Celebrating the Depression

Timely typographic note: if the New York Times main-page headline is in all-caps and centered, something messy has probably hit the proverbial fan.

It was capped and centered yesterday, accompanied by a neat little plunging line graph that conjured up--as if it weren't already looming--the quaint specter of the Great Depression.

I try to keep cheerful while big things crumble, so I've had the New Deal on the brain lately, along with art deco, soup, Steinbeck, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, and frugal adventures in canning. I'm nostalgic like this. And I have a serious thing for the Thirties. If we're going to keep evoking the Depression, let's look on the bright side, yes?

I feel like it's as good a time as any to celebrate the burst of creative productivity that a couple of WPA programs fostered. (I have private little celebrations of this kind on a semi-regular basis, usually when my procrastination needs are deep or I don't have enough to do but can't leave the cube.)

It's kind of a well-kept secret, but an increasing amount of this material is available electronically--dangerously addictive for those like me who thirst for this stuff, but also, I think, a good way for anyone to redirect some economic jitters into a more hopeful channel by dipping into some relevant collective memories.

First, in the interest of thematic unity, I've got to [rakishly] tip my plumed fedora to the Federal Writers' Project. Brief history lesson: From around 1935 to the start of American involvement in World War II, the government funded writers, historians, journalists, art critics, cartographers, and other sorts of sexy luminaries to draft things like local histories and ethnographies, to capture folklore, to document the way people lived across the country. This yielded a series of state guidebooks, most famously, but there was a lot more to it. Participants included the likes of Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Elliston, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Steinbeck. The Library of Congress--whose website, it should be known, is a gateway to endless treasures for the print geek or Americana enthusiast--offers manuscripts short and long, of all kinds, for the peeking.

Now, then, some other Library of Congress organizational efforts you really shouldn't miss:

The Chronicling America project lets you view newspapers from 1880 to 1910; this should come with a warning label aimed at junkies like me.

You can browse the Printed Ephemera collection, which has all sorts of digitized old paper things--menus, tickets, catalogs, ads--going back, I kid not, to Revolution-era stuff. Absurdity.


Lastly, talk about a timesink: if you're at all into documentary photography, you might just love poking around this giant, categorized database of Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information photos from 1935 to 1945. You can search by location, too--try places you've been, the place where you grew up, places you imagined as the settings of novels. There's a streamlined series here, if you'd like a more focused tour, which includes work by people with names you know: think Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange. It's such good stuff.

Here's to no more all-caps centered newspaper headlines. Here's to weathering our century's version of this storm, at a time when people no longer wear cool hats by day to help them stay dry and proper. Somehow, I think it might help to look back at when they did.

N.B. 1: You'll forgive, I hope, the fact that I'm illustrating this post with pictures I had on hand that felt fitting, even though they're not from quite the right time. Well, the old photo on the chalkboard isn't, at least: it's from a cross-country roadtrip my great aunt took in the early '40s (she's on the left, looking away, and check out that car!). The old Paymaster check machine, though, might be--I saw it in an antique store and didn't ask, and after a lot of hunting just now, I still can't figure out how old that model is (Series 8000, sources say). But hey, let's pretend. The tone is right.