Federal Writers Research Articles

The Edith Lett Papers: The Federal Writers’ Project, West Virginia, and the Everyman Writer

The Edith Lett Papers: The Federal Writers’ Project, West Virginia, and the Everyman Writer

Write. Persist. Struggle: Sponsors of Writing and Workers’ Education in the 1930s

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role.

In the absence of integration: working in and against Nation in Erna Brodber's Louisiana

Animated by the efforts of historians and sociologists over the past decade to conceptualize a ‘long’ civil rights period, this article examines how the conspicuous absence of the 1950s and 1960s from Jamaican writer Erna Brodber's novel Louisiana (1994) constitutes an act of ‘black ellipsis’ that opens up space to envision, from our post–civil rights standpoint, alternative courses of history. Using comparative historicist analyses, the article reads the nation-centric US identity promised by sanctioned forms of integration such as the Federal Writers’ Project against the alternative modes of identity found in Louisiana's recovered diasporic history and the Universal Negro Improvement Association's transnational delegation, for example. Focusing on Brodber's rehistoricization of black diasporic cultural and labor issues in the simultaneously US and global setting of southern Louisiana, ‘In the Absence of Integration’ argues that Brodber overwrites the nationalist thrust of US projects of racial integration by recuperating diasporic affiliations forged earlier in the century and resituating US blackness in global terms.

Pattern and Chaos: Ralph Ellison and the Federal Writers’ Project

Beginning with its mazelike underground journey to reach the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic, Ralph Ellison's 1948 essay Is Nowhere spins out series of surreal fantasies in sketching a character that arises from the impact between urban slum conditions and folk sensibilities.1 Many Harlemites refer to their neighborhood as nowhere, the essay explains, because of the feeling that they have no stable, recognized place in society. . . . One 'is' literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in ghetto maze, 'displaced person' of democracy.2 Lamenting this displacement, at once social and psychological, the essay prefigures the notion of invisibility in the novel Ellison was writing at the same time.What Kind of Citizen Could Come from Nowhere?This question has offered one of the key fault lines in critical approaches to Invisible Man. Should readers take seriously the narrator's claim in the epilogue that there's possibility that even an invisible man has socially responsible role to play, or is this claim kind of buggy jiving?3 The details of Ellison's employment with the Federal Writers Project (FWP)-a unique, socially transformative moment in which he participated on project designed to encourage participatory citizenship-offer useful perspective. While it kept generation writing and engaged in the business of cataloguing and describing American stuff during the Depression, the FWP particularly offered several African writers-including Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Roi Ottley, Ellen Tarry, Rebecca West, and Richard Wright, among others-a literary home during the 1930s in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. Though many writers resented their work reporting what must have at times seemed like utterly mundane minutia, Ellison utilized both historical and folk material generated by his FWP investigations to write Invisible Man. He openly recognized his debt in 1977 interview with Ann Banks:For me, being on the Writers' Project was way to broaden my knowledge of Afro-American culture. I'd always liked the stories and things, and I couldn't hear enough of them, so this was throwing me into my own history. Once you touched the history of blacks in New York then you were into history.4Ellison's reminiscent evaluation captures an important dynamic of Invisible Man reflected in its final claim about lower frequencies:5 the difference between awareness of history and touching the materials that form its deep elements.In Invisible Man, Ellison utilized material from his FWP tenure to critique the foundations of utopian progressive thought, placing in its stead critical liberalism, one that was anti-utopian and much more cautious in outlook than much postwar liberalism and, most importantly, emphasized local knowledges and claims on justice against broader plans for reform and modernization. The ideal citizen of the New Deal welfare state as imagined in its documents was historically knowledgeable, socially progressive, and oriented toward modernization. Ellison's work bracketed each of those ideals, highlighting the ways that positivist overconfidence tended to downplay important stories and disguise prejudice, and thus elided crucial elements of ongoing dispossession. While new interpretation of Invisible Man is not the aim of this essay, focus on the New Deal and its cultural activity illuminates broader field of discourses within liberalism with which Ellison was engaged. In particular, Invisible Man's deployment of vernacular culture and history attacks the underpinnings of planning and development advanced by the FWP and other New Deal agencies, discourses central to the New Deal national imaginary before the Second World War and to an international one afterwards.6Though widely recognized as formative experience, the New Deal remains relatively under-analyzed in studies of Ellison. …

Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time AdrianMiller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time Adrian Miller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.Soul Food, like its subject, is deliciously entertaining and rich in its history. Adrian Miller uses many perspectives to present soul food's history, influences, ingredients, and innovations old and new. Miller's credentials as an attorney and political analyst may seem off-point, but he is also a Southern Foodways Alliance board member and a certified barbecue judge. He argues that the story of soul is more complicated and surprising than earlier works have indicated; he has built his book on the oral histories of slaves and former slaves gathered in Federal Writers' Project interviews; written accounts from slavers, plantation visitors, and newspapers; interviews with famous soul cooks; and a year visiting 150 restaurants in thirty-five cities.This reviewer's favorite facts from Miller's research: Louisiana Senator Huey Long created a controversy in the 1930s when he argued that cornbread should be dunked whole in the likker left after cooking greens. Among those holding opposite views was then-Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who declared he preferred his cornbread crumbled into pot likker. Later, Roosevelt became the second US President who craved sweet potatoes and roasted possum (Taft was the first). Roosevelt, who spent months of therapy in Warm Springs, Georgia, learned to enjoy regardless of ethnic or class origins.Miller addresses the southern or soul food question very thoroughly, arguing that poverty foods became significant in the cultures of both African Americans and poor whites, especially during the Civil War years when successful blockades and destruction of crops and livestock reduced all southerners' to only a few home-grown necessities. Miller identifies a Slave Food period (1619-1865), marked by the constant introduction of new foods and different cooking brought by the forced migration from West Africa. A Southern Cooking (1865-present) saw the development of African American foodways in the rural South after Emancipation, which then traveled north with the millions-white and African American -leaving the rural South during the Great Migration. Miller also identifies modern, overlapping trends: a Soul Food (1950s-present) with traditional food now overtly merged with racial politics (7) and the current Neo-Soul Period, when the aesthetics and ingredients of the cuisine are being changed for health reasons (among others).Miller does not ignore the influences of Native American crops and cooking, nor the European sources of many foods that we think are West African in origin. …

Sources: Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project

Although primary source content from the Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers' Project exists in many other locations and formats, Slave Culture is the first reference work that attempts to order selected narratives from these collections into thematic categories, allowing readers to "better understand what aspects of enslavement reverberated most forcefully for them [the interviewees] as well as why they [the aspects] were important" (xi).

Toward a Twenty-First-Century Federal Writers’ Project

This article draws parallels between the Great Depression and the great recession that began in 2007 in light of the history, methods, themes, and relevance of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) to contemporary community writing projects. Through a critical analysis of the FWP’s legacy as both a twentieth-century American epic and a lesson in powerful, sometimes flawed methodologies, this article suggests that a twenty-first-century reprise of the FWP would unify and inform already existing university-community partnerships to enact the “public turn” called for in composition and other disciplines at a critical juncture in American—and world—history.

Slave culture: a documentary collection of the slave narratives from the Federal Writers' Project

For the first time, the WPA Slave Narratives are organized by theme, making it easier to examine-and understand-specific aspects of slave life and culture. * Provides topically arranged access to views expressed in the slave narratives, something never done before * Offers students both contextual analysis and primary source material so they can draw their own conclusions about various aspects of slavery * Creates a personalized understanding of the challenges that accompanied enslavement * Allows various populations, such as previously enslaved women, to speak bluntly about the particular difficulties they faced under slavery

Teaching the History of Slavery in the United States with Interviews: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938

THIS ESSAY OFFERS a practical approach to teaching with the Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936–1938 collection available on the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. The essay begins with background on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews and proceeds to a discussion of the historical debate about their reliability. The essay concludes with two instructional methods: an individual activity and a group activity. It attempts to reach a broad audience that includes postsecondary and K–12 educators. The WPA slave interviews offer an innovative approach to engage students with the history of slavery in the United States. History educators at all levels rely on primary sources, and well-planned implementation of the WPA interviews has tremendous potential to develop analytical and writing skills. Instructors should encourage students to question the sources, contextualize them with the secondary literature, and develop interpretations. The overall goal of the activities outlined in the following pages entails the facilitation of active student learning in history; that is, “doing history.”

The Rowan Tree: The Lifework of Marjorie Edgar, Girl Scout Pioneer and Folklorist, With Her Finnish Folk Song Collection “Songs from Metsola.”

Songs of Camp Minnesota for Girl Scout Leaders (Zimmerman Print, 1925) contained twelve songs from diverse ethnic groups. her success at teaching singing at Girl Scout camps led to a request from the national organization to com- pile a ballad book, which she at first turned down but eventually published as Old Songs and Balladry for Girl Scouts (Girl Scouts, inc., 1930). these were not scholarly collections, but were designed for practical use. edgar collected and arranged songs from various published sources, as well as her own transcriptions. There was a complex relationship between the nationally recognized folklorist robertson and the local folklorist edgar. on the one hand, edgar was publishing, performing, and lectur- ing about this material herself, so she was some- what reluctant to share it, but also she knew the importance of national collection to preserve these local traditions. in the end, with edgar's help and cooperation, robertson made some of the earliest recordings of Finnish and Gaelic music from northern minnesota, preserved today at the library of congress. in the early 1940s, edgar was hired by the minnesota branch of the Federal Writers Proj- ect to work on a comprehensive history and ethnography under the title "iron men:

Creating a Living Historiography:

In 1865 Sarah Gudger left her master’s farm in North Carolina to begin life as a free black woman. “Aunt Sarah,” as she was called locally, had seen fifty years of slavery and watched from her porch in Asheville as America transformed into an emancipated nation. In 1937, at what she claimed was the age of 121, Gudger recounted her slave experience for the Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her riveting narrative, in which the WPA transcriber attempts to capture her southern dialect in detailed phonetic spellings, is replete with descriptions of nightmarish conditions, cruel masters, violent lashings, and watching her mother be taken away. Gudger assures the interviewer, “Law, chile, nobuddy knows how mean da’kies wah treated.” Sarah Gudger’s WPA slave narrative, available online from the Library of Congress, is a part of the most concrete and widely accessible evidence attesting to black women’s lives in America before Emancipation. However, while the WPA records and other

Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression

When we imagine ordinary Americans in the 1930s, many of us think of the subjects of Dorothea Lange's photographs or the characters in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). But Sonnet Retman complements those images in Real Folks by exploring representations of the folk in five less-well-known works by novelists, ethnographers, and filmmakers from the decade of the Great Depression. She spends one chapter each on the novels Black No More (1931) by George Schuyler and A Cool Million (1934) by Nathaniel West, the Federal Writers' Project's 1939 travel guide Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (her 1935 collection of folklore), and Preston Sturges's 1941 movie Sullivan's Travels. As Retman shows, the creators of these texts constructed the category of “the folk” in varied and complicated ways. These texts focus not just on the poor, rural whites so often shown by the more familiar works of the period, but also on African Americans and sometimes Native Americans. Furthermore, instead of presenting the folk “as a pastoral resource integral to the nation's healing and crucial to the brokering of new deals,” these writers and filmmakers used the folk to critique American ideals and to demonstrate the realities of racism, classism, and consumerism in 1930s America (p. 2).

Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century

A general overview of the Writing Democracy project, including its origin story and key objectives. Draws parallels between the historical context that gave rise to the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project and today, examining the potential for a reprise of the FWP in community literacy and public rhetoric and introducing articles collected in this special issue as responses to the key challenges such a reprisal might raise.

Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21 st Century

A general overview of the Writing Democracy project, including its origin story and key objectives. Draws parallels between the historical context that gave rise to the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project and today, examining the potential for a reprise of the FWP in community literacy and public rhetoric and introducing articles collected in this special issue as responses to the key challenges such a reprisal might raise.

Rediscovering America: The FWP Legacy and Challenge

This article examines the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project’s challenge and legacy to scholars seeking to create an FWP-inspired project today. It explores how scholars in various disciplines engaged in the “public turn,” which has contributed to university-community research and teaching projects, can gain perspective and insight from learning about the FWP’s goals and accomplishments. The article focuses on the FWP’s pluralistic vision of national identity, which led national FWP officials to examine American diversity in encyclopedic guidebooks and through oral history, ethnic, and folklore studies. By exploring why the work of the FWP was ignored for a long time and how its vision and work gradually reemerged, I seek not only to provide a history of the FWPs reputation but also to shed light on the opportunities and responsibilities the FWP offers to current efforts to create new FWP-like projects for a new time.

William Stetson Kennedy (1916–2011)

Stetson Kennedy was a folklorist, oral historian, writer, anti-poverty government employee, and a lifelong Floridian. Most of all, he was a tireless activist for liberal causes throughout the twentieth century-battling against racism, poverty, anti-immigration and anti-labor movements, and fighting for environmental protection. He died on August 27, 2011, at the age of 94, but his legacy lives on in the Stetson Kennedy Foundation, with a mission to carry forward mankind's unending struggle for human rights in a free, peaceful, harmonious, democratic, just, humane, bounteous and joyful world, to nurture our cultural heritages, and to faithfully discharge our commitment of stewardship over Mother Earth and all her progeny (http://www .stetsonkennedy.com/foundation.html). Stetson was a friend and mentor to me and many others, and he will be missed.Stetson Kennedy was an accidental folklorist, born to a prominent family in Jacksonville, Florida, where his father owned a large furniture business. As a teenager, Stetson worked in the family business to collect the dollar down, dollar-a-week debts owed by the poorest residents who rented furniture from his father. He began to write down the folk idiom, colloquial speech, and personal stories that he heard in the neighborhoods of Jacksonville. At the same time, his consciousness of the class struggle and racial inequity that pervaded his home state of Florida was raised. He determined to write about what he heard and saw, using the vernacular speech and folklore he was collecting as a vehicle.Stetson studied for one year at the University of Florida, where he met folklorist Alton Morris and author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. He dropped out of college to move to Key West and continue to do what we now call fieldwork- collecting the folklore and oral histories of Cubans, Conchs, and other characters in the southernmost reaches of Florida. It was during this time that he met Alan Lomax, and his work came to the attention of Benjamin Botkin, who tapped him (at the age of twenty-one) to be the Head of the Folklore, Ethnic Studies and Oral History Unit of Florida's Federal Writers Project (FWP). In this way, he became Zora Neale Hurston's supervisor on the FWP and worked with her, Alan Lomax, Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, Robert Cook and others to document Florida folklife. This material was used in the Florida State Guidebook for the FWP and for Stetson's first book, Palmetto Country (1942).When the United States entered World War II and the FWP quickly folded, Stetson infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Stone Mountain, Georgia, to fight fascism at home. He gathered evidence and documentary material for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, journalist Drew Pearson, and the producers of the Superman radio series. His efforts to document the Klan's terrorist activities by exposing their folklore (secret passwords, handshakes, etc.) to a mass audience resulted in the loss of their nonprofit status in Georgia. The Klavern at Stone Mountain subsequently filed for bankruptcy. When Kennedy came out from undercover to testify, his life was in jeopardy and his land in North Florida was set afire by Klan members. He published a book that documented the culture of several homegrown hate groups, Southern Exposure, in 1946. Stetson at that point went overseas and eventually landed in Paris, where he became friends with Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was Sartre who made it possible for Kennedy to publish his expose of the Klan, I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan (1954) and his satirical Jim Crow Guide to the U. …

The Federal Writers' Project: A Legacy of Words

The Federal Writers' Project: A Legacy of Words

Book Review: Roi Ottley’s World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist

Ottley's World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist. Mark A. Huddle, ed. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011. 200 pp. $29.95 hbk.While Nazi gunners dropped shells on African American soldiers on the Anzio beachhead in the first half of 1944, Ernie Pyle, after talking to black cartoonist Ollie Harrington of the Pittsburgh Courier, offered to write several columns about them. He did, about the blacks who kept the military supplied with food and ammunition, but he didn't mention any issues they had to face because of their race.That helps explain the importance of the small number of black correspondents who wrote about the half-million black service members for black newspapers. John Stevens profiled twenty-seven of these correspondents in a pioneering study. Stevens chose not to include blacks who wrote for white publications. That meant leaving out Ottley, even though Ottley became the first black to write for a major American newspaper, and who thus could communicate black concerns to a white public.Roi Ottley's World War II provides an introduction to the life of Vincent Roi Ottley. The book presents his incomplete workbook of diary entries and letter and article drafts, June-December 1944, and offers thirteen selected articles from his journalistic work-ten from the liberal newspaper PM, 1942-1946. Mark Huddle, now an assistant professor of history at Georgia College, discovered this material in the St. Bonaventure University Archives when he was on the faculty at St. Bonaventure, where Ottley (1906-1960) spent the first two years of his college career on a track scholarship and where he began to develop as a writer before transferring to Michigan.Ottley became an important figure in the cultural life of Harlem in the 1930s, where he was a reporter, columnist, and editor for the Amsterdam News. Forced from the paper for his political views, he joined the Harlem branch of the Federal Writers' Project, which led to him supervising a team that included Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Among his friends he counted Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Fats Waller, and W. C. Handy Jr.When the United States entered World War II, Ottley was swept up in the debate over issues and strategies that African Americans should employ to advance their cause while serving their country. Ottley contributed New World A-Coming, published in 1943, in which he described for a white audience what it was like to be an African American and how African Americans viewed their past and future. He criticized violence against black soldiers in the South, which was detrimental to the US cause. The book appeared in the middle of a summer when race riots broke out in Los Angeles, Harlem, Detroit, Mobile, and elsewhere. …

New World A-Coming: African American Documentary Intertexts of the Federal Writers’ Project

In the twentieth century prior to the Depression, Harlem was defined by turns as the incubator for cultural uplift and the launching pad for black nationalism, a separate sphere for African Americans and the playground of both white and black leisure classes. At the end of the 1930s, however, a new set of contradictory terms emerged reflecting the uncertain future of Harlem. New Deal cultural programs portrayed the neighborhood as a slum, shaping a growing narrative of ghettoization that would be advanced in texts like Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). This portrayal somewhat ironically paved the way for New Deal texts to invoke Harlem's reform as the keystone for an emergent progressive national community. The New Deal's Federal Writers' Project (FWP) guidebooks to New York City offered a powerful image of African American inclusion in the national community through New Deal-initiated urban reform. In so doing, they promoted Harlem as a showcase for their efforts. Although the overall framing of the guidebooks worked to ensure that the reader would see New Deal housing and social initiatives as markers of an inclusive community, the materials on Harlem, written primarily by black authors, suggested no small degree of worry. In the final words of one FWP essay on Harlem, of tragic premonition hovered over the African American experience, intimating the skepticism many African Americans felt about the actual likelihood of social and economic inclusion in this modernized national community (FWP, Panorama 151). These shadows would emerge more clearly still in the 1940s legacy of the FWP, as documentary texts by black writers who had formerly worked for the Writers' Project questioned both its hopeful vision and the national government's resolve to address racial injustice. Several African American documentary texts written for a public audience in the 1940s, including Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and Roi Ottley's New World-A-Coming, explored national welfare through a consideration of Harlem as the New Deal made way for wartime priorities. These texts lay at the intersection of several discussions of New Deal culture: the relationship between federal arts patronage and other cultural projects of the era, the growth of the documentary aesthetic, the politics of spatial and racial representation, and African American views of New Deal nationalism. However, critics have not given them enough attention to draw out the relationships among these discussions. Ottley and Wright drew on narrative strategies and textual elements of New Deal documentary projects to discuss Harlem's problems. However, they advanced competing understandings of urban culture and community, drawing on the growing discourse of racial nationalism to clarify the stakes of lingering injustice. (1) Wright rejected Harlem's status as a unique enclave and contested the New Deal's futurological discourse of state-sponsored spatial and community reform with an imagined cross-class community, foregrounding racial nationalism as an important marker of blacks' claim to justice. (2) Ottley, on the other hand, presciently mapped the undercurrents of racial nationalism within Harlem politics and social life as a coherent force that threatened national stability. As intertexts of the FWP guides, these documentary texts offer modern readers concrete examples of the politics of New Deal spatial representation, showing us how rhetorical battles over particular spaces contributed to national debates over community and social justice. Critics have suggested that the FWP influenced African American literature, particularly in fostering a generation of young black writers, but few have explored this legacy in depth. (3) One approach to this issue is through a consideration of African American documentary texts. …

Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (review)

Reviewed by: Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era Jeff Allred Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 328 pp. $35.00. Lauren Sklaroff ’s book examines a period in African American cultural history that often falls between the stools of the 1920s New Negro movement and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her study of struggles over the cultural representation of African Americans in the New Deal era differs markedly from much recent work in African American studies (and ethnic studies more broadly): one searches in vain for accounts of radical experiments in aesthetic form, the articulation of heretofore silenced voices from the militant margins, the refunctioning of mainstream cultural forms for counterhegemonic goals, and the like. Instead, one finds the more sober yet strikingly fresh story of how the middling strata of cultural workers—primarily bureaucrats serving New Deal cultural programs, but also advocacy groups like the NAACP, performers working in the cultural industries, etc.— struggled to liberalize representations of African Americans within the cultural mainstream. Stories about cultural middle ranks tend to lack the punch of accounts of avant-gardes and movements from the margins, and Sklaroff ’s book does become somewhat repetitive in its account of the various straddles and compromises one associates with liberal politics. But the breadth of her account, spanning a wide range of genres, media, and cultural agents, as well as the intensity with which she analyzes the internal tensions within each site, lend the book an unexpected dynamism. Sklaroff ’s book argues that the cultural programs of the New Deal—including the familiar federal projects for theater, art, music, and writing, but also, especially during war mobilization, offices dedicated to film and radio—promoted progressive representations of African Americans. White liberals and leftists within the New Deal cultural apparatus collaborated with African American leaders, bureaucrats, and artists in a broad-based effort to dispel minstrel-tinged performance traditions and usher in new, more progressive roles for black performers. In doing so, Sklaroff emphasizes, they “worked within the tightest of spaces,” hemmed in by inadequate budgets, racist resistance at the state level, the enforced “unity” of war mobilization, and the rising tide of intolerance of “un-American activities” that lead to HUAC [End Page 544] and McCarthyism (2). The book thus offers an ironic narrative in which grand plans for new cultural forms, forums, and styles are diverted, diminished, and frustrated at many points while nonetheless improving the cultural climate for African Americans in heretofore underappreciated ways. Sklaroff ’s methodological focus throughout is not on cultural products but on processes: rather than the more traditional ideological reading of texts, she offers a peek behind the curtain covering the messy collaborations that produce culture. In this way her work diverges from past studies of similar terrain—Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal (1992), for example—that emphasize the inadequate or falsifying white-authored representations of African Americans in the period. Rather, she reveals the agency (albeit highly constrained) of African Americans as filterers, shapers, and co-producers of the images of blackness consumed by the masses. Her well-chosen case studies recall the wide net cast by the New Deal’s antiracist efforts: on the stage (the Theater Project’s “swingcopated” take on Gilbert and Sullivan, Swing Mikado); in the arena (Joe Louis’s boxing demonstrations for fellow GIs); on the airwaves (the African American variety show Jubilee); and on the screen (the Bureau of Motion Pictures’ promotion of antiracist imagery in Hollywood films). In each case, she underscores the modest victories notched by cultural workers amid political pressure from conservative legislators, hostile elements within the American public, and unimaginative government officials. Sklaroff ’s account of the African American poet and critic Sterling Brown’s role in the production of the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide vividly illustrates the payoff of her approach. Brown was appointed head of Negro Affairs within the FWP in 1936, the highest post held by an African American within the entire Works Progress...