First-person Plural: The Voice of the Masses in Farm Security Administration Documentary

Abstract

What narratives do, among other things, is propose ways of imagining collective identity. Nevertheless, few stories are told in the voice of a we, and the prominence of the choral voice during the Great Depression is therefore remarkable. For instance, the 1930s is the period in which the gospel hymn I'11 Someday becomes the first-person plural anthem of mass action now identified with the US Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: We Shall Overcome (Lynd; Lieberman 151). A first-person plural voice of the masses is also one of the characteristic narrative techniques of US Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary films of the Depression, as well as of FSA photographic captioning and commentary. This intra-diegetic, collective, narrator-as-protagonist voice can be found throughout the first photodocumentary book to depend on FSA photographs, Archibald MacLeish's Land of the Free, as well as in the texts which are the focus of this essay: Richard Wright's FSA photobook collaboration with Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices, and Pare Lorentz's FSA documentary film The River 1