The Food of a Younger Land (5 page)

Saxon was supposed to produce an overall essay on the South and then the other four regional directors were to be given it as a model. In addition, each region was to present a few “detailed descriptions of special eating occasions.” The coverage of each region was to be two thirds the essay and about one third the shorter pieces.

 

 

 

B
y 1941 several publishers, including Houghton Mifflin, which Lyle Saxon preferred, and Harper & Brothers, had expressed interest in publishing
America Eats.

The deadline for all copy was the end of Thanksgiving week 1941. On December 3 a gentle reminder that the deadline had passed was sent out. Four days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly there was a panic to try to complete the project before the FWP was shut down. In the weeks following the December 7, 1941, attack, a flurry of letters went out from Washington to the states urging them to get in their copy before they were overrun by the war and to give progress reports on
America Eats
in light of “the present emergency.” One such letter to the Massachusetts Project on December 26, 1941, said,

In January 1942 Denis Delaney of the Massachusetts Project replied that Massachusetts would not be able to make a major contribution to
America Eats
because the state project had shrunk to the point that most of their writers were replacements from other states who knew little of New England traditions.

Other states rushed in copy. The entire file for the state of Washington is stamped “received Dec. 17, 1941.” All five regional essays were called in, and they arrived in various states of disrepair. New Jersey handed in the one for the Northeast with apologies, saying, “The whole essay boils down, I fear, to a list of foods, which we are aware falls short of the design of the book.” They pleaded that more time would be needed to do the job as it should be done. Joseph Miller, the Arizona supervisor, sent in the Southwestern essay with apologies. “It’s a shame, such an interesting subject, that more time couldn’t have been taken to think the thing through.” He then suggested that Saxon might be able to fix it. “He’s a good writer.” Some editors started talking about changing the book to place greater emphasis on the ability of the early pioneers to deal with privation, as more suitable to a book coming out in wartime.

On May 1, 1942, the Federal Writers’ Project officially became the Writers’ Unit of the War Services subdivision of the WPA, which went on to produce sixty-four Servicemen’s Recreational Guides, a guide to the U.S. Naval Academy, books on military history, and books such as the
Bomb Squad Training Manual
from the Ohio Project.

On May 14 Katherine Kellock was dismissed with two weeks’ notice and spent most of her remaining time making sure that every manuscript and letter she had was turned over to the Library of Congress, much of it with little cataloging or filing. On July 15 Lyle Saxon finally left the project without ever having edited
America Eats.

By February 1943, when the WPA was finally closed down, some million words had been published about America by the Federal Writers’ Project. There were at least 276 books and hundreds of pamphlets and brochures, in all more than one thousand publications. But
America Eats
was not one of them.

 

 

 

W
hen I opened the files of
America Eats
in the U.S. Library of Congress, I felt as though I had accidentally stumbled back into prewar America. The manuscripts were all typed. Most of them were blurry duplicates, reproduced with carbon paper on that thin translucent paper that they used to call onionskin. The
America Eats
project often took articles from magazines or newspapers or earlier WPA publications and put them in their files with the intention of using them in the new book. These, too, were typed with duplicates in carbon paper because there were no copying machines. Within these gray cardboard boxes it was prewar America again.

What remained of
America Eats
is mostly to be found in these five boxes filled with onionskin carbon copies. There are also twenty-six photographs. This cache is clearly incomplete. The New York City pieces are entirely missing, at least some of them to be found in the Municipal Archives in New York amid the papers of another unpublished WPA project,
Feeding the City
. But of the many other missing papers, it is not always possible to say if the material was not produced or just had never been sent in to the Library of Congress. The Missouri file contains only a short memo about a cookbook. In the letters among the
America Eats
papers there is a reference to an outstanding piece on Down East cooking that had been prepared for the guide to Portland, Maine, and then omitted at the last moment to make room for photographs. At the request of the Maine Project, it was returned to them. This manuscript, which the note referred to as a “very valuable essay,” vanished along with most of the Maine archive in a later fire.

The paper in the boxes at the Library of Congress amounts to a stack almost two feet high of raw, unedited manuscripts, many from amateur writers. It is far more material than the 75,000 words envisioned for the book, but FWP projects averaged 10 percent of the submitted material. A surprising number of essays begin with the line “In the fall, when the air turns crisp . . .” A memo from Washington stated, “The work should be done by creative writers who will avoid effusive style and the clichés adopted by some writers on food and who have been interested in sensory perception and in their fellow-men, their customs and crochets.” This ideal was not always lived up to in these manuscripts the way it probably would have been in the final crafted book. But an astonishing array of interesting culinary and cultural observations are present.

Some of the manuscripts were information intended to be incorporated in the five regional essays. A range of short stories, poems, anecdotes, and essays were apparently vying to be run as the additional material that was to accompany the five essays. The
America Eats
staff was considering running this additional material with bylines. Professional and would-be professional writers seemed to be trying to make their pieces stand out so that they would be selected among the few signed articles. But some sent in notes, others recipes, and some submitted lists of local books for the informal bibliography.

Because many of the articles were to be incorporated into larger pieces, some have no byline. Some projects, such as New Mexico and New Hampshire, as a matter of practice, never used names. In states where authors are identified it is often in WPA fashion, as the “worker.” Some of these unsigned manuscripts, though probably not many, may be from unnamed literary masters. Algren’s contribution has been identified because it turns up in other collections, but inevitably, since it is not signed, there are some historians who question its authenticity.

Ironically, the chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts has left us with a better record than would the nameless, cleaned-up, smooth-reading final book that Lyle Saxon was to have turned in. A more polished version would still be an interesting book today, a record of how Americans ate and what their social gatherings were like in the early 1940s. Like the guidebooks, it would have been well written and well laid out. And it would not have had frustrating holes and omissions. But we would have had little information on the original authors. There are among these boxes a few acknowledged masters, such as Algren and Eudora Welty, some forgotten literary stars of the 1930s, and authors of mysteries, thrillers, Westerns, children’s books, and food books, as well as a few notable local historians, several noted anthropologists, a few important regional writers, playwrights, an actress, a political speechwriter, a biographer, newspaper journalists, a sportswriter, university professors and deans, and a few poets. They were white and black, Jews, Italians, and Chicanos—the sons and daughters of immigrants, descendants of Pilgrims, and of American Indians. Typical of the times, there were a few Communists, a lot of Democrats, and at least two Republicans.

One thing that shines through the mountain of individual submissions is how well they reflect the original directive: “Emphasis should be divided between food and people.” It is this perspective that gives this work the feeling of a time capsule, a preserved glimpse of America in the early 1940s.

With this in mind, I selected not always the best but the most interesting pieces, both unsigned and signed. The plan called for line drawings, possibly by Ross Santee, a cowboy artist and writer who for a time directed the Arizona Project, but they were never made—it was first discussed three days before the Pearl Harbor attack. I decided to make linocuts, a popular book-illustrating technique of the period, and add a few photographs from the remarkable WPA photo archive. The files make it clear that the editors had intended to borrow, wherever necessary, from other WPA projects—they included in the manuscripts several guidebook items, some previously published and others unused.

Had
America Eats
been published as planned, we would have had a well-thought-out and organized, clearly written guide to the nation’s food and eating customs just before the war. The southern section was to include a smoothly written fourteen-page essay by Lyle Saxon titled “We Refresh Our Hog Meat with Corn Pone,” summing up the information from the essays, and one other individual piece, “South Carolina Backwoods Barbecue” by Genevieve Wilcox Chandler. Instead, we have a chaotic and energetic assortment of reports, stories, and poems on America and its food by hundreds of different voices, including a few who became prominent writers. Together these many writers in their different voices bring to life the food and people of 1940 America in a way the single-voiced, well-edited book would not have.

It is rare to find this kind of untouched paper trail into the past. Merle Colby, the Massachusetts writer of several of the guidebooks who had stayed on to the very end to edit service manuals, wrote the final report on
America Eats
to the Library of Congress, ending with the hope that “Here and there in America some talented boy or girl will stumble on some of this material, take fire from it, and turn it to creative use.”

NEW JERSEY—
responsible for the region
MAINE
NEW HAMPSHIRE
VERMONT
MASSACHUSETTS
RHODE ISLAND
CONNECTICUT
NEW YORK CITY
NEW YORK STATE
PENNSYLVANIA

T
he strange bedfellows produced by collecting states in the U.S. Census groupings can be seen in this Northeastern segment. It may make sense to those from other parts of the country, but as any New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox fan can explain, New Yorkers and New Englanders regard their cultures as completely different. It is an age-old competition that began long before baseball, originating in the seventeenth century when conservative religious colonies controlled by England were competing with a commercial colony controlled by a Dutch trading company. Even after the British took over New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York, the competition between the ports of Boston and New York continued.

It is interesting that the FWP split New York City and New York State into separate groups because it is clear from their food contributions that New York State, especially Long Island, which was settled by people from Connecticut, has more in common with New England than with New York City.

New York City, Massachusetts, and Connecticut had all been stars of the FWP. But while New York City offered imaginative contributions despite having lost its most distinguished writers, the leading New England states were contributing very little by the time of
America Eats
, and Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine became more important.

ROALDUS RICHMOND

I
n Vermont farmhouses and village homes there are three meals a day, breakfast, dinner and supper, and dinner comes at 12 o’clock noon, which is as it should be for men who rise early and work hard. It is characteristic that Vermonters care not at all that this custom may be derided as old-fashioned, out-moded and lacking in sophistication. Many country hotels in the state also uphold the order of dinner at noon and supper at six, both full and heavy meals. A working man with a long active forenoon behind him needs more than a sandwich and a glass of milk to sustain him through the afternoon.