Read an Excerpt
Sounds of the New Deal
The Federal Music Project in the West
By Peter Gough UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09701-0
CHAPTER 1
"Musicians Have Got To Eat, Too!"
The New Deal and the FMP
In 1937, a young woman from Texas sent a letter to the White House. Presumably aware of the Federal Music Projects active in her state, Lillian McKinney appealed to President and Mrs. Roosevelt to support her ambition of a career in the performing arts. Written in a clear, practiced cursive, the letter arrived in Washington, D.C., early in October:
President Roosevelt,
Dear Sir,
This is to ask you would you be kind enough to answer a poor Negro girl's letter and help her to be a good singer. I have the voice for singing if I had a place to used it and get some-thing for my singing I am asking you. Because you are the only one I know to go to but God and you being next to God in this world is why I come to you. You are the greatest man on earth. I no you got love in your heart for Negros to help one.
Talk this over with Mrs. Roosevelt, tell her I am a good Negro ... and have always tried to stay in my place and do rite. I am 21 years old, weight 125. I have never had a chance to use my voice because I never had any help. I am a little crippled in one leg, but no one can tell it. My mother ... has 10 children ... and can not feed all of us any longer, so I am trying to make my own way. I am praying hard tonight that you will hear and answer my prayer with God. If you don't think I am a good honest girl here is the name of some white people, and you can ask any of these three about me.
By the end of the month, Lillian McKinney received a personal letter from Works Progress Administration administrator Ellen Woodward directing her to the local FMP agency. The swiftness of the response was not unusual. One of the first orders from the newly inaugurated president in 1933 had been that people who wrote or telephoned the White House in distress or seeking assistance should never be ignored. "The intellectual and spiritual climate," wrote Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, "was Roosevelt's general attitude that the people mattered."
The sentiments expressed by this young Texan were not exclusive to one section of the country, but nonetheless took on additional significance in the West during the 1930s. For reasons peculiar to the region, many looked directly to the Roosevelt administration for relief from the Depression. The national government held and controlled expansive swaths of land in the western portion of the United States, and most believed federal capital was needed to further utilize the natural resources of this largely undeveloped land. Enthralled by his larger-than-life persona and seemingly boundless energy—and with the legends of his cousin Theodore's cowboy exploits in the Dakota territories still fresh—many westerners displayed both a rapid affinity and high expectations for the former governor of New York.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried every state in the West in 1932. A Nevada senator expressed astonishment at the size of the crowds in his and neighboring states that came to hear candidate Roosevelt: "Practically all the people at small places and for hundreds of miles around" arrived in droves. "They were in distress and despair," he wrote, and came "as those seeking salvation." The president responded by later calling the West "a great area ... of incalculable importance to the prosperity of the United States" and believed that the region's frontier past would be "helpful in the social pioneering that has been commanded by today's necessities." In the West, more than in any other section of the country, Roosevelt consistently appealed to his liberal and progressive political base; subsequently, many expected to see such policies enacted following his election. Furthermore, FDR's campaign rhetoric broke sharply with traditionally held views of the region. "Our last frontier has long since been reached and there is practically no more free land," he said. "There is no safety valve in the form of a western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the eastern economic machines can go for a new start" and the nation must begin "the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources ..., of distributing wealth and products more equitably." Such statements represent a stark departure from long-held national assumptions about the West.
Ecological and climatic conditions compounded the hardships suffered by westerners during the Great Depression. Devastated by seasons of severe drought and decades of insufficient crop rotation, the resulting agricultural depletion affected considerable portions of the West and culminated in the Dust Bowl migrations of hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers. The New Deal stands as the Roosevelt administration's response to these catastrophic events, and for many Americans, the support of the Music Projects and the other programs were their solitary lifelines to survival. In a particularly harrowing account of an Oklahoma music education unit, a supervisor recorded:
Three months ago I had occasion to call at the home of one of our teachers. Upon meeting the teacher's wife, I noticed that she had a bad case of pellagra and inquired if she realized that her condition was caused by improper diet. She replied, "Oh, yes, I know; the doctor told me what I should eat, and if Davy can just stay on the WPA he has promised me that he will buy the vegetables I need." On August 18 this woman died. A proper diet had been delayed too long.
Reflecting the tenacity and determination often associated with the region, the teacher "courageously tried to rear three children" while also leading the local choir, which was "sure to have an inspiring influence" in the community. The problems besetting the West during the Depression era were unique—even within distinct sections of the region itself—and the federal response adjusted to changing circumstances. Similarly, the developing administrations of the various FMP programs in the region often reflected an awareness of these special needs as well as the social and cultural character of each community.
The original national administration of the FMP differed significantly from the other aspects of Federal One. The entire WPA had emerged out of a massive emergency relief act in 1935 to be administered by Harry Hopkins, with his assistant Jacob Baker placed in charge of the cultural projects and other white-collar programs. By July, the four national directors for Federal One accepted their new positions: Henry Alsberg for the Writers' Project, Holger Cahill for Art, Hallie Flanagan for Theatre, and Nikolai Sokoloff for Music. With the notable exception of the Music Project, all of the national directors were to varying degrees associated with the avant-garde or modernist elements within their respective fields. The musical preferences of the FMP's Nikolai Sokoloff were instead quite traditional, and the noted conductor had limited contact with music in the West prior to his appointment.
Yet, Nikolai Sokoloff's professional qualifications were beyond dispute. Born in Russia in 1886, he was both the son and grandson of accomplished symphony musicians. A prodigy, he played the violin with the Kiev Municipal Orchestra (which his father, Gregory, conducted) by the age of nine years. Two years later, the family moved to the United States, selling young Nikolai's violin to afford the passage. The Sokoloffs eventually settled in Connecticut, and when Nikolai learned of a scholarship audition at the Yale School of Music, he scrounged an old violin in anticipation of the event. Excitement turned to utter disappointment upon his arrival at the New Haven campus; Nikolai had received misinformation. The competition had been held the previous week, the scholarship already awarded. Sokoloff was granted an impromptu audition by Horatio Parker. During the audition, Sokoloff displayed a personal persuasiveness and determination, even at a tender age, that so impressed the renowned conductor that the adolescent violinist was awarded a special scholarship. Nikolai Sokoloff became, at thirteen, the youngest student enrolled at the Yale School of Music.
Following several years' study, while still a teenager, the future FMP director became a member of the violin section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As was expected of serious musicians, Sokoloff sought further musical training in Europe, studying under Vincent D'Indy and Eugene Ysaye in France. He eventually performed a successful tour as a violin virtuoso, but a subsequent temporary conductorship of the Manchester Symphony Orchestra in England redirected Sokoloff's ambitions toward conducting. Returning to the United States, he served in a number of capacities before being named as the conductor of the recently formed Cleveland Symphony Orchestra in 1920. Sokoloff would develop a national and international reputation as a guest conductor in over a hundred cities in the United States, Canada, Cuba, and Great Britain. Just prior to his position with the New Deal, Sokoloff organized and conducted a symphony orchestra in New York City.
The assignment of Nikolai Sokoloff as national director of the FMP, however, represents a clear departure from the other choices for the administration of Federal One. Sokoloff did not embrace the experimentalist impulses emerging in the field of music in the first decades of the twentieth century. His predilections tended exclusively toward classical works, particularly symphonic music. Educated in the romantic school of musical presentation, Sokoloff favored the traditional compositions of primarily European composers. The only relation between swing music and "real" music, he argued, "is that they both make sounds." Indeed, to compare jazz and swing to classical music "is like comparing the funny papers with the work of a painter."
Sokoloff's disdain for popular music was unrestrained; the ordinarily reserved Sokoloff denounced it in rather colorful terms. To one reporter, he argued that jazz and swing did not represent popular music at all: "Popular music is music that endures through the years, as Handel's Messiah and the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven—that's popular music. I'd bet more people today in the world know the Fifth Symphony—and it was written one hundred years ago." The national director also felt just as strongly about embellishments to performances of symphonic or chamber music: "The clever dance arrangements of classical airs," he told one meeting of music directors, "are as ludicrous as your lovely grandmother made up to look like a chorus girl."
The collection and performance of folk music aroused considerable interest and enthusiasm by the 1930s, and Sokoloff agreed "great symphonies have been written around the folk songs of Russia or Germany." Yet, the new national director initially discouraged folk music activities in the FMP because "much of it still remains parochial" and "musicians and scholars are not entirely agreed" as to "whether the folk music of America will furnish material for great and lasting works." Sokoloff, however, encouraged American composers to create their own symphonic scores. He told a Southern California newspaper: "I believe very firmly that we should give the good American conductors a chance when there are vacancies in these orchestras, and I believe we should give plenty of opportunity to American composers of merit." Yet, as stated in the FMP preliminary report, his "administration has ... no intention of fostering incompetence."
Because of Sokoloff's professional stature, his assignment as national director appears to have provoked little objection. At least one complaint, however, arrived in August 1935 from the exclusive resort town of Bar Harbor, Maine. Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of the Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, wrote that "a great many people of the musical world who are summering here feel very much concerned at the appointment." She believed that Sokoloff was not "fitted by temperament and character for the position" and this was the "sentiment of most people." She felt compelled to share this information because the appointment was "vital to the whole music world."
The implications of the Morgenthau letter are so vague, however, that the objections truly defy analysis. A letter received a month later from Margaret Klem, a prominent WPA administrator in Colorado, provided a starkly contrasting view of the newly appointed FMP national director. Describing a recent speech by Nikolai Sokoloff given at the annual banquet of the National Federation of Women's Music Clubs, Klem attested that she had "never seen a speaker hold the undivided attention of a large group of women as well as he did." She wrote glowingly of the new director's "most interesting and inspiring talk on the Federal Music Project" and believed this opinion to be held by all who were in attendance. Though perhaps presumptuous to attribute a regionalist explanation for the disparity between the Morgenthau and Klem reactions, in the years to come the FMP national director beyond question received far more public approval and less criticism in the West than in the East.
In the same letter, Margaret Klem wrote that Sokoloff, as many others, had been "discouraged with the lack of music standards which had been followed in the old SERA music project in Los Angeles county." The State Emergency Relief Administration had previously funded musical activities in California that stressed recreational music rather than the professionalism demanded by the new FMP national director. In Southern California, as in other areas, the program early on became rife with charges of both graft and incompetence. The Sokoloff appointment, and his insistence upon hiring only accomplished musicians, no doubt lent a legitimacy and credibility to the projects in the eyes of many. While the national director's initial emphasis on European symphonic music would soon defer to regional and local demands, especially in the West, musicians performing in popular or folk ensembles were nevertheless required to demonstrate a high degree of virtuosity in order to gain employment with the FMP. This demand for a high level of musicianship is perhaps Nikolai Sokoloff's greatest influence on Federal Music.
Descriptions of Nikolai Sokoloff's personality varied dramatically. Though seen by some as snobbish and difficult, by the time of his appointment to the FMP, Sokoloff had nonetheless procured an astonishing assemblage of professional contacts and supporters. Many of these advocates commented not only on the conductor's musical professionalism but also his personal charm. In press accounts, Sokoloff was routinely described as engaging, knowledgeable, and well-spoken. Most regional program directors in the western states expressed anticipation and delight with his visits.
The impact of Sokoloff's insistence upon "high art" or classical music in the FMP has been exaggerated. Even a casual survey of FMP program descriptions reveals that the programs supported a variety of musical genres. Indeed, the single most striking aspect of the WPA music projects in the West is the ethnic, religious, and musical diversity evidenced in the performances. While the national director unquestionably expressed an early preference for symphonic music, the stance withered within the first full year of project operation. Also, his authority proved far less than autocratic. When, for example, State Director Helen Chandler Ryan (New Mexico) or State Director Lucile Lyons (Texas) challenged Sokoloff's initial rejection of certain Hispanic folksong and Mexican orquesta tipica performances, the national director soon acquiesced. Director Sokoloff's management style suggested a degree of conflict avoidance; one close observer described "the patented Sokoloff system of avoiding trouble by methods copied from the ostrich."
In many ways, history has been unfair to Nikolai Sokoloff and diminished his substantive contributions as national director of Federal Music. It is largely through his efforts that the project succeeded in ways unequalled by any other New Deal cultural venture. Despite limited administrative experience prior to his appointment, Sokoloff had many music programs "up and running" sooner than any other Federal One project. Articulate in speech and eloquent in the written word, Sokoloff exuded confidence and commanded respect.
Furthermore, the national director's expressions of and demands for equality and fairness within the project were not empty platitudes but sincere personal convictions. As he told reporter Gail Martin in Utah:
WPA music projects are for all sexes, creeds, races and colors. Women play along side of men in the orchestras. We have a number of splendid negro choruses. Thoroughly American in spirit, the Federal Music Project considers only ability to perform and discriminates against no race.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sounds of the New Deal by Peter Gough. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
