by John Egerton
The New Deal didn’t exactly change those conditions overnight—in fact, even the ostensible signs of progress sometimes turned out to be false indicators. Robert Vann, the black publisher from Pittsburgh, had made an early break from the Republican Party to support FDR, telling African-American voters to “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall” and make the switch with him. But Vann (whose ancestral lineage included some of the same eastern North Carolina roots as that of the white historian C. Vann Woodward) lasted only two years as an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, and he left the government embittered by his experiences. So did Forrester Washington, an Atlanta dean of social work who went, on Will Alexander’s recommendation, to a post in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The essence of their complaints was that the administration was not truly committed to equal opportunity, and that token signs of black inclusion in government departments concealed the reality that they had no real influence or authority to reduce racial discrimination.
Out in the precincts where federal laws were supposedly being implemented, there was often an enormous gap between lofty ideals and commonplace realities. Take the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example. The TVA was a pathfinding and controversial New Deal agency created in 1933 to bring navigation and flood control to the wild Tennessee River and hydroelectric power to its impoverished valley residents. Headquartered in Knoxville, far from the governmental mainstream in Washington, the TVA was directly exposed to the ingrained and remorseless prejudices of the South. In spite of its bold image as a model of social planning and its stated policy of nondiscrimination in hiring, the agency (directed and managed in the main, incidentally, by Midwestern progressives) repeatedly yielded to its area congressmen and senators in excluding blacks from its benefits.
The TVA’s model town of Norris, Tennessee, was for whites only. Not even one in every twenty-five salaried positions in the agency went to black applicants, and most of those were for maids, cooks, and janitors; from 1933 to 1950, only two blacks were hired in professional positions—and both of them were to supervise other blacks. Between 1934 and 1938, the NAACP sent Charles H. Houston, John Preston Davis, and Thurgood Marshall into the Tennessee valley to investigate the agency’s discriminatory practices, but neither Congress nor the press paid much attention to their findings. The TVA may have been the most radical of all the New Deal’s agencies (critics called its economic planning initiatives “socialistic”), but in its overall handling of racial and socioeconomic issues, it seldom rose above the conventional biases of its Southern environment.
In spite of such shortcomings, however, the Roosevelt administration was no replay of the Hoover-Coolidge-Harding years—or, for that matter, of Woodrow Wilson’s. Nonwhite minorities, the economically distressed, and Southerners of every class and color who had endured a perpetually inferior status vis-à-vis Northerners could find in the New Deal’s promises and programs sound reason to hope that they were headed for better times.
Agriculture, the enterprise at the heart of the economic peril when FDR took office, commanded the undivided attention of a multitude of New Deal administrators, bureaucrats, and members of Congress from 1933 on. Together they tried just about everything—price supports, production limits, commodity protection, soil conservation, crop diversification, easier credit, tax reforms, farm mortgage refinancing, reciprocal trade pacts, scientific and technological improvements, even land redistribution. It might have been argued in, say, 1940 that eight years of government intervention had not rescued agriculture from distress, but no one could seriously claim that the New Dealers had simply sat on their hands.
The restructuring and transformation of the American (and especially Southern) farm economy in the decades of the thirties and forties have been impressively documented by numerous historians and others. Collectively, they have recorded a sprawling, multidimensional tale of mechanization, electrification, migration, and technological innovation that has dramatically changed the size and character of farms and affected the lives of millions of people. Much of this might have happened eventually in any case, but there is no doubt that government intervention was the single most potent and effective stimulus to what has become an ongoing revolution.
Throughout most of his eight years as the first director of this effort, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace performed, as expected, more or less like the moderate and cautious Midwesterner that he was, and not in any sense like the left-wing radical he was widely thought to be by the time he mounted a third-party campaign for president in 1948. Coincidental with his tenure as the administration’s top farm hand, fierce ideological debates on agriculture policy raged just beneath the surface. In a way, this was just another replay of the classic struggle between the hands-on and hands-off philosophies of public policy.
The American agriculture establishment, made up of federal and state bureaucrats, university agriculturists, traditional organizations of farmers, and the larger planters and corporate executives to whom they catered, wanted to maintain the independent and unregulated free-market traditions that had served their interests; they were challenged by insurgent groups of reformers pressing for more equity, more government intervention to help the working class, and more planning of a cooperative nature. Wallace did not become strongly identified with either side of the argument; like FDR, with whom he was very close, he gave encouragement to both camps.
Far more of an interventionist and a reformer than Wallace was his undersecretary, Rexford G. Tugwell, a Columbia University economist whose friendship with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt preceded by several years their move to the White House. Introverted and temperamental, Tugwell lacked FDR’s charm, but his skills as a social planner and his interest in the welfare of those hardest hit by the depression made him a valuable member of the President’s inner circle of advisers.
In April 1935, Roosevelt signed an executive order naming Rex Tugwell director of the Resettlement Administration, an independent new agency with a broad mandate to rehabilitate communities in depressed rural areas and to relocate displaced families into newly created rural and suburban villages. Previous efforts along these lines by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Division of Subsistence Homesteads in Harold Ickes’s Interior Department were incorporated into the new agency. Knowing that a substantial majority of its community efforts would be in the deeply impoverished South—and having observed that Will Alexander was an influential advocate of the interests of poor Southerners, black and white—Tugwell prevailed upon Alexander to become his deputy director.
Short, portly, convivial “Dr. Will” (his common tag with practically everyone who knew him) was by then fifty-one years old and widely hailed as the dean of liberal white Southerners. His imprint was all over the region. He had directed the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta for sixteen years; he had coordinated the effort to start a new black institution, Dillard University, in New Orleans, and served briefly as its first president; at his suggestion, the Rosenwald Fund had established a fellowship program that was sending dozens of bright young Southern men and women, white and black, out into the wider world for advanced study. His connections and influence were legendary, not only among white and black progressives but also with radicals and reactionaries of the left and right. Never one to seek glory for himself, he quietly downplayed the press notice of his Resettlement Administration appointment—but his name was also in the news because the critical study of farm tenancy that he had coauthored with Charles Johnson and Edwin Embree was just beginning to reverberate through Washington.
By his own admission, Will Alexander had neither the temperament nor the desire to administer a large bureaucratic organization; his style ran more to personal charm and folksiness, more to storytelling over drinks and dinner than to writing memos and chairing meetings. But Tugwell convinced him that his services were desperately needed, and so, out of a sense of duty, he left his wife and family in Atlanta, left
the CIC in the care of its small cadre of faithful staffers, and took up residence in the Cosmos Club in Washington for what he thought would be a brief sojourn. In fact, it lasted five years.
Tugwell’s visionary ideas about easing credit for beleaguered tenant farmers and sharecroppers, and resettling many of them on misused and wasted land acquired by the federal government, appealed to Alexander’s continuing concern for Southern social problems. The New Deal’s first attempts to address agriculture issues had more or less ignored the chronic plight of farm laborers—yet in the South alone in the mid-thirties, there were nearly two million tenant families, totaling about nine million people, and those numbers didn’t include the tens of thousands of day-wage laborers who drifted from farm to farm, or the countless migrant agricultural workers who followed the harvest. Displaced coal miners and other rural laborers stranded by the depression also added to the backcountry crisis.
Although most of the money appropriated on their behalf was spent on loans and grants to individuals rather than on developing homestead villages for a dozen to several hundred families each, it was these communities that attracted the most attention and opposition. Between 1933, when planning was begun on the first two subsistence homesteads (one in West Virginia, the other in Tennessee), and 1946, when a hostile Congress finally abolished the program, about a hundred new communities were created, two-thirds of them in Southern or border states. Some Southerners in Congress—including Maury Maverick, in whose home state of Texas ten of the villages were built, and the Bankhead brothers, who helped land eight of them in Alabama—initially gave enthusiastic support to Tugwell and Alexander in their efforts to lift the rural poor out of serfdom.
But far more vocal were the opponents, led by Senators Harry Byrd of Virginia and Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee and House members E. E. Cox and Malcolm C. Tarver of Georgia. They railed against the inclusion of new communities for blacks, even though rigid segregation was maintained throughout the program and only a token few all-black communities were ever built. They also complained of collectivism, waste and extravagance, social experimentation, and big-brother intrusion by the federal government. They vilified Rex Tugwell as a reckless radical, if not a Communist, and his arrogant disdain for such critics had the effect of confirming their negative opinions. But even genial Southerners like Alexander were sometimes spattered with the same brush, as in a 1939 House debate when Congressman Cox called him an “off-color politician” (by which he presumably meant pink, if not red), and in 1942, when C. B. Baldwin, a Virginian and successor to Tugwell and Alexander, was bluntly tagged a Communist by Senator McKellar.
As time went on, “Dr. Will” proved to be better suited to the give-and-take of program-tending in Washington than the more abrasive Tugwell, who was long on planning but short on selling or implementing his ideas. By the fall of 1937, the Resettlement Administration had been transformed into a new agency, the Farm Security Administration, within the Department of Agriculture, and Tugwell had moved on to other challenges. Will Alexander moved up to the top job, working for the secretary, Henry Wallace. The new Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act preserved many of Tugwell’s ideas under the FSA banner, but shifted the emphasis from democratic empowerment in cooperative communities to individual tenant purchase of subsistence farms. Still, controversy dogged the program until the very end, when all of the nearly eleven thousand housing units were either bought by their residents or sold at public auction. The liquidation was essentially completed in 1948, by which time both Tugwell and Alexander were long gone.
One of Alexander’s legacies was his persuasive appeal to idealistic young Southerners, white and black—and others beyond the South—to give of themselves for the betterment of the region and the nation. The roster of his recruits to government service included Clark Foreman, George S. Mitchell, Horace Cayton, Mark Ethridge, Brooks Hays, Ira De A. Reid, John Fischer, Julia Waxman, Skip Hudgens, Gordon Parks—a few of the many who went on to prominence. In addition, scores of Rosenwald fellows were among the multitude who heeded Dr. Will’s Pied Piper call to public service.
Rex Tugwell left some deep tracks too, not least of them being in the Farm Security Administration’s photographic documentation project. A onetime Colorado cowboy named Roy Stryker, who had been Tugwell’s graduate assistant at Columbia, was summoned to Washington by his former mentor in 1935 to organize a team of photographers and record what Tugwell called “as complete a record as [possible] of an agonizing interlude in American life.” Stryker was not a photographer himself, but he had a knack for finding and motivating such professionals, and the dozen or so individuals who did the bulk of the work for him—among them Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, and Marion Post Wolcott—left a collective body of work that is universally acclaimed as a timeless and classic example of photographic excellence. None of the main FSA photographers were from the South (Walker Evans of St. Louis came closest) and none were black (though Stryker, on direct orders from Alexander, did reluctantly take on Rosenwald fellow Gordon Parks as an apprentice); nonetheless, almost half of the more than 120,000 images they left in their “complete record” were Southern scenes of revelation and timeless poignancy.
It is surprising how much the fine arts figured in the programs and philosophy of the New Deal—not through endowments of independent creativity, as we have now, but through direct government employment of creative artists. In addition to the FSA photographers, there were four arts projects (for writers, actors, artists, and musicians) in the Works Progress Administration—and even mural painters in the Treasury Department, their role being to “embellish Federal buildings with the best contemporary American art.” The esthetic sensibilities of public officials may have had something to do with fund allocations for projects such as these, but the more likely explanation is probably the one given by relief czar Harry Hopkins, who said of his WPA artists: “They’ve got to eat just like other people.” (And not sirloin and caviar, either; top pay was $103.50 a month.) Providing creative work for creative people was actually an inspired idea; it not only attacked the unemployment problem in an original way, but also gave the viewing, reading, and listening public a panorama of useful, often excellent, and at times inspirational fare.
The WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project is especially noteworthy for the sheer volume of its output: more than three hundred publications, including a hundred books, in just four years—from the fall of 1935, soon after the WPA was established by executive order, to the fall of 1939, when Hopkins moved over to the Commerce Department and the projects were broken up.
Each state and some large cities had Writers’ Project offices, and their staffs—novelists, poets, journalists, editors, and other professionals who were unable to find employment elsewhere—turned out a diversity of informative and well-written materials on everything from folklore and narratives of ex-slaves to contemporary interviews and travel information. The American Guide Series of state and city resource books drew widespread praise for both their content and the quality of their prose.
Henry G. Alsberg, a fifty-seven-year-old ex-journalist and theater producer from New York, directed the Writers’ Project for Hopkins with just the right mix of political savvy and artistic sensitivity. In the constant tension between creative free expression and government propaganda—and between the idealism of a nation trying to rise to its promise and the reality of a nation beset by gangsterism in the North, racism in the South, and poverty everywhere—Alsberg somehow managed to steer a steady course. Loudly clashing ideologies were vying for attention: liberalism and conservatism, New Deal optimism and Old School skepticism, communism and socialism and fascism. Rumors and frontal attacks mixed with occasional praise swirled around Alsberg throughout his tenure, until he was finally fired by Hopkins’s successor.
Some soon-to-be-noted or already well-known Southern writers got valuable exposure in the state-based projects, among them novelist Lyle Saxon in Louisiana, folklorist and n
ovelist Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, dramatist Paul Green in North Carolina, folklorist Vance Randolph in Arkansas, and aspiring novelist Eudora Welty, who took photographs for the Mississippi guidebook. But once again, racial and social taboos held the South back. Even though Alsberg encouraged the state directors to enlarge the role of blacks, most were unwilling to do so (Hurston, a veteran of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the top writers in the Florida project, but she was a singular exception). Most of the African-Americans who participated in the Writers’ Project made their contributions in New York, Chicago, Washington, and other cities; included on that list were Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Frank Yerby, Ted Poston, and Ralph Ellison.
Two of Harry Hopkins’s top aides, Aubrey Williams of Alabama and Ellen S. Woodward of Mississippi, were staunch advocates of the creative artists’ projects, and both of them would eventually feel the heat of Southern congressional criticism. Once, after a Writers’ Project party in Washington, an outraged Senator Theodore Bilbo, having seen a snapshot of white and black staff members casually socializing, thundered on the Senate floor that such “crimes” were punished in Mississippi by “hanging from the highest magnolia tree.” (He later had the remark stricken from the Congressional Record.)
Another critic, Texas congressman Martin Dies, expressed alarm about what he said were subversive ties more than racial ones. His newly created Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings for weeks in the summer of 1938, during which he and other members characterized the writers’ and artists’ projects as “a hotbed of Communists.” Typical of the know-nothing recklessness of the committee’s probe was the attack by Representative Joe Starnes of Alabama on “a Communist by the name of Christopher Marlowe.” (The famed British playwright had been dead since 1593.) But the hearings took their toll. Within a year, President Roosevelt had transferred Harry Hopkins, and the dismantling of the WPA creative projects soon followed.