The Food of a Younger Land (4 page)

A small woman with a giant voice, she was often abrasive, but it was widely recognized that all she wanted was to produce great guidebooks. She believed it was important for Americans to finally start examining America. She often told workers not to worry about the writing but to just send in the information. She hungered for particulars on agriculture and history and pushed the books into a richness of detail.

It was often said that Kellock developed an appreciation of the Baedeker guides while traveling through Europe, which sounds like she was on a vacation. In fact, she had been traveling through southern and central Europe with Quaker relief organizations trying to stave off starvation in areas that had been devastated by World War I.

Baedeker had done its last guidebook on the United States in 1893 and last updated it in 1909. It had been written by an Englishman for the English. There was no guide to America for or by Americans. Many, including Henry Alsberg, believed that this could be extremely important work—the first detailed study of America, its people, culture, and ways. The Depression had awakened in Americans a deep interest in the country and for the first time in its history it was becoming fashionable to examine and look for the meaning of America and what it was to be American.

This new self-searching was clearly expressed in two 1940 songs. First there was Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which was repeatedly bellowed on the radio by the ungentle voice of Kate Smith. Finally, a twenty-eight-year-old singer named Woody Guthrie—named after Wood-row Wilson, who was elected the year he was born, 1912—could not stand hearing Kate Smith anymore, and he wrote an antidote called “This Land Is Your Land.” It is a melodic song celebrating, as does the Berlin song, the diversity and natural beauty of America. Originally the last line of the chorus was “God blessed America for me,” but Guthrie later changed it to “this land was made for you and me.” Guthrie’s song, unlike Berlin’s, also asked questions about the people who were being locked out of the American dream—the hungry, the people in welfare lines—and he asked this question toward the end of the song: “Is this land made for you and me?” Today the critical final stanza is almost never heard.

These two songs reflected a growing split in American culture, and one that would continue. Two Americas emerged out of the early twentieth century, and in 1940 each got its anthem. Kellock’s idea for the guidebooks was for them to be a Guthrie song, not a Berlin—really examining and not backing off from the hard social issues.

Because they pleased local chambers of commerce and tourism interests, the guidebooks were able to garner more support for the FWP than most writing projects would have yielded. Even conservative newspapers that attacked the New Deal would accept the Federal Writers’ Project because it gave work to their newspapermen who had been laid off. But this meant that these local interests had leverage to exert influence on the projects. The local chamber of commerce kept a discussion of labor disputes out of the guide to Pittsburg, Kansas, removing one of the few contentious issues in the book. Local pressure eliminated all historic debate from the description of the siege of the Alamo in the San Antonio Guide. Because the FWP was a government agency, conservative congressmen also had a say, forcing the New Jersey Guide to remove a reference to tear gas being used against striking workers. And labor issues in Butte were removed from the Montana Guide.

 

 

 

F
WP employees wrote with a wide range of skills. As long as they were able to deliver copy containing information, a handful of reliable writers could amalgamate it and turn it into books. Some copy was little more than lists of facts. Others sent in short stories and poetry. Supervisors also came with varying levels of competence. According to Jerre Mangione, who worked on the FWP, Lyle Saxon, a supervisor in the South, was sent to one southern state director, the aunt of a senator, to find out why all of Kellock’s instructions were ignored and only literary attempts were being sent in. The woman ushered Saxon into a stately pillared mansion to a room where her staff was at work and said, “Have you ever seen such an inspiring sight? Seventeen poets, all in one room, writing poetry seven hours a day.”

Experienced professionals such as Lyle Saxon gathered the material and wrote the books. The Massachusetts book was largely written by Merle Colby, from an old New England family, who wrote about the history of New Englanders. Idaho was written by Vardis Fisher, who was thought to be one of the most promising western writers, often compared to his close friend Thomas Wolfe and to Faulkner and Hemingway. While his reputation has not endured, largely because he put aside the writing of successful novels for failed tomes of ancient history, he did write thirty-six books by the time of his death in 1968. Today Fisher’s books remain in print and still have a following in Idaho, where he is also remembered for having commissioned for his home Idaho’s only Frank Lloyd Wright building.

B
y 1939 Katherine Kellock could see the guidebooks coming to an end. Guides had been done or were in progress for each of the forty-eight states, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. Guides to about thirty cities plus regions and even small towns had been published. They were an unexpected success. Some of the guidebooks are in print today and remain useful and enjoyable. Alfred Kazin, writing about 1930s literature in 1942, credited the guidebooks with considerable literary merit and wrote that they “set the tone of the period.” But now the FWP was in need of a new idea, new ways of examining America. It turned to ethnic themes such as
Armenians in Massachusetts
and
Italians in New York
and the New York City Writers’ Project planned one on Jews and Italians in New York with the working subtitle
From Shofar to Swing.
But Kellock had the idea for a nationwide examination of how America eats.

America Eats
was to be put together very much like the guidebooks, with many contributions amalgamated into a few essays by the handful of competent writers. It came out of the ethnic books, which in turn came out of the “Negro” sections of the guidebooks. It was to be a book on eating traditions and foods in the various parts of the United States. Like most of the FWP work, it would have a strong social and anthropological component. It would show varying ethnic traditions as well as the regional and local customs.

With the Depression waning and war looming, it was clear that America and its customs would soon be changing. By the 1930s frozen food was appearing. Industrial food from the beginning of the century, such as Jell-O, factory-made bread, and cake mixes, was making huge gains in the market from new advertising vehicles such as radio. What could better spell the beginning of the end than bottled salad dressing, the manufacture of a product that was so easy to make at home? The editors of
America Eats
understood that in another ten years American food would be very different.

The Washington office sent a memo to regional editors calling for
America Eats
to be a 75,000-word book on “American cookery and the part it has played in the national life, as exemplified in the group meals that preserve not only traditional dishes but also traditional attitudes and customs. Emphasis should be divided between food and people.”

According to the plan, the writing was to be “light but not tea shoppe, masculine not feminine.” This odd but important statement was Kellock’s effort to have food writing approached more seriously. Kellock did not want
America Eats
to be like most of the food writing of the day that generally appeared in women’s magazines or in women’s sections of newspapers. These items, almost always written by women and for women, followed the belief that women were not interested in politics and social problems. The style was bright and cheerful and all issues and social observations were avoided.

The memo went on to say, “In describing group meals tell how they are organized, who supplies and cooks the food, what the traditional dishes are, what local opinion is on heretical variations in the recipe, and what the group mores are in connection with the meal. (Virginia, for example, dusts shellfish lightly with flour before frying and scorns the Maryland custom of dipping the fish in batter.)”

 

 

 

B
eing a government agency, the FWP divided the country in accordance with the peculiarities of the U.S. Census Bureau. Like the census, the book was to have five regions, and it titled them “The Northeast Eats,” “The South Eats,” “The Middle West Eats,” “The Far West Eats,” and “The Southwest Eats.” The South would include the old Confederacy minus Texas but with Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., added. Nevada and Utah were put in the Far West rather than the Southwest, and the FWP had its own invention of dividing California into Los Angeles-based Southern California in the Southwest and San Francisco-based Northern California in the Far West. The result was that the amount of copy from each region was determined not by the variety of foods, the size of the area, or the population, but rather by the number of separate Writers’ Projects in each region. The South generated the most copy, because fifteen projects were reporting. The least copy came from the Southwest, with only five projects reporting. This unevenness, which is quite pronounced, probably would have been evened out in the final book. Each region was to have an essay of about one hundred pages and one, two, or three additional pieces.

The regional essays were to be produced by the Writers’ Projects in whose writers Washington had particular confidence. That Louisiana was in charge of the South and Illinois with the Chicago staff was given the Middle West was predictable. But the Northeast was run by the New Jersey Project rather than New York City or Massachusetts; Arizona had the Southwest; and Montana, not Northern California with San Francisco, had the Far West. This may have reflected which projects were best holding together in the slowly evaporating FWP of 1940.

At its peak in April 1936, the Federal Writers’ Project employed 6,686 people, but by the time
America Eats
was proposed in 1939 the project was down to 3,500. By November 1941 the number had dropped to 2,200. Writers didn’t like working for the government and felt there was a stigma to writing for a welfare check. They also did not like writing without a byline. They left whenever they had another opportunity, and by 1940 the economy was improving. In that year alone, 2 million unemployed Americans found jobs.

Kenneth Rexroth, weary of doctoring bad writing, resigned in 1939. John Cheever, who disliked the people of Washington in their matching and predictable suits, wanted to leave, but Alsberg talked him into helping with the New York City Guide. He resigned after it came out in 1939. By 1941 Vardis Fisher had left the Idaho Writers’ Project, which had few people remaining.

The New York City Writers’ Project struggled to keep Richard Wright. Wright had been born in 1908 in Mississippi, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and his educated schoolteacher wife. The family moved to Memphis when he was young, and he got books from the library by presenting a signed note from a white friend stating, “Please let this niggar boy have the following books.” Now, as he approached his thirties while working for the FWP, the blossoming of his career seemed an irresistible force. Most of the senior FWP editors were certain of it. He entered four short stories titled
Uncle Tom’s Children
into a competition and won a $500 prize. With that money he faded from FWP to finish
Native Son.
With Alsberg’s help he won a Guggenheim grant. In 1940
Native Son
was published and made Wright a literary star. But unlike Algren, Cheever, and many of the others, he always acknowledged a debt to the FWP for nurturing him.

Even Alsberg himself was removed, replaced by John D. Newsom, who, the reverse of his predecessor, had a reputation for getting things done but not for literary judgment.

Many of the greats and future greats were gone by the time
America Eats
copy started flowing in 1940. The writers were not eager for new projects. Stetson Kennedy recalled, “Washington kept cooking up these sidelines.
America Eats
was one of those sidelines.” Nor were all the state directors enthusiastic. The Tennessee state director called Kellock’s proposal “unusually uninspiring.”

Lyle Saxon of New Orleans was placed in charge of the final editing of the project, something that never took place. Saxon had been considered a great catch for the FWP. As director of the Louisiana Writers’ Project, he was a logical choice to be in charge of
America Eats
. He had been one of the few directors who had been able to turn in guidebooks clean enough and good enough for a final edit. His New Orleans Guide was considered the model guidebook, a local bestseller that is still read and referred to in New Orleans. In 1926 his short story “Cane River” had won an O. Henry Prize, and he was immediately hailed as the next great voice from the South. In the 1920s, while Saxon was working on the
Times-Picayune
, he hosted late-night salons with William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and other celebrated literati in his French Quarter home. In 1937 his novel
Children of Strangers
, about mulattoes in northern Louisiana, was acclaimed by critics as the new great southern novel. He never fulfilled that promise, but he is still remembered in New Orleans for the New Orleans Guide, some of his Louisiana legends that are still in print, and for having been a character in the celebrated French Quarter literary scene. It is his nonfiction for which he is known today in New Orleans, and
America Eats
probably would have been one of his enduring accomplishments. Although a flagrant anti-Semite—he once wrote “a good massacre would do New York no end of good. It is now the largest Jewish city in the world”—he considered himself a great friend of “the Negro” and worked hard for a black presence in FWP work.