Henry Alsberg: A New Deal Life

This blog post is provided to us courtesy of our guest, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, academic librarian, professor emeritus at Suffolk County Community College in New York and dramatic writer and journalist. Professor DeMasi is the author of several publications on Henry Alsberg, Director of the New Deal era’s Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) from 1935-39. She is currently working on a biography of John Gilbert Winant, a peace and labor advocate who served as the first Chair of Social Security, the first American Director of the International Labor Organization, Ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War II, and the first U.S. representative to the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council. Her essay for Folklife Today on Henry Alsberg’s early career is the second in a series of occasional blogs – following John Edgar Tidwells’s essay on Sterling Brown – that illuminate various aspects of the accomplishments of the FWP. In this essay DeMasi expands on her talk at the 2023 American Folklife Center symposium marking the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022). The anthology and symposium offered a range of scholarly perspectives and retrospective analyses of the FWP on its 80th anniversary (see this post about the symposium); webcasts of the event are accessible here: https://guides.loc.gov/2023-federal-writers-project-symposium. Professor DeMasi’s post touches on Alsberg’s pre-FWP activities as a writer, book editor and theatrical producer, all of which were concerned with advancing the struggle for social justice and human rights.

To write a biography is to gain insight not only into a specific person’s life, but to also explore the times in which he or she lived. My first biographical subject was Henry Alsberg, who directed the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project from 1935-1939. (Nearly all of the FWP’s publications are available at the Library of Congress, both in print and online formats.) My writings on Alsberg, as well as my talk at the Library of Congress in June 2023 focused on this period of his life. But it’s important to recognize his earlier activities and how he brought his social justice sensibilities to his New Deal work.

From 1919 through the early 1930s, Alsberg spent time in Europe as a refugee worker, a journalist covering Bolshevik Russia, and as an advocate for international political prisoners. Back home in New York, he was a journalist and an experimental-theatre producer, almost always maintaining a strong focus on human rights inequities.

In researching his life, I learned about the first “Red Scare” in 1919, as well as pre-Amnesty International endeavors to protect international political prisoners. (Alsberg co-founded the International Committee for Political Prisoners in 1924.) I became aware of Alsberg’s years-long efforts to provide relief to Jewish pogrom survivors and refugees during the interwar period in Eastern 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.]

Many of his early activities in support of oppressed people came via his writings. More than twenty years before he took on the directorship of the FWP, he wrote and edited for the New York Evening Post. Later, his compassion for the disenfranchised came through in articles for The Masses and The Nation. (It’s easy to see where his empathy for oppressed peoples came from; as a Jew, he was subject to antisemitism his entire life and as a homosexual his very existence was considered “illegal.”)

During a stint working as a producer with the Provincetown Playhouse in New York, he helped bring plays known for their social conscience to audiences, such as Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, In Abraham’s Bosom, that had a theatrical run from 1926 to 1927. The play dealt with slavery and bigotry, analogous to the topics he would deal with later as FWP director.

As I wrote in my biography of him, everything he did prior to the FWP mattered, and “taken together, everything led him to the Writers’ Project.” And although he is mostly known as the Federal Writers’ Project’s “Guiding Light,” his entrance into the New Deal came in 1934, a year before the FWP was born. As an out-of-work writer during the Great Depression, he was lucky to land a job with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). A precursor to the larger Works Progress Administration, FERA funded state work relief programs along with direct relief to individuals. Within FERA was the Civil Works Administration, or CWA, another of the so-called alphabet agencies of the New Deal. The CWA gave jobs to millions of people on public works projects that shored up infrastructure nationwide. The CWA also supported educational, health, and vocational activities, with a smaller amount of funding devoted to arts programs.  

As a FERA editor, one of Alsberg’s accomplishments was producing a book outlining the CWA’s accomplishments. The large-format publication, America Fights the Depression came out in 1934. With 200 photographs and accompanying commentary, it reflected his utopian leanings, as I noted in my biography of Alsberg:  “Women, minorities, and other ignored segments of the population appeared throughout the book. In a section lauding the Civil Works Administration’s support for musicians, a photograph of an African American choir appeared next to a white symphony orchestra from San Francisco. Both black and white children were shown frolicking in CWA-built playgrounds and schools. And in a nod to open-mindedness not usually found in government-sponsored publications, men and women in a sculpture class observed a nearly nude male model as they worked on their sculptures” (DeMasi, 2016, p. 153). Other CWA benefits came to life in those one hundred and fifty plus pages with a celebration of accomplishments ranging from farmers cooperatives to Native Americans public works art projects.

In 1935, Alsberg helped create and was hired to run the FWP. The American Guide series—at the core of the FWP’s work—became much more than travel guides, as the name might suggest. He insisted on including essays to explore the cultural landscape of America.  Here’s his quote from a press release that was more prescient than he might have realized: “Historians generations hence will look upon the American Guide as a mine of information from which to reconstruct the past and it will always, while civilization lasts, serve to assert and establish countless details which form the background of 20th century culture.”

Some FWP titles were critically acclaimed; others became best-sellers. The Project flourished: it published children’s books, encyclopedias, countless regional and local guides and FWP workers – Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison among them – wrote radio scripts, taught journalism classes and collected oral histories.

Alsberg had three main missions: 1) to keep the FWP alive and his writers employed (a struggle because conservative forces threatened the FWP’s existence from day one); 2) to nurture promising writers; and 3) to produce quality work. In 1937, he solicited writers for their “off-time” writing, and arrangements were made via private financing to publish the book, American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse. Creative pieces from about fifty FWP writers, notably Richard Wright, were included among them. 

The Project came under attack from almost the moment of its inception. For instance, in 1937, when the Massachusetts American Guide came out, it brought congratulatory words. But soon conservatives called for book burnings because they said it devoted too much space to the Sacco-Vanzetti case and to labor laws that protected children in the workplace. In 1938, the formation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) rang the death knell for the FWP and other New Deal arts groups. HUAC chair Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. and other members accused Alsberg, and the FWP, as a whole, of inciting class warfare and promoting communism. Throughout the HUAC hearings, which lasted about two years, the FWP continued publishing. Even as public approval of the Dies committee was high, so too were book sales. (A number of HUAC members and their witnesses later were shown to have lied under oath.)

By the end of the summer of 1939, Henry Alsberg was fired and the FWP lost federal sponsorship. Alsberg’s final New Deal job came in 1942 as an editor with the Office of War Information. But soon after, the Civil Service Commission accused him of having a homosexual relationship, which was prohibited by law. Not wanting to face another battle, Alsberg resigned. Later that decade, he brought the American Guides back to life as editor for the commercially published, multi-volume version that made the New York Times best seller list in 1949. Alsberg had succeeded, over a 14-year period, in delivering millions of words to tell the story of America.

In the course of writing about Alsberg’s life and his times, I knew I had to explore the documents and resources that told his story and the story of the FWP. Where did I turn?

Fortunately, when the Project was closed down and the lights turned off, when all of the editors and writers went home, many thousands of documents were deposited at the Library of Congress. Current-day scholars and researchers are thankful for this national treasure. Almost ninety years after out-of-work writers put pen to paper in FWP offices all over the nation, this collection—over 1000 boxes filled with FWP jewels, as well as the many web pages added in recent years—continues to be mined by researchers, writers, novelists, filmmakers, and podcasters. The collection includes book manuscripts that were unpublished when the program ended, folklore from nearly every state, oral testimonies of formerly enslaved people, the less exciting (but no less important) administrative files, and so much more. The earliest plans to “collect, preserve and organize for use” have been realized.

If anyone wonders why archives and libraries matter, they only need to take a look at the books and other materials that have emanated from this and other collections. They’ve helped shine a light on the FWP, helped it develop into a legitimate field of study, and contributed to the story that Henry Alsberg wanted to tell: the story of America. As Alsberg once predicted, “These Federal Writers projects books should provide a rich mine of colorful Americana to our writers of this and future generations.”

References:

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

Alsberg, Henry Garfield. America Fights the Depression; a Photographic Record of the Civil Works Administration, edited and compiled from photographs and material furnished by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the state emergency relief administrations; introduction by Harry L. Hopkins. New York, Coward-McCann, 1934. https://lccn.loc.gov/34028437 

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

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

Federal Writers’ Project. Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide. [Chicago, IL: WPA federal art project, between 1936 and 1940] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98507272/

Federal Writers’ Project. Skiing in the East The best trails and how to get there: A guide for winter sport fans: Describing overtrails in 216 localities. [New York: WPA federal art project, dis. 4, between 1936 and 1939] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98514616/.

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

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

Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Illinois. Cavalcade of the American Negro, compiled by the workers of the Writers’ program of the Work projects administration in the state of Illinois; frontispiece by Adrian Troy of the Illinois Art project. Chicago: Diamond Jubilee exposition authority, 1940. https://lccn.loc.gov/40013298/