The Food of a Younger Land Read Free Page A

the translation and noticed that Yiddish, a High German language, is written with Hebrew letters. He charged, as though he had at last found a smoking gun, that they were both the same language. Others denounced the FWP as an encroachment on states’ rights. Congressional criticism culminated in hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee under Texas Democrat Martin Dies in late 1938 on alleged Communist ties, which caused considerable difficulties because, in fact, many of the better-known writers in the FWP had at one time or another had Communist affiliations. But the real goal was to attempt to show a Communist underpinning to Roosevelt’s New Deal, ironic since many historians today credit the New Deal with stopping the growth of Communism in the United States.
     
     
     
    W hen Henry Alsberg, a native New Yorker, was appointed director of the FWP at the age of fifty-seven, he had been a newspaper journalist, off-Broadway director, and writer, but was little known outside of New York. He had graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of twenty and had worked as a foreign correspondent, covering the tumultuous early days of the Soviet Union. He had experienced numerous adventures as a correspondent and later as director of the American Joint Distribution Committee. For a long time he contemplated an autobiography but could never finish it and went to work for Roosevelt’s New Deal. As director of the FWP, a chain-smoker chronically in search of something on his ash-strewn desk, he quickly earned a reputation for his inept administrative style and his high editorial standards. Alsberg was constantly at odds with the administration over the conflict between his goal of producing good books and theirs of simply providing relief work.
    The first problem of the FWP was deciding who was eligible. If it was to be only writers, what was the definition of a writer? Did it have to be a published writer? In the end, in keeping with the initial intention of the WPA, almost anyone who was reasonably literate and needed a job qualified. This included secretaries who had worked on the many local newspapers that had now folded. In fact, people who could type were especially valued. Advertising copywriters qualified, as did technical writers and out-of-work teachers. So did published poets and the authors of well-received novels.
     
     
     
    S tetson Kennedy, then an inexperienced young aspiring writer, recalled his work for the Florida Writers’ Project: “To work for the FWP you had to take an oath that you had no money, no job, and no property. I was eminently qualified.” He, along with Zora Neale Hurston, the only published novelist of the two hundred people hired for the Florida project, were taken on as junior interviewers for $37.50 every two weeks. “I remember going window shopping with my wife trying to decide what we would do with all the money,” said Kennedy.
    The wage scale varied from state to state. A New York writer received $103 a month, and Georgia and Mississippi paid $39. Cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco had a concentration of talented writers. The project would have liked to move some of those writers to other states where there was a shortage, but the pay difference made these writers unwilling to move. In some of the hard-hit prairie states where there were few professional writers, employment in the Federal Writers’ Project saved unqualified people and their families from literal starvation. That, too, was a goal of the WPA.
    In Chicago, the Illinois Writers’ Project, directed by John T. Frederick, an English professor with an eye for emerging midwestern talent, had Nelson Algren. Algren was one of the few writers on the project who already had a published novel to his credit. Other writers in Chicago included Saul Bellow, who had recently graduated from college; Jack Conroy, who was born in a mining camp and had earned praise for two novels of working-class