1938 The most comprehensive literary project undertaken by the Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July) was the life histories of ordinary Americans. Almost 3,000 of these were filed in the Library of Congress, and several thousands more in state collections. Typically the writers would approach the subjects, interview them, then write up the encounter from memory. Few had shorthand and none had recording devices.
Life stories of the south-eastern region often had the flavour of case studies, as if interrogating an underlying social problem. As assistant field supervisor for the region, Ida Moore had formulated many of the questions that the writers were to ask.
The Haithcocks, interviewed on this day in 1938, live with another family in ‘a small four-room house’. The two men work in the cotton mill; the wives stay at home sewing tags on Bull-Durham tobacco sacks, and the children amuse themselves. Here is how Moore sets the scene:
Monkey Bottoms begins with a washed-out, hilly road, flanked on one side by closely-placed and disorderly-looking houses and on the other by a jumbled growth of hedge, scrubby trees and briars. … Freida Haithcock and Hulda Foster sit in this room hours at a time, both fortified by a generous quantity of snuff, tagging the tiny sacks and dreaming of the day when they will again have a job in the mill. Together they share a tin can spittoon which is obligingly shifted from one to the other as the need arises. Flies swarm thickly about the poorly screened house and hunt out the bread crumbs scattered by the three oldest children.
The women’s avid snuff-taking could come right out of Erskine Caldwell. In this panoramic moral view of the Haithcocks’ case, the decrepit landscape of Monkey Bottoms slides imperceptibly into the physical and social disorder within the house. As Freida and Hulda dream idly of a steady job, the flies are already exploiting the poorly maintained household defences and the children’s slovenliness, moving in to undermine the family’s health.
It’s not clear how even the most independent and vigorous life story could surface through this heavy imputation of universal degeneration.