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American Literature Readings
in the 21st Century

Series Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
USA
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14765
 Sara Rutkowski

Literary Legacies
of the Federal
Writers’ Project
Voices of the Depression in the American
Postwar Era
Sara Rutkowski
English Department
Kingsborough Community College:
City University of New York
Brooklyn, New York, USA

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

ISBN 978-3-319-53776-4 ISBN 978-3-319-53777-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53777-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934480

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
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Printed on acid-free paper

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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my parents, Alan and Rendene Rutkowski, and to my partner,
Dean Dalfonzo, and our son, Sam
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Morris Dickstein, whose brilliant scholarship on

mid-century American writing both inspired and shaped this study, and
the librarians in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for
their expert assistance with my archival research.
I am also deeply grateful to my partner, Dean Dalfonzo, our son, Sam,
and my parents, Alan and Rendene Rutkowski, whose love and guidance
have made this project possible.

vii
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: A Literary Venture, Sidestepped 1

2 Pioneering a New Literary Form 9

3 From Politics to Personalism: A Historical Perspective 17

4 Ralph Ellison: Capturing the Idiom 31

5 Beyond Hurston and Wright; Toward

West and Walker 59

6 Conclusion: Forging a Critical Path—Other

Considerations for Pursuing the FWP’s
Literary Legacies 81

Works Cited 91

Index 99

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Literary Venture,

Sidestepped

The contribution of the Program to American literature can only be

measured in years to come when future readers and researchers will have
the picturization of American life obtained and delivered first hand by
the thousands of workers who were given useful employment in an
enterprise attempted in the face of the emergencies of appalling
proportions. Likewise private industry has been stimulated and aided
by the Writers’ Program since the publishing industry, with millions
invested, has been provided, during the 1930’s and ‘40’s, with hundreds
of books which otherwise would have remained unwritten. The
cooperation of communities, sponsors, and thousands of anonymous
workers has produced social benefits as well as a lasting heritage in
American literature.
—Internal Memo, 1942 (FWP, “Objectives”)

Abstract The Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project

(FWP) set out to influence the course of American literature. Federal
writers, many of whom would become famous in the postwar era, col-
lected oral histories, folklore, and ethnographies that served as raw mate-
rial for their own writing. Yet studies of the FWP have been almost
exclusively undertaken not by literary scholars but by cultural historians
who have perceived its unique place in Depression-era history. This intro-
ductory chapter chronicles the FWP’s mission to influence the course of
American literature and then cites three reasons why the Project has long

© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Rutkowski, Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project,
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53777-1_1
2 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

eluded literary criticism: its influence on later writing is diffuse and difficult
to identify; its documentary form is often associated solely with 1930s’
social realism; and its role as a bureaucratic arm of the New Deal has
precluded it from being recognized as an agent in the creative process.

Keywords American literature
Creative process
Cultural historians

Depression era
Documentary form
Ethnographies
Federal Writers’
Project (FWP)
Folklore
Social realism
New Deal
Oral histories

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

From its inception in 1935, the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA’s)

Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was expected to influence the course of
American literature. Scores of administrative reports and correspondence,
press clippings, speeches, and scholarly essays all attest to the widespread
speculation that this unprecedented experiment in state intervention in the
arts would imprint itself on literary innovations in the years to come.
Though the quality of that influence was never specified, the fact of it
was rarely doubted; it was readily assumed that the task the Writers’
Project had engineered for itself—to peer into every corner of the country
and essentially write America’s biography during a time of profound
crisis—would invariably serve to transform American writing. “It is not
too much to expect that important literature will result indirectly from the
ideas and information which thousands of writers at work for the govern-
ment are coming into contact with every day,” wrote the FWP’s director
Henry Alsberg in an internal letter (qtd. in Hirsch Portrait 32). Similarly,
the critic Lewis Mumford wrote, “[T]his apprenticeship, this seeing of the
American scene, this listening to the American voice may mean more for
literature than any sudden forcing of stories” (qtd. in Mangione 247). In
his 1942 survey of American literature, On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin
concluded, albeit somewhat disparagingly, that the Project’s documentary
output was “all too often only a sub-literature, perhaps only a preparation
for literature.” Although he also maintained that it offered a “record of
what most deeply interested the contemporary imagination” (489).
Such opinions can be appreciated now with the knowledge that the
Project hired and trained many of the nation’s soon-to-be most famous
writers, including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston,
John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Arna Bontemps, Saul Bellow, Jack Conroy,
Nelson Algren, Claude McKay, Conrad Aiken, Margaret Walker, Dorothy
 1 INTRODUCTION: A LITERARY VENTURE, SIDESTEPPED 3

West, May Swenson, Tillie Olsen, Kenneth Patchen, Frank Yerby, etc., and
the names go on. In fact, the list of notable federal writers is so extensive that
it comes as a surprise when a writer from that era did not work for the Project.
As much during its own time as now, the very idea of the FWP—a relief
program to supply thousands of inexperienced writers with government
paychecks in exchange for reports of American life—was audacious, what
W.H. Auden termed “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings
ever attempted by any state” (qtd. in Mangione 51). In practice the Project
was no less venturesome. It established a bureaucratic network that spanned
48 states and that trained and managed a workforce with otherwise mostly
unserviceable skills in a devastated economy. Unlike the other WPA arts
projects collectively named Federal One—the Federal Art, Theater, and
Music Projects—which were smaller with limited scopes, the FWP reached
into nearly every pocket of society, employing some 6,000 out-of-work
professionals and producing hundreds of published guidebooks, collections
of folklore, and oral histories over eight years. Yet even in the New Deal
spirit of social investment, the Project garnered charges of boondoggling
and government meddling. Among staunch conservatives, it was worse: a
channel for communist propaganda. When Congress began to investigate
organizations with suspected communist ties in the mid-1940s, the FWP
was put on trial by the House Committee on Un-American Activities led by
Congressman Martin Dies of Texas. But during its brief lifespan, the
Writers’ Project also commanded a good measure of public respect, not
least for its ability to celebrate American culture at a time when so many
Americans felt bewildered by their collective sense of misfortune. Called
upon to transcribe and report on the real America, federal writers sought
countless fresh perspectives and abundant raw material that would, many
argued, stimulate new literary interpretations of the nation and help usher in
the social change promised by the New Deal.
Since the Project officially folded in 1943 when the war effort rechanneled
government resources, its influence on American writing has never been
disputed. But nor has it really ever been verified. Over the last few decades,
a handful of scholars have examined how specific documents that individual
writers produced for the FWP are echoed in their later fictional work. For
example, Carla Cappetti charts similarities between Nelson Algren’s FWP
interview with a prostitute and a monologue delivered by the character Mama
Tomek in his novel Never Come Morning, and Rosemary Hathaway explores
how Richard Wright’s depiction of Chicago’s South Side in Native Son
follows many of the details he included in an ethnographic essay he wrote
4 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

for the Project. Others have noted that Meridel Le Sueur’s novel The Girl
(1939), about a young woman thrown by poverty into prostitution, report-
edly features direct material from her FWP interviews with women in
Minnesota (Le Sueur was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and her
novel was not published again until 1978). According to Jerre Mangione,
Sam Ross’s novel Windy City (1979) chronicling Chicago’s jazz scene was
based on Ross’s extensive FWP fieldwork in jazz clubs. But most critics
addressing the FWP have made claims about its significance to American
writing without attempting to articulate the quality or scope of its literary
achievement. In his recent chronicle of the program, Soul of the People:
The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (2009), David
Taylor argues that while the Project shares “a link to remarkable con-
tributions to American fiction,” defining or measuring that link is a
“tricky matter” (221). Instead, Taylor concentrates his engaging study
on the experiences of many FWP writers, weaving together letters, inter-
views, speeches, and biographies to create a collective portrait of the
program’s vibrant and unprecedented venture.
Taylor is right: teasing out the Project’s direct ties to later writing is
complicated. The notion of influence is itself slippery; fallacious connec-
tions can easily be drawn between what writers experienced during their
tenure with the Project and what they later wrote. Although thousands
were employed by the FWP, only a relative few became famous, and those
that did wrote under a constellation of influences, their brief stint with the
Project often being a minor one. Of course, the Writers’ Project itself was
influenced by a range of cultural and economic factors, by the politics of
the Depression and the aesthetics and concerns of both proletarian and
modernist writers, by the high-minded promise of democratic pluralism,
and the ground-level wrangling of a government bureaucracy. Moreover,
the extraordinary number and variety of FWP materials were not all
guided by the same principles and methodologies; they range widely in
quality and depth and have been subject to varying levels of analysis. To
put it simply, the FWP cannot be pinned down or easily summed up any
more than the diverse group of writers who participated in it.
But it is curious that the FWP has not been examined in terms of its
relationship to literary developments, especially given its leaders’ expressed
interest in cultivating new literature, not to mention subsequent critics’
assertions that the FWP had succeeded in doing so. Instead the subject of
the FWP has been almost exclusively in the possession of historians and
cultural critics who have rightly perceived in its unique place in New Deal
 1 INTRODUCTION: A LITERARY VENTURE, SIDESTEPPED 5

history a wealth of instructive and absorbing material. A number of

impressive historical accounts of the program include Jerre Mangione’s
The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (1972),
Monty Penkower’s The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government
Patronage of the Arts (1977), and Jerrold Hirsch’s Portrait of America: A
Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (2006). Much attention
has also been directed to the Project’s extraordinary primary source mate-
rials—the volumes of oral histories, slave narratives, state guides, ethno-
graphic essays, and folklore collection. One of the largest and best-known
undertakings of the FWP is its American Guide Series, a set of narrative
guidebooks that depict the culture, people, history, and points of interest
in every state and many cities, towns, and rural areas across the country.
Lesser known but equally extensive is the Project’s folklore collection,
which includes oral testimonies from Americans of all walks of life—
industrial workers, tenant farmers, housewives, and immigrants. In
1939, the FWP published a sample of these personal narratives in These
Are Our Lives, followed much later by additional personal narratives in
Such As Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (1978). The most significant
oral testimonies that the Project collected were those from former slaves,
the last living generation of Americans born into slavery. A selection of
these interviews was published in Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of
Slavery in 1945. Not until 1972 was the entire collection of former slave
narratives published under the title The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography, and edited by George Rawick, a historian who had worked
for the Project.
Moreover, few dispute the instrumental role the FWP played in helping
to inaugurate the field of oral history. Its work collecting personal testi-
monies helped to pioneer a new breed of grassroots historiography that
would flourish in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as historians moved away
from writing the nation’s history from the perspective of its most powerful
figures. Studs Terkel, who worked for the Illinois Writer’s Project collect-
ing oral testimonies and writing radio scripts, essentially became a one-
man FWP for several decades after the Depression. His many collections of
oral history culled material from both the FWP’s folklore archives and
methods, the “bottom-up” history of whom Terkel calls “the anonymous
many.” Though it deserves more attention, the Project’s role in shaping a
new historiography has been recognized and its extraordinary range of
archival documents continues to offer historians and cultural critics a
seemingly endless trail of inquiry.
6 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

But the questions remain: Why does the FWP still largely elude literary
analysis? And why is it so difficult to qualify the FWP’s connection to
American literature?
The answers may lie both in the equivocal, often conflicting nature of
the Project and in the larger literary-historical terms that have come to
define the 1930s. While the FWP was designed above all to provide relief
employment to “all needy persons within the writing field,” its secondary
objective, as described in archival memoranda, was to “give concrete
form and value to the work of these writers” (FWP, “Objectives”). But
the ambiguity inherent in this notion of “form and value” has from the
beginning created some confusion about the nature and purpose of the
writing that emerged from the Project. The FWP claimed that its goal was
to allow writers to “produce books of creative value, novels, poetry and
other works in their leisure time” (FWP “Objectives”). It even published
an anthology of creative work by federal writers, entitled American Stuff
(1937), in which appeared Richard Wright’s now famous essay “The
Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” as well as poetry
by Kenneth Rexroth, Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown. In his fore-
word, Alsberg writes that the book countered any public perception that
FWP writers “are incapable of producing anything but guides” in which
the “creative element is present only incidentally” (v). Even so, the pro-
duction of the Guidebook Series was at least initially the Project’s main
effort—in its own words, its “immediate aim.” The form and value of
these guides have always been more calculable than the federal writers’ off-
time creative work; unlike the latter, the guidebooks and interviews are
artifacts directly attributable to the FWP. They were generally viewed as
educational, historically and culturally significant, morale-boosting, and
economically beneficial. On the other hand, the literary work that the
Project potentially encouraged has long seemed too diffuse and difficult to
identify. The FWP thus poses a conundrum for literary critics: its tangible
body of work is not literary enough and the literary work it may have
inspired is not tangible enough.
Another likely reason the FWP has attracted so little literary scholarship is
because it existed within—and indeed, because of—1930s’ Depression-era
culture, and therefore has generally been folded into the established literary
historical framework of that era. In conventional terms, Depression literature
is associated with the proletarian genre, social realism, and the brief resur-
gence of literary naturalism that waned shortly after the war when writers
turned their attention to more psychological and metaphysical dimensions of
 1 INTRODUCTION: A LITERARY VENTURE, SIDESTEPPED 7

American life. Among the formalist critics of the 1950s, the socially engaged
work of the FWP appeared anachronistic, even an unpleasant reminder of the
Depression. Although many of the writers from the FWP went on to become
prominent postwar writers, the Project is generally viewed as disconnected
from the concerns and aesthetics that dominated the late 1940s and the
1950s, when the previous modernist heroes like Hemingway and Fitzgerald
were seen as rhetorically more congenial to the cultural climate. Many critics
today are still more likely to see the work of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright,
and Jack Conroy—all notable social realists—as more emblematic of the
Project’s influence than the self-seeking explorations of Ellison or Algren.
The 1930s’ documentary style, coupled with left-wing populism, continues
to prevail in our conception of the FWP and consequently the Project has
become hermetically sealed within the boundaries of Depression discourse.
A yet more implicit factor that may contribute to the FWP’s failure to
impact literary discourse involves the general discomfort among both
literary critics and writers with the relationship between the arts and
government, the individual artist and the authority of the state. The
massive cultural engineering that the Roosevelt administration performed
through Federal One may continue to garner fascination—particularly
among art historians who have exhaustively studied the WPA murals—
but the idea that it mediated the creativity and vision of artists working
outside their relief duties still seems unconvincing to many. The theore-
tical distance between art and government remains sacrosanct in American
cultural discourse, even to scholars who readily engage with how political
ideology inscribes itself on art production. As a bureaucratic arm, the FWP
is viewed at worst as a propagandist force for the New Deal and at best as a
facilitator for writers and the writing profession, but rarely as an agent in
the creative process, the notion of which may offend the “bottom-up”
paradigm that many critics have constructed to make sense of 1930s’
literary innovation.
This study attempts to fill the critical void by examining the overlooked
role the FWP played in shaping American literature following the
Depression. While some literary scholars suggest that the FWP’s relevance
died alongside the political and social currents of the Depression, I argue
that the FWP’s materials and methods long outlived the program itself.
By aiming their documentary lenses so precisely on individual voices and
cultural communities, FWP writers would ultimately eschew the social
realism of 1930s’ culture in favor of themes surrounding personal
and cultural identity in the postwar era. Many previously marginalized
8 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

writers—black and women writers in particular—found their literary

voices in part because of the FWP’s efforts to create a grassroots metho-
dology that privileged folklore, self-expression, and subjective experiences,
and that allowed many emerging writers to claim their place in American
culture. Drawing on archival documents from the FWP’s folklore unit,
recovered writings, and critical histories, I explore the history, nature, and
practice of the Project’s unique documentary method along with its
influence on three notable black writers for whom the FWP served as a
turning point and an inspiration in their literary careers: Ralph Ellison,
Dorothy West, and Margaret Walker. I do not mean to suggest that these
writers epitomize the influence of the FWP, but rather that they offer three
engaging and divergent examples of how the Project continued to express
itself in a new body of fiction that grappled with black identity—examples
that can help open a critical space in which to examine other federal writers
whose work was informed by the FWP. Indeed, the purpose of this study is
to offer a foundational perspective from which to invite further re-readings
of a range of twentieth-century American writers through their correla-
tions with the Writers’ Project. To that end, I conclude by proposing
areas for further inquiry that consider the FWP as a repository from which
communities of writers drew material, techniques, and philosophical
direction in ways that would, I argue, help steer the course of American
writing.
 CHAPTER 2

Pioneering a New Literary Form

Abstract In 1954, the critic Malcolm Cowley noted a “new breed” of

American fiction that had emerged in the postwar era—writing he labeled
personalism, which merged literary naturalism with explorations of
subjectivity. This chapter examines how the FWP’s quest for national
self-discovery, its focus on folklore, voice, and subjective experience, and
its quasi-literary documentary methods anticipated the new school self-
conscious literature that came to dominate the postwar period. The FWP’s
relevance did not die alongside the political and social currents of the
Depression, but rather the Project’s materials and methods long outlived
the program itself.

Keywords American fiction
Depression
Federal Writers’ Project

(FWP)
Malcolm Cowley
National self-discovery
Personalism

Postwar period
Quasi-literary documentary methods
Ralph Ellison

Saul Bellow
Nelson Algren
Naturalism
Postwar literature

Writing in The New Republic in 1954, the literary critic Malcolm Cowley
noted a “new breed” of American fiction that had emerged in the postwar
era—writing he labeled “personalism,” and which, he argued, merged
literary naturalism with explorations of subjectivity while avoiding any
strict determinism by concentrating its lens so tightly on characters’

© The Author(s) 2017 9

S. Rutkowski, Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project,
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53777-1_2
10 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

perspectives. According to Cowley, the key personalists were Ralph

Ellison, Nelson Algren, and Saul Bellow, as each “seems to believe that
the author himself should be a personality instead of a recording
instrument, and therefore he keeps trying to find a personal approach
and a personal manner of writing” (16). What Cowley does not
mention is that all three of these men had cut their literary teeth in
the 1930s while working for the FWP. But his assertion that each of
their novels “starts with social conditions and ends as a defense of the
separate personality” (16) aligns very closely with the FWP’s method
of using the larger Depression era as the landscape on which writers
painted portraits of individual selves. Indeed, the Project might
well be the source of this new school of personalism; with its multi-
tude of subjective voices and its quasi-literary documentary methods,
the FWP would later find expression in the new textual universe of the
postwar era.
Most critics agree that an important legacy of the Writers’ Project
was the support and empowerment it gave a number of writers, particu-
larly so-called ethnic and working-class writers, who would later become
major voices in postwar American literature. In his essay “Going to the
Territory,” Ellison wrote: “I could not have become a writer at the time
I began had I not been able to earn my board and keep by doing research
for the New York Project” (668). Indeed, the FWP can reasonably be
credited with giving many major writers like Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora
Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Dorothy West, and Nelson Algren—not to
mention legions of unknown writers—an opportunity to develop their
craft during a period of severe economic insecurity. But the FWP gave
writers more than income; it provided them access to parts of American
culture they otherwise might not have encountered—unique individuals,
communities, and folklore, and therefore a wealth of raw material for their
own writing. The FWP’s quest for national self-discovery—its attempt to
seek out and define the nation’s pluralist identity by charting a vast array of
experiences and histories—anticipated in many ways the new breed of self-
conscious literature that came to dominate the postwar period. By offering
writers anthropological tools and a close-up lens through which to view
pockets of American life, the Project would focus writers’ attention on
both cultural and personal identity and the intersection of these two
strands of who we are. In the prosperous economy and Cold War climate
of the 1950s and 1960s, the FWP’s obsession with trying to explain
America to itself would bloom into something discernibly different. The
 2 PIONEERING A NEW LITERARY FORM 11

collectivist discourse of the 1930s fell away, and along with it a sense of
optimism and progress engendered by the New Deal. Yet the drive among
writers to probe the character and quality of Americans did not wane
under these new conditions. Postwar writers who had worked for the
Project persisted in hammering away at the question: what does it mean
to be American? They and many others continued to explore the lives of
victims and outsiders and the struggles of so-called ethnic Americans,
whose claims for recognition became yet more insistent with the ascen-
dency of white middle-class values in the 1950s.
In his critique of postwar writing, Leopards in the Temple (2002),
Morris Dickstein describes the literary shift from the 1930s to the
1950s as a move “away from social problems toward metaphysical con-
cerns about identity, morality, and man’s place in the larger scheme of
the universe” (63). After the war, the vantage point of writers pivoted,
Dickstein argues, from Marx to Freud—from the steely reality of the
Depression to the personalized, impalpable experience of trying to know
one’s self. Realism, the prevailing mode in twentieth-century American
writing, did not die with the 1930s, but emerged as a new approach
that largely spurned the naturalism to which realism had so long been
linked—the attempts among writers from Theodore Dreiser to John Dos
Passos to Wright to represent the intractable societal forces that squelch
human agency. In their sweeping portraits of American experience, these
social realists wrestled with the political and economic currents that
consumed individual lives. But as the realities of these conditions chan-
ged after the war, their work became a target of antipathy. As Dickstein
writes, “Their naturalist methods, which required an immense piling up
of realistic details, and a minute verisimilitude, seemed unable to encom-
pass the complexities and absurdities, to say nothing of the social changes
of the postwar world” (25). Sounding the same note, critic Thomas Hill
Schaub describes the critique of naturalist aesthetics this way: “In its
materialism, its assumption of determinate behavior, and its documen-
tary methods literary naturalism relied too much for its truths upon
surface detail and failed to provide an adequate portrait of the inner
life” (43).
By contrast, the postwar writers were preoccupied with the inner life.
They had a vastly different culture from 1930s’ writers to contend with,
one in which the pressure to conform and succeed was more urgent than
any need for collective engagement, where the moral abomination of
fascism and war cast profound doubt over the faith in modern progress
12 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

and raised questions about human nature, while dizzying economic and
technological changes proved the triumph of capitalism and effectively
stunned its opposition. Political action was put aside; the thriving econ-
omy, coupled with the moral fatigue from the monumental crises of
Depression and war, prompted Americans to retreat into their private
lives in search of inspiration and fulfillment. In response to this new
cultural reality came a more insular, self-reflective literature. Writing that
explored the individual’s internal drive to find meaning replaced the
proletarian genre where class struggle defined life’s experiences. Postwar
writers therefore sought a realism that turned away from political con-
cerns and incorporated—indeed, privileged—the psychological reality of
life, so that the external fabric of society became filtered through the
individual’s mind.
Yet this emergent brooding self has antecedents in the subjects of the
FWP, the vast collection of ordinary Americans, social misfits, and cultural
outsiders whose individual voices federal writers painstakingly transcribed.
Much of the writing of the late 1940s and 1950s that developed into a
perceptible body of self-conscious literature shares the FWP’s interest
in personal identity, voice, and self-expression. Federal writers, especially
black and working-class writers, carried these concerns over to a new
cultural climate. They did not abandon the outside world; rather they
interpreted the social conditions through the lens of the self and the first-
person voice—much like the FWP, which was geared toward translating
society’s influences and meanings through subjective experience and per-
sonal struggle. These writers fought society not by means of political
protest but, in Lawrence Lipton’s terms, by “disaffiliating” with society,
and turning “their back on the status quo in utter rejection” (388).
Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944) and
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) all unfold through the internal
musings of their narrators who struggle to define themselves within
and against the oppressive prescriptions of American society. Although
Algren’s novels, Never Come Morning (1942) and The Man with the
Golden Arm (1949), with their claustrophobic fixation on the urban
under-classes, tend to be viewed as spillover from the 1930s, much of it
is animated by the inward gloom of his offbeat characters who try to better
themselves under the disapproving glare of middle-class American culture.
The FWP was in many ways tailor-made for a writers like Algren who
was, both by nature and circumstance, part beat reporter, part cultural
anthropologist, part poet, and part poor man—all identities that
 2 PIONEERING A NEW LITERARY FORM 13

the Project either catered to or cultivated. Algren’s early experience

working for the FWP in Chicago helped inspire his unique merger of
gritty social realism with the language of human psychology and the
struggle for self-definition. Within his fieldwork interviews we find the
seeds of his fictional portrayals: the brooding, hapless outcasts who
populate his novels and short stories.1
We see similar studies in self-definition elsewhere among former FWP
writers. Anzia Yezierska’s semi-fictional protagonist in Red Ribbon on a
White Horse (1950) wages an internal battle over her dual identity
as struggling immigrant and American writer and Chester Himes’ Bob
Jones in If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) is tormented by his deep anger
toward and his simultaneous desire to be accepted by his hostile white
surroundings. Himes’ novel has been widely associated with the proletar-
ian genre, but it too, with its highly personal and self-aware account of the
psychological effects of racism, moves away from the social construct of
protest fiction. These novels and many others are marked by their prota-
gonists’ inner voices and ability to self-consciously analyze their social
conditions in pursuit of an authentic self. Many post-Depression writers
seem to have imbibed the documentary form that channeled social criti-
cism through the eyes of the outsider. Their narrators are immersed not in
fighting the larger societal structures of oppression but in their own
internal longing for self-definition.
In its thousands of oral histories and personal narratives, the Project
anticipated the widespread use of the first-person narrative point of view
that came to characterize the new psychic alienation of postwar fiction.
Schaub argues that the embrace of the personal perspective among so
many mid-century writers sprung from a need to tell stories “which both
reflected [the characters’] rupture with society and established at the same
time a legitimate source of authority for describing a redefined ‘reality’”
(68). He continues, “For a surprising number of writers, this strategy
amounted to the invention of first person voices, often autobiographical,
a point of view which embodied in one degree or another the isolation of
the speaker, while at the same time issuing from the unimpeachable
authority of his consciousness and perception” (68). Schaub credits the
move toward subjective narration to “simply an effect of the shift from
economy to mind so visible throughout the intellectual community of the
time” (68–69).
But long before what Schaub calls the “swing toward the authority
of subjective experience” (83) was appreciable, the FWP promoted the
14 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

first-person voice—not only as an aesthetic device to record interviews,

but as a more immediate and powerful way than the objective narrative to
portray individuals’ efforts to construct and interpret their own lives. The
colloquial voices of ordinary Americans were central to the FWP’s doc-
umentary form, which sought to highlight the orality and idioms of
American expression—not only the things people say, but the way they
say them. In the same vein as Mark Twain, FWP writers experimented with
vernacular prose and with capturing the cadence of the individual’s voice.
Their transcriptions and portraits of those they interviewed were often
funny and folksy, unstructured and spontaneous monologues from peo-
ple lost in their own streams of consciousness, reflecting on the facts of
their lives. Emerging writers enthusiastically embraced this intimate
conversational voice, the regional colloquialisms, the lore, and the spon-
taneous, haphazard riffing of real first-person speech. Even when writers
did use third-person narration, as Algren, West, Walker, and others
frequently did, their narrators maintain a close proximity to the prota-
gonist, adopting his or her voice so that the objective and subjective
perspectives seem to merge.
Jerre Mangione is one of the few to recognize how the FWP actually
helped turn writers away from the proletarian model of writing popular
during the Depression. Federal writers, he argues, “without realizing it,
provided a powerful antithesis to the widespread obsession with proletar-
ian writing that dominated the literary atmosphere of the thirties—the
obsession which produced an outpouring of didactic writing that told and
retold what was wrong with the country and what Marxist-Leninist solu-
tions could save it from the evils of capitalism. The Project writers, during
this same period, simply told their countrymen what their country was
like” (373). But while reportage was among the key features of the
Project’s documentary approach, the federal writers did more than present
the nation simply as it was. In their search for folklore, autobiography,
history, and ethnography, they helped develop a narrative mode that
captured reality through the unique voices of personal experience. More
humanist than Marxist, this approach to producing social documentary
from the inside—or what I term subjective realism—emphasized the
realities of ordinary and outcast Americans and their expressions of
humanity. The nation’s identity therefore became compressed into
the individual, and larger questions about national identity began to
emanate from the essential question: “Who am I?” This new ethos of
contending with history and social injustice through the inner voice
 2 PIONEERING A NEW LITERARY FORM 15

would migrate easily over to storytelling in the postwar era where the
identity claims of cultural outsiders were among the main ingredients of
literary narrative.

NOTE
1. For a full discussion about Nelson Algren’s fieldwork for the FWP and how
it influenced his body of writing, see my article “Nelson Algren’s
Personalism: The Influence of the Federal Writers’ Project” in Studies in
American Naturalism (Winter 2014, Vol. 9 Issue 2, pp. 198–223).
 CHAPTER 3

From Politics to Personalism: A Historical

Perspective

Abstract This chapter traces the FWP’s documentary methods and aims
as articulated in critical histories and archival fieldwork instructions and
speeches. The Project’s approach to documenting individual stories can be
tied to President Roosevelt’s own interest in personalizing the nation’s
economic crisis through individual accounts of struggle. Central to this
discussion is Benjamin Botkin, the FWP’s national folklore editor, and
Sterling Brown, the Negro Affairs editor, who together led the FWP’s
efforts to compile a vast and unprecedented collection of folklore and oral
histories, including those of former slaves. Both men advocated for the use
of literary techniques in fieldwork and both believed that the creative
writer—more than the trained folklorist—could humanize folklore,
making it accessible to the general public and a vehicle for promoting
awareness of and appreciation for the nation’s cultural diversity.

Keywords Archival fieldwork
Benjamin Botkin
Critical histories

Cultural diversity
Documentary methods
Economic crisis
Folklore

FWP individual accounts of struggle
Negro affairs
President Roosevelt

Sterling Brown

The genesis of what Cowley terms literary personalism—the tendency

of postwar writers to view social problems through the lens of the
individual—might be traced to the immediate politics and personalities

© The Author(s) 2017 17

S. Rutkowski, Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project,
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53777-1_3
18 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

of the Roosevelt administration. Historians have long maintained that

politics and social policy during the Depression were shaped in part by
President Roosevelt’s impulse to personalize the economic crisis through
anecdotal evidence of its effects—the plight of one poverty-stricken family,
for example. In his now classic Documentary Expression and Thirties
America (1973), William Stott argues that for Roosevelt, personal
experiences could illuminate the nation’s crisis more than any theories
or statistics. His famous “fireside chats” and speeches, peppered with
testimonies from ordinary Americans, suggest that in Roosevelt’s world-
view “people appear to have counted more than ideas” (Stott 97). The
intellectual Left of the early 1930s, for which Marxist determinism
helped to explain the current state of affairs, naturally chafed against
the president’s reliance on personal stories rather than ideology. “To
most intellectuals of the thirties, everything personal was suspect” (99),
Stott writes. “Roosevelt moved cheerfully against this current of the
time” (100).
In many ways, the FWP’s documentary form was another reification
of Roosevelt’s desire to project the nation through its individual voices. In
its attempt to conceptualize a pluralist collective identity, the Project
stridently avoided scientific or scholarly appraisals of American society,
opting instead for literary renderings and first-person accounts of indivi-
dual experiences. These slices of life and selections of regional folklore
would not only offer Americans a record of their culture, but would also,
ideally, help foster mutual appreciation and expand previously narrow
concepts of who qualified as American. Whether naïve or visionary, the
architects of the FWP believed that exposure to Americans from typically
marginalized backgrounds would help to correct widely held misconcep-
tions and propel integration into mainstream culture. The Project aired
as never before the perspectives of communities of blacks, immigrants,
and the poor. Personalizing their larger social realities by showcasing
their individual voices became a critical element to the FWP’s documen-
tary form.
In its aesthetic and formal strategies, this documentary form would
both draw on and deviate from the social realism and determinism—the
efforts among artists and social scientists to expose and critique the social
structures that sustain the conditions of the lower classes—that tend to be
associated with 1930s’ documentary. While the FWP echoed leftist con-
cerns in its attempt to showcase the plight of ordinary Americans, it did so
(at least in theory) not by enforcing their representation, but by insisting
 3 FROM POLITICS TO PERSONALISM: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 19

instead that these Americans speak for themselves and, in effect, write their
own histories.
The methodological foundation for this approach was never particularly
firm, but its precariousness was ultimately a critical factor for what made it
both unique and influential. The fact alone that writers were charged with
conducting fieldwork more commonly performed by trained social scien-
tists suggests that the outcome would be original. As Mangione describes
it, the strategy involved “the knack of asking the right questions at the
right time, of intuitively providing leads that would encourage the infor-
mant to talk freely.” This, he explains, “more than compensated for the
Project writers’ lack of folklore training,” and as a result, “fresh techniques
were developed which were highly effective” (272).
The FWP is chiefly known today for the sweeping American Guide
Series, its signature and most ambitious project aimed at chronicling each
American state, its cities, roadways, history, and lived reality. All told,
the Project produced some 378 guides that range widely in quality and
scope and whose merits spring from both the varying levels of editorial
direction and the relative strength of their individual writers. The ultimate
goal of the Guidebook Series was also variable. Theoretically the guide-
books boasted an obvious economic benefit in that they could help spur
domestic tourism, though it became apparent that road travel during the
Depression was generally not for pleasure. But more generally the guides
were designed to create a sense of shared national identity and to gen-
erate interest in the nation’s extraordinary cultural and topographic
diversity. From the perspective of Washington, the guides could also
serve to mobilize support for the New Deal’s vision of unity and cultural
progress.
Writers were assigned to address specific areas and granted consider-
able freedom for choosing and collecting their material. Rather than
being secluded in offices or libraries, they were dispatched as fieldworkers
to freely mingle with local informants (many of whom they likely already
knew) and empowered as temporary historians charged with document-
ing the familiar textures of their home states. The results were, not
surprisingly, experimental: a cobbled together assortment of styles and
inspirations, a sometimes jarring mix of hard history and chatty prose.
Writing about the Guide Series in the New Republic in 1939, Robert
Cantwell proclaimed: “The America that is beginning to emerge from
the books of the Writers’ Project is a land to be taken seriously: nothing
quite like it has ever appeared in our literature.” It was an America, he
20 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

argues, devoid of the mythologized and triumphant figures of traditional

American history:

[These guides] have no such rigorous standard to determine inclusion:

people are mentioned whether they succeeded or failed, whether their
inventions worked or not, whether they won or lost their duels, made
money inside or outside the law: the only test seems to be that some living
evidence of their presence, if only a legend or the name of a street, still
persists in their own towns. (324)

Countering triumphalism, self-advertisement, and boastful nationalism,

the guidebooks painted what Cantwell called “a slightly alarming pic-
ture” (325) of the nation, though he emphatically praised what he saw as
a pioneering attempt to capture the truth and grit of American life: “It
is a grand, melancholy, formless, democratic anthology of frustration
and idiosyncrasy, a majestic roll call of national failure, a terrible and
yet engaging corrective to the success stories that dominate our litera-
ture” (325).
But despite its breadth and the rich source of raw material it provided
aspiring writers, the Guidebook Series alone tells us less about the Project’s
documentary form as the FWP’s other, lesser known, and still largely
unpublished undertaking: the mining for American folklore. It was within
the Project’s folklore unit—charged with collecting a vast miscellanea of
oral histories, stories, and folk ephemera between 1936 and 1939—that
many soon-to-be important American writers became immersed in a
narrative philosophy and a documentary practice that helped them
develop their craft. As Mangione writes, “More than any other official
Project undertaking, the search for lore gave the writers engaged in it a
sense of literary creativity and the satisfaction of being directly involved
with the current scene” (273).
Headed first by distinguished folklorist and musicologist John Lomax
and later by folklorist and poet Benjamin Botkin, the folklore unit dis-
patched writers to collect first-hand accounts of daily life, traditions, and
folklore from Americans across the cultural spectrum. Though Lomax
initiated many of the unit’s major assignments, including the collection
of former slave narratives, it was Botkin who published portions of its
findings and who expressed a “broader and even more contemporary”
view of folklore that emphasized shared bonds between living cultures
(Mangione 269). Having taught English at the University of Oklahoma
 3 FROM POLITICS TO PERSONALISM: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 21

and edited four volumes of regional folklore entitled Folk-Say, Botkin

brought to the field of folklore a literary sensibility and perhaps the most
articulated vision for how the FWP’s folklore work could help create a new
breed of American literature. Alongside the Project’s Negro Affairs editor
Sterling Brown, also a celebrated poet, and Social-Ethnic Studies editor
Morton Royse, Botkin shunned the traditional view of folklore studies as a
means to preserving the past and instead embraced a broader, dynamic
view of the field as a study in contemporary life. Folklore, he believed, does
not comprise relics of a rural and pre-modern American identity, but
rather is itself “a study in acculturation—the process by which the folk
group adapts itself to its environment and to change, assimilating new
experience and generating fresh forms” (qtd. in Hirsch, “Folklore in the
Making”). Botkin thus set out to document the diversity and cacophony
of an increasingly urban society in which he saw the material of a
new, more fluid national identity while rejecting, as Jerrold Hirsch
argues, “the genteel identification of the national character with Anglo-
Saxon Americanism” (“Folklore” 10). Similarly, Mangione maintains
that Botkin helped to rescue “folklore from the academically embalmed
atmosphere in which it had long been contained and bringing it to a
large audience that was hungry for the kind of Americana which reflected
the nation’s varied personality” (277).
Central to Botkin’s philosophy was the belief that creative writers,
instead of trained folklorists, should be in charge of collecting folklore—
not simply because there were not enough folklorists available to undertake
the FWP’s mission, but because writers were better equipped to tell the
stories that folklore naturally contains. Unlike traditionalists, Botkin
argued, writers tend to pay attention to the folk side of folklore and could
therefore humanize the lore, making it more relevant, engaging, and even
transformative for the general public. Indeed, the job of assembling indi-
viduals’ stories and cultural practices was by its very nature literary, offering
writers useable material and select vantage points of American life.
Among the clearest and most succinct articulations of Botkin’s theory of
folklore and literature is a speech Botkin delivered to the “Folklore Craft
session” of the 3rd Congress of the League of American Writers in 1939,
titled “The Folk and the Writer.” Here, he argues that writers should make
creative use of folk materials, and that folklore is “not something far away
and long ago, but real and living among us and that the writer has more
than materials, idiom and forms, to gain from it. He gains a point of view.”
According to Botkin, the foremost purpose of such identification in
22 LITERARY LEGACIES OF THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT

literature is “its attempt to make the inarticulate articulate and above all to
let the people speak in their own voice and tell their own story by recording
and stimulating the worker as writer.” He also stresses the importance of
listening: the writer who makes use of folk sources, he writes, “must be a
good listener with a good ear for remembering both what is said and how it
is said.” There “must be a creative rather than an imitative listener. He must
be able to catch the inner as well as the outer accents and rhythm. He must
also be able to live many lives.” Botkin’s conception of folklore is not “an
old woman’s tale to frighten children or a song to lighten the tedium of
labor or leisure,” but a “social portraiture and protest, an outlet, organizer
and interpreter of social thought” (“The Folk and the Writer”).
Botkin challenged the FWP to put his theory into action. Internal
guidelines for how folklore material was to be collected varied widely
from state to state and depended a great deal on the personalities and
priorities of regional directors. In Chicago, for example, director John T.
Frederick allowed his writers to seek out any subject of their choosing.
Jack Conroy, who had already gained a reputation as a proletarian novelist,
helped launch the Industrial Lore unit for which he gathered experiences
and “tall tales” from factory workers in Chicago’s rust belt. Another
writer, Sam Ross, spent his fieldwork hours in jazz clubs and Nelson
Algren conducted the majority of his interviews in local Chicago bars.
Working for the Florida Writers’ Project, Zora Neale Hurston, a trained
anthropologist, was free to continue the work she had begun in and
published in Mules and Men (1935), an anthology of Florida folklore
from her hometown of Eatonville.
Written instructions to writers tended to emphasize the importance of
being “natural” to prevent a stiff or formal interview. Writers were advised
to “avoid skipping about from point to point. In drawing the informant
out, also guide him skilfully [sic] along so that in progressing you exhaust
each topic before leaving it . . . Rather than ask directly for certain types of
folklore material, let the collection grow out of the interview, naturally and
spontaneously” (FWP, “Manual”). Even for the ex-slave narratives, whose
historical purpose was more self-evident than much of the collected folk-
lore, the guidelines were open-ended. Though fieldworkers were provided
a list of specific questions to pose, they were also counseled to be selective:
“If he will talk freely, he should be encouraged to say what he pleases
without reference to the questions” (FWP, “Memo”).
Perhaps most significant were the guidelines for transcribing the inter-
views. Writers were often encouraged to minimize the insertion of their
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Diligent Dick
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
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country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Diligent Dick

or, the young farmer

Author: Madeline Leslie

Release date: August 26, 2023 [eBook #71493]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Young & Bartlett, 1871

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DILIGENT DICK ***

Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.

DICK TRAINING THE HORSE.

THE HAPPY HOME STORIES.

DILIGENT DICK;
OR,
 THE YOUNG FARMER.

BY AUNT HATTIE.

[MADELINE LESLIE]

"Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall

stand before kings; he shall not stand before

mean men."—Paul.

BOSTON:

YOUNG & BARTLETT,

26 SCHOOL STREET.
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by

HENRY A. YOUNG & CO.,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

LIST

OF VOLUMES IN

THE HAPPY HOME STORIES.

FOR BOYS.

VOL. I. DILIGENT DICK.

VOL. II. COUSIN WILLIE.

VOL. III. LAZY ROBERT.

VOL. IV. LITTLE FRITZ.

VOL. V. THE NEW BUGGY.

VOL. VI. BERTIE AND HIS SISTERS.

LIST
 OF VOLUMES IN

THE HAPPY HOME STORIES.

FOR GIRLS.

VOL. I. LITTLE FLYAWAY.

VOL. II. THE SPOILED PICTURE.

VOL. III. FLEDA'S CHILDHOOD.

VOL. IV. THE SINGING GIRL.

VOL. V. MOLLY AND THE WINE GLASS.

VOL. VI. THE TWINS.

 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. VISIT TO MR. JONES

CHAPTER II. DICK AT HOME

CHAPTER III. DICK AT SCHOOL

CHAPTER IV. DICK IN TROUBLE

CHAPTER V. DICK'S PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER VI. DICK'S ADVENTURE

CHAPTER VII. DICK'S STORY

CHAPTER VIII. DICK TAMING THE HORSE

CHAPTER IX. DICK AND THE DEACON

CHAPTER X. DICK'S VISIT TO MAINE

 DILIGENT DICK.

CHAPTER I.

VISIT TO MR. JONES.

MR. JONES sat in his office on Pearl Street one of the hottest afternoons in
August, eighteen hundred and fifty-eight. His linen coat was thrown on the
back of his chair, his vest was loosened from top to bottom, a pitcher of iced
water stood convenient to his hand; but he puffed and panted continually.

"This is terrible!" he said to Mr. Follinsby a gentlemen sitting opposite, trying to

lose the recollection of his discomfort in the columns of the newspaper,
"Terrible! Thermometer ninety-eight in the shade. I pity the horses—"

"A boy to see you, Mr. Jones," said a clerk smiling.

"Ha! A boy is there? Well ask him in. Any body who ventures out in the street
under such a sun ought to have important business."

The gentlemen both looked toward the door, and were rather surprised to see
a little fellow, not more than twelve years of age, standing there, with his straw
hat in his hand. He had on what is called a French shirt of some light material
made loose with wide sleeves, to which his pantaloons were attached, and a
small ruffled collar round his neck. Before he spoke a word, he took a
handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead,
brushing back the heavy mass of curls which had fallen there. The only parts
of his countenance which deserve particular notice at this time, were a pair of
honest, earnest, blue eyes, which looked straight, without fear or hesitation,
into the face of the one he addressed; and a small, well cut mouth, which told,
without his speaking, a whole story of the possessor's sweetness of temper,
and mirthfulness; and yet the manner of shutting it proved that he had
firmness too.
All this, which has taken so long to describe, only cost the two gentlemen one
searching glance; then the boy took two or three steps forward, saying in a
pleasant, respectful tone—

"I want to see Mr. Jones."

"That is Mr. Jones," remarked Mr. Follinsby, waving his hand toward the
gentleman.

"Are you the chairman of the Committee on decorating the St. Stevens'
church?"

This question was so wholly unexpected by Mr. Jones, who supposed the boy
had come to ask charity; or perhaps to seek a place as errand boy in his store,
that for one moment he did not answer, but sat eyeing the lad with a
perplexed smile, then he said:

"Hem! Yes, I'm the one."

"Have you engaged your evergreens for Christmas, sir?"

"For Christmas? Ha! Ha! Ha! We haven't begun to think of Christmas yet, my
little fellow."

"I want to engage the job, if you please. I'll supply the evergreen as cheap as
any body. I know, it's a good while before Christmas; but mother says it's best
to be in season when you're to do any thing."

He said all this in such a matter-of-fact way, as though he had been used to
business of the kind for years, that Mr. Jones, after a glance at his friend, burst
into a hearty laugh, in which the boy joined with perfect good humor.

"What is your name?" was the next question.

"Richard Monroe Stuart, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve last March."

"Have you ever decorated a church before?"

"No, sir; and I don't expect to decorate it this year. Mother says it takes tall
men with ladders, to do that. I only want to supply the evergreens. I'll do it as
cheap as any body, sir."

"Where do you live, Richard?"

"I live in Annesley, sir. They always call me Dick at home." He added this with
a smile, so full of humor that both the gentlemen laughed.

"Is your father living, Dick?"

"Oh, yes, sir! He is the minister in Annesley."

"And you are doing the business on your own account?"

"Yes, sir. One of our neighbors has a church in the city to decorate every year;
and he makes a good deal of money."

"I suppose your parents are willing you should do this; I mean that they knew
of your coming here?"

"Mother does, sir, of course. I never do any thing without telling her."

"Why not your father, too?"

"I want to surprise him. The people are poor; and so they can't give much
salary. If I get the job, I'm going to buy a new buffalo robe. We've needed one
for the sleigh a good while."

"Whew!" ejaculated Mr. Jones. "Will it ever be cold enough to need

buffaloes?"

Dick laughed aloud, mentally resolving to tell his mother what a very pleasant
man Mr. Jones was.

"I don't know what Mr. Jones will do," said Mr. Follinsby; "but if I were the
chairman of the Committee, you should have the job. I approve of boys who
tell their mothers every thing."

"Thank you, sir. There's one thing I haven't told mother yet. Last spring our
hod got broken. If I make enough I want to get her a new one."

"That's a good boy. I guess you'll have enough besides the buffalo robe. If you
don't, it wont be a very profitable job. Shall you gather the evergreen
yourself?"
"Yes, sir, in the vacation at Thanksgiving. Mother says she thinks she shall
have time to help me wind it evenings; and then I can keep it fresh down
cellar. Do you think, Mr. Jones, I can get the job?"

"Come here the first of November, and I will tell you. Our church are feeling
rather poor this year; but if we decorate at all, you shall supply the evergreens.
Here is my card. Shall you remember?"

"Oh, yes, sir! I should remember you, and where you live, without any card;
but I'll take it if you please."

Mr. Follinsby put his hand in his pocket, and drew out his porte-monnaie.

"Suppose, Dick," he said, "that I give you enough to buy a hod now. It's
inconvenient to do without one."

A flush of honest pride flew into Dick's checks, and even mounted to his
forehead.

"I'm much obliged to you, sir," he said very seriously; "but I'd rather earn the
money for it. Mother'd like it a great deal better. I'll be sure to be back, sir, the
first of November."

He made a bow which would not have disgraced a drawing room, and was
retiring when Mr. Jones held out his hand:

"Good bye, Dick," he said, "You've got a good mother, I'm sure."

"Yes, sir," the boy answered, his blue eyes dancing with pleasure. "She's the
best woman in the world." He held out his hand to Mr. Follinsby, and said,
"Thank you, sir," once more and went away.

CHAPTER II.
DICK AT HOME.
"I'D give a hundred dollars if my boy had been here to see Dick," said Mr.
Follinsby. "He'll make his mark in the world. He's got the true grit."

"I'd give ten thousand if I had one like him," said the other. "The idea of
Christmas decorations on this hot day!" And he ha-ha'd, till the ceiling rang
with his mirth.

"We shall hear of Mr. Richard Monroe Stuart again; or I'm mistaken," he added
presently.

In the mean time Dick, who had accompanied a neighbor to the city, hurried
back to the main street to be in time to ride home with him in the covered
wagon. But finding by the clock on the great steeple that he had still an hour,
he set off on a tour of inspection through the streets.

In a small purse at the bottom of his pocket there was a fourpence-ha'penny,

an old fashioned coin for which the half dime and a penny have long been
substituted. This had been given him by his mother to spend as he pleased,
and it was a matter of grave importance with him, that it should be well
expended. He passed up and down the main street, gazing in at the windows,
smiling at the many objects of interest, laughing outright at the swarthy figure
of a man holding cigars at a shop door, laughing again at the toys displayed in
a large window; but never dreaming of changing his coin for any thing he saw.
He held it tightly in his hand, walking back and forth until it was time for him to
meet the neighbor at the stable, and then with a smile concluded to give it
back to his mother again.

Once more inside the wagon, he pulled from under the cushion a small paper
bundle, and taking out a cake said, as he ate it with a relish—

"Nobody makes such good ginger snaps as mother does."

At home there were three boys younger than Dick all of whom were daily
taking lessons of industry and thrift, as well as lessons in practical godliness.

Richard, though only a few months past twelve, had already made up his mind
to be on the Lord's side. To be sure he knew little of the great army of foes
arrayed against the Captain of his Salvation; the world, the flesh and the
Devil; but he knew well the iniquity of his own heart. He knew how much
easier it was to do wrong, to be lazy and selfish and unkind to his brothers
when his interest crossed theirs, than to be diligent, generous, and thoughtful
of their wishes; but he had also learned by a happy experience the delight of
conquering himself, for the sake of pleasing his dear Saviour.
Richard being the eldest, somehow did not regard himself as a boy. He had
always taken care upon himself, so as to relieve his mother, and though the
merriest fellow alive, singing or whistling at his work, he had never within his
recollection spent a whole day in play. "The fact is," said his father watching
him as he took the milk pail, the night after his visit to Mr. Jones, and went out
to do the barn chores, "the fact is, our Dick makes play of his work."

Mr. Stuart was a scholar, naturally absorbed in the duties of his profession. He
betook himself to his study at an early hour and midnight very often found his
lamp still burning. His wife was competent to manage the affairs of the little
household, and he wisely left them to her, often wondering, however, how she
made the small salary cover even their frugal expenses. Happily freed from
this charge, he gave himself entirely to his work, and brought forth to his
people deep, hidden treasures. As a pastor he was unwearied and almost
unrivalled. Like a true shepherd he cared for his flock, leading them unto
green pastures, and beside the still waters. In sickness he was by their side.
In sorrow he wept with them. In all circumstances of life, their firm, faithful and
sympathizing friend, leading them through prosperity or adversity to look
beyond this world to the mansions above the skies.

The minister's family lived in small house which they owned; and connected
with it was a farm of fourteen acres. They kept a horse, cow, pig and chickens.
In the spring a man was hired to plough, and assist in planting the corn and
potatoes; and he generally came again in the fall to help get in the harvest.
The hoeing and weeding of the vegetable garden was done mainly by
Richard; his long summer vacation coming just in the time he was most
needed. Eddy, the boy next in age, not yet ten, had this year assumed the
responsibility of the chicken house and with his little saw and hatchet could
cut kindlings as well as any body; but Richard was the one on whom his
mother mainly depended.

After his visit to the city, the church decorations and the probability of his
securing the job, were often the subject of discussion between himself and his
mother. But Dick was shrewd as well as industrious.

"I'd better not tell the school boys," he said one day. "If I do, they'll be pulling
all the evergreen in Mr. Pond's pasture; and there isn't any more within half a
mile. How many wreaths can I make in a day?"

"I don't know, Dick. You may go, over some afternoon to Mr. McIntosh's and
learn how; then you can teach me and I'll help you."
"Thank you, mother. I do hope the church wont be too poor to decorate. Mr.
Jones was real kind about it."

DICK SWEEPING FOR HIS MOTHER.

CHAPTER III.

DICK AT SCHOOL.

THE fall term of the District school commenced in September. It was hard at
first for Richard to take his mind from his work, and fix it upon his studies. He
was up in the morning as soon as it was light, to feed the horse and cow and
groom them, to feed the pig, and milk, and sweep out the barn floor. Then
after breakfast and family prayers he was off to work in the garden till mother
rang the bell for him to dress for school. Sometimes he had to go on an errand
for her, or his father, and hurry Eddy and little Lyman along, so that by the time
he was seated behind his desk, he was often sleepy. But he loved study and
soon roused himself, resolved to do this term, as he had last, and keep his
place at the head of the class.

Fortunately for Dick, the teacher, Miss Wheeler, was every way worthy of her
trust. She had studied the character of every scholar. She loved them and
spared no pains to help them to progress in their studies.

Richard, her dear minister's son, was a special object of interest to her. She
trusted him implicitly. She was very strict in her government, a little stiff in her
manners, but occasionally was thrown off her guard by some witty answer,
and laughed more heartily than she herself approved.

Every Wednesday there was declamation by the boys, and reading of

composition by the girls. Richard, as his teacher always called him, was fond
of speaking; and not being timid, generally carried off the palm. He gathered
his pieces for these occasions from a Third Class Reader,—selections from
the speeches of Webster, Clay or Everett.

"Richard Stuart, you may come to the desk," called Miss Wheeler one
morning. "Have you your piece ready?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What is the name of it?"

"The thunder storm."

"From what book did you learn it?"

"I didn't find it in a book. I found it in a paper."

"Are you sure you can say it without being prompted?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am!"

"Very well. I shall call you the first one after recess."

"The Thunder Storm, by Richard Stuart," called out the teacher at the
appointed time.

Richard rose from his seat, and with a slight flush on his face, took his position
on the platform, bowed and commenced, with great animation:
"The thunder roared,
The clouds grew big,
The lightning flashed,
And killed a pig."

He had made his parting bow and taken his seat, before either his teacher, or
the scholars, had time to recover from their surprise. Miss Wheeler stood in
front of her desk, a little ruler, with which she thumped upon it to call the
scholars to order, in her hand, staring at the place where the boy ought to be,
but where he was not. Then recovering herself in a degree, she glanced
toward Richard, whose eyes were fixed on a book before him, a suspicious
smile playing about his mouth. She could endure it no longer; but burst into a
hearty laugh in which all the scholars joined.

"Richard," said the teacher after school, "how came you to get such a piece as
that? I supposed from the name it would be very fine."

"I thought it was a good one; and it was easy to learn. I said it to father first."

"What did he say to it?"

"He didn't say any thing; but he laughed till he choked himself. You see, he
thought 'twould be a long piece."

The next time Richard's selection was a poem on the Union by Whittier; and
he received ten good marks for it.

The week following, there were visitors present; and among them the Pastor;
Richard, being the best speaker, was called out among the first.

After his bow, he announced as his subject, "The Seasons;" and then went on.

"Some people like Spring best, some like Summer best;" then with a sudden
burst of feeling clasping his hand on his heart, he continued, "But as for me,
give me liberty or give me death."

When he bowed himself off the stage the clapping commenced, while the
dignified teacher, struggling between her inclination to join the laugh and to
maintain order blushed crimson.