions . . . they will do much to alleviate financial conditions in this
country and reduce unemployment.12
At the state level, Florida FWP Director Dr. Carita Doggett Corse's personal concept of the
project also centered on presenting the "interesting features of Florida to the traveling public and
8
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 42, 46-47.
9
Christine Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1999), 27; Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 354.
10
Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 4-6.
11
H.G. Nicholas, "The Writer and the State: The American Guide," The Contemporary Review
155 (January-June 1939): 91.
12
Quoted in Sonnet Helene Retman, "The 'Real' Collective in New Deal Documentary and
Ethnography: The Federal Writers' Project, the Farm Security Administration, Zora Neale
Hurston's Mules and Men, and James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men" (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1997), 22-23.
3
to the students."13 Not surprisingly then, the Florida Guide reflected this concern with tourism.
Not only did it devote 241 pages to tours, its introductory essay entitled "Contemporary Scene"
opened the book by tracing the evolution that many Florida visitors made from "tourist into a
permanent resident."14
Although the guidebooks remain the most well-known FWP products, the FWP also
published a collection of short stories, poems and Americana by project writers (American Stuff)
and regional studies. In addition, the FWP instituted the Slave Narrative Project that undertook
the enormous task of interviewing former slaves (an estimated 100,000 were still alive at the
time).15 Some evidence suggests that the Florida FWP played a role in creation of this project.
Although federal writers in other southern states also were interviewing ex-slaves, Florida
Director Corse brought the slave stories directly to Washington's attention in March 1937 when
she forwarded some for editorial comment. In April, FWP Associate Director George Cronyn
wrote to the directors of the southern states:
We have received from Florida a remarkably interesting collection of
autobiographical stories by ex-slaves. Such documentary records by the survivors
of a historic period in America are invaluable, both to the student of history and to
creative writers.
If a volume of such importance can be assembled we will endeavor to
secure its publication. There undoubtedly is material of this sort to be found in
your State by making the proper contact through tasteful interviewers. While it is
desirable to give a running story of the life of each subject the color and human
interest will be greatly enhanced if it is told largely in the words of the person
interviewed. The peculiar idiom is often more expressive than a literary
account.16
The FWP Folklore Project also collected "life histories" of ordinary Americans. As early as
1935, the Washington office was instructing field offices on how to report on local customs and
13
Nancy Williams, "An interview with the state director of the Federal Writers' Project in
Florida, Dr. Carita Doggett Corse" (New Smyrna Beach, FL: [s.n.] 1976), University of Florida,
Special Collections.
14
Florida Federal Writers' Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939), 7.
15
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 263.
16
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 142-43; quote on 143.
4
lore and encouraging them to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to collect
valuable but disappearing folklore.17
Before the FWP, American academic folklorists had situated folklore almost exclusively
in the past. By developing the form of the oral life history, the FWP broadened American
folklore to include the contemporary context. After folklorist Benjamin Botkin joined the FWP
as folklore director in 1938, the project also began to engage in social-ethnic studies that
depicted the diversity of the American people.18 In Florida, Stetson Kennedy was put in charge
of collecting the state's folklore, oral histories, and social-ethnic studies in 1938, after his
inventory of Key West folklore caught Botkin's eye.19 At that point, much information had
already been collected in the field, and Kennedy set about organizing along ethnic lines the
folklore that "was scattered all over the state office."20 Unfortunately for scholars, however,
much of the social-ethnic work carried out by the FWP was never published.
Determining who qualified for positions as FWP "writers" was more difficult than
deciding what they would write. First and foremost, the purpose of Federal One was to aid
Americans on the relief rolls, and so, the WPA required that ninety percent of FWP personnel
had to be officially certified as needy.21 In addition, each state and local FWP office had to hire
persons from its local area, which meant that some offices found themselves with an
overabundance of literary talent while others had a hard time recruiting any experienced writers.
In the end, almost anyone with knowledge of the English language qualified for employment
with the FWP. Alsberg even issued a statement that the FWP would accept not only professional
writers, but also " 'near writers,' 'occasional writers,' and even would-be writers."22 This broad
17
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 265.
18
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 269, 277.
19
Stetson Kennedy, "The WPA Florida Writers Project: A Personal View," FEH Forum 12
(Spring 1989): 2.
20
Kennedy, "A Personal View," 2.
21
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 97.
22
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 48.
5
definition of "writer" meant that the FWP employed a wide variety of professionals, including
librarians, ministers, and lawyers—essentially, anyone with a college degree.23
On the advice of Floridians involved in writing, publishing, and education, Alsberg
appointed Dr. Carita Doggett Corse as state director of the Florida FWP in October 1935. Corse,
who came from a politically- and socially-connected Jacksonville family, had received her
undergraduate degree from Vassar College in 1913 and her master's degree from Columbia
University in 1916. In addition to publishing her thesis, Dr. Andrew Turnbull and the New
Smyrna Colony of Florida, in 1919, Corse had authored several books and articles on Florida
history prior to joining the FWP.24 Her Florida writings, which went beyond the strictly
academic, appear to have secured her position as Florida director. As she would later recall:
. . . I had published two books on Florida and as the depression developed I began
to branch out from strictly historical writing to books dealing with Florida points
of interest and the various physical aspects of Florida that were unique such as its
wide variety of parks and its springs and the structure of Florida. Thses [sic] were
sponsered [sic], and when I say sponsered [sic] I mean published, ordered, by
state organizations so that I developed a friendly relation with these public bodies
in Florida. When the Writers' Project came on, my name was suggested and had a
friendly reception from the state organization.25
Undoubtedly, Corse's knowledge of Florida history and her political connections served her well
as state FWP director, although in her own words, she was "green and innocent" when she joined
the FWP.26 This self-assessment mirrored national tour editor Katherin Kellock's report to
23
Cramer, "National Resource," 54.
24
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 39-42. Although Corse taught for a number of years at a
private Jacksonville high school, her scholarship on early Florida history merited her an honorary
doctorate from the University of the South in 1932. From that time, and during her work with
the FWP, she was known as "Doctor" Corse. Ibid.
25
Williams, "An interview with the state director."
26
Evanell K. Powell-Brant, WPA Federal Writers' Project: with an Emphasis on The Florida
Writers and Carita Doggett Corse (Lake Panasoffkee, FL: Evanell K. Powell-Brant, 1990), 2.
This short pamphlet (10 pages) was based on the author's personal interviews with Carita
Doggett Corse in the 1960s and 1970s.
6
Alsberg that Corse "is a Florida 'lady,' with no idea of arithmetic or expenses."27
Whatever her initial shortcomings may have been, Corse appears to have taken her duties
seriously. She began the process of hiring staff immediately upon being officially appointed
state FWP director in 1935, personally interviewing every applicant.28 Florida had a large
unemployed white-collar population from which she could choose FWP staff. Not only had
Florida (and the South, generally) entered the Great Depression earlier than the rest of the nation,
Florida's economic problems deepened in the early 1930s, as tourism and agricultural markets
declined. Many middle-class families who survived on their savings for the first years of the
Depression began to apply for relief in the middle part of the decade. In addition, many freelance writers had moved to the state during the land boom of the 1920s to write promotional
literature for real estate developers.29 Thus, by 1936, Kellock was reporting back to Alsberg
about Florida's "large white-collar problem" and of the many people "on the fringe of relief."30
Given this, Corse's expressed goal for the project was "to keep writers employed primarily;
because there were a large number of teachers and newspaper men and interviewers, such as
court reporters, out of work at this time." 31
As in other states, Florida FWP applicants had to be "certified" as needy to be eligible for
project service. Florida FWP writer and editor Stetson Kennedy later described his own
experience with this process:
27
Katherine Kellock to Henry Alsberg, January 20-26, 1936, Field Reports, Florida, Federal
Writers' Project Files, RG 69, National Archives, quoted in Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 51.
28
Powell-Brant, WPA Federal Writers' Project, 2. According to Powell-Brant, no master list of
Florida FWP writers ever existed. Ibid., 3.
29
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 32-35; see also, William W. Rogers, "The Great Depression,"
in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon, 304-322 (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1996) and William W. Rogers, "Fortune and Misfortune: The Paradoxical Twenties," in
The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon, 287-303 (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1996).
30
Katherine Kellock to Henry Alsberg, January 23, 1936, Field Reports, Florida, Federal
Writers' Project Files, RG 69, National Archives, quoted in Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 35.
31
Williams, "An interview with the state director."
7
One had to take a Pauper's Oath: 'no job, no money, no property, and no prospect
of any of those things.' Being eminently qualified in all of these respects, I got the
job [of Junior Interviewer], which paid $37.50 fortnightly.32
According to Corse, the Florida employees did not feel ashamed about having to pass this means
test because the project was popular with the Florida public.33 This somewhat rosy assessment
did not hold true for Zora Neale Hurston, who concealed her work with the Florida FWP from
family and friends. She did not mention it in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942),
and apparently only made one known allusion to it in her personal correspondence—a February
1939 letter to friend Carl Van Vechten speaking of her desire to "bolt the Project."34 Hurston
may have been a unique case, given that she was a published author of some note at the time she
joined the Florida FWP, but in any event, many other Florida applicants wanted a relief position
enough to request letters of reference from their congressmen, including Kennedy, who solicited
support from Senator Claude Pepper.35
Corse nevertheless had the final say in staffing decisions, and by November 1935, she
had hired 110 workers. Ninety-three of these individuals were on relief, and the remaining
seventeen were in non-relief supervisory positions.36 Additional hires brought the Florida staff
total to 138 by December. Unfortunately and unknowingly, she had exceeded the state quota by
21 workers, prompting an urgent wire to Alsberg, " 'We must have additional funds immediately
32
Stetson Kennedy, "Way Down Upon . . . Gathering Tales of Folklife in Suwannee Country,"
FHC Forum 17 (Spring/Summer 1993): 25. As state director, Dr. Corse received an annual
salary of $2,500. Williams, "An interview with the state director."
33
Williams, "An interview with the state director."
34
Pamela Bordelon, ed., Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from
the Federal Writers' Project (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), xi, 179 n.1.
35
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 45; see also, Elna C. Green's 2007 edited collection of letters
written by Floridian women to agencies, charities, and state and federal officials requesting relief
assistance during the Great Depression. Elna C. Green, ed., Looking for the New Deal: Florida
Women's Letters during the Great Depression (Columbia: The University of South Carolina
Press, 2007).
36
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 45-46. In addition to non-relief administrators, "specialists in
writing books" could be hired without meeting the needs requirement. Williams, "An interview
with the state director."
8
if we are to continue to pay guide workers.' "37 In response, Alsberg advised Corse to cut back
on either expenses or staff.38 Over the life of the Florida FWP, the size of the staff varied from
100 to 200, depending on the financial situation of the FWP, which paid for writers' salaries but
not the expenses of publication.39
Staff was divided among nine local and district offices—Gainesville, Jacksonville,
Lakeland, Miami, Orlando, Pensacola, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, and Tampa. The largest
group was employed in Jacksonville, where the Florida state office was located.40 The
segregated office of the Florida FWP's Negro Unit was also in Jacksonville, where it was housed
in the Clara White Mission in the African-American section of town.41 Most of the actual
writers were journalists from defunct rural weeklies, and many of the field research workers
were women.42 Only a handful of Florida FWP members, including Corse, Carl Lester Liddle,
Rolland Phillips, and Zora Neale Hurston, were published authors of any note prior to joining the
project. Stetson Kennedy, who later would achieve some success as an author and folklorist,
came to the project as an inexperienced twenty-year-old with aspirations of becoming a writer.
All Florida writers, regardless of their experience, followed the same general writing
process while working for the FWP.43 Upon joining the project, each writer received a topic of
research, for which a detailed bibliography would be compiled and approved before writing
could begin. To build their bibliographies, writers combed libraries, historical societies, and
37
Telegram, Corse to Alsberg, November 29, 1935, Box 1107, Works Projects Administration
Records, RG 96, National Archives, quoted in Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 49.
38
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 49.
39
Williams, "An interview with the state director."
40
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy, "The WPA Guide to Florida: A Conversation Between
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy," Florida Forum 9 (Fall 1986): 10.
41
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 134.
42
Henderson and Kennedy, "A Conversation," 10.
43
It appears that at least one Florida writer was treated as something as a special case. As Corse
would later recall, Zora Neale Hurston had "free rein to collect copy at the sources." Williams,
"An interview with the state director." This seems to be a reflection of both Hurston’s
independent nature and her established skill as a writer and folklorist.
9
newspapers for traditional source materials and conducted interviews with local residents or
specialists to add color and detail. The next step was writing field reports that covered
everything pertaining to the subject at hand. Once collected by the state office, editors rewrote
and combined field copy to create the essays and tours that would constitute the Florida Guide.44
This study will examine how this largely untrained and inexperienced Florida staff
interacted with and wrote about the state's African-American and mixed-race population, with
the goal of broadening our understanding of the extent to which contemporary cultural, political,
and economic concerns influenced the work of the FWP with regards to race. As discussed
further in Chapter 1, during this period the American intellectual community, influenced by
concepts of cultural pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural anthropology, was engaged in an
ongoing discourse on redefining American identity and culture to include a broader spectrum of
the American people. Although these ideas influenced the FWP editors in the national office,
one might expect that this liberal ideology would not filter down unaltered into the state offices,
particularly those in the South, which was deeply committed to Jim Crow segregation by the
1930s. Indeed, a cursory examination of the Florida Guide reveals that, in most instances, it did
not provide three-dimensional portraits of African Americans, whose depictions did not often
stray far from the familiar stereotype of the superstitious, story-telling, jocular Negro.
In addition, the Guide generally whitewashed Florida's history. For instance, the
tumultuous years of Reconstruction were painted in broad strokes. During this period, Florida
was “darkened by suffering and poverty, though it was not characterized by the harshness
experienced in other Southern states.”45 Redemption (a term not used in the guide) was covered
in a brief discussion of Florida's adoption of a new constitution in 1885 that “represented a
compromise between the necessities of the times and the political philosophy of the Old
South.”46 Florida also appeared not to be afflicted by farm tenancy—the “key problem of
44
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 73-75. All state copy also underwent editing at the national
level, a lengthy process that took three years in the case of the Florida Guide. Ibid., 76.
45
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 58.
46
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 63.
10
Southern agriculture”—to the same extent as other Southern states, as it only existed in the north
and west sections of the state.47
Clearly, such statements did not depict the entire truth of Florida's history. Nor did the
guide present unbiased descriptions of the state's African Americans. What was the genesis of
these highly-constructed representations of Florida and its people? Certainly, the agency desired
to produce an uncontroversial guide that would appeal to the traveling and reading public.
Beyond this, however, the FWP writers themselves would have brought their own class and race
biases to the project. By examining both published and unpublished manuscripts of the Florida
FWP, this thesis provides some insight into exactly how those biases influenced and shaped its
work.
Previous studies of the FWP (which was largely ignored as the subject of historical
inquiry until the 1970s) have tended to focus more on the administrative history and intellectual
underpinnings of the project. The first comprehensive history of the FWP was Jerre Mangione's
The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943, published in 1972.
Mangione's view of the FWP was that of an insider, for he served as the national coordinating
editor of the FWP in Washington D.C. from 1937 to mid-1939. As a consequence, The Dream
and the Deal presents an interesting and lively account of the FWP that is full of anecdotes and
amusing, often informative, stories of life in the trenches. The book is not, however, a mere
memoir, for Mangione based his account not just on his memories, but also interviews with
numerous FWP veterans and review of surviving FWP records.
The Dream and the Deal mainly focuses, however, on the activities of the Washington
D.C. office and tends to celebrate the FWP's work, especially the guidebooks. Essentially, it is
an administrative history of the FWP, tracking its path from birth to death. Mangione avoids
drawing any conclusions about federal patronage of the arts, but he does conclude that the FWP's
affect on its employees was a success. Not only did the project keep writers working and alive,
their work “established a sturdy launching pad for future American writers; and contributed to
their own literary development.”48
47
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 85.
48
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 373.
11
The next major work on the FWP was also an administrative history that tended to
overlap with Mangione's account. Monty Noam Penkower's The Federal Writers' Project: A
Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (1977) also follows the FWP from conception to
demise, focusing on the administrative and political problems that plagued the project.49
Penkower did more archival research than Mangione, and he provides footnotes, which are not
included in The Dream and the Deal.
Neither Penkower nor Mangione, however, attempted to place the FWP in its proper
cultural and intellectual context as do the more recent books on the subject. Christine Bold's
1999 study of the guidebooks, The WPA Guides: Mapping America, reconstructs the production
and circulation of selected guidebooks in order to "trace their brokering of individual,
community, and national identities."50 Bold concludes that the guidebooks were not mere
celebrations of democracy and diversity, but rather, attempts at shaping a national culture and
citizenry through the process of negotiation between federal and local groups. The guidebooks
were thus part of a larger discourse on Americanism in the 1930s that was attempting to " 'fix'
cultural identity and provide a natural order to social relations."51 Bold narrows her study to the
production of five guidebooks—Idaho, the Highway Route Series, New York City, North
Carolina, and Missouri. Her chapter on the North Carolina guidebook's treatment of race,
gender, and class is perhaps the most relevant precursor to this investigation of the FWP in
Florida.
The most recent book addressing the FWP is the most ambitious from a methodological
standpoint. Jerrold Hirsch's Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers'
Project (2003) treats the FWP not as a mere government relief agency, but as an "episode in
American cultural and intellectual history and as part of the cultural component of the New
Deal's program of political and economic reform."52 In particular, Hirsch looks at how FWP
officials, whom he sees as both "romantic nationalists and cultural pluralists," tried to contribute
49
Monty Noam Penkower, The Federal Writers' Project: A Study in Government Patronage of
the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
50
Bold, The WPA Guides, xiv.
51
Bold, The WPA Guides, xv-xvi, 12.
52
Hirsch, Portrait of America, 1.
12
to American culture.53 He is not concerned with the administrative history of the FWP so much
as he is with the deeper purposes behind what the FWP was trying to accomplish. As such, his
focus is on placing the FWP within a larger discourse on the definition of American identity and
nationality. He concludes that FWP officials attempted to create an American nationality with a
"democratic and inclusive vision of America."54 Hirsch does recognize, however, that the
Southern guidebooks were written within the Southern plantation tradition that "worked against
every goal that national FWP officials hoped to achieve," and his discussion of the friction
between southern federal writers and the national officials raises interesting questions for this
study of the Florida FWP.55
Although the FWP also has been the subject of some scholarly articles, such shorter
pieces do not add significantly to the treatment in the four books discussed above, which
represent the main body of national FWP scholarship. The only detailed study of the Florida
FWP to date is Pamela G. Bordelon's 1991 unpublished dissertation "The Federal Writers'
Project's Mirror to America: The Florida Reflection." Bordelon focuses on the operations of the
Florida project, providing an overview of the administrative and editorial activities that went into
producing the Florida Guide. She also devotes chapters to the non-Guide activities carried out
by Florida writers, including the collection of folklore, life histories, and ex-slave interviews.
Bordelon's dissertation is one of the few detailed studies of Florida during the New Deal
era. Although the major published works on Florida History, like Michael Gannon's The New
History of Florida (1996) and Charlton Tebeau's History of Florida (1971), include chapters on
the Depression and New Deal, these are necessarily cursory treatments of the period.56 Most
recently, Elna C. Green published in 2007 an edited collection of letters from Florida women to
state and federal officials and agencies asking for various forms of relief assistance during the
Great Depression. Green's "Introduction" provides a brief overview of Florida during the New
Deal years and highlights some of the recurring themes of the letters, including the great faith
53
Hirsch, Portrait of America, 4, 9.
54
Hirsch, Portrait of America, 223.
55
Hirsch, Portrait of America, 192.
56
Rogers, "The Great Depression;" Charlton W. Tebeau, "The Depression and the New Deal," in
A History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 393-413.
13
that Floridians had in their government, the writers' assumption of a governmental contract to
provide assistance to upstanding citizens, and the desperate, "last resort" nature of the letters.57
To date, however, the most in-depth analyses of the New Deal in Florida remain
unpublished.58 William Dunn's 1971 dissertation, "The New Deal and Florida Politics," provides
a general overview of the political scene in Florida during the 1930s and the ways in which the
New Deal transformed state and local politics.59 In addition, several dissertations and theses
have focused on the activities of particular relief projects in Florida, including Robert Francis
Mardis' 1972 dissertation surveying the work of the Florida Federal Theatre Project, which
provided over 250 jobs to the state's theatrical professionals from January 1936 to July 1939.60
David J. Nelson's master's thesis, "Relief and Recreation: The Civilian Conservation
Corps and the Florida Park Service, 1936-1942," examines the complex relationship between the
Florida Park Service and the federal Civilian Conservation Corps, which initially "funded,
designed, built, and in large part, ran the state park program." Nelson concluded the FPS that
emerged out of the New Deal was the product of negotiations and compromises among three
groups: Florida's civic and business leaders, whose primary concern was fostering tourism, the
federal government, which was focused on recreation, conservation, and work relief, and the
57
Green, Looking for the New Deal, 4.
58
The Florida Historical Quarterly also has published a handful of articles on New Deal topics
in Florida, mainly short local studies or biographical sketches. See, for example, Merlin G. Cox,
"David Sholtz: New Deal Governor of Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (October
1964): 142-52; Durward Long, "Key West and the New Deal, 1934-1936," Florida Historical
Quarterly 46, no. 3 (January 1968): 209-218; Charles B. Lowry, "The PWA in Tampa: A Case
Study," Florida Historical Quarterly 52, no. 4 (April 1974): 363-380; R. Lyn Rainard, "Ready
Cash on Easy Terms: Local Responses to the Depression in Lee County," Florida Historical
Quarterly 64, no. 3 (January 1986): 284-300; Robert E. Snyder, "Marion Post and the Farm
Security Administration in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 65, no. 4 (April 1987): 457479.
59
James William Dunn, "The New Deal and Florida Politics" (PhD diss., Florida State
University, 1971).
60
Robert Francis Mardis, "Federal Theatre in Florida" (PhD diss., University of Florida, 1972),
467.
14
CCC enrollees themselves.61 As this thesis demonstrates, the work of the Florida FWP also
entailed tensions between the goals of the national office and the state office.
The most recent graduate study on the New Deal in Florida also focuses on the work of
one agency in the state. Alicia Pearia's 2007 master's thesis, "Preserving the Past: Library
Development in Florida and the New Deal, 1933-1942," examines three WPA projects sponsored
by the Florida State Library Board: the State Archives Survey (later the Historical Records
Survey component of Federal One), the Statewide Library Project, and the Rare Books Project.
Like the FWP, these projects represented New Deal initiatives to fund the preservation of
cultural and historical knowledge, while providing work relief to white-collar Floridians.62
This thesis, then, will add to the slowly growing literature on Florida and the New Deal,
as well as the similarly small body of scholarship on the FWP, with Bordelon's dissertation
providing the main jumping-off point for my analysis. Although Bordelon recognizes that the
Florida Guide reflected the "popular biases and ethnic stereotyping typical of the times," she
does not engage in the type of in-depth analysis of those biases that this study employs.63 In
addition, while her discussion of the Florida folklore, life history, and ex-slave programs
provides a good overview of how those programs operated and what they revealed about the
contemporary scene in Florida, she does not explore what they might also reveal about the FWP
and its interactions with the people of Florida.
Thus, while this thesis builds upon Bordelon's work, it will delve much deeper into the
inner workings of the Florida FWP to expose the ways in which it not only reflected, but actually
contributed to the construction and perpetuation of "popular biases and ethnic stereotyping."
This question retains its relevance almost seventy years after publication of the Florida Guide,
which was reprinted as recently as 1981 and has become (along with the other volumes in the
American Guide Series) a collector's item. As a result, its biased representations of racial
61
David J. Nelson, "Relief and Recreation: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Florida
Park Service, 1935-1942" (master's thesis, Florida State University, 2002), 2-3, quote on 2; see
also, David J. Nelson, "Florida Crackers and Yankee Tourists: The Civilian Conservation Corps,
the Florida Park Service and the Emergence of Modern Florida Tourism" (PhD diss., Florida
State University, 2008).
62
Alicia A. Pearia, "Preserving the Past: Library Development in Florida and the New Deal,
1933-1942" (master's thesis, Florida State University, 2007).
63
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 117.
15
identity—backed by both state and federal authority—continue to inform popular perceptions of
Florida's diverse ethnic groups.
16
CHAPTER 1
"WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?": CONCEPTIONS OF CULTURE
AND IDENTITY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
In 1942, Alfred Kazin characterized the Federal Writers' Project publications as part of a
"new nationalism" addressing the "question . . . no longer posed from afar—'What is an
American?' "1 By and large, New Dealers advocated a variety of ideologies that challenged
traditional notions of society and culture and encouraged diversity of thought. Like all New Deal
programs, the Federal Writers' Project operated within this dynamic intellectual and cultural
milieu, and its work reflected the influence of several strands of thinking that emerged in the first
two decades of the twentieth century, from modernism to cosmopolitanism to cultural pluralism.
New modes of thinking about culture developed by anthropologist Franz Boas also had a
profound effect on the work of the FWP, which as a program actively writing about America and
its people, was in a unique position to participate in redefining what it meant to be an American.
Consequently, as one historian noted as early as 1961, the work of the FWP "cast considerable
light on the social, economic, political and intellectual ideals of a whole generation of American
literary craftsmen."2
The roots of American concerns about issues of national culture and identity in the 1930s
were firmly planted in the Progressive Era. In the two decades before and after the turn of the
twentieth century, railroads connected Americans everywhere, immigrants and migrants swelled
the cities, and captains of industry built corporate giants as they amassed unimaginable fortunes.
All of these developments reshaped America and its society in a pell-mell fashion that created a
sense of dislocation and bewilderment within a people still clinging to traditional small-town
values. In addition, the United States census of 1890 officially declared the closing of the
American frontier, the consequences of which were famously analyzed by progressive historian
1
Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature
(New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), 486.
2
Daniel M. Fox, "The Achievement of the Federal Writers' Project," American Quarterly 13 no.
1 (Spring 1961): 4.
17
Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 address entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in
American History."
Applying evolutionary theory to society, Turner argued that the frontier had provided
Americans a constant source of rebirth and renewal. As each successive generation moved west
across the continent, it became more and more American and less and less European. With the
closing of the frontier, however, the nation no longer had an outlet to escape the complexities
that plagued European civilization. It was at this point that a new nation began to emerge, one
marked not by the democratic ideals of the yeoman farmer and rugged pioneer, but by "the
massing of population in the cities and the contemporaneous increase of urban power, and of the
massing of capital and production in fewer and vastly greater industrial units."3 This
development was potentially dangerous to the nation's identity, for as Turner believed, it was
"[i]n the crucible of the frontier [that] the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused
into a mixed race."4 Most Americans in the Progressive Era accepted Turner's argument that the
country's ideals and institutions were formed by the frontier and that pioneering had helped forge
the American character.5 What would it mean to be American without a frontier, especially as
thousands of immigrants were arriving daily?
At the same time Americans were struggling with this identity crisis, new developments
in the realms of science and philosophy were attempting to come to grips with the uncertainties
engendered by the increasingly industrialized and urbanized modern world. By the end of the
nineteenth century, the dominant philosophical movement was pragmatism, which applied the
newly developed scientific method to philosophy. Charles Sanders Peirce, pragmatism's
founder, rejected Cartesian concepts like introspection and intuition, arguing that human
3
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1920), 317; David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917 (Chicago: Rand McNally &
Company, 1970), 24-25.
4
Turner, The Frontier in American History, 23.
5
Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930 (Chicago: Rand
McNally & Company, 1970), 81. Although for decades historians have criticized Turner's thesis
for its neglect of women, Native Americans and other regional minorities, and western cities and
industries, the frontier myth still has a strong hold on the American psyche. See, Richard W.
Etulain, ed., Does the Frontier Experience make America Exceptional? (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin's, 1999).
18
understanding of ideas and internal knowledge is derived wholly from observation of external
facts. Thus, philosophy should adopt a scientific methodology based upon experimentation.
Peirce's best known essays, "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make our Ideas Clear"
(1878), set forth his strategy for overcoming doubt, which he characterized as an irritating and
unsettling state of mind. Only through inquiry could the mind appease doubt and attain belief.
In addition, the best mode of inquiry for fixing belief was collective, not individual. In other
words, as in scientific research, a true belief was one that could be agreed upon by all who
investigated it.6 Because Peirce had the utmost faith in cooperation and community, his version
of pragmatism responded to the problems of modernism by offering Americans an alternative to
individualism and capitalism.7
Although Peirce was the first to formulate pragmatic principles, he was not well known
by the public and his writings never found a wide audience. The credit for popularizing
pragmatism instead lay with William James, Peirce's good friend and a fellow founder of The
Metaphysical Club, a group of young, mostly Harvard-educated intellectuals who met in
Cambridge in the 1870s. James first introduced pragmatism to the philosophical community in
his 1898 lecture "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," and his 1907 book
Pragmatism spread the movement to the world.8 By the time that James publicly identified
himself as a pragmatist, however, he had already established himself as a pioneer in the
emerging field of psychology. In 1890, he published his masterpiece, Principles of Psychology,
in which he argued that the mind was a physical organ like any other part of the body, not the
intangible, transcendent resting place of the human soul. It thus functioned as no more nor less
than a tool through which man adjusted to his environment.9
James also contended in his 1896 essay, "The Will to Believe," that belief was a function
of free will—that truth was created by an individual's decision to act on certain propositions,
6
John P. Murphy, Pragmatism, From Peirce to Davidson, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 21-31.
7
John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge
and Authority (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 163.
8
Murphy, Pragmatism, 14-15, 39.
9
Nash, The Nervous Generation, 47.
19
such as belief in God. In essence, men made themselves and their worlds exactly as they wished
them to be, merely through the act of belief.10 Given this emphasis on individual will, it is not
surprising that James' version of pragmatism differed from Peirce's. Although they both revered
the scientific method and experimentation, Peirce believed that truth could be found only through
consensus. In contrast, James perceived the struggle against doubt to be a personal endeavor.11
Nevertheless, both Jamesian and Peircean pragmatism offered Americans a means to resolve the
uncertainties of modern life.
John Dewey, the other great pragmatic philosopher, went further than either James or
Peirce in applying pragmatism to the social problems facing America at the turn of the twentieth
century. Although a generation younger than James and Peirce, Dewey also was the product of
the late-nineteenth century intellectual community that celebrated the scientific method and
reason. Dewey's version of pragmatism, however, was based on what he called
"instrumentalism," a conception of thought much different from Peirce's or James'. Peirce
believed that the purpose of inquiry was to resolve the uncomfortable state of doubt by attaining
a new state of belief. Dewey's concept of inquiry was much broader—he believed that it could
alter not only mental states but actual conditions. Thus, not only could internal doubt trigger
inquiry, so too could problematic situations in the external environment. What is more, unlike
James, Dewey moved the goal of thought and belief beyond the success of the individual to that
of society at large.12 With this focus on contributing to the public good, Dewey became more
deeply involved in the political reforms of the Progressive Era than did his pragmatic
predecessors.
While a professor at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1904, Dewey became a
strong supporter of Jane Addams' settlement work at Hull-House. He also began in this period to
apply pragmatic principles to education, the field with which he would become most associated.
Dewey believed that the school was the most important institution for effecting liberal reforms
and realizing the democratic ideals of the nation. Rejecting the traditional education system
founded on discipline and rote memorization, Dewey established The Chicago Laboratory
10
Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 129.
11
Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 163-164.
12
Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 227.
20
School, where children learned through hands-on experience and experimentation and were not
separated by talent or class. In 1904, Dewey moved to Columbia University's Teachers College,
where until 1930 he indoctrinated a generation of secondary school teachers in his childcentered, reform-oriented educational philosophy.13
After World War I began in 1914, Dewey—by that time, the nation's foremost
intellectual—surprised many by coming out in favor of America's entry into the war, which he
saw as an opportunity to apply the concept of pragmatic instumentalism to international affairs.
Dewey accepted America's involvement as an inevitability, and rather than resist it, he chose to
approach it pragmatically. Distinguishing between force and violence, Dewey argued that
although all violence involves force, not all force is evil, for the state can employ it
"economically, efficiently, so as to get results with the least waste."14 Dewey thus saw the war
as a potential instrument for reconstruction of society along democratic lines.15
One of the most outspoken critics of Dewey's support of the war was Randolph Bourne, a
member of the younger generation of intellectuals who came to prominence in the 1910s and
1920s. In his writings before and during the war, Bourne established himself as a romantic
nationalist who believed that art is the foundation of national fulfillment. After earning his B.A.
(1912) and M.A. (1913) from Columbia University (where he studied with Dewey), he traveled
throughout Europe on a fellowship until the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. He returned to
America with a strong sense of his young country's cultural failings, what he described as "our
almost pathetic eagerness to learn of the culture of other nations, our humility of worship in the
presence of art that in no sense represents the expression of any of our ideals and motivating
forces."16 Bourne contended that America must overcome its cultural humility and develop an
indigenous art based on its own dynamic experience and history.17
13
Robert M. Crunden, A Brief History of American Culture (New York: Paragon House, 1994),
152-153.
14
John Dewey, "Force, Violence and Law," New Republic 5, no. 64 (January 22, 1916): 295.
15
Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 252-53.
16
Randolph Bourne, "Our Cultural Humility," Atlantic Monthly CXIV (October 1914): 505.
17
Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century
America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 80.
21
Bourne published his most important contribution to American cultural thought in
Atlantic Monthly in 1916. His essay "Trans-National America," the first statement of the ethos
that would later be called "cultural pluralism," was a celebration of America's diversity at a time
when most of his countrymen were struggling to come to grips with the changes wrought by two
decades of massive immigration.18 Bourne's vision for Americanization of the immigrant was
neither assimilation into a "melting pot" nor forced adoption of Anglo-Saxon culture and
traditions. Rather than fear immigrants or view them as nothing more than a source of unskilled
labor, Bourne recognized the important role that they and their transplanted traditions could play
in building a truly "American" culture:
We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and
not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and
school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with
friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile
insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it,
and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the
first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made.19
Bourne held up the South—the "most distinctly 'American' " region—as a warning of
what could happen if America continued to cling to nativist sentiment. While the North had
benefited socially and commercially from the influx of immigrants, the South "remains an
English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early
Victorian era." Lacking the advantages of "cross-fertilization" of diverse peoples and traditions,
the South thus remained "culturally sterile." To avoid this dire fate, America must avoid looking
backward to its English roots and instead, like Bourne, stake a claim to its future as a
cosmopolitan "federation of cultures" that is energized not enervated by the diversity of its
people.20
18
Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 81.
19
Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," Atlantic Monthly CVIII (July 1916): 86-87.
20
Bourne, "Trans-National America," 89, 90, 91. Bourne's critique of the South is quite different
from that put forward by H. L. Mencken in his November 1917 essay "The Sahara of the
Bozart," in which he characterized the South as "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually,
culturally as the Sahara Desert." H. L. Mencken, "The Sahara of the Bozart," in A Mencken
Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 184-195, 184. Unlike Bourne, Mencken
22
One of the undercurrents of "Trans-National America" was Bourne's distaste for the war
and the overzealous European nationalisms that had led to it. His subsequent wartime essays
grew increasingly critical of the Wilson administration and prowar progressives like Dewey,
revealing the depth of damage the war had done to the American intellectual community.21
Although many intellectuals followed Dewey's lead on the war, some, like Bourne, saw his
justifications as a betrayal of the progressive ideals that pragmatism claimed to support. If
Dewey could so easily bend his philosophy to justify entry into the war, then pragmatism had
failed the nation. In his 1917 essay "Twilight of Idols" Bourne explored the limits of
pragmatism and concluded that it was ill-suited to confront the "poison" of war:
Dewey's philosophy is inspiring enough for a society at peace, prosperous and
with a fund of progressive good-will. It is a philosophy of hope, of clear-sighted
comprehension of materials and means. Where institutions are at all malleable, it
is the only clue for improvement. It is a scientific method applied to "uplift." But
this careful adaptation of means to desired ends, this experimental working out of
control over brute forces and dead matter in the interests of communal life,
depends on a store of rationality, and is effected only where there is strong desire
for progress.22
To Bourne, Dewey's instrumentalism focused too much on the ends to be achieved by the
war without sufficiently taking into account the means to that end. He also highlighted a fatal
flaw in Dewey's approach to the war by asking, "If the war is too strong for you to prevent, how
is it going to be weak enough for you to control and mould to your liberal purposes?"23
Although Bourne spoke for the minority, his probing critique of Dewey's philosophy could not
be ignored. When pushed to extremes, pragmatism could be used to justify almost anything,
laid the blame not on the South's lack of diversity, but on the Civil War, which drained the
region of its "best blood," and the subsequent mixing of the Anglo-Saxon blood of the remaining
"poor white trash" with Negro, Celtic, French, Spanish, and German blood—"some of the worst
blood of western Europe." Ibid. 188-190. The result, according to Mencken, was that "[t]he
South has not only lost its old capacity for producing ideas; it has also taken on the worst
intolerance of ignorance and stupidity." Ibid. 193.
21
Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 81.
22
Randolph Bourne, "Twilight of Idols," The Seven Arts 11 (October 1917): 691.
23
Bourne, "Twilight of Idols," 692.
23
making it an ineffective philosophy for confronting large-scale problems like war and the
totalitarianisms of the 1930s. As a consequence, though it continued to influence many aspects
of American life, its dominance of the nation's intellectual community began to wane after the
war.24
Dewey, who lived until the 1950s, did continue to be a force in American philosophy and
education. His work in education was predicated, in part, upon the idea that environment
influenced character. The same concept influenced the anthropological work being carried out
by German-born Columbia professor Franz Boas during the Progressive Era. Boas and his
students argued that all aspects of a culture were interrelated, and thus, like the Progressives, that
humans were social beings shaped by their society and environment.25 They thus approached the
study of societies and cultures pragmatically, attempting to discern those social institutions that
worked best for the group being examined rather than simply judging them by Western standards
of civilization.26 This approach, which directly challenged the dominant nineteenth-century
belief in hierarchical stages of societal development, had a tremendous impact on how
Americans conceived of culture in the 1930s.
Before Boas, nineteenth-century anthropologists influenced by concepts of Social
Darwinism ranked societies along a scale that progressed from simplest to most complex, with
the technologically-advanced Europeans and Americans occupying the highest levels of
civilization. Rather than accepting technological development as the main marker of civilization,
Boas argued that no one standard should be applied to all societies, as each develops according
to its own experiences and conditions. Primitive cultures were not merely less-developed
versions of modern civilizations; they were modern civilizations that had developed according to
their own history and experiences and should not be judged according to European or American
24
Crunden, A Brief History, 154.
25
Robert M. Crunden, From Self to Society, 1919-1941 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1972), 10-12.
26
Charles C. Alexander, Nationalism in American Thought, 1930-1945 (Chicago: Rand
McNally & Company, 1969), 132.
24
intellectual systems.27 As a result, cultures could not be assessed in terms of best or worst, and
none could claim superiority over another. Each culture was the result of the totality of its
components, and indeed, the term "culture" itself should be applied broadly to encompass all
aspects of human life.28
Although Boas was living and working with the Eskimos and Kwakiutl tribe of the
Pacific Northwest as early as the 1880s, he did not publish his general critique of traditional
evolutionary anthropology until 1911, with The Mind of Primitive Man. Boas' ideas about
cultural relativism did not move much beyond American intellectual circles, however, until the
1920s and 1930s, when multiple works by his students made his theory part of a broader national
discourse on culture. For example, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and
Growing up in New Guinea (1930) showed how more "primitive" societies successfully
navigated the journey from childhood to adulthood, a troubling period of life for most
adolescents in more "advanced" Western cultures.29
Even more influential than the work of Boas and Mead, however, was Ruth Benedict's
Patterns of Culture (1934), which was widely read by the American public, despite being a work
of professional anthropology.30 Also a student of Boas, Benedict was something of a social
misfit in American society. Shy, partially deaf, childless, and unhappily married, she felt the
uselessness experienced by so many middle-class women during the Progressive Era. She did
not, however, focus her energies on reform, choosing instead to enroll in graduate school at
Columbia. Given her own sense of being an outsider, she approached the study of other cultures
with a sense of tolerance for those things that American society would define as abnormal, for
normality according to Benedict, was no more than a social construct.31
27
Crunden, From Self to Society, 12; Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America: A History (New
York: Franklin Watts, 1984), 321.
28
Terry A. Cooney, Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1995), 106.
29
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 106-107.
30
Warren J. Susman, "The Thirties," in The Development of an American Culture, eds. Stanley
Coben and Lorman Ratner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 179-218, 184.
31
Crunden, From Self to Society, 11-12.
25
In her work with Native American cultures of the Southwest, she explored the "relativity
of cultural habits" by comparing competition-based cultures with cooperation-based ones.
Benedict, who avoided judging all "primitive" cultures by one standard, as if they were
undifferentiated, looked at each in its entirety, assessing every ritual, idea, and product in relation
to the "whole configuration."32 Looking at three types of cultures, which she described as
Apollonian, Dionysian, and paranoid, she showed how all of these types, though disparate in
terms of social traits like congeniality, materialism, and attitudes toward drugs, formed
successfully functioning cultures. As a result, all forms of human behavior should be understood
on their own terms, for "[j]ust as we are handicapped in dealing with ethical problems so long as
we hold to an absolute definition of morality, so we are handicapped in dealing with human
society so long as we identify our local normalities with the inevitable necessities of existence."33
Patterns of Culture, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became a staple in
American universities, had a significant impact on how Americans understood the concept of
culture well into the 1960s.34 Indeed, as historian Warren Susman has argued, it was through
Benedict's work that Americans discovered and "domesticated" the concept of culture in the
1930s, and "began thinking in terms of patterns of behavior and belief, values and life-styles,
symbols and meanings" that constituted the "American Way of Life" and "The American
Dream."35 Thus, Boas and his students largely were responsible for destroying nineteenthcentury notions about the nature of American culture.36
In the first decades of the twentieth century, other intellectuals like literary critic Van
Wyck Brooks turned a critical eye toward the nation's literary and artistic culture. Like so many
of his peers, Brooks rejected the stifling Victorian view of culture, what philosopher George
Santayana labeled the American's "Genteel Tradition." Because he believed that art emerged
from the customs, traditions, and values of the people, Brooks worried that America, with its
32
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934), 11, 50.
33
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 271.
34
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 107.
35
Susman, "The Thirties," 184.
36
Perry, Intellectual Life, 323.
26
roots in austere New England Puritanism and its reverence for commercialism, would ever
develop a national culture of its own. He also contended that America lacked the national
childhood necessary for the production of great art, which must be inspired by a history rich in
color and experience. 37
Although Brooks had begun writing on American culture immediately upon his
graduation from Harvard in 1907, he did not establish himself as one of the nation's foremost
literary critics until 1915, with the publication of America's Coming-of-Age. In this work,
Brooks explored the division between American experience and American thinking in the
nineteenth century, which he characterized as a split between Lowbrow and Highbrow culture,
neither of which constituted great art. America's literary tradition consisted of the dry,
humorless thinking of Puritan figures like Jonathan Edwards and the refined, aloof writings of
Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Brooks' assessment of this Highbrow culture was
highly critical:
". . . American literature has had the semblance of one vast, all-embracing
baccalaureate sermon, addressed to the private virtues of young men. It has been
one shining deluge of righteousness, purity, practical mysticism, the conduct of
life, and at the end . . . the highest ambition of Young America is to be—do I
exaggerate?—the owner of a shoe factory."38
He was no more favorable in his assessment of America's practical and commerce-oriented
Lowbrow culture, which was epitomized by the "catchpenny opportunism" of Benjamin Franklin
and subsequent American capitalists.39
Given this paucity of cultural tradition from which to draw inspiration, Brooks held up
Europe as the standard for artistic expression, all the while advocating for a national awakening
of the arts in America. His most famous essay, "On Creating a Usable Past" (1918), examined
America's literary history for those aspects that might provide the basis for a national literary
culture. He paid particular attention to the failure of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to realize
37
Van Wyck Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past," The Dial 64, no. 764 (April 11, 1918): 33741; Alexander, Here Lies the Country, 35-37.
38
Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Heubsch, 1915), 84-85.
39
Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age, 9; Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 38-39.
27
their full potential, for he believed that modern creators could learn from the failures of their
forebears. Perhaps by understanding these past failures, they would be able to create a new,
useable past and in the process acquire "that sense of brotherhood in effort and in aspiration
which is the best promise of a national culture."40
Brooks, who became in the 1920s the foremost spokesman for American romantic
nationalism, searched throughout that decade for a useable past for the nation. It was in this
period that he published critical studies of the two dominant figures in late-nineteenth-century
American letters—Mark Twain and Henry James, exemplars of Lowbrow and Highbrow culture,
respectively. Though he found much to admire in both, Brooks ultimately concluded that neither
had realized his full artistic potential. Twain had been stifled by the restrictive moral and
intellectual climate of nineteenth-century America, which had driven James into voluntary exile
in England, where he gave himself up to masterful, yet emotionally sterile writing. Thus, both
Twain and James were examples of American artistic failure.41
Brooks' negative assessment of American culture was challenged directly by the work of
Constance Rourke, who applied Boasian concepts of cultural relativism to the study of American
folk culture. In 1931, Rourke published American Humor: A Study of the National Character, a
work that would become one of the foundational documents of the American Studies movement.
In it, Rourke examined the country's time-honored comic figures of New England Yankee,
backwoodsman, and minstrel to explore the existence of national myth and language traditions.
Her conclusion—that folk humor provided American literature with a unified cultural
foundation—directly challenged Brooks' assertion that no great works of American literature
would be possible in the absence of a "secure and unobtrusive element of national character,
taken for granted, and providing a certain underlying coherence and background of mutual
understanding."42
In addition, implicit in Rourke's thesis in American Humor was the notion that the
American people themselves were the ultimate creators and possessors of American culture.
Undoubtedly, this conclusion reflected the influence of cultural relativism, for just as primitive
40
Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past," 341; Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 82-83.
41
Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 92-93.
42
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age, 120.
28
cultures should be judged on their own terms, so should American culture. What is more, its
culture should not be judged by the achievements of a few great men of letters and art, but by
diverse and multi-cultural contributions of all Americans.43 According to Rourke, Americans
need not continue to look to Europe for cultural standards or models for great art and literature.
By instead embracing their own folk traditions, Americans would discover just what it was that
made America American, and find release from the nagging sense of inferiority to Europe.
Rourke's work, by focusing on the common people, also helped create a more inclusive and
democratic concept of American culture that encompassed many different social and ethnic
groups.44
In the mid-1930s, Rourke brought this democratic approach to the New Deal when she
assumed direction of the Federal Art Project's Index of American Design. With the Index, which
ultimately included some 20,000 illustrations of American furniture, silverwork, textiles, pottery,
and other crafts, Rourke succeeded in revealing the breadth and depth of the country's vernacular
expression.45
Her untimely death in 1941 cut short Rourke's work on a proposed three-volume
reinterpretation of American creative expression that would integrate American history,
anthropology, and aesthetics. What work she had completed on the project was compiled and
edited by, ironically enough, Van Wyck Brooks, who by the end of the 1930s had made a
complete volte-face on the issue of American culture. By this time, he had given up his quarrel
with the nation's past, largely due to his rediscovery of Emerson in the late 1920s.46 He
published Rourke's last essays in The Roots of American Culture, which further developed her
thesis that the fine arts should not be considered separately from folk art, for a nation's culture is
determined by both the polite and impolite arts. Indeed, as she pointed out, the original meaning
of culture encompassed much more than high art—"culture is tillage, a fertile medium, a base or
43
Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 214.
44
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 108-109.
45
Alexander, Nationalism in American Thought, 73.
46
Alexander, Here the Country Lies, 93-94.
29
groundwork inducing germination and growth. Surely a culture is the sum of such growth in
terms of expression."47
The efforts of American thinkers like Brooks and Rourke were part of what one historian
has called "the most overwhelming effort ever attempted to document in art, reportage, social
science, and history the life and values of the American people."48 The FWP was another
important participant in this documentary endeavor, and its work would reflect all of the various
components of the intellectual dialogue of the 1930s—from cultural relativism to cultural
pluralism to the study of American folk culture. In the first part of the decade, this documentary
output consisted mainly of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, that focused on exposing the
harsh realities of the Depression, from breadlines to hobo camps to urban and rural poverty. This
documentary urge also found expression throughout the decade in photography, films, social
science reports, and art that conveyed facts observed at first hand in parts of American society
beyond the usual reach of public attention. Ultimately, the reportage moved from chronicling the
bad to a search for signs of American fortitude and self-reliance. Thus, the social reportage of
the 1930s contained a certain aspect of cultural celebration and affirmation of national identity.49
In the mid-1930s, the New Deal inserted itself into this documentary process with the
Federal One arts projects, which clearly focused on celebration over deprivation.50 The main
FWP work product—the state guides—could easily have devolved into dry-as-dust catalogues of
main points of interest to travelers, particularly as all of the guides followed the same general
format (introductory essays, city studies, and highway tours). The Washington office remained
vigilant, however, in coaxing "unique" local color from state offices, as when national editors
returned the Minnesota draft "racial customs" essay with the following comment: "Surely there
must be folk-dancing and Old World costumes to be observed."51
47
Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays, edited with a preface by
Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 49.
48
Susman, "The Thirties," 189.
49
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 157-160.
50
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 165.
51
Mabel S. Ulrich, "Salvaging Culture for the WPA," Harper's 178 (May 1939): 656.
30
The FWP's emphasis on variety and color represented a distinct turning away from the
social documentary of the earlier 1930s. With the guides, federal writers were much more
interested in capturing what made their respective states unique than with chronicling the
immediate social experience of the Depression. At the same time, their stories of local history,
culture, and personalities contributed to a wider definition of America and its people.52 Thus, the
FWP played a role in the ongoing debate among 1930s intellectuals regarding the question of
national identity. Indeed, historian and literary critic Lewis Mumford characterized the early
state guides as "the first attempt, on a comprehensive scale, to make the country itself worthily
known to Americans" and "the finest contribution to American patriotism that has been made in
our generation."53
The guides' depiction of the unique and disparate people and places that made up the
American landscape produced a portrait of America quite different from that of the social
documentary of the early 1930s. The FWP's America had not been defeated by the Depression;
rather it was a country of remarkable resilience and home to a disparate people with a distinctive
character made stronger by its wide-range of experiences.54 In this way, the FWP's work was
just one component of the larger intellectual movements of the 1930s—influenced by cultural
relativism, cultural pluralism, and folklore—that celebrated America's unity through diversity.
As historian Terry Cooney summed up this aspect of the 1930s, "the revelation of a country
disparate and diverse in nature became a proclamation of common loyalty to the nation's
traditional political ideals," that is to say, freedom and democracy.55
These intellectual strains all helped to produce an atmosphere in the 1930s in which those
writing and reporting on America cast a broader net that captured multiple voices, which
previously would have been ignored or overlooked in any search for national identity. This was
true in the work of the FWP, particularly the ex-slave narrative, life history, and folklore
components of the project, which clearly reflected the theme of heterogeneity that had taken hold
52
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 171.
53
Lewis Mumford, "Writers' Project," New Republic 92 (October 20, 1937): 306, 307.
54
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 172-73.
55
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 173.
31
of American intellectuals by the mid-1930s.56 The FWP's oral histories and ethnic studies were
intended to provide not only a social history of ordinary people, ex-slaves, ethnic minorities, and
industrial workers but also a new picture of American life and culture.
But did the intent of the national FWP officers filter down to the state offices? The staff
in Washington was remarkably similar in educational background. Most of them had studied at
Columbia or Harvard, institutions where faculty members (such as John Dewey and Franz Boas
at Columbia) had made major contributions to American thought regarding nationalism and
culture. In other ways, however, they represented the diversity of the nation, for their number
included Jews, African-Americans, Italians, Southerners, and Westerners. As a result, the
outlook of the national officials reflected the cosmopolitan and pluralistic thinking common to
the American liberal intelligentsia of the 1930s.57
Staffing at the state level, however, particularly in the South, was not so diverse.
Although several of the Southern states, including Florida, established all-black "Negro Units"
that focused on gathering information about the African-American experience, the majority of
Southern federal writers were white, conservative, and middle-class. What is more, they tended
to reject modern notions of pluralism and egalitarianism, favoring instead a traditional, agrarian
view of society, in which the social order was highly stratified. As a result, as Jerrold Hirsch
concluded in his 2005 study of the FWP, the Southern guidebooks taken together reveal that their
writers "worked within a conservative, antimodern, hierarchical, romantic southern plantation
tradition that viewed the past with nostalgia, rationalized the status quo, and looked at folklore as
material endangered by change."58
Certainly, there were exceptions to this assessment. For instance, the Florida FWP
employed African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who had studied under Franz Boas at
Columbia. In addition, some of the younger Florida staff, like Stetson Kennedy, challenged the
more conservative outlook of Florida director Carita Doggett Corse. On the whole, however, as
will be demonstrated in the chapters that follow, the work of the Florida FWP did little to help
56
Cooney, Balancing Acts, 184-185.
57
Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 23-24.
58
Hirsch, Portrait of America, 180-181, 188.
32
redefine what it meant to be American with regard to race. Not only did the project's depictions
of African-Americans adhere to traditional southern racial stereotypes, those stereotypes were
transferred to Florida's mixed-race groups. Consequently, even though the Florida federal
writers participated in the program mandated by Washington—collecting life histories and exslave narratives, adding local color to their guides, preparing ethnic studies—their ultimate
contribution to the new American identity emerging in the 1930s was neither pluralist nor liberal.
33
CHAPTER 2
THE FLORIDA FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT
AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN
One of the most important steps taken by the Federal Writers' Project in its attempt to
redefine the contours of American identity was making African Americans and their culture a
priority to the project. Like other New Deal programs, the FWP made an effort to employ
African Americans, giving many their first opportunity to hone or develop their writing skills.
National FWP director Henry Alsberg also encouraged state projects to engage in studies of
African-American culture and hire qualified African-American workers. More significantly, he
appointed author and Howard University English professor Sterling A. Brown national editor of
Negro affairs in 1936. Brown tirelessly monitored state copy to ensure that African Americans
were not ignored or portrayed unfavorably. For example, he admonished the Florida staff for
including only one sentence about African Americans in Sarasota, advising that what was needed
instead was description of
. . . where he lives, what he does for a living, his homes, churches, school, social
business, and professional activities deserve mention, however brief, in any
representative treatment of the city's life.1
Brown also visited several states to set up African-American studies programs and
resolve personnel issues ranging from reluctance to employ African Americans to racial
discrimination once they were hired.2 State projects often had difficulty finding qualified
African-American writers, which Brown acknowledged, but as he noted in a 1937 report, "for
anything like a fair representation of the Negro in the Federal Writers' Project, more Negro
1
Quoted in Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers'
Project (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 206.
2
Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943 (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 258.
34
workers are urgently needed."3 Even so, the number of African Americans hired represented a
small percentage of the total number of federal writers (106 out of 4,500 in 1937, for example).
The New York City, Illinois, and Louisiana projects employed the largest number of African
Americans, while most other projects, whether through lack of qualified applicants or outright
discrimination, employed only a handful or none.4
Working on the project did allow many later well-known African-American authors to
continue writing during the economic hardships of the Great Depression. For example, the New
York City Project employed Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Claude McKay, all of whom
later used the knowledge of black history and folklore they acquired with the FWP in their
fiction writing.5 In Florida, Zora Neale Hurston completed Moses: Man of the Mountain (1939)
while turning in 1,500-word weekly FWP assignments.6
Hurston, perhaps the most famous Florida federal writer, black or white, had studied
anthropology under Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas (whom she called "Papa Franz") at Barnard
College of Columbia University. After graduating in 1927, she spent the years between 1928
and 1932 collecting black folklore in the South and published a novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, in
1934 and a collection of folklore, Mules and Men, in 1935. Royalties from these works were
never large enough to support Hurston, however, and as the Depression deepened, her main
source of funding—patronage of wealthy white sponsor Charlotte Osgood Mason—also dried
up. She subsequently received two successive Guggenheim grants that funded her study of
hoodoo in Jamaica and Haiti, where she performed field work in 1936 and 1937. Illness cut
short her work in the Caribbean, and she returned to New York in mid-1937. Although she
published two additional books—Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God—within the
3
Sterling Brown, "Summary of Work on Negro Life and History," Federal Writers' Project, E27,
RG69, Box 200, National Archives, Washington, DC (hereinafter, NA).
4
Monty Noam Penkower, The Federal Writers' Project: A Study in Government Patronage of
the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 66-67.
5
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 255-257.
6
Pamela Bordelon, ed., Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from
the Federal Writers' Project (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), xi.
35
year, by 1938, her financial situation had deteriorated again to the point that she turned to New
Deal relief.7
In the spring of 1938, Hurston joined the Florida FWP, and despite being a respected
anthropologist and published author, she was given the lowest position, "relief writer," and
assigned to the state's Negro Unit.8 Generally, professional writers like Hurston would have
joined the FWP in a nonrelief, editorial position with a higher pay and more job security than
relief writers. Such editors also were exempt from certification as needy. Shortly after Hurston
joined the Florida FWP, she traveled to Washington to attend the National Folklore Festival, and
while there she visited the national FWP offices and met Director Henry Alsberg. She so
impressed him that he wrote Florida FWP Director Dr. Carita Doggett Corse to suggest that
Hurston be made an editor and given a salary raise to $150 per month.9
If these recommendations had been carried out, Hurston's editorial authority over whites
would have posed a direct challenge to Jim Crow segregation. Ultimately, Corse never made the
controversial appointment, though Hurston was given a $75 travel allowance that increased her
monthly salary to $142.50, a not insignificant amount given that the highest paid state editor at
the time received $160.10 Corse would later admit that "the principal oversight of my direction"
was not making Hurston editor of the project's "Negro book" (presumably, The Florida Negro,
which is discussed below). As Corse recalled, "I should have realized and I believe that other
Writers' Project staff should have realized . . . but she was forty years ahead of her time."11
7
Bordelon, Go Gator, 10-13.
8
Bordelon, Go Gator, ix.
9
Bordelon, Go Gator, 14-16.
10
Bordelon, Go Gator, 16. Bordelon's discussion of these events, based on correspondence
contained in the FWP files housed in the National Archives, corrects Hurston biographer Robert
Hemenway's statement that "Zora became an editor for the Florida project on April 25, 1938."
Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1977), 251 (italics added). Corse's salary as state director was $2,500 per year
(approximately $208 per month). Nancy Williams, "An interview with the state director of the
Federal Writers' Project in Florida, Dr. Carita Doggett Corse" (New Smyrna Beach, FL: [s.n.]
1976), University of Florida, Special Collections.
11
Williams, "An interview with the state director."
36
By Corse's own admission then, it appears that Hurston's treatment by the FWP with
regard to position and salary represented a case of racial discrimination. It also underscored the
differences in mindset between the national and southern state offices regarding race. Only three
southern states—Louisiana, Virginia, and Florida—employed more than a handful of AfricanAmerican staff members, and they adhered to the tenets of Jim Crow segregation by separating
them into Negro Units.12 In Florida, the Negro Unit was established in 1936, apparently at the
urging of Director Corse and African-American organizations, for as national tour editor
Katherine Kellock reported to Henry Alsberg in January 1936:
Mrs. Corse and others are exceedingly interested in a negro project and there is a
good deal of pressure from negro organizations for such a white collar project. It
seems feasible and there is a-pleanty [sic] of available on relief—Ph.D.'s doing
ditch-digging or little better…13
The Negro Unit, located in Jacksonville, was comprised originally of ten members,
although reductions in the quota of staff allotted to the Florida project required dismissing two in
June 1936 and another five in December 1936, resulting in a Negro Unit of only three persons.14
Other than Hurston, the Unit was composed of little- or unknown writers like Martin Richardson,
Alfred Farrell, Viola Muse, James Johnson, Paul Diggs, and Rachel Austin, who traveled across
the state collecting materials for the Guide relating to African-American folklore and
contemporary life, as well as conducting many of Florida's ex-slave interviews.15
Excepting Hurston, little is known about the members of the Florida Negro Unit. In his
research on the unit in connection with publication of The Florida Negro in 1993, anthropologist
Gary W. McDonogh discovered a Martin Richardson in the Jacksonville City Directory as a
12
Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 180.
13
Katherine A. Kellock to Henry Alsberg, January 23, 1936, Field Reports, 1935-1939, E6, RG
69, Florida—Kellock Folder, NA.
14
Carita Doggett Corse to Henry G. Alsberg, December 16, 1936, Florida Writers' Project Files,
E27, RG 69, Box 200, NA.
15
Gary W. McDonogh, ed., The Florida Negro: A Federal Writers' Project Legacy (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1993), ix-x.
37
painter in 1935 and a teacher in 1936 and 1938. 16 In an April 1940 letter to Sterling Brown,
Richardson indicated that he was City Editor of the Square Deal-Boston Chronicle Publishing
Company.17 The 1945 Lakeland City Directory included a Paul Diggs as manager of Lake Ridge
Homes and husband of Louise, a school principal.18 Alfred Farrell, a former college instructor at
Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, had graduated magna cum laude from Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania with a degree in English.19 Beyond this, little else is known about
Florida's African-American writers, though it appears that several of the men were former
newspapermen.20 Given the nature of the work they would be required to carry out—
documenting the African-American experience in the state—and the fact that so few positions
were available to them with the FWP, it is safe to assume that the members of the Negro Unit all
possessed a level of education sufficient to provide them with above-average research and
writing skills. Such education also would seem to indicate some connection to or identification
with the middle class.
One of the main projects of the Negro Unit was an in-depth study entitled The Florida
Negro written and revised in 1937 and 1938, primarily by Martin Richardson, and edited by
Stetson Kennedy.21 The Florida Negro was part of a program of black studies instituted by
16
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, xvii.
17
Martin D. Richardson to Sterling Brown, April 17, 1940, WPA State Series, RG 69, Box 1108,
Folder—Fla 651.3178, NA.
18
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 155.
19
Pamela G. Bordelon, “The Federal Writers’ Project’s Mirror to America: The Florida
Reflection” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1991), 39.
20
Bordelon, “Florida Reflection,” 137. Bordelon seems to have based this conclusion on
interviews with Stetson Kennedy in 1988 and 1989. Ibid. n.12. She also described Richardson
as a "seasoned newspaper journalist," but did not provide a source for this statement. Ibid., 148.
21
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, xxx n. 5. Pamela Bordelon also concluded that Martin
Richardson was the primary author of The Florida Negro and that although Hurston wrote essays
for the book after she joined the FWP in 1938, none of her writings were included in the final
manuscript subsequently published by McDonogh in 1993. Bordelon, Go Gator, 30-35. Both
Bordelon and McDonogh thus disagree with Robert Hemenway's earlier assertions that Hurston
was "heavily involved in collecting and editing material" for The Florida Negro, which
contained many stories and songs collected by her. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 252.
38
national Negro Affairs Editor Sterling Brown, who intended for these collateral projects to
compensate for the sketchy treatment of African Americans in most of the state guides.22 Only
two book-length studies were published during the life of the FWP, however—The Negro in
Virginia and Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, both
in 1940.23 Although the FWP hoped that The Florida Negro might repeat the success of The
Negro in Virginia, which received much critical acclaim, Florida's study appears never to have
reached publishable form. As late as 1941, an official FWP survey of state projects described
The Florida Negro as "[a] semi-completed manuscript," which would be completed if
sponsorship and publication arrangements could be made.24 In any event, the manuscript
remained unpublished until 1993, when McDonogh introduced his edited and annotated version.
Nevertheless, as a manuscript reviewed and edited by both the Florida and national offices, The
Florida Negro should be read side-by-side with the Guide in any analysis of the influence of
racial stereotypes and prejudices upon the Florida FWP.
The Guide itself did not contain an essay or section devoted entirely to Florida's AfricanAmerican history or folklore, though references to its "Negro" population can be found
throughout. The first mention occurred early in the opening essay, entitled "Contemporary
Scene," in a discussion of how Florida meant very different things to different people:
To the visitor, Florida is at once a pageant of extravagance and a land of pastoral
simplicity, a flood-lighted stage of frivolity and a behind-the-scenes struggle for
existence. For the person with a house car it is a succession of trailer camps and a
vagabond social life. For the Palm Beach patron it is a wintertime Newport made
up of the same society, servants, and pastimes. For the migratory agricultural
labor it means several months of winter employment in the open under pleasant
skies; and for the Negro turpentine worker, an unvarying job in the pine woods.25
22
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 259.
23
Penkower, The Federal Writers' Project, 145-146.
24
Stella Bloch Hanau, "Report of an official visit to survey the Writers' Projects of Region III,"
October 1941, WPA State Series, RG 69, Box 1107, Folder 651.317, Jan. 1941-Jan. 1942, NA.
25
Florida Federal Writers' Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939), 4.
39
This passage not only depicted the dichotomies that made up Florida—extravagant yet pastoral,
frivolous yet poverty-stricken—it also set the tone for how the Guide would treat Florida's
African Americans, apparently the most downtrodden of its citizens.
The "History" essay covered slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Redemption in a
mere two and a half pages.26 None of the worst hardships of slavery were related, and regarding
Reconstruction the Guide noted that although the period was "darkened by suffering and poverty
. . . it was not characterized by the harshness experienced in other Southern States."27 The
Florida Negro devoted substantially more space to discussions of these periods, including two
chapters entitled "Slave Days in Florida" and "Sidelights in Slavery" that were based on
information taken from interviews with Florida's former slaves. The depiction of slavery they
presented, while including instances of punishment, was one of an overall moderate institution.
For example, immediately following the tale of a slave killed for attending church, came the
statement that "[t]here seem to have been fewer really 'hard' plantations, however, in Florida than
in Mississippi, Alabama, and other states where there were more and larger plantations."28
For the most part, the "Slave Days in Florida" chapter followed the format of the
interview questions, which covered such subjects as foodstuffs, living conditions, clothing, and
entertainment.29 Edited transcripts of two ex-slave interviews—Margaret Nickerson and Mama
Duck—were included in "Sidelights on Slavery." Although Nickerson related accounts of slaves
being punished with beatings, she wanted it understood that she had forgiven her master:
Now jes lissen, I wanna tell you all I kin, but I wants to tell it right. Wait now, I
don' wanna tell no mistakes an' I don' wanna lie on nobody. I ain' mad now an' I
know taint no use to lie. I'se taking my time, I done prayed an' got all de malice
out o' my heart an' I ain' gwine tell no lie fer un, an' I ain' gwine tell no lie on um.
I ain' never seed no slaves sole by Marse Carr . . . .30
26
Carita Doggett Corse later claimed to have written the Guide's "History" essay, as she "felt
responsible for the historical sections of the guide." Williams, "An interview with the state
director."
27
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 59.
28
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 23.
29
See the Appendix for the questions asked in interviews with former slaves.
30
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 33.
40
Similarly, Mama Duck described severe beatings of others, but said of herself, "No, I nevah got
no beatings f'm mah mastah when I was a slave. Onlies' t'ing I evah got was a little slap on the
han', lak dat." She also responded negatively when asked if she were glad slave days were over:
Not me. I was a heap bettah off den I is now. Allus had sumpin' to eat an' a place
to stay. No sech t'in as gittin' on a black list. Mighty hard on a pusson ol' as me
not to git no rations an' not have no reg'lar job.31
Historians have long recognized, however, that such favorable statements about slavery
should not be taken at face value. While the FWP ex-slave interviews provide much valuable
information regarding the conditions and experiences of slave days, they are flawed sources in
many ways. The interview process itself was marked by a vastly unequal power dynamic in
which the African-American interviewees, usually living in dire poverty, were expected to be
forthcoming with interviewers who, in addition to being representatives of the government, were
likely to be educated, middle class, and/or white. In Florida, most of the ex-slave interviews
were conducted by African-American members of the Negro Unit, though as discussed
previously, they almost certainly would have been well-educated, and thus from or influenced by
the middle-class. As a result, though the interviewees no doubt felt more comfortable talking to
members of their own race, class differences still may have skewed the interviews.32
Even if the interview were not skewed by the process itself, the age of the interviewee
was likely to impact significantly the trustworthiness of the interview. Ex-slaves still alive in the
1930s were likely either to be so advanced in age as to undermine the reliability of their answers
or too young to have experienced slavery as anything but a child.33 As historian Stephanie J.
Shaw has recently argued, however, even with such internal flaws, the ex-slave narratives
31
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 36. Mama Duck's mention of a "black list" refers to her belief
that she had been denied relief because only "young folks what's wukkin" receive rations. She
also refused to go to the poor house because she could not take along her trunk, which contained
her "blue-black Webster" book and her Bible. Ibid., 35.
32
Of the two interviews included in The Florida Negro, Mama Duck was interviewed by a white
man (Jules A. Frost) and Margaret Nickerson by an African-American woman (Rachel Austin).
33
For a classic critique of the ex-slave interviews, see John W. Blassingame, "Using the
Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems," Journal of Southern History 41, no. 4
(November 1975): 473-92.
41
contain invaluable information, not just about slavery, but for other topics like the history of
family, labor, race relations, as well as the impact of the Great Depression on elderly African
Americans.34
Of course, the authors of The Florida Negro were not thinking in such terms, and
appeared to have taken Mama Duck and Margaret Nickerson at their words. They also chose to
follow these two ex-slave narratives with an excerpt from Patriarchal System of Society, written
by prominent Florida slaveholder Zephaniah Kingsley. The excerpt described how Kingsley
treated his slaves well, allowing them to regulate their own familial relations and cultivate their
own gardens. To his eye, the slaves "appeared quite happy," and his punishments rarely entailed
more than shaming them.35 Such idyllic conditions could hardly have been the norm, though
when Kingsley's account is read in conjunction with Nickerson's and Mama Duck's narratives,
the picture of slavery presented in The Florida Negro is, as editor Gary McDonogh concludes,
one of "more moderate visions of good times, which could have appealed to the constructed
nostalgia of a white southern audience."36
Regarding the development of sharecropping and tenant farming in the aftermath of the
Civil War, the Guide explained only that "[a]n immediate adjustment was made between planters
and the Freedman's Bureau, and by 1866 nine-tenths of the Florida Negroes were at work in the
fields, while employers were asking for more."37 This explanation not only whitewashed the
abusive natures of these systems of labor, it also denied the role that African Americans
themselves played in the transition from slave to free labor. The Guide concluded that although
tenancy was a problem that "affects about half of all Southern farmers and naturally depresses
the whole Southern economy," the situation was not so severe in Florida, where the percentage
of tenant-operated farms was much lower than other Southern states.
34
Stephanie J. Shaw, "Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to study the Impact of the Great
Depression," Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (August 2003): 655.
35
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 37-38.
36
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, viii. Of course, it is possible that white editors inserted the
Kingsley discussion in the manuscript prepared by the Negro Unit, but whoever included it, a
concern for the book's potential white audience was likely the primary impetus for this benign
representation of slaveowners.
37
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 58-59.
42
The Guide's brief mention of racial terror during Reconstruction similarly downplayed
the negative aspects of the history of race relations in the state:
About 1870, Florida experienced a period of lawlessness, particularly in the
turpentine sections of middle Florida, evidenced by an unusually active Ku Klux
Klan; but even this disturbance disappeared by 1871.38
The historical record clearly refutes this rosy picture. After the war, Florida followed the same
trajectory as the other former Confederate states. Its white leaders enacted harsh Black Codes
immediately after the war, subsequently submitted to Congressional Reconstruction, and began
the process of disfranchising its African-American population and instituting legalized Jim Crow
segregation once federal troops left the South in 1877. Indeed, white violence against AfricanAmericans, from rape to lynching to destruction of entire communities was common in Florida
throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with Florida accounting for the
highest per capita rate of lynchings in the country from 1882 to 1930.39
The Florida FWP's whitewash of its history is consistent, however, with the major goal of
the Guide, which was to draw tourists to the state, not explore the darker side of its past. Of
more interest to this thesis are the ways in which the FWP depicted Florida's African-Americans
and whether those depictions fit within the liberal, pluralist image of American society adopted
by the national FWP office.
First and foremost, the FWP saw African Americans in Florida as laborers that
contributed one-quarter million workers to the state's work force. They worked first as slaves,
which the Guide did not address in any significant detail, and later in farm fields, turpentine
camps, phosphate mines, docks, and railroad construction crews. As the Guide acknowledged,
"[e]conomic opportunities for Negroes are well-defined and limited, and are even further reduced
in times of depression when many manual occupations are taken over by white labor." One-third
38
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 59.
39
Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White
Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 61. See also, Joe M. Richardson, The Negro in the Reconstruction of
Florida, 1865-1877 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1965; and James R.
McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1982).
43
of the African-American workforce consisted of women who worked as domestics, though men
also engaged in domestic service.40 African Americans also made up a large portion of the
migratory labor force that harvested vegetable crops in central Florida.41 In the industrial sector
of the economy, African Americans represented the majority of the 14,000 workers in the state's
turpentine camps, which provided thirty-one percent of the nation's and twenty percent of the
world's supply of naval stores in 1938.42
Although the Guide described the process of turpentining and the structure of the industry
in detail (including noting that camp operators advanced cash to workers "throughout the season,
deducting these loans at the end of the year"), it did not give an indication of the truly horrible
conditions experienced by African Americans in the camps.43 The Florida Negro was more
critical of conditions in the camps, noting that the widely employed "commissary system" forced
workers to purchase supplies from the camp store at inflated prices and that forced labor still
existed in camps in Baker, Duval, and Clay counties. In many ways, then, the turpentine
camps—hidden from the outside world, deep in the woods—recreated a society reminiscent of
slavery, as is made shockingly clear by this excerpt from the Life History of camp foreman C.W.
Wimster:
Most camps are so deep in the woods that law officers don't bother em much.
Outside of murder, the officers usually leave it up to the camp foreman to make
and enforce his own laws. At least that's the way it used to be. In the old days
there were very few legal marriages or divorces. For the sake of good camp
government and economy in housing, it was to the interest of the foreman to see
that all unattached men and women got 'married' to each other. This was done by
what the workers called a 'commissary weddin'. The foreman was a purty good
match maker, and when it was decided between him and a couple that they should
40
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 94.
41
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 82.
42
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 378.
43
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 377. See also, Jerrell H. Shofner, "Negro Laborers and the
Forest Industries in Reconstruction Florida," Journal of Forest History 19, no. 4 (October 1975):
180-191; Jeffrey A. Drobney, Lumbermen and Log Sawyers: Life, Labor, and Culture in the
North Florida Timber Industry, 1830-1930 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); and
Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and Penal
System in the Progressive Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).
44
'marry up with each other' they simply went to the commissary and were assigned
a house, and an account for rations and clothing was opened for the pair. Then
they took their supplies to the house given them and began housekeepin together.
This was a 'commissary marriage'. Once in a great while, when a couple had
some extra money and wanted to put on style, they would have a 'cotehouse'
marriage. That is, they would go to the courthouse at the county seat, get what
they call a 'pair o' licenses', and be legally married.44
This description sounds very much like slave marriages conducted on plantations under
the master's aegis. Little wonder then, that The Florida Negro also reported that circumstances
in one camp were so bad that workers feared to be seen talking to FWP fieldworkers.45 This
account may have come from unpublished field reports by Zora Neale Hurston, Stetson
Kennedy, and Robert Cook regarding their visit to the Aycock and Lindsey turpentine camp at
Cross City. Hurston visited the camp first by herself, and her raw notes based on interviews with
camp denizens include notations like the following:
Road guarded, etc. debt 129.00 Nobody allowed to leave.
Women kicked and beaten.
Social Security not turned in.
The people murmered [sic] at me with the edge of their lips.46
After two weeks in the camp, Hurston sent a 12-page report back to Jacksonville
regarding her findings, and Kennedy and Cook soon arrived to photograph the camp and make
audio recordings of some of its residents singing work songs. Kennedy's final field report
(which included many of Hurston's original notes), further illuminated the horrible conditions in
the camp, quoting the manager as bragging:
With the commissary we makes a gross profit of 60 percent and a net profit of 20
percent. You know that’s pretty good—it takes a good slice off the salaries. We
don’t hardly have to pay no salaries. The private stores around here do good to
make a 5 to [8] percent profit. Of course we have to charge more, but the niggers
44
"Life History of C. W. Wimster, Turpentine Man," August 22, 1939, Stetson Kennedy
Archive, RG 158, .S 1585, Box 2, FF 42, Florida State Archives (hereinafter, FSA).
45
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 41.
46
Zora Neale Hurston, "Turpentine Camp – Cross City," Stetson Kennedy Archive, RG 158, .S
1585, Box 2, FF 42, FSA.
45
save in the long run. Just think how much it would cost them to drive 20 to 30
miles into town for vittals if they had cars!47
Kennedy also related an account of one of the camp resident's reticence to have his complaints
(made while the recording machine was being set up) about government relief efforts recorded.
Kennedy described the uncomfortable scene as follows:
[Hudson] was asked to repeat the above statement for recording. The three white
woodsriders present maintained an ominous silence; the Negroes squirmed
uneasily. [Hudson] faltered a moment, then exclaimed: “Oh, no! I’m smarter
than you think I is—I know bettern to say anything against the [Goverment]!48
As revealed by these field reports, turpentine camps were places of abuse and oppression
for their African-American workers. One of the Cross City visitors even wrote in his field report
that he did not mind suggesting that turpentine workers, though not slaves, were "the lowest
strata of legally free humans."49 Even so, the Guide's description of a "typical turpentine camp"
at Cliftonville was of "orderly rows of shacks in the rear of the turpentine still. Here reside the
families of Negroes whose job is to slash the trees and collect gum in the surrounding forest."50
A more realistic depiction was given of the camps at Okahumpka, although the emphasis was on
the residents' superstitions rather than their oppression:
Backwoodsmen of the turpentine country…depart at dusk for their homes hidden
in swamps and pine forests. Their families are often large and their wives and
children shy of strangers. They care for their own sick, disabled, and aged,
having a dread of institutions. 'Healing' is often practiced with herbs, charms, and
Negro voodoo ritual."51
47
Stetson Kennedy, "Just Katie Now," Stetson Kennedy Archive, RG 158, .S 1585, Box 2, FF
42, FSA.
48
Kennedy, "Just Katie Now."
49
Bill Duncan, "Report on Trip to Cross City," Stetson Kennedy Archive, RG 158, .S 1585, Box
2, FF 42, FSA.
50
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 511.
51
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 452.
46
This interest in their secretive rituals is consistent with another of the Guide's main
characterizations of African Americans as superstitious adherents to magic and voodoo. In the
"Folklore" essay, the first African American introduced was the "Negro voodoo doctor" Brundas
Hartwell of Chester, who had built a profitable business placing and removing curses and
dispensing evil spirits for "the credulous people of his race."52 Further south, near Okeechobee,
blacks from the Bahamas and West Indies "indulge in voodoo ceremonials and dances" far from
outside eyes. African Americans also attributed many of their problems to witches, against
whom elaborate precautions were taken prior to retiring for the night. Many superstitions
discussed in the Guide revolved around the gambling game of "bolita," brought to Florida by
Cubans, but widely played by African Americans, who turned to all sorts of superstitions—from
astrology to numerology—to divine the winning numbers.53
Although the Guide noted that "Negroes and whites alike" played bolita, AfricanAmericans appear to have succumbed most deeply to its lure. In fact, The Florida Negro
devoted an entire chapter to the game, opening with this somewhat uncomplimentary
assessment:
Few things give a clearer side glance at the makeup of the Negro than his almost
universal addiction to the Cuban gambling game of bolita. In the following
picture, incomplete though it be, can be seen something of his superstitious belief
in the power of luck, his instinctive following of hunches, and his sanguine faith
that sooner or later some stroke of fortune will overcome the economic insecurity
under which he constantly lives.54
Even worse, bolita had done that which the upstanding white community feared most—its
"insidious influence" had affected whites who came in contact with the Negro neighborhoods
52
It should be noted that although "Folklore" did present the native white Florida "cracker" in
less than glowing light, he retained a certain native intelligence and shrewdness, for "[h]e has
appropriated the defensive guile of the Negro and turned it to good account in his dealings.
Consequently he drives a hard bargain with soft words," particularly against his Yankee tourist
prey. Although the "cracker" was superstitious enough to avoid setting fence posts by moonlight
or planting underground root crops, he did not practice voodoo. That remained the refuge of
African-Americans and Cubans. Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 129.
53
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 131-132.
54
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 63.
47
(policemen, collectors, and businessmen, for example), with the effect that whites also had
joined the ranks of bolita devotees. All cities (nationally and statewide) with substantial AfricanAmerican populations had thriving bolita businesses, despite its illegality and the well-known
fact that the game was invariably rigged.55
One superstition mentioned in "Folklore," however, did give more chilling insight into
the precarious nature of life for Florida's African Americans. This was the story of the mulberry
tree in the town of Mulberry, a legend "fraught with realistic dread." This tree was the
customary location for lynch mobs to hang their victims and "riddle their bodies with bullets."
Such gunfire eventually killed the tree, which stood apparently dead for many years until again
sprouting leaves. That spring, many African-American residents left the vicinity for other parts,
fearing the new growth was an omen of more lynchings to come.56
Like the Guide, The Florida Negro also addressed folk culture, voodoo, and conjure,
though in a much different manner. Its "Folklore" chapter amounted more to a laundry list of
superstitions (relating to cures, bolita, ghosts, and childbirth) than an essay on folk traditions like
the one included in the Guide. The introductory paragraphs of this chapter, however, did take a
critical tone towards African Americans for clinging to superstitious beliefs despite "[c]oncerted
health drives and increased educational advantages," for such beliefs "no doubt . . . have
contributed to the high Negro death rate."57 "Hoodoo and Voodoo" was essentially a minibiography of a hoodoo doctor, Henry M. Abraham, who came to Florida to work in the
turpentine camps but ended his life as one of the wealthiest men, black or white, in Bradford
County, after fifteen years treating the sick and "spell-bound."58 Similarly, the chapter titled
"Conjure Shop" focused on one shop in Jacksonville, rather than giving an overview of conjure
practices in the state. It is interesting to note, however, that this shop was owned by a white
man, whose customers were both white and African American and from all classes.59 An
55
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 63-66.
56
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 133.
57
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 80.
58
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 81-84.
59
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 85-87.
48
unpublished field report likewise noted that "a number" of the many "witch doctors" in the
Jacksonville were white and that some of them have "large white followings."60 As a
consequence, it seems a blatant falsehood to open the "Folklore" chapter as follows:
Out of a past colored with superstition that was his religion the Negro has
developed certain practices relative to cures and beliefs that are peculiar only to
himself.61
The Guide also depicted African-American Floridians as jocular, music-loving,
emotional individuals, with their "Negro 'jooks,' primitive rural counterparts of resort night
clubs, where turpentine workers take their evening relaxation deep in the pine forests."62 The
word "jook" originally applied to "Negro bawdy houses" but came to be used for any night club,
black or white.63 African Americans also attended jooks to gamble and meet women, and
"[o]ccasionally the music is broken by the crack of a pistol; at other times differences are settled
with knives," and this despite such warning signs as:
No Guns or Knives Aloud.
You can DRINK in here, but go outside to get DRUNK!
No women allowed en hear; this don't mean Bob, it means you!64
Surely, the Guide did not expect that visitors to the state would be drawn to such rough and
tumble establishments, although no doubt people of all races and walks of life could be found in
the jooks.65 At any rate, the national office seems to have wanted discussion of the jooks
included—perhaps as an example of African American life and culture—given that a 1938
60
"Negro Superstitions," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 14, FSA.
61
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 71 (italics added).
62
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 114.
63
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 133.
64
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 356.
65
For additional discussion of Florida jook joints and their status as sites of working-class
resistance to racial segregation, see Madeleine Hirsiger Carr, "Denying Hegemony: The
Function and Place of Florida's Jook Joints during the Twentieth Century's First Fifty Years"
(PhD diss., Florida State University, 2002).
49
editorial comment on the Folklore essay pointed out that "[t]he account of the 'jook' is quite
inadequate in view of the excellent account in the Field Notes."66
The Florida Negro expanded on the Guide's discussion of the jook, explaining that in
rural areas it could consist of anything from a dance party to a dancing and gaming get-together
for people from neighboring communities. Some jooks were nightly events with a small
attendance, and others were weekly balls with large crowds.67 The Florida Negro also moved
beyond the Guide by describing more middle-class entertainments of the state's AfricanAmerican population, including tennis and golf and Mardi Gras balls.68 Even so, the general
picture painted of African-Americans in this discussion of "Amusements and Diversions" did
little to dispel the stereotype of the happy Negro, as evidenced by the following conclusion that
despite being the "underprivileged class" in Florida:
Nevertheless, the Negro is a cheerful individual. To a visitor who sees large
groups of Negroes for the first time, it is always a matter of surprise that the least
favored class in the community should be so care-free and happy; he is apt to
conclude that the Negro is a natural-born optimist.69
The Guide's "Music and Theater" chapter highlighted "Negro spirituals and secular
tunes," observing that "[m]usic always has been an emotional outlet for the Florida Negro, and
his songs have multiplied and shaped themselves to his tasks, his tribulations, and his
irrepressible spirits."70 The Florida Negro similarly emphasized the importance of music,
opening its chapter on "Workaday Songs" with the following sentiment: "The soul of the
66
H. G. Alsberg to Carita D. Corse, October 12 & 13, 1938, Editorial Correspondence, Florida,
1936-1939, Federal Writers' Project Papers, E13, RG 69, Florida State Guide Essay Folder, NA
67
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 57.
68
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 59-61.
69
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 56. McDonogh added an interesting note to this passage,
suggesting that perhaps it had a double meaning—yes, it fit the "naïve visitor's" stereotyped
image of African Americans, but contained a sense of irony for native Floridians who "should
know better." Ibid., n. 65, 130-31. Even if McDonogh's theory is correct, that does not negate
the fact that if The Florida Negro had been published with this passage, it would have
contributed to the perpetuation of this stereotype, both within and outside of Florida.
70
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 149.
50
American Negro seems to find its most natural expression in music."71 Although this chapter
was devoted to work songs that broke the monotony and drudgery of labor in the camps and on
the docks, a later section of The Florida Negro examined religious music, from sedate hymns to
"the semi-jazz music of the small, back-woods 'sanctified' churches." The focus here was on less
orthodox religious music, including the "swing hymn" influenced by jazz, chants, moans, and
wordless chants punctuated by shouting and screams.72
Regarding African-American religion in general, both the Guide and The Florida Negro
were most interested in the "sanctified" churches, which an unpublished field report defined as "a
wide range of small churches, often mere store-fronts, whose memberships are exceedingly
fluctuating," such as the Church of God and Saints of Christ, the Pillar of Truth, and the "Holy
Rollers" denominations.73 The Guide included the Church of God and Saints of Christ as a point
of interest in the Jacksonville city study, describing not only its history and architecture (as was
the usual approach with other churches mentioned in the Guide), but also its doctrines and
worship styles, which included speaking in tongues, healing, and exorcism.74 Likewise, The
Florida Negro devoted several paragraphs to describing the more unusual aspects of worship in
sanctified churches, rather than simply listing the number of members, congregations, and
income, as it did with the other main denominations in Florida. McDonogh added the following
apt notation to this section: "Sanctified Churches seemed to exercise a continuing fascination
over the fieldworkers of the Negro Unit." One wonders if this fascination was not a reflection of
class differences between the fieldworkers and their subjects, differences that perhaps also partly
explain why the Florida Negro Unit included so many stereotypic depictions in The Florida
Negro.
71
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 44.
72
McDonogh, The Florida Negro, 112. The Florida Negro also included a chapter on Negro
spirituals, one of the most "authentic contributions" to American culture from African
Americans. This chapter is incomplete, consisting of two introductory paragraphs and a list of
the spirituals that would have been included. Ibid., 114-115.
73
"Negro Customs," June 30, 1938, Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 4,
FSA.
74
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 192.
51
The somewhat patronizing attitude toward the sanctified church was evident in an
unpublished field report by Negro Unit member James Johnson regarding his visit to a revival at
Mount Pleasant Sanctified church in South Jacksonville. He began with a rather romanticized
description of the worshippers:
The congregation has now gathered, men and women of the soil. Their faces are
the pictures of complacency, their minds appear to be receptive. The Biblical
adage they seem to have imbibed: 'Ye must become as a little child or ye shall not
enter the kingdom of Heaven.'75
Given their childlike natures, the guest speaker—Mother Reed, from South Carolina—easily
worked them into an "emotional frenzy" in which many sprang from their seats and ran into the
aisle "with arms swinging, head pitched back, and uttering some holy words, feet prancing."76
Although not unaffected by the emotion of the scene, Johnson seemed proud of his ability to
remain detached, concluding:
Mother Reed then spied me sitting in a corner, She called out: 'We have a visitor
here, maybe he's got sumpin to say.' I must confess that I modestly arose and said
'Friends I'm indeed grateful for having the privilege to come out tonight. I
enjoyed the services, and I want you to pray for me.' I then sat down. You could
hear the Saints saying; 'Uh huh, we'll git him yet.'
A song was sung, the benediction said and church ended. Never so much
emotionalism have I ever witnessed, and the people appeared to be earnest in their
efforts.
They did not 'Git me' for I never returned.77
An FWP essay by Zora Neale Hurston entitled "Negro Religious Customs—The
Sanctified Church" also highlighted the primitive emotionalism of "Negro Holy Rollers" in the
Church of God in Christ and the Saints of God in Christ.78 In the essay, Hurston argued that the
75
"Negro Religious Customs," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 5, FSA.
76
"Negro Religious Customs."
77
"Negro Religious Customs."
78
Editors deleted this essay from the final draft of The Florida Negro, and it remained
unpublished until 1981 when Toni Cade Bambara included it in an anthology of Hurston's
folklore writings also entitled The Sanctified Church. Bordelon, Go Gator, 94.
52
sanctified church was a protest by "the more primitive Negro who associates the rhythm of sound
and motion with religion" against the "high-brow" African-American Protestant congregations
that had adopted white attitudes toward religion. Hurston saw "pagan" African survivals within
the drum beat rhythms and dancing of the sanctified church and described the worship service as
"drama with music," with the priest "chanting his barbaric thunder-poem before the altar with the
audience behaving something like a Greek chorus in that they 'pick him up' on every telling point
and emphasize it." In addition, she likened the congregants' "shouting" to the African belief in
"'Possession' by the gods." Although Hurston's goal in the essay was not to condemn the
sanctified church but to show its connection to African folk culture and religion, her use of
words like "primitive," "pagan," and "barbaric" made the overall tone in this essay somewhat
condescending.
Similarly, her focus on the music of the sanctified church seems to discount the sincerity
of "primitive" Negro spirituality, as when she concluded that the sermon in a sanctified church
was "loose and formless and is in reality merely a framework upon which to hang more songs.
Every opportunity to introduce a new rhythm is eagerly seized upon." 79 Almost certainly,
despite what Hurston's intentions may have been, readers (particularly white readers) without an
understanding of folklore and anthropology would not have found anything in "The Sanctified
Church" to challenge the stereotype of the overly-emotional, primitive Negro. In fact, Hurston's
celebration of low-brow African-American culture often made her the focus of criticism from her
peers in the Harlem Renaissance, as when Richard Wright criticized Their Eyes were Watching
God for perpetuating a minstrel image.80
A more explicit example of how Hurston may have helped unintentionally to perpetuate
such stereotypes is revealed in the following anecdote related by Carita Doggett Corse in a 1976
interview:
She [Hurston] asked me one time if I would like to go visit a store-front church in
Jacksonville. Of course, my editors and I were delighted. So about nine o'clock
one night we went down on the corner of Broad and Forsyth, further out Forsyth
Street than we were accustomed to going at night as it was sort of a Negro
79
Zora Neale Hurston, "Negro Religious Customs—The Sanctified Church," Stetson Kennedy
Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1 FF 4, FSA.
80
Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 241.
53
section. And there one of the abandoned stores had been occupied as a church by
the neighboring Negro congregation. We arrived about ten o'clock, and the
preacher wasn't preaching very earnestly and loudly at the time, but after we took
our seats, Zora whispered to me, 'I'm gonna get 'em on their feet.' She rose and
began clapping her hands and saying, in a rhythmic tone, 'Yeah Lord . . . Yes . . .
Yes . . . Yes,' until the rest of the congregation began to imitate her, and finally
they were in such ecstacies [sic] from the hypnotic rhythm that they began to roll
on the floor. I got very uneasy at this uncontrolled activity and whispered to Zora
that I would like to leave. So we slipped out a side door, and took our car from
the alley, and departed. But it made a deep impression on me, what the love of
rhythm did to the Negro people of that area.81
Assuming that Corse's account of this event is accurate, Hurston's willingness to manipulate the
congregation for her white friend's entertainment seems remarkably callous, especially given
Hurston's deep respect for the African-American folk. Of course, Hurston simply might have
been attempting to demonstrate the vibrancy of African-American religion, a lesson lost on
Corse, who filtered the event and the congregation's "uncontrolled activity" through the prism of
race, seeing only what she expected to see—their "love of rhythm."
In all likelihood, however, something else entirely was going on here. Hurston had a
history of courting white patrons by introducing them to African-American culture—years
earlier she also had taken Charlotte Osgood Mason to visit a small church in Harlem. Here, then,
Hurston may have once again been playing the role of "pet darkie" with Corse, exploiting the
traditional white southern mentality that singled out favorite individuals for special privileges
and attention, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the plight of the African-American
community as a whole.82 Unfortunately, in so doing, Hurston contributed to Corse's continuing
perception of the church-goers not as devout Christians but lovers of rhythm.
Although the overall presentation of African Americans within the Guide and The
Florida Negro was informed mainly by similar traditional stereotypes, some more realistic
aspects of their history and living conditions did appear. For example, after being barely
mentioned in the "History" essay, the Ku Klux Klan appeared four hundred pages later, in an
unvarnished account of the November 3, 1920, Election Day race riot in Ocoee. In the middle of
81
Nancy Williams, “An interview with the state director of the Federal Writers’ Project in
Florida, Dr. Carita Doggett Corse,” New Smyrna Beach, FL: [s.n.], 1976, University of Florida,
Special Collections.
82
Bordelon, Go Gator, 18.
54
Tour 9, sandwiched between two run-of-the-mill paragraphs about the town's founding and the
successful truck farming and subirrigation facilities of the surrounding area, the following
description of the riot appears:
One of several conflicting stories attributed to the trouble to the fact that July
Perry, Negro foreman of a large orange grove, appeared at the polls intoxicated,
brandishing a shotgun, and killed two officers sent to arrest him at his home.
According to another report substantiated by many eye-witnesses and published
widely, the conflict arose when Mose Norman, prosperous grove owner and the
town's most prominent Negro, ignored the threats of the local Ku Klux Klan and
came to the polls to cast his ballot. Badly beaten, he retired to the home of his
friend, July Perry. All versions of the conflict agree on what ensued. In an attack
on the house two whites were killed, Perry was wounded. During a lull in the
fighting Perry crawled away into the fields, but he was found and locked up in the
Orlando jail. At sunrise the jail was stormed; Perry was dragged forth, tied to the
back of an automobile, and finally hanged from a telephone pole along the
highway. Meantime, mobs had surrounded the Negro section of the town and
fired it, burning 30 houses and two churches, forcing men, women, and children
back into the flames. In all, some 35 Negroes perished. The conflict spread to
Orlando, Apopka, and Winter Garden, and for a week Negro districts in these
towns were patrolled by armed squads of whites. Since that time Negroes have
not been permitted to live in the town of Ocoee.83
This horrific passage has been quoted in its entirely due to the incongruity of its inclusion
in a work that, on the whole, avoids controversial issues.84 In general, the city descriptions and
tours included in the Guide contain more information about African-American life, apparently
because the Washington office insisted that every city description contain a paragraph regarding
its African-American population.85 In addition, Florida FWP Director Corse rejected a proposed
"Racial Elements" essay in the first part of the Guide, which meant that the bulk of the material
83
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 457.
84
Pamela Bordelon's edited collection of Zora Neale Hurston's FWP writings, Go Gator and
Muddy the Water, includes a longer essay by Hurston detailing the Ocoee Riot. It appears that
the Guide incorporated portions of Hurston's account, which was told from the AfricanAmerican perspective. Specifically, the report that the riot was sparked by Mose Norman's
attempt to vote comes from Hurston's essay, as does the description of July Perry's lynching: "It
was after sunup when the mob stormed the jail and dragged him out and tied him to the back of a
car and killed him and left his body swinging to a telephone post beside the highway." Bordelon,
Go Gator, 146-150, quote on 150.
85
Bordelon, “Florida Reflection,” 126.
55
on African Americans had to be put in the "Folklore" essay and spread throughout the tour and
city sections.86 Thus, most of the city descriptions and tours included depictions of the "Negro
settlements" and "slum" areas of the state's cities, as well as descriptions of African-American
life and labor.
Machinations within the Florida FWP office also may have accounted for the inclusion of
the Ocoee Riot passage, for there was a group of younger, more liberal writers within the Florida
project who preferred to present a more realistic representation of conditions in the state. As
Stetson Kennedy explained in a 1986 interview:
. . . throughout the writing of the Florida Guide, which you know took place over
years, there was an ongoing struggle to incorporate certain material about race
relations, segregation, lynching, poll tax—that sort of thing. Health conditions
among blacks, education, expenditures—all were crucial to life in Florida at the
time. This was the essence of it. There were those of us who wanted that to be
included in the guide. Another school thought it should be something to attract
tourists with the usual palm trees and bathing beauties, moonlight-and-magnolia
approach. The two camps were at constant war about this thing. We would write
in about lynching one day. The other camp would delete it the next day. This
was what was going on and on until we realized that it was a question of who got
in the last word.87
The contentiousness of this editing process was illuminated in a March 1939 letter from assistant
state editor Robert Cornwall to Kennedy (who was working in Key West at the time):
The project: miss your collaboration in the work. Max [Hunter] was scheduled to
come to Jax and incorporate the essays criticisms that the rest of us made, but he
was customarily late, so Cochrane and I work for two straight weeks on
incorporation and tight proofreading. Got all the liberal dope in them. Then,
Max appeared on scene, after the final typing. Was he hot? He, dr. [Corse],
Herndone, and I had battles. We won most of them, and I'm sure that
considerable of Max's assinity [sic] was exposed to Dr., although she gave no
indication of it. Max went back to Tampa for some more easeful drunks, the
shambles was cleared away, and the essays were prettied up again. A few hours
before the essays, which were in final and untouchable form, went to Washington,
Dr. secretly deleted matter on our supplement to the history essay. I didn't have a
chance to fight back; it was a case of Duby being in cahoots with her. I may fox
86
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 125.
87
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy, “The WPA Guide to Florida: A Conversation Between
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy,” Florida Forum 9 (Fall 1986): 11-12.
56
her, though. I edited the chronology today, and put some of the deleted stuff in it,
which may get by. There is still a chance that Lowenstein, the militantly-liberal
guy in Washington, may replace some of the essay material—he's Max's pet
hatred and I judge that he understands Max.88
Perhaps then, the realists "got in the last word" on the Ocoee riot before copy was sent to
Washington. In addition, the Washington office requested that Hurston travel there with state
editors Max Hunter and Rolland Phillips to assist in the Guide's final editing, which almost
certainly would have guaranteed that the account of the Ocoee Riot remained in the final,
published version.89
In the final analysis, however, the "palm trees and bathing beauties" camp won the war.
Despite the reality of conditions reflected in field reports and interviews, both the Florida Guide
and The Florida Negro—the two most significant Florida FWP works addressing the state's
African-American life and culture—did not stray far from traditional Southern notions about
race. Thus, despite the best efforts of national FWP editors to ensure fair and accurate portrayals
of African Americans and their contributions to American life, Florida's African American
remained the unskilled, illiterate laborer; the happy, fun-loving darkie; the uneducated,
superstitious hoodoo practitioner; and the overly-emotional Holy Roller. Unfortunately, these
stereotypes, so embedded in the southern psyche, easily transferred to groups that defied simple
racial classification, of which Florida, with its long history and diverse population, boasted more
than a few. Perhaps it is in the FWP's treatment of such marginal groups—the Creoles of
Pensacola, the Dominickers of the Ponce de Leon, the Bahamian Conchs of Riviera—that the
race and class biases of the Florida writers become most visible.
88
Letter to Stetson Kennedy from Bob Cornwall, dated March 22, 1939, Stetson Kennedy
Archive, RG 158, .S 1585, Box 1, FF 11A, FSA. Presumably, the "Duby" Cornwall referred to
here was FWP office manager Moselle Dubose, who was a member of the "Palm Tree and
Bathing Beauty group," along with Corse and the project's two primary editors, Max Hunter and
Rolland Phillips. Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 89.
89
Bordelon, Go Gator, 27-28.
57
CHAPTER 3
THE FLORIDA FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT
AND CONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL IDENTITIES
The Florida Guide's Index entry for "Negroes" was composed of such not unexpected
words and phrases as bolita, civil rights of, folklore, jooks, migratory workers, segregation,
superstitions, voodooism, and work songs. Somewhat incongruously, however, the first
reference in the entry is to "Bahamans," followed shortly by "Creoles," two of the state's mixedrace groups that the Florida FWP elected to classify as African American, despite the fact that
neither of the groups identified themselves in that way.1 Such classification, as well as the
FWP's treatment of such groups in the Florida Guide and other written materials, reveals just
how entrenched racial stereotypes were and provides insights into the race and class assumptions
that shaped the work of the FWP.
The Guide's city study of Pensacola described its "peculiar ethnic group calling
themselves 'Creoles,' " who were the descendants of a "Spanish and Negro admixture" that
prospered in the city prior to the Civil War. Many of them owned their own homes, and though
whites did not accept them as social equals, they held themselves "aloof" from the city's AfricanAmerican populations. A more detailed depiction of Pensacola's "Creole Negroes" can be found
in the unpublished FWP manuscripts, wherein they were described as:
. . . remnant of a much larger group whose predominating white blood sets them
apart from the colored race. There is pathos in the isolation of this group who
refuse to associate with the Negro, yet are barred from the society of white
people.2
The Guide's account thus not only toned down the underlying racism of this passage, it also
rejected its flowery prose. It also did not include the manuscript's more favorable discussion of
1
Florida Federal Writers' Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939), 588.
2
"Creoles in Pensacola," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S1583, Box 1, FF 15, Florida State
Archives, Tallahassee, Florida (hereinafter, FSA)
58
the Creole-operated barber shops in Pensacola that were preferred by many to white shops, or the
fact that Creoles could serve on juries and testify in court.3
Another mixed-race people addressed by the Florida FWP were the "Dominickers" who
lived in the backcountry near the town of Ponce de Leon, in Holmes County in the northwestern
portion of the state. According to the Guide, this "part Negro and part white" group originated in
the early 1860s, when a white widow married a male slave.4 Their five children married both
whites and African-Americans, and their descendants came to be called "Dominickers" because
they were "black and white, like an old Dominicker chicken." The Guide provided a fairly bleak
description of their lives:
The men are of good physique, but the women are often thin and worn in early
life. All have large families, and the fairest daughter may have a brother
distinctly Negroid in appearance . . . Dominicker children are not permitted to
attend white schools, nor do they associate with Negroes. About 20 children
attend a one-room school. As no rural bus is provided, the pupils often walk
several miles to attend classes. An old cemetery, containing a large number of
Dominicker graves, adjoins the school.5
Thus, the Guide's overall message regarding these known mixed-race groups, including
more prosperous ones like the Pensacola Creoles, was that they were social outcasts, accepted by
neither whites nor African-Americans. The undeniable implication of such a conclusion is that
there is nothing quite so sad as belonging to neither race.
Perhaps this is why the FWP devoted to much time and energy to determining the race of
another small, insular community of Floridians—the Bahamian Conchs of Riviera. The group
was discovered in 1938, by Veronica E. Huss, a young federal writer who had been given the
assignment of reporting on society life in Palm Beach, surely a daunting task for a poor girl from
3
"Creoles in Pensacola."
4
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 445. The Guide did not address the issue that the widow
could not have married a "slave" legally, nor did it give a definite year for the marriage.
5
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 445-446. Although there appears to be little existing
academic scholarship on the Dominickers, a 1972 article in American Speech by a native of
Holmes County, Florida, notes that local whites used the term "dominicker" to generally
designate anyone of mixed race ancestry. Ralph D. Howell, "Dominicker: A Regional Racial
Term," American Speech 47, no. 3/4 (Autumn-Winter 1972): 305-306.
59
La Belle, in rural Hendry County, Florida. Eager to prove herself, Huss plucked up her courage
and knocked on the doors of Palm Beach's elite citizens, reportedly landing interviews with such
prominent figures as Colonel (later General) Omar Bradley.6 As it turned out, the wealthy and
powerful did not remain the focus of Huss' reportage, for she soon discovered a community of
people no less foreign to her—the Bahamian Conchs living just across Lake Worth from the
elegant homes and hotels of Palm Beach. Huss subsequently spent more than a year getting to
know the Riviera Conchs and faithfully transcribing their stories and songs in field reports that
were never published.7
Huss was one of national FWP director Henry Alsberg's "would-be writers." Like most
FWP workers, she never achieved literary greatness, and as a result, little remains of her in the
historical record beyond field reports contained in the scattered manuscript collections of the
Florida FWP. Fortunately, in the 1980s, photographer Charles Foster, who worked briefly with
Huss in Riviera in 1939, would track down valuable, though sparse, information about Huss' life
in connection with his 1991 book, Conchtown USA: Bahamian Fisherfolk in Riviera Beach,
Florida.8
Though she was born in Kansas, Huss' family moved to Fort Myers, Florida, when she
was still a young child. She was in sixth grade at the start of the Great Depression and had just
completed seventh grade when hard times drove the family to move to her grandmother's farm
near La Belle, in the Everglades. Apparently, her formal education ended at this time, though
Huss refused to succumb completely to the Great Depression. According to her sister, Huss
began working to support the family during this period, while also walking four miles from the
farm to La Belle in order to attend typing classes. Sometime around 1935, when she was just
6
Charles C. Foster, Conchtown USA: Bahamian Fisherfolk in Riviera Beach, Florida (Boca
Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1991), 49.
7
Foster, Conchtown, 49.
8
Foster was a photographer with the Florida Federal Art Project who traveled to Riviera in May
1939 to photograph Huss' Conch subjects. Like Huss' Conch study, his photos were never
published, and he decided in the late 1980s to publish them himself. With Stetson Kennedy's
urging and assistance, he decided to expand the publication into a book incorporating some of
Huss' research on the Conchs. His additional research for the book included speaking with some
of the remaining Riviera Conchs, as well as Veronica Huss' sister. Unfortunately, he does not
provide source citations in Conchtown, but it is likely that he obtained information on Huss'
personal history from her sister.
60
eighteen, Huss obtained work from the WPA. Because she had access to a government car and
traveled throughout the Everglades, it seems likely that she was working as a social worker.9
If in fact she was a social worker, Huss probably received some additional education
from the State Board of Social Welfare. Florida did not have an "adequate number of welltrained social workers" when the Board was organized in 1935, but it quickly developed a
training program that incorporated classes, reading material, and skilled guidance in social
work.10 In June of 1936, the Board also adopted a merit examination process "to test the
applicant's general ability and understanding of the social and economic problems of the day."11
This examination process included an assessment of experience and education, a written exam,
and a personal interview. Additionally, applicants had to be high school graduates, at least
twenty-one years old, and residents of Florida.12 If Foster was correct about Huss' age and
educational background, these requirements would have ended her work as a social worker.
Little is known about how Huss came to the Florida FWP, but Foster reported hearing
that Florida Director Dr. Carita Doggett Corse "took Veronica under her wing and treated her as
a protégé" after meeting Huss during a trip to south Florida.13 While working in the state's main
FWP office in Jacksonville, Huss showed a "lack of experience," and she was sent to Palm
Beach to report on the local socialites.14 This assignment, an exception to the general rule that
writers be assigned to work in their own localities, among friends, neighbors, and relatives, may
have resulted from personal tensions within the state office. Whatever the reason for the
assignment, Stetson Kennedy would later recall that Huss was overwhelmed by Palm Beach,
9
Foster, Conchtown, 48.
10
State Board of Social Welfare, "Organization of the State Board of Social Welfare," Biennial
Report of the Florida State Board of Social Welfare Covering the Period August, 1935 to March,
1937, Publication No. 4 (May 1937), 65.
11
State Board of Social Welfare, "Organization," 66.
12
State Board of Social Welfare, "Organization," 66.
13
Foster, Conchtown, 48.
14
Foster, Conchtown, 49.
61
where she "just walked the streets wide-eyed before she could muster the courage to ring
doorbells."15
Although Kennedy painted a picture of Huss as a timid naïf, his assessment may have
been biased by their professional disagreements. As a series of letters from Florida FWP writer
Robert Cornwall to Kennedy reveal, there was no love lost between Huss and Kennedy regarding
who should get credit for the Conch study. As the reporter on the ground, Huss appears to have
been solely responsible for collecting information and compiling reports on the Conch
community in Riviera. Kennedy—who had been placed in charge of collecting the state's
folklore, oral histories, and social-ethnic studies in 1938—oversaw Huss' efforts and apparently
advised her on composition of her final study. The extent to which they collaborated is not clear,
but Huss certainly seems to have asserted her right to claim sole authorship, no doubt angering
Kennedy and his supporters. Indeed, Cornwall's description of the episode in a letter to Kennedy
was undeniably harsh:
[The national editors'] suggestions on the Conch study puffed up [Huss'] ego in a
dangerous fashion, and she fancies herself near the top of the literary ladder—the
dolt. In the first flush of her pride, I suggested that you [Kennedy] had something
to do with the development of the study. She acknowledged it, and said 'Why, do
you think I'm conceited, Bob?' I replied 'Yes,' and the tears began to fall.16
This animosity towards Huss appears to be part of a larger conflict within the Florida
FWP office between Corse and the more liberally-minded faction of her staff headed by
Cornwall and Kennedy.17 Whether due to her gender, her class, her youth and inexperience, or
her personality, Huss—a favorite of Corse—seems to have come under particularly vicious
attack. In another letter to Kennedy, Cornwall derided Corse's belief in "the sugar-coated little
15
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy, "The WPA Guide to Florida: A Conversation Between
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy," Florida Forum 9 (Fall 1986), 10.
16
Letter to Stetson Kennedy from Bob Cornwall, dated March 22, 1939, Stetson Kennedy
Archive, RG 158, .S 1585, Box 1, FF 11A, FSA.
17
See Pamela G. Bordelon, "The Federal Writers' Project's Mirror to America: The Florida
Reflection" (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1991), 89-91.
62
fiction that Veronica had emerged as a writer in her own right."18 The following statement
makes even clearer his contempt for both Corse and Huss:
Dr. prides herself on her fancied ability to teach others the secret of her own
success as a writer—the benevolent patroness gives largess, initiative, and ability
to those who but yesterday climbed out of the gutter of poverty onto the relief
payroll of the Federal Writers' Project.19
Whatever the genesis of this acrimony, it cannot have been comfortable for Huss in the state
office. Little wonder, then, that she dedicated herself to the Conch study and remained so highly
proprietary over it.
Despite, or perhaps because of such tensions, Huss worked hard in Riviera to prove that
she was more than a young girl just one step out of the "gutter of poverty." She took her job
seriously, spending months interviewing and getting to know several Conch families and drafting
pages upon pages of reports. Of course, the irony of the situation was that Cornwall had not
been that far off the mark. Huss was an inexperienced writer whose work product, despite
Corse's tutelage, did not impress the Washington office. In a letter to Corse regarding Huss'
manuscript, Alsberg offered this assessment:
The Conch Town manuscript leaves me somewhat cold. As the start of a novel or
other type of narrative it might have some prospects, but for our purposes it holds
little promise. It is much too rambling, with an extremely difficult dialect, and
never does give us a picture of the Conchs. . . . What to do with this manuscript is
frankly beyond me.20
Such criticism may be a reflection of Huss' lack of formal education. Indeed, her background
was probably not significantly less humble than that of the Riviera Conchs. By the summer of
1938, when she first came into contact with the Conchs, however, Huss seems to have developed
a very middle-class worldview, something clearly reflected in the attitude of condescension that
characterized most of her written observations about the Conchs. Perhaps she acquired this
18
Letter to Stetson Kennedy from Bob Cornwall, dated March 28, 1939, Stetson Kennedy
Archive, RG 158, .S 1585, Box 1, FF 11A, FSA
19
Cornwall to Kennedy, March 28, 1939.
20
Quoted in Foster, Conchtown, 49, without a source citation.
63
attitude while working as WPA social worker. Or perhaps it was something ingrained in her
personality—a sense of self that had pulled her from the "gutter of poverty" into the offices of
the FWP. Either way, by the time she reached Riviera, Huss surely saw herself as quite different
from and even superior to her poor subjects, whom she approached in a very professional
manner.
Conch fishermen had arrived in the Riviera area around the turn of the twentieth century.
During the winter fishing season, they set up camps at an old inlet that cut through an island
(later known as Singer Island) separating the Atlantic Ocean from Lake Worth. This location
provided them easy access to the fish houses at West Palm Beach and Miami. Sometime
between 1910 and 1914, about twenty-five fishermen built dwellings on the island, and as their
families gradually joined them, the settlement grew to include a Pentecostal church and
schoolhouse.21
By 1920, the Conch community had moved to the mainland across Lake Worth. A
number of factors precipitated this move, including a major hurricane that struck the island
community in 1919 and construction on the mainland of a loading platform for fish shipments by
the Florida East Coast Railway.22 Of perhaps more pressing concern to the Conch settlers was
the appearance on Singer Island of a man from Lake Worth who informed them that he owned
the land and that they must pay him a monthly rent. After moving across the lake, however, they
learned that the "land shark" in fact had not owned the land and, even worse, had used them to
acquire it. As Riviera Conch Wilbur Roberts later recalled:
'E told us if we'd all pay 'im a dollar a piece for back rent, 'e'd let us stay. Well,
that haint much money, so we paid 'im and 'e let us be. 'E come back in a month
or two, and this time 'e 'ad papers showin that the land was his. 'E told us if we
wanted to stay we'd 'ave to pay 'im $20 a month. That was too much for poor
fisherfolk like us to pay, so we moved. We moved right here to Riviera. We
found out afterwards that 'e didn't own the land at first, but when we give 'im the
dollar, that was what give 'im a legal claim.23
21
Lynn Brink, ed., A History of Riviera Beach, Florida (Riviera Beach: Bicentennial
Commission of Riviera Beach, Florida, 1976), 23.
22
Foster, Conchtown, 90-91.
64
Once in Riviera, the Conchs bought land and built homes near the fish docks and the lake, and by
1922, there were seventy-five commercial fishing families, many of whom were active in efforts
to incorporate the town in that year.24
In addition to fishing, some Riviera Conchs also profited from rum-running after
ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and passage of the Volstead Act in 1919. Bahamian
smugglers—operating special, lightweight boats with powerful engines—could make two trips to
the Florida coast per night. They unloaded their contraband on the ocean side of Singer Island,
and it was brought by second boat across Lake Worth, sometimes by Riviera Conch fishermen.25
Despite their legal and illegal income, the Conchs were never a wealthy community, and
their situation worsened markedly in 1928 after another hurricane struck the Lake Worth area.
Combined with the collapse of the Florida land boom and the onset of the Great Depression, the
hurricane marked the beginnings of very hard times for the community. Years later, Bernice
Smith (daughter of Huss' main informant, Wilbur Roberts) would describe their situation to
Charles Foster in connection with his research for Conchtown:
For a while after the hurricane, people came around in trucks with food and milk
for the kids. We got a piece of meat once a month. After that stopped, and before
the WPA and welfare came along, we had almost nothing. At first my husband,
Dick, and I rented a house but we just couldn't make it. We had to move in with
my father and mother.26
Their circumstances had not improved significantly by the time Huss arrived in Riviera in
1938. As Foster recalled of his own visit to the area, everything looked "run down and in need
of repair."27 Most of the Conchs could not afford electricity, and they had no running water or
23
Veronica E. Huss, "Wilbur Edward Roberts, A Riviera Conch," American Life Histories:
Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940,
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpalife.html.
24
Brink, Riviera Beach, 24; Foster, Conchtown, 98.
25
Foster, Conchtown, 100-101.
26
Foster, Conchtown, 105.
27
Foster, Conchtown, 105.
65
indoor toilets. The Roberts family continued to use an outhouse despite the "Condemned" sign
placed on it by the Health Department.28
In early August of 1938, Huss was introduced to the Roberts and Smith families by Mrs.
Dorethea Comstock, a caseworker with the local Board of Social Welfare.29 Huss recognized the
value of meeting her subjects through a common acquaintance. After she had known the Roberts
and Smiths for a few weeks, Huss had Bernice Smith introduce her to the Harding family, who
along with the Roberts would become her best informants in Riviera. Regarding their first
meeting, Huss wrote, "[h]aving been introduced by one of their own clan (Mrs. Bernice Smith), I
was more than welcome. Broad smiles greeted me, and their untidiness of dress brought many
apologies. I put them at ease though and assured them that there was no need for apology."30
Huss' general approach, perhaps developed during her days as a social worker, always
was to become friendly with subjects before asking them probing questions—"Opening my visit
[to the Hardings] with all the friendliness that I could muster, I soon had them discussing the
subjects I wished most to hear."31 Similarly, in her report of one of her earliest meetings with the
Roberts family she noted:
They are not very freindly [sic] until they know you, or unless one has the knack
of appealing ot [sic] their childish ways and thus drawing them out. If the latter
is an approach which the interviewer understands, it is not long before he has
accomplished his task. This can often be done through a genuine interest in their
discussion and a complete understanding without any form of rebuke or [sic]
anything they do or say. I have no trouble with them at all.32
The Conchs had additional reasons, however, for being friendly to Huss. To them, she
was a representative of the federal government who might have some power to help improve
their situation. From the first, they spoke with Huss about their straitened economic
circumstances. As she noted, "[n]umerous complaints are lodged against the U.S. Government
28
Foster, Conchtown, 105.
29
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 2, FSA.
30
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
31
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
32
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter II," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 2, FSA.
66
by these people."33 Huss did recognize that they hoped for her assistance with obtaining relief
from both the Board of Social Welfare and Works Progress Administration, stating that "[t]hey
are friendly to me with this as their main idea." Indeed, she admitted that she had already spoken
to the Red Cross on behalf of several Conch families.34
Their main concern at the time appeared to have been the perceived inequity in
regulations of the fishing industry. The Conchs were forced to sell their catches at "the lowest of
prices," to licensed fish dealers who resold the fish at "exorbinant [sic] prices."35 The local
Pentecostal pastor, Carl L. White, also attributed the Conchs' poverty to this practice: "They
have been betrayed and gypped right and left by the fish dealers, which accounts for their
impoverished condition."36 Later, when Huss toured the local fish house, its manager also asked
her to plead his own case with the government:
In return for the information he gave me, he requested me to ask the government
to 'please buy the fisherman's fish, so that even at the lowest prices, they could be
kept fishing and thus making a living.' His idea proved to be worthwhile, for he
stated that the government bought other things to give to the people in form of
commodoties [sic]; therefore why can't they buy fish?37
It is notable that Huss characterized the Conchs' concerns as "complaints" rather than
legitimate grievances. In addition, throughout her reports on the Conch families, she repeatedly
made less than favorable reference to the fact that they benefited from federal relief. Her earliest
report, dated August 12, 1938, included the observation that "[t]here is a noted evidence to avoid
work when possible, unless it is fishing. Government welfare takes care of the majority of
33
"Palm Beach Guide, Riviera Conchs," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 3,
FSA.
34
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter II."
35
"Palm Beach Guide, Riviera Conchs."
36
Veronica Huss and Stetson Kennedy, "The Riviera Conch," November 1938, Florida Folklife
Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 3, FSA.
37
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter VIII," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 2, FSA.
67
them."38 Her opinion on this issue did not change as she spent more time with the Conchs. One
month later, on September 13, 1938, Huss observed:
Being fishermen and with this industry at its lowest, their livings are gleaned
mainly from charitable organizations and work on WPA. They are strange people
and seem to think that the world owes them a living.39
She repeated this refrain yet again in her report dated October 10, 1938, remarking that "they
think that the world owes them a living and they intend to take all they can get."40
Comments like these reveal a distinct bias against direct relief, which in the words of
President Roosevelt sapped the "vitality of our people."41 In addition, Huss apparently did not
recognize the irony of the fact that she herself was on relief, albeit work relief. Many anti-New
Deal and conservative Americans liked federal work relief no better than direct relief, especially
when it involved white-collar work like Huss'. Some FWP critics observed that the nation would
now have WPA "pencil leaners" in addition to "shovel leaners."42 The project also came under
fire repeatedly for being a "boondoggle" of little value to the public.43
The Riviera Conchs also received aid from private charity efforts, particularly through
the Community Club house sponsored by wealthy women from Palm Beach and directed by a
professional social worker, Mrs. Marie Anderson.44 At the Community Club, Conch women
engaged in craft work, making hats, purses, and rugs of braided palm fronds, flowers of shells
and fish scales, and carved coconut souvenirs. These items would later be sold in Palm Beach to
38
"Palm Beach Guide, Riviera Conchs."
39
"Riviera Conchs, September 13, 1938," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF
2, FSA.
40
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter V," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 3, FSA.
41
United States Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 1st sess., 1935, 79, pt 1, 95,
quoted in Cramer, "National Resource," 51.
42
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 48.
43
Cramer, "National Resource," 57.
44
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter III," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box I, FF 3, FSA.
68
local women or tourists. The women also made quilts to be distributed among their own needy
families.45
The Community Club was run like a nondenominational mission, with ministers from
various area churches invited to give short talks and lead devotionals. On the day of Huss' visit,
Father Fraziel of Lake Worth Episcopal Church spoke about "the present world crisis and the
dire necessity of continual peace." Huss doubted, however, that the women understood his
message. She also made note of their general lack of interest in his talk, which they indicated by
continual squirming and whispering, until he cut his speech short. While there, Huss learned that
the Community Club had the Conch women read a daily lesson from the Bible or the Upper
Room, a Methodist-Episcopal publication. She concluded that "[i]t is evident that they hope to
wean these people from the Church of God which they now attend."46
Huss did not dwell overly on the Conchs' religion, though she did note that they generally
subscribed to fundamentalist Protestantism. Although Wilbur Roberts had not been a church
member previously, once he moved to Riviera, he joined the "local Gospel Hall, which is a part
of the Holiness Religion."47 Similarly, Huss' other main informant, midwife Izzelly Harding,
attended the "Holy Roller" Gospel Hall.48 Regarding the Conchs' religion, Huss concluded
rather cynically that "[a]pparently they are deeply religious, but whether this religion is any more
than talk is hard to tell."49
Overall, Huss seemed less interested in the Conchs' religious practices than in their
superstitions, just as the Florida Guide and The Florida Negro had emphasized AfricanAmerican superstitions. For instance, they repeatedly disavowed any belief in black magic or
45
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter V." To decide which families would receive the quilts, the women
voted among themselves to determine those most in need. After the vote, the chosen names were
put in a hat and the family whose name was drawn won the quilt. Ibid.
46
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter V."
47
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter X," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 3, FSA.
48
"State Editorial Identification Form, February 17, 1939," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S
1583, Box 1, FF 3, FSA.
49
"Riviera Conchs, September 13, 1938," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF
2, FSA.
69
voodoo, yet they often told stories that belied such claims. Huss made frequent note of this
contradictory behavior, as in this meeting with Mrs. Harding:
Additional superstition met me on this interview, yet, as in the Roberts home I
was told that they did not believe in such things because it is forbidden by the
Bible. But when telling their stories, Mrs. Harding especially, stated that they
were true and that she would be willing to stand before God and remain true to
her word.50
Mrs. Harding related several stories of voodoo "kun-jure" or "o-bear" practiced by blacks
(and some whites) in the Bahamas, including instances when she or a family member was the
victim of a spell.51 Whites in the Bahamas so feared obeah that they "dare not treat the negro as
they are treated here in our own Southern States," for even to call them "niggers" was sure "to
bring wrath down on your head."52 Mrs. Harding also admitted that "obeah tricks" had followed
them to Riviera.53 Huss speculated that the Conchs' denied their superstition because white
Americans associated it with blacks and a lack of education:
At frequent intervals, I am reminded by these humble folk, that they do not
believe in the art of witchcraft, mainly because it is forbidden by the Bible. Yet
as before, when each story is related, the 'teller' maintains that it is true and
practically demands that you believe them before going on. It is odd, the manner
in which they try to hide the fact that they are as superstitious as their negro [sic]
neighbors. They are proud and do not want the Americans to think that they
50
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter VI," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 3, FSA.
51
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter VII," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 2, FSA;
"kun-jure" and "o-bear" are dialect references to the practice of obeah, for which Huss provided
the following definition taken from the New Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "OBEAH: (Of
African origin) A religion, probably of Ashanti origin, practiced esp. formerly, among the
Negroes, chiefly of the British West Indies, the Guianas, and the Southeastern U.S., and
characterized by the use of sorcery and magic ritual. Its practice was formerly often attended by
grave or fatal consequences, its practitioners (called obeah doctors, or obeah men and women)
being adept in the use of poisonous herbs, ground glass and the like, and the production and
fostering of fear." "State Editorial Identification Form, February 17, 1939," Florida Folklife
Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF 3, FSA.
52
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter VII."
53
"Obeah," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF3, FSA.
70
believe in such things for they realize that things of this sort are connected with
people of little education.54
While at the Community Club house, Huss also observed how the social worker, Mrs. Anderson,
interacted with the Conchs. After Father Fraziel finished speaking, Anderson spoke about club
business, and Huss criticized Anderson’s manner of talking down to the Conchs:
They are ignorant, but not so much so that they cannot understand that she is
treating them, like she considered herself much better than they. . . . Mrs.
Anderson would have much more success with them, if she were to act more as
one of them, than one who is there to make a show of herself. Condescension on
the part of those who hope to work with them merely draws forth all the
stubborness [sic] that they are capable of commanding.55
Huss' own condescension toward the Conchs, however, was evident in her assessments of
their essential characters. She was quick to point out their vulgarity: "It might be well to
mention that vulgar talk among these people is common. I noticed this first thing."56 She later
provided the following joke as an example of this vulgarity:
Riddle-ma, riddle-ma, rocket,
What a poor man throws away,
A rich man puts in his pocket.
What is it?
The answer was "snot," for rich men blow their noses on a handkerchief that goes back into their
pocket, while poor men blow their noses onto the ground.57
In contrast, Huss makes no such comment about the following poem contained in the
same report:
The woodpecker flew in the schoolhouse yard,
He pecked and pecked until his pecker got hard.
54
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter VII."
55
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter V."
56
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter II."
57
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
71
He lit on the sill above the door.
He pecked and pecked until his pecker got sore
He looked at his pecker and his countenance fell,
No more could he peck until his pecker got well.
Now every time he thinks of the schoolhouse yard,
His head turns red and his pecker gets hard.58
Huss accepted without comment the very literal explanation—"as intriguing as the poem
itself"—that this poem was about a young woodpecker who left the nest when his beak was still
tender but had to return to the nest after he made it sore by trying to use it.59 One cannot help but
wonder if Huss truly missed the sexual metaphor of this poem, or if this was a case of purposeful
ignorance, due to her own, more middle-class mores.
In addition to noting their vulgarity, Huss commented throughout her reports on the
Conchs' simple and childlike natures. Indeed, "these simple folk" appeared to be her preferred
label for the Conch community as a whole. She also characterized as childlike their
understandable enthusiasm at being asked to share their stories and experiences. "Again I might
say that these people are childish, easily excited and prone to do all the talking. They have a
habit of trying to talk, all at once, this being the main reason that I had little chance to ask
questions."60
Her apparent frustration during this particular visit with the Conchs may have stemmed
from the fact that Stetson Kennedy (by that time, Florida folklore editor) had sent her a
questionnaire with specific items to be answered. Instead of giving her a chance to complete this
assigned task, the Conchs continued to supply her with "[s]tories of the Bahamas which gave me
little chance to ask questions."61 Kennedy’s questions focused not on the Conchs' history and
folklore, but on their current circumstances, including their living conditions, their speech
patterns, and their interactions with African Americans.
58
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
59
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
60
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IX," Florida Folklife Archive, RG 158, .S 1583, Box 1, FF3, FSA.
61
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IX."
72
Regarding the Conchs' homes and sanitation practices, Huss reported that the average
house was small, of wood-frame construction, and unfinished on the inside. Some also had
modern conveniences like electricity and radios, although generally, the Conchs' used outhouses
and obtained their water via hand pump. Here again, Huss' modest sensibilities emerged in her
descriptions of their lifestyles. She did not see any magazines, books, or newspapers in the
Roberts' home, although she had heard that Bernice Smith was very fond of "dirty" magazines.
More generally, she noted that "there is a decided stench of too close living, too much cooking
without sufficient airing and the odor of general body filth."62 This particular observation made
it into the Life History of the Riviera Conchs as the slightly less strident phrase: "Each residence
has an odor of too close living in small quarters."63
Kennedy's interest in relations between the Conchs and African Americans echoed a
theme that ran through almost all of Huss' reportage from Riviera. Her very first report noted
that "Negro, Spanish and white blood are predominate in the make-up of these people. (Those I
talked with were all white)," and from that point on, it appears as if one of her primary goals was
to determine their actual racial make-up.64 She learned from caseworker Dorethea Comstock
that the Roberts and Smiths were "all white," but after meeting the Hardings, Huss noted that
they were "dark skinned and evidently one of those families for which Riviera is known.
Meaning that negro [sic] blood runs in their veins."65 She later asked Bernice Smith if the
Hardings were of mixed race, and although Smith did not know the answer, she did tell Huss of
other Riviera Conchs who were. Smith also explained the Conch belief that Bahamians from
Long Island (such as the Hardings) were generally of mixed race, due to its scarcity of
population. On that island, blacks and whites were drawn together through loneliness, "until
each considered the other as good as himself, and the act of marrying one another cmae [sic]
without thought or care."66
62
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IX."
63
Kennedy and Huss, "The Riviera Conchs."
64
"Palm Beach Guide, Riviera Conchs."
65
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
66
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IV."
73
Smith's and the other Riviera Conchs' apparent belief of this miscegenation on Long
Island appears to have been Huss' main proof that the Riviera Conchs were of mixed race.
Physical appearance alone was not a clear enough indicator. For instance, in one of her
descriptions of Mrs. Harding, Huss listed her father as white and her mother as "full blooded
Negro," and then proceeded to describe her as "[t]all, well-built, with Anglo-Saxon
appearance."67 Similarly, when Smith pointed out known "half breeds" (a term that Huss used
frequently on her field reports) to Huss at the Community Club, she made careful examination of
their features, concluding that "[a]ll have heavy features, but of the numerous profiles I studied,
they seem more pointed than flat."68 At another time, she noted that many of the Riviera Conchs
deemed to have African American blood had more the look of Native Americans, with "the high
cheek bones and long noses of the Indian, rather than the general flat features of the average
negro."69
Although this question of whether the Riviera Conchs were of mixed race seemed
foremost in Huss' mind, she never seemed quite sure how to confirm it. She asked those whom
she knew (or believed) to be white but remained hesitant to push the issue too far for fear of
insulting her subjects. Unfortunately, the state office pushed the issue, which placed her in a
difficult position:
Although the Questionaire [sic] requests that I broach them on the subject, I still
do not think it advisable, for it would not only be a breach of etiquette, but lower
the ethics of sound interviewing and probably cut off the entire flow of
information. . . . but if the same information may be obtained elsewhere, I will do
all in my power to bring it to the attention of the project.70
Despite all of Huss' difficulty determining the exact nature of the Riviera Conchs' ethnicity, the
Florida Guide described them thus: "Those on the Keys are part Spanish while some of the
67
"State Editorial Identification Form, February 17, 1939."
68
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter V."
69
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IX."
70
"Riviera Conchs, Chapter IX."
74
Riviera Conchs bear evidence of Negro blood, having dark skins, kinky hair, thick lips, and
heavy features."71
This conclusion, which to modern readers would constitute obvious racial stereotyping,
was reflective of generally-accepted concepts of race in the 1930s. As Stetson Kennedy later
would admit, "those were the days when stereotyping on the basis of race, religion, class, region
and even occupation dominated the public mind."72 Such prejudice was reinforced within the
FWP by the fact that locally-hired writers brought regional attitudes toward race to their work.
In the South, where Jim Crow ruled, "white chauvinism and paternalism were inevitable in the
copy produced by whites."73 In an effort to ameliorate the influence of local prejudices and
standardize FWP field work, the national office developed an American Guide Manual based on
the experiences of trained anthropologists and sociologists who advised the FWP.74 The manual
could never completely counter, however, the provincialism, sometimes racism, of writers in the
field. That probably was a losing battle, given that even the most respected anthropologist of the
day, Franz Boas, was willing to use differences in black and white physiognomy to support his
argument that Europeans should not be divided into separate races.75 In such an atmosphere,
Zora Neale Hurston (who had studied under Boas) once remarked that " 'white people could not
be trusted to collect the lore of others.' "76
Veronica Huss' work with the Riviera Conchs provides a concrete example of how the
personal biases and prejudices of local FWP writers colored the project's interactions with and
representations of minority ethnic groups, despite the national office's desire to move beyond
traditional stereotypes. Although Huss herself came from humble beginnings, by 1938 she had
71
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 313.
72
Kennedy, "A Personal View," 3.
73
Kennedy, "A Personal View," 3.
74
Catherine Aileen Stewart, "Native Subjects: 'Race' and the Rise of Ethnographic Authority in
the Federal Writers’ Project," (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999),
53
75
David Kadlec, "Zora Neale Hurston and the Federal Folk," Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 3
(2000): 477.
76
Quoted in Kadlec, "Zora Neale Hurston," 477.
75
adopted and internalized a decidedly middle-class worldview. This is apparent in her
observations about her Conch subjects, which were always paternalistic and frequently
judgmental. Her repeated criticism of their acceptance of charity and federal relief make obvious
her conception of them as the "other"—she in no way identified with them, despite the fact that
she herself benefited from federal work relief. Throughout her reports, her observations about
the Conchs were tinged always with an air of superiority or disdain, and reading them gives one
the feeling that while she felt sympathy for them, she did not quite respect them. To her, they
were "humble," "simple," and "childlike," characterized more by their belief in superstitions than
a true religious faith.
In addition, her investigation into their racial background revealed her own racial
prejudices. Huss' reports were not overly or virulently racist, but it is telling that at all times she
seemed more concerned with proving (rather than disproving) that the Riviera Conchs were
"half-breeds." To be fair, however, this issue was not solely Huss' agenda. The state FWP office
clearly wanted an answer to this question and, in the end, was willing to accept as fact that the
Conchs were of mixed race—a conclusion apparently based mainly on assumption and rumor.
This conclusion was not without consequence. The Florida FWP acted under
government aegis, and its main product, the Florida Guide, was at the time the definitive
resource on Florida, its history, and its people. Consequently, when it stated that "[t]he Conch
colony at Riviera includes persons of mixed Cockney and Negro blood, a result of
miscegenation," it engaged in the construction of a racial identity that would inform the popular
perception of Riviera Conchs for decades to come.77 Indeed, when interviewed in 1976, Carita
Doggett Corse would describe the Conchs as "a mixture of various races of people."78 The
Florida FWP and its writers thus helped create and perpetuate a commonly-held racial stereotype
about the Riviera Conchs—a stereotype that perhaps led Rivieran Edmond L. Thompson, Jr.,
grandson and son of Conch fishermen, to assert five decades later, "I am not a Conch."79
77
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 134.
78
Nancy Williams, "An interview with the state director of the Federal Writers' Project in
Florida, Dr. Carita Doggett Corse," New Smyrna Beach, FL: [s.n.], 1976, University of Florida,
Special Collections.
79
Foster, Conchtown, 102.
76
CONCLUSION
The federal government's foray into sponsorship of the arts did not last long. The general
political and public animosity directed toward the Works Progress Administration was often
more intense with regard to Federal One, which many Americans saw as a "boondoggle."1 Even
worse, the arts projects were the subject of constant red-baiting, and by the summer of 1938—
while Veronica Huss was interviewing the Riviera Conchs, and well before the Florida Guide
arrived in Washington for final editing—members of the newly formed House of
Representatives' Special Committee on Un-American Activities (chaired by Texan Martin Dies,
Jr.) were calling for an investigation into alleged communist activities in the Theatre and Writers'
Projects.2 This red-baiting, together with the administration's general policy shift from domestic
to international issues, hastened the demise of federal sponsorship of the arts.
The Dies Committee's objections to the FWP initially focused on the New York City
project, which did employ a significant number of Communists. Although this office was
atypical of the FWP, the committee generated a lot of headlines regarding prolabor material and
statements in support of class hatred included in FWP writings. The hearings also produced
testimony regarding project intentions of changing the status quo regarding race relations.3
According to Florence Shreve, a member of the national office staff, "there has always been an
effort to build up subtly the oppression of the Negro everywhere, in all copy," a charge that
national Negro Affairs Editor Sterling Brown—who spent so much of his time encouraging
states merely to mention African Americans—surely would have found groundless.4
Although the Dies Committee hearings were something a farce, with little crossexamination, much leading of witnesses, and too much reliance on subjective judgment and
1
Christine Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1999), xiv; William S. Cramer, "The Federal Writers' Project: Work Relief that
Preserved a National Resource," Publishing History 18 (1985), 57.
2
Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943 (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 290.
3
Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 203-205.
4
Hirsch, Portrait of America, 205-206.
77
hearsay, they signaled the beginning of the end for Federal One and the FWP.5 As 1939 began,
newly elected congressmen were eager to begin trimming Roosevelt's relief spending, and many
WPA projects found themselves on the chopping block. The FWP, which had always been
vulnerable to criticism as a boondoggle for pencil pushers, was no exception.6 In June, the
House Appropriations Committee recommended that the Federal Theatre Project be eliminated
and that the other art projects be continued under state sponsorship.7 Congress subsequently
passed the Emergency Relief Act of 1939, which required that the three remaining arts projects
(including the renamed WPA Writers' Program) find state sponsors willing to assume at least
twenty-five percent of their maintenance costs.8
Despite this setback, work continued at the Florida Writers' Program until 1943, first
under the primary aegis of the State Planning Board and, after 1940, under the University of
Florida. Initially, the program completed work begun under federal sponsorship, including the
Guide, which was published in November 1939, but eventually, the program began turning out
more uninspired fare like agricultural bulletins, a Florida Fact Book, and school readers. As the
war effort gained momentum in the early 1940s, the program contributed by compiling
informational materials for the State Defense Council. Eventually, however, the war eclipsed all
else, and the national office shut down the state programs in January 1942. What was left of the
Florida office (a handful of staffers ineligible for military service) continued to work for the
Defense Council until March 1943.9
In terms of its primary mandate, the Florida FWP can be considered a success in that over
the course of these seven years it produced an impressive list of publications and provided
hundreds of workers a means of subsistence through employment commensurate with their
education and skills. With regard to race, however, the project's legacy is more mixed. Yes, it
employed African Americans and was one of only three southern states with a significant
5
Monty Noam Penkower, The Federal Writers' Project: A Study in Government Patronage of
the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 198.
6
Penkower, Federal Writers' Project, 200-201.
7
Cramer, "National Resource," 63.
8
Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 330.
9
Bordelon, "Florida Reflection," 244-247.
78
number of African-Americans workers, but those workers were segregated into an all-black
Negro Unit, and when the national office reduced the Florida quota for workers, AfricanAmerican writers were some of the first to lose their positions. In addition, Zora Neale Hurston,
one of the only nationally-known writers on the project—was denied the editorial position that
her background and experience merited, solely on the basis of her race.
More troubling, however, are the ways in which the Florida FWP depicted AfricanAmericans. None of the project's writings moved far a-field of traditionally accepted negative
racial stereotypes, and behind the scenes editorial machinations were necessary to ensure the
inclusion of material presenting truthful accounts of African-American life in Florida. Even The
Florida Negro, written primarily by members of the state's Negro Unit, placed undue emphasis
on African-American gambling, love of music, superstitions, and emotionalism. This likely
reflected the class biases of Negro Unit writers, although racial prejudices of white editors no
doubt also played a part. These class and race prejudices also influenced how the Florida FWP
chose to represent racially mixed groups, even where—as in the case of the Riviera Conchs—
such racial admixture could not be proven definitively.
Thus, the work of the Florida FWP demonstrates the multiple ways in which race placed
limits on the national FWP's efforts to craft a more inclusive definition of American identity.
What is more, further research into the Florida project also is likely to show just how vulnerable
the ideals of cultural pluralism were at the state level, particularly in the South. As in all
southern states, Florida's federal writers had to address the question of race, but in Florida, that
question went far beyond the black/white dichotomy. In addition to a large African-American
population, Florida possessed Latin and Native American communities, as well as native poor
whites—the "crackers" who inhabited the interior portions of the state—that would have been no
less foreign to the mostly college-educated and middle-class FWP writers.
A brief examination of the Florida Guide reveals that, as with African-Americans, these
minority and ethnic groups did not receive three-dimensional portraits. For example, the
Seminole Indians were depicted as little more than tourist attractions, who set up their villages
along the road “as a lure to passing motorists.”10 In addition, even during the Great Depression,
the “Indians live well,” as they were not subject to hunting and fishing laws and made extra
10
Florida Federal Writers' Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939), 5.
79
money selling goods to tourists or acting as hunting guides.11 Cubans were mainly known for
their connection to the cigar industry and for the “political troubles” they brought with them to
Florida.12 The Guide also softened the harsher aspects Florida's history as it related to natives,
glossing over the Seminole Wars and Indian removal and portraying the Indians mainly as a
nuisance to European and American settlement. One can only assume that delving further into
the manuscripts of the Florida FWP would reveal a story for all of these groups quite similar to
that for African Americans—that despite the best intentions of national FWP officers to present a
more inclusive and diverse picture of America and its people, local prejudices, particularly in the
South, would always win the day.
11
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 44-45.
12
Florida FWP, Florida: A Guide, 60.
80
APPENDIX
EXAMPLE OF EX-SLAVE NARRATIVE QUESTIONS1
1.
Where, and about when, were you born?
2.
If you were born on a plantation or farm, what sort of farming section was it in?
3.
How did you pass the time as a child? What sort of chores did you do and what did you
play?
4.
Was your master kind to you?
5.
How many slaves were there on the same plantation and farm?
6.
Do you remember what kind of cooking utensils your mother used?
7.
What were your main foods and how were they cooked?
8.
Do you remember making imitation or substitute coffee by grinding up corn or peanuts?
9.
Do you remember ever having, when you were young, any other kind of bread besides
corn bread?
10.
Do you remember evaporating sea water to get salt?
11.
When you were a child, what sort of stove do you remember your mother having? Did
they have a hanging pot in the fire place, and did they make their candles of their own
tallow?
12.
Did you use an open well or pump to get the water?
13.
Do you remember when you first saw ice in regular form?
14.
Did your family work in the rice fields or in the cotton on the farm, or what sort of work
did they do?
15.
If they worked in the house or about the place, what sort of work did they do?
16.
Do you remember ever helping tan and cure hides and pig hides?
17.
As a young person what sort of work did you do? If you helped your mother around the
house or cut firewood or swept the yard, say so.
1
Questions were extracted from transcript of interview of Salena Taswell by Cora M. Taylor,
May 14, 1937, Miami, Florida. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography, vol. 17, Florida Narratives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company,
1972), 303-310.
81
18.
When you were a child do you remember how people wove cloth, or spun thread, or
picked out cotton seed, or weighted cotton, or what sort of bag was used on the cotton
bales?
19.
Do you remember what sort of soap they used? How did they get the lye for making the
soap?
20.
What did they use for dyeing thread and cloth and how did they dye them?
21.
Did your mother use big, wooden washtubs with cut-out holes on each side for the
fingers?
22.
Do you remember the way they made shoes by hand in the country?
23.
Do you remember saving the chicken feathers and goose feathers always for your
featherbeds?
24.
Do you remember when women wore hoops in their skirts, and when they stopped
wearing them and wore narrow skirts?
25.
Do you remember when you first saw your first windmill?
26.
Do you remember when you first saw bed springs instead of bed ropes?
27.
When did you see the first buggy and what did it look like?
28.
Do you remember your grandparents?
29.
Do you remember the money called "shin-plasters"?
30.
What interesting historical events happened during your youth, such as Sherman's Army
passing through your section? Did you witness the happenings and what was the reaction
of the other Negroes to them?
31.
Did you know any Negroes who enlisted or joined the northern army?
32.
Did you know any Negroes who enlisted in the southern army?
33.
Did your master join the comfederacy [sic]? What do you remember of his return from
the war? Or was he wounded and killed?
34.
Did you live in Savannah when Sherman and the Northern forces marched through the
state, and do you remember the excitement in your town or around the plantation where
you lived?
35.
Did your master's house get robbed or burned during the time of Sherman's march?
36.
What kind of uniforms did they wear during the civil war?
82
37.
What sort of medicine was used in the days just after the war? Describe a Negro doctor
of that period.
38.
What do you remember about northern people or outside people moving into a
community after the war?
39.
How did your family's life compare after Emancipation with it before?
40.
Do you know anything about political meetings and clubs formed after the war?
41.
Do you know anything regarding the letters and stories from Negroes who migrated north
after the war?
42.
Were there any Negroes of your acquaintance who were skilled in any particular line of
work, if so give details?
43.
What sort of school system was there for the instruction of the Negro? Were there any
Negro teachers in your community?
44.
How old were you at the close of the civil war?
45.
Describe the type of early religious meeting, the preachers, etc.
46.
Do your friends believe in charms and conjure bags, and what has been their experience
with magic and spells?
47.
Did you ever use an ox to plow with? What sort of plow?
48.
How much did various foods and drinks and commodities cost just at the end of the war
and afterwards?
83
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival Sources
Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, FL.
Florida Folklife Collection.
Stetson Kennedy Papers.
National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
Federal Writers' Project Files, Records of the Work Projects Administration, Record
Group 69.
Field Reports, 1935-1939, Florida, Records of the Work Projects Administration, Record
Group 69.
WPA State Series, Florida, Records of the Work Projects Administration, Record Group
69.
University of Florida Special Collections, Gainesville, FL.
Williams, Nancy. "An interview with the state director of the Federal Writers’ Project in
Florida, Dr. Carita Doggett Corse." New Smyrna Beach, FL: [s.n.] 1976.
Published Primary Sources
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934.
Bourne, Randolph. "Our Cultural Humility." Atlantic Monthly CXIV (October 1914): 503-507.
_____. "Trans-National America." Atlantic Monthly CVIII (July 1916): 86-97.
_____. "Twilight of Idols." The Seven Arts 11 (October 1917): 688-702
Brooks, Van Wyck. America's Coming-of-Age. New York: B. W. Heubsch, 1915.
_____. "On Creating a Usable Past." The Dial 64, no. 764 (April 11, 1918): 337-341.
Dewey, John. "Force, Violence and Law." New Republic 5, no. 64 (January 22, 1916): 295297.
Florida Federal Writers' Project. Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939.
Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/flwpahtml.
84
Florida State Board of Social Welfare. "Organization of the State Board of Social Welfare." In
Biennial Report of the Florida State Board of Social Welfare Covering the Period
August, 1935 to March, 1937. Publication No. 4 (May 1937).
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern Prose Literature. New York:
Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942.
Mencken, H. L. "The Sahara of the Bozart." In A Mencken Chrestomathy, 184-195. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
McDonogh, Gary W., ed. The Florida Negro: A Federal Writers' Project Legacy. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Mumford, Lewis. "Writers' Project." New Republic 92 (October 20, 1937): 306-307.
Nicholas, H. G. "The Writer and the State: The American Guide." The Contemporary Review
155 (January-June 1939): 89-94.
Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. 17, Florida
Narratives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.
Rourke, Constance. The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays. Edited with a preface by
Van Wyck Brooks. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1920.
Ulrich, Mabel S. "Salvaging Culture for the WPA." Harper's 178 (May 1939): 653-664.
WPA Life Histories from Florida. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/flcat.html.
Secondary Sources
Alexander, Charles C. Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century
America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
_____. Nationalism in American Thought, 1930-1954. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company,
1969.
Blassingame, John W. "Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems."
Journal of Southern History 41, no. 4 (November 1975): 473-492.
Bold, Christine. The WPA Guides: Mapping America. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1999.
85
Bordelon, Pamela, ed. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings of Zora Neale Hurston from
the Federal Writers' Project. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.
Brink, Lynn, ed. A History of Riviera Beach, Florida. Riviera Beach: Bicentennial
Commission of Riviera Beach, Florida, 1976.
Cooney, Terry A. Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Cox, Merlin G. "David Sholtz: New Deal Governor of Florida." Florida Historical Quarterly
43, no. 2 (October 1964): 142-52.
Cramer, William S. "The Federal Writers' Project: Work Relief that Preserved a National
Resource." Publishing History 18 (1985): 49-68.
Crunden, Robert M. A Brief History of American Culture. New York: Paragon House, 1994.
_____. From Self to Society, 1919-1941. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972.
Diggins, John Patrick. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge
and Authority. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Drobney, Jeffrey A. Lumbermen and Log Sawyers: Life, Labor, and Culture in the North
Florida Timber Industry, 1830-1930. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997.
Etulain, Richard W., ed. Does the Frontier Experience make America Exceptional? Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.
Foster, Charles C. Conchtown USA: Bahamian Fisherfolk in Riviera Beach, Florida. Boca
Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1991.
Fox, Daniel M. "The Achievement of the Federal Writers' Project." American Quarterly 13, no.
1 (Spring 1961): 3-19.
Glassman, Steve, and Kathryn Lee Deidel, eds. Zora in Florida. Orlando: University of Central
Florida Press, 1991.
Green, Elna C., ed. Looking for the New Deal: Florida Women's Letters during the Great
Depression. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1977.
Henderson, Ann, and Stetson Kennedy. "The WPA Guide to Florida: A Conversation Between
Ann Henderson and Stetson Kennedy." Florida Forum 9 (Fall 1986): 10-13.
86
Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Howell, Ralph D. "Dominicker: A Regional Racial Term." American Speech 47, no. 3/4
(Autumn-Winter 1972): 305-306.
Kadlec, David. "Zora Neale Hurston and the Federal Folk." Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 3
(2000): 471-485.
Kennedy, Stetson. "Way Down Upon . . . Gathering Tales of Folklife in Suwannee Country."
FHC Forum 17 (Spring/Summer 1993): 22-27.
. “The W.P.A. Florida Writers Project: A Personal View.” FEH Forum 12 (Spring
1989): 1-4.
Long, Durward. "Key West and the New Deal, 1934-1936." Florida Historical Quarterly 46,
no. 3 (January 1968): 209-218.
Lowry, Charles B. "The PWA in Tampa: A Case Study." Florida Historical Quarterly 52, no.
4 (April 1974): 363-380.
Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943. Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1972.
McGovern, James R. Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
Miller, Vivien M. L. Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and
Penal System in the Progressive Era. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Murphy, John P. Pragmatism, From Peirce to Davidson. With an Introduction by Richard
Rorty. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
Nash, Roderick. The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930. Chicago: Rand
McNally & Company, 1970.
Noble, David. The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1970.
Ortiz, Paul. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White
Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005.
Penkower, Monty Noam. The Federal Writers' Project: A Study in Government Patronage of
the Arts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Perry, Lewis. Intellectual Life in America: A History. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.
87
Powell-Brant, Evanell K. WPA Federal Writers' Project: With Emphasis on the Florida Writers
and Carita Doggett Corse. Lake Panasoffkee, FL: E.K Powell-Brant, 1990.
Rainard, R. Lyn. "Ready Cash on Easy Terms: Local Responses to the Depression in Lee
County." Florida Historical Quarterly 64, no. 3 (January 1986): 284-300.
Richardson, Joe M. The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 1865-1877. Tallahassee:
Florida State University Press, 1965.
Rogers, William W. "Fortune and Misfortune: The Paradoxical Twenties." In The New History
of Florida, edited by Michael Gannon, 287-303. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1996.
. "The Great Depression." In The New History of Florida, edited by Michael Gannon,
304-322. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Shaw, Stephanie J. "Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to study the Impact of the Great
Depression." Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (August 2003): 623-658.
Shofner, Jerrell H. "Negro Laborers and the Forest Industries in Reconstruction Florida."
Journal of Forest History 19, no. 4 (October 1975): 180-191.
Snyder, Robert E. "Marion Post and the Farm Security Administration in Florida." Florida
Historical Quarterly 65, no. 4 (April 1987): 457-479.
Susman, Warren J. "The Thirties." In The Development of an American Culture, edited by
Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Tebeau, Charlton W. "The Depression and the New Deal." In A History of Florida. Coral
Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971.
Unpublished Dissertations and Theses
Bordelon, Pamela G. "The Federal Writers' Project's Mirror to America: The Florida
Reflection." PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1991.
Carr, Madeleine Hirsiger. "Denying Hegemony: The Function and Place of Florida's Jook
Joints during the Twentieth Century's First Fifty Years." PhD diss., Florida State
University, 2002.
Dunn, James William. "The New Deal and Florida Politics." PhD diss., Florida State
University, 1971.
Mardis, Robert Francis. "Federal Theatre in Florida." PhD diss., University of Florida, 1972.
88
Nelson, David J. "Florida Crackers and Yankee Tourists: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the
Florida Park Service and the Emergence of Modern Florida Tourism." PhD diss., Florida
State University, 2008.
. "Relief and Recreation: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Florida Park Service,
1935-1942." Master's thesis, Florida State University, 2002.
Pearia, Alicia A. "Preserving the Past: Library Development in Florida and the New Deal,
1933-1942." Master's thesis, Florida State University, 2007.
Retman, Sonnet Helene. "The 'Real' Collective in New Deal Documentary and Ethnography:
The Federal Writers' Project, the Farm Security Administration, Zora Neale Hurston's
Mules and Men and James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."
PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997.
Stewart, Catherine Aileen. "Native Subjects: 'Race' and the Rise of Ethnographic Authority in
the Federal Writers' Project (John Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston)." PhD diss., State
University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999.
89
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Angela Elizabeth Tomlinson was born in south Georgia and raised in Mobile, Alabama.
She was graduated, summa cum laude, from Tulane University in 1994, with a B.A. in History.
She received a J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1997. After practicing law in
Houston for six years, she resumed her study of History at Florida State University in the fall of
2004. She will receive her M.A. in History from Florida State in Spring 2008 and plans to
continue her studies there as a doctoral candidate in the Department of History.
90