Henry Alsberg: A New Deal Life

This weblog submit is offered to us courtesy of our visitor, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, educational librarian, professor emeritus at Suffolk County Group School in New York and dramatic author and journalist. Professor DeMasi is the creator of a number of publications on Henry Alsberg, Director of the New Deal period’s Federal Writers’ Venture (FWP) from 1935-39. She is presently engaged on a biography of John Gilbert Winant, a peace and labor advocate who served as the primary Chair of Social Safety, the primary American Director of the Worldwide Labor Group, Ambassador to the UK throughout World Conflict II, and the primary U.S. consultant to the U.N.’s Financial and Social Council. Her essay for Folklife At present on Henry Alsberg’s early profession is the second in a collection of occasional blogs – following John Edgar Tidwells’s essay on Sterling Brown – that illuminate varied points of the accomplishments of the FWP. On this essay DeMasi expands on her speak on the 2023 American Folklife Heart symposium marking the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Venture (2022). The anthology and symposium provided a spread of scholarly views and retrospective analyses of the FWP on its eightieth anniversary (see this submit concerning the symposium); webcasts of the occasion are accessible right here: https://guides.loc.gov/2023-federal-writers-project-symposium. Professor DeMasi’s submit touches on Alsberg’s pre-FWP actions as a author, guide editor and theatrical producer, all of which have been involved with advancing the battle for social justice and human rights.

To jot down a biography is to realize perception not solely into a selected individual’s life, however to additionally discover the instances during which she or he lived. My first biographical topic was Henry Alsberg, who directed the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Venture from 1935-1939. (Practically the entire FWP’s publications can be found on the Library of Congress, each in print and on-line codecs.) My writings on Alsberg, in addition to my speak on the Library of Congress in June 2023 targeted on this era of his life. But it surely’s vital to acknowledge his earlier actions and the way he introduced his social justice sensibilities to his New Deal work.

From 1919 by means of the early Nineteen Thirties, Alsberg hung out in Europe as a refugee employee, a journalist overlaying Bolshevik Russia, and as an advocate for worldwide political prisoners. Again dwelling in New York, he was a journalist and an experimental-theatre producer, virtually at all times sustaining a robust deal with human rights inequities.

In researching his life, I realized concerning the first “Pink Scare” in 1919, in addition to pre-Amnesty Worldwide endeavors to guard worldwide political prisoners. (Alsberg co-founded the Worldwide Committee for Political Prisoners in 1924.) I turned conscious of Alsberg’s years-long efforts to offer reduction to Jewish pogrom survivors and refugees throughout the interwar interval in Japanese Europe. [Editor: In the years following the First World War, the “Red Scare” was marked by the repression of labor organizers, leftist activists, immigrants, pacifists, and African Americans seeking  their rights, as subversives and the enemy within American society; two books on the topic are noted below.]

A lot of his early actions in help of oppressed folks got here through his writings. Greater than twenty years earlier than he took on the directorship of the FWP, he wrote and edited for the New York Night Publish. Later, his compassion for the disenfranchised got here by means of in articles for The Lots and The Nation. (It’s straightforward to see the place his empathy for oppressed peoples got here from; as a Jew, he was topic to antisemitism his whole life and as a gay his very existence was thought-about “unlawful.”)

Throughout a stint working as a producer with the Provincetown Playhouse in New York, he helped convey performs identified for his or her social conscience to audiences, reminiscent of Paul Inexperienced’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, In Abraham’s Bosom, that had a theatrical run from 1926 to 1927. The play handled slavery and bigotry, analogous to the matters he would cope with later as FWP director.

As I wrote in my biography of him, every part he did previous to the FWP mattered, and “taken collectively, every part led him to the Writers’ Venture.” And though he’s principally often known as the Federal Writers’ Venture’s “Guiding Gentle,” his entrance into the New Deal got here in 1934, a 12 months earlier than the FWP was born. As an out-of-work author throughout the Nice Despair, he was fortunate to land a job with the Federal Emergency Reduction Administration (FERA). A precursor to the bigger Works Progress Administration, FERA funded state work reduction packages together with direct reduction to people. Inside FERA was the Civil Works Administration, or CWA, one other of the so-called alphabet businesses of the New Deal. The CWA gave jobs to thousands and thousands of individuals on public works initiatives that shored up infrastructure nationwide. The CWA additionally supported instructional, well being, and vocational actions, with a smaller quantity of funding dedicated to arts packages.  

As a FERA editor, one among Alsberg’s accomplishments was producing a guide outlining the CWA’s accomplishments. The big-format publication, America Fights the Despair got here out in 1934. With 200 images and accompanying commentary, it mirrored his utopian leanings, as I famous in my biography of Alsberg:  “Girls, minorities, and different ignored segments of the inhabitants appeared all through the guide. In a piece lauding the Civil Works Administration’s help for musicians, {a photograph} of an African American choir appeared subsequent to a white symphony orchestra from San Francisco. Each black and white kids have been proven frolicking in CWA-built playgrounds and faculties. And in a nod to open-mindedness not often present in government-sponsored publications, women and men in a sculpture class noticed a virtually nude male mannequin as they labored on their sculptures” (DeMasi, 2016, p. 153). Different CWA advantages got here to life in these 100 and fifty plus pages with a celebration of accomplishments starting from farmers cooperatives to Native Individuals public works artwork initiatives.

In 1935, Alsberg helped create and was employed to run the FWP. The American Information collection—on the core of the FWP’s work—turned way more than journey guides, because the identify would possibly counsel. He insisted on together with essays to discover the cultural panorama of America.  Right here’s his quote from a press launch that was extra prescient than he may need realized: “Historians generations therefore will look upon the American Information as a mine of data from which to reconstruct the previous and it’ll at all times, whereas civilization lasts, serve to claim and set up numerous particulars which kind the background of twentieth century tradition.”

Some FWP titles have been critically acclaimed; others turned best-sellers. The Venture flourished: it revealed kids’s books, encyclopedias, numerous regional and native guides and FWP employees – Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison amongst them – wrote radio scripts, taught journalism lessons and picked up oral histories.

Alsberg had three fundamental missions: 1) to maintain the FWP alive and his writers employed (a battle as a result of conservative forces threatened the FWP’s existence from day one); 2) to nurture promising writers; and three) to supply high quality work. In 1937, he solicited writers for his or her “off-time” writing, and preparations have been made through non-public financing to publish the guide, American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse. Inventive items from about fifty FWP writers, notably Richard Wright, have been included amongst them. 

The Venture got here beneath assault from virtually the second of its inception. For example, in 1937, when the Massachusetts American Information got here out, it introduced congratulatory phrases. However quickly conservatives referred to as for guide burnings as a result of they mentioned it devoted an excessive amount of area to the Sacco-Vanzetti case and to labor legal guidelines that protected kids within the office. In 1938, the formation of the Home Committee on Un-American Actions (HUAC) rang the dying knell for the FWP and different New Deal arts teams. HUAC chair Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. and different members accused Alsberg, and the FWP, as a complete, of inciting class warfare and selling communism. All through the HUAC hearings, which lasted about two years, the FWP continued publishing. At the same time as public approval of the Dies committee was excessive, so too have been guide gross sales. (Various HUAC members and their witnesses later have been proven to have lied beneath oath.)

By the tip of the summer season of 1939, Henry Alsberg was fired and the FWP misplaced federal sponsorship. Alsberg’s last New Deal job got here in 1942 as an editor with the Workplace of Conflict Info. However quickly after, the Civil Service Fee accused him of getting a gay relationship, which was prohibited by legislation. Not eager to face one other battle, Alsberg resigned. Later that decade, he introduced the American Guides again to life as editor for the commercially revealed, multi-volume model that made the New York Occasions finest vendor record in 1949. Alsberg had succeeded, over a 14-year interval, in delivering thousands and thousands of phrases to inform the story of America.

In the middle of writing about Alsberg’s life and his instances, I knew I needed to discover the paperwork and assets that advised his story and the story of the FWP. The place did I flip?

Thankfully, when the Venture was closed down and the lights turned off, when the entire editors and writers went dwelling, many hundreds of paperwork have been deposited on the Library of Congress. Present-day students and researchers are grateful for this nationwide treasure. Virtually ninety years after out-of-work writers put pen to paper in FWP workplaces all around the nation, this assortment—over 1000 bins full of FWP jewels, in addition to the various internet pages added lately—continues to be mined by researchers, writers, novelists, filmmakers, and podcasters. The gathering contains guide manuscripts that have been unpublished when this system ended, folklore from almost each state, oral testimonies of previously enslaved folks, the much less thrilling (however no much less vital) administrative recordsdata, and a lot extra. The earliest plans to “gather, protect and arrange to be used” have been realized.

If anybody wonders why archives and libraries matter, they solely want to check out the books and different supplies which have emanated from this and different collections. They’ve helped shine a light-weight on the FWP, helped it develop right into a reputable area of research, and contributed to the story that Henry Alsberg wished to inform: the story of America. As Alsberg as soon as predicted, “These Federal Writers initiatives books ought to present a wealthy mine of colourful Americana to our writers of this and future generations.”

References:

Ackerman, Kenneth D. Younger J. Edgar: Hoover, the Pink Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007. https://lccn.loc.gov/2007298158

Alsberg, Henry Garfield. America Fights the Despair; a Photographic Document of the Civil Works Administration, edited and compiled from images and materials furnished by the Federal Emergency Reduction Administration and the state emergency reduction administrations; introduction by Harry L. Hopkins. New York, Coward-McCann, 1934. https://lccn.loc.gov/34028437 

DeMasi, Susan. Henry Alsberg, The Driving Drive of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Venture. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2016. https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023917

DeMasi, Susan. “Henry Alsberg: Architect and Defender of the Venture and its Legacies,” in Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Venture, Sara Rutkowski, ed. College of Massachusetts Press, 2022. https://lccn.loc.gov/2023289212

Federal Writers’ Venture. Illinois: A Descriptive and Historic Information. [Chicago, IL: WPA federal art project, between 1936 and 1940] {Photograph}. https://www.loc.gov/merchandise/98507272/

Federal Writers’ Venture. Snowboarding within the East The most effective trails and get there: A information for winter sport followers: Describing overtrails in 216 localities. [New York: WPA federal art project, dis. 4, between 1936 and 1939] {Photograph}. https://www.loc.gov/merchandise/98514616/.

Federal Writers’ Venture. American Stuff : An Anthology of Prose & Verse, by members of the Federal Writers’ Venture; with sixteen prints by the Federal Artwork Venture. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, c1937. https://lccn.loc.gov/37028500/

Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace : Hope and Concern in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. https://lccn.loc.gov/2006051258

Writers’ Program of the Work Tasks Administration within the State of Illinois. Cavalcade of the American Negro, compiled by the employees of the Writers’ program of the Work initiatives administration within the state of Illinois; frontispiece by Adrian Troy of the Illinois Artwork challenge. Chicago: Diamond Jubilee exposition authority, 1940. https://lccn.loc.gov/40013298/