(Western) Music and Country: Popular Musics, Popular Fronts, and the Federal Music Project
Glancing at Peter Gough’s study, Sounds of the New Deal, scholars might be intrigued, but then after reading the subtitle, The Federal Music Project in the West, they might conclude that this study is too narrow for them. They would be mistaken. Reading Gough, they will see that title and subtitle work together both metaphorically and literally to indicate how a sharp focus can lead to a study that has broad implications. Looking at The Federal Music Project in the West can give scholars not only a better understanding and appreciation of the work of the Federal Music Project (FMP) but also insights into New Deal/Popular Front culture, western history, and the history of “folk” and “art” music and the United States. All of this should be of great interest to both folklorists and historians.
Gough has made a significant contribution to the growing body of work on New Deal arts projects in the last twenty-five years. These studies have moved us beyond the early administrative histories that largely ignored the work of these programs. Instead, there is a growing cultural and intellectual history of the arts projects. Now when historians examine the work relief and administrative aspects of these depression-era programs, it is in terms of how those matters affected the cultural endeavors of these projects. The New Federal Arts Project History—an appellation unlikely to catch on—has not only added to a broader history of these projects but also pointed out the complexity and contradictions in New Deal art projects. There is now room for new approaches, revisionist challenges, and conflicting interpretations. Gough’s study deserves a significant place in this New History.
In well-researched and probing chapters, Gough demonstrates how his focus on the west provides a new way of looking at the history of the FMP that directly challenges earlier studies of that project. In his introduction, he rejects the views of previous historians who saw the project as accomplishing little. Gough also criticizes the view that the FMP “effectively muted the diversity of the American mosaic” (5) and ultimately promoted musical conformism and consensus. According to Gough, neither the FMP, nor by extension any of the arts projects, provided in the guise of pluralism a homogenized and contained culture compatible with New Deal liberalism, as some scholars have concluded.
In the opening chapters, Gough provides a view of the economic crisis facing both popular and high art musicians that the FMP tried to address. Nikolai Sokoloff, the first director of the FMP, defined musical skills in terms of classical techniques, which worked against musicians in the popular arts, much to the consternation of leaders of their professional organizations. Gough also addresses how Americans had been exposed to few aspects of diverse forms of music, especially regarding European high art traditions and their nation’s own varied indigenous musical heritage. On the last point, there was significant conflict within the FMP over whether priority should be given to introducing art music to Americans over diverse strains of indigenous music, and within art music whether the stress should be on the great European classics of that tradition or whether the focus should be on the performance of new American composers.
By examining the history of the FMP in a single region, Gough is able to view the project from the ground up, from the local perspective, rather than using a top-down approach that looks at the FMP from the point of view of national project officials in Washington, such as Sokoloff. Unlike the directors of the other arts projects, Sokoloff, a European-born conductor of classical music, had little interest in American vernacular culture. Nevertheless, in the end he concluded he had to respond to grassroots demands for indigenous musical performances, song collecting, and education in these areas. It also helped that Eleanor Roosevelt remained interested in the work of the FMP and supported the exploration of indigenous music.
Gough’s understanding of the west is neither monolithic nor mythic. He pays close attention to differences in the FMP in various parts of the west. For example, he discusses the grassroots demand for orquestas típicas in New Mexico and requests for programs centered on Native American music from public schools in Oregon. Interestingly, in Oregon, Native American groups also asked for performances of European classical music. Since Gough’s analysis is informed in part by his knowledge of left/radical regional theorists in that period, he avoids the charge made then and now that regionalism is inherently conservative and that all regionalists develop a static mythic regionalism outside of history and therefore without conflict. For Gough, the west was never an idyllic world. It had a history full of ethnic and class conflict. His research benefits from that assumption. He draws on both the insights of 1930s radical western regionalists and the New Western history that has developed in the last forty years.
Gough has thought carefully about the relationship between his own research and previous work on the New Deal arts projects. He rejects the views of historians who see the New Deal’s celebration of American diversity as an effort to control the cultural representations of individuals and groups that it wanted to incorporate into a national consensus that it defined. He sides instead with historians who stress these programs’ emphasis on inclusion, diversity, and democracy in understanding American nationality and culture. Like arts project officials, Gough is interested in the relationship between diversity and unity, government and culture, and culture and democracy. He points out that his research does not support those scholars who see the heads of national arts projects forcing their view of American culture on diverse local populations. He notes instead that in New Mexico, state director Helen Chandler Ryan, with local support, struggled with the national FMP office to get support for the collection and presentation of, and education about, folksong in her area. As he puts it, the work of “Ryan and others like her in the western FMP programs ensured that local voices would not be squelched by the ambitions of the federal administration” (46). When one actually studies, as does Gough, the dialogue among local community leaders, local arts projects officials, and the national office, it becomes very clear that the idea of the hegemonic ideological power of the national arts project administrators is mistaken. Those scholars, who, unlike Gough, stress the idea that federal art projects were about control and containment often offer seamless hegemonic interpretations not easily open to facts on the ground, as we would now put it.
Gough’s study has benefited from his understanding of new interpretations of the Popular Front. He demonstrates that the work of Charles Seeger, who served first on the Resettlement Administration and then the FMP, and the project’s production of “Ballad For Americans” are representative of the impact of the Popular Front on all of the arts projects. He convincingly demonstrates that the performance by the FMP’s Oakland Negro Chorus of “Ballad For Americans” was an example of the FMP’s “fusing of nationalism, radicalism, and regionalism’’ (156). Earl Robinson and John La Touche, who worked on the Federal Theatre Project and were central figures in Popular Front culture, composed this cantata that was popular on radio and performed in 1940 at both the Republican and CPUSA national conventions. “Ballads For Americans” reflected the fact that New Deal/Popular Front culture drew on folk, popular, and art music in producing works that stressed an egalitarian democratic patriotism. The cultural dynamics of the Popular Front meant that for many in the administration it was acceptable for one to be part of the New Deal and the Popular Front. This was only a problem for right-wing critics of the New Deal, not for the Roosevelt administration.
For a long time after World War II liberal anti-communists—anti-communism was not just a right wing phenomenon—denigrated the Popular Front’s politics as Stalinist and its art as entirely shallow, vulgar, chauvinistic, and provincial. Some of these intellectuals had a few years earlier been Trotskyist critics of the Popular Front. Their critique had not changed, but by the end of WWII they were in a more conservative mood. For many of these liberal intellectuals the Popular Front meant only Stalin, Moscow, and the CPUSA. Stereotypes substituted for careful analysis when it came to Popular Front cultural and political commitments at home. Not until near the end of the twentieth century did a synthetic overview of the Popular Front appear that asked new questions and provided new provocative answers by focusing on it as a cultural movement.
A new generation of artists who had emerged from working-class immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds shared the Popular Front ethos and were able to survive and create with the help of the federal arts projects. There were also “patrician” liberals and radicals who became part of the cultural front, as in the case of Charles Seeger. Popular Front artists did work that broke down the lines between categories such as high, popular, and folk culture. On the FMP, Gough shows how Seeger welcomed and aided this development that Sokoloff tried to resist. At the heart of the cultural front was a social democratic movement that supported industrial unionism, fought racism, and opposed fascism. Rather than being provincial, the arts projects were interested in the experience of a diverse American working class, affirmed a pluralistic nationalism, and encouraged a cosmopolitan appreciation of American diversity. While other scholars have developed these points in relationship to the other arts projects, Gough is the first scholar to show they were part of the history of the FMP.
Gough argues that not only did the New Western history influence his research on the FMP in that region, but also that the FMP influenced the New Western history. About the first point there is no doubt. The second claim is more questionable. In his study of the FMP in the west, Gough follows the approach of the New Western historians in seeing the west as a geographical region, as a place replete with diverse people involved in racial and class conflict. Gone is the notion of the frontier as a process that marked the advance of civilization, the triumph of European Americans over savages, a process that made “American” history a story of triumph and exceptionalism. Instead, we have a land of conquest, not a frontier. It was conquest that made the American west an ethnically diverse land. It was the scramble for its resources that led to racial and class conflict. The west in this view marks not Turner’s notion of the moving frontier as a democratizing force that challenged the entrenched hierarchies of the east, but as a site of bitter conflicts over power and hierarchy. Gough, for example, sees FMP participants in the region fighting for a banjo band in Glendale, California, orquestas típicas in Arizona, and Hispanic folksong transcription in New Mexico as a product of the history of the west as we have only fairly recently begun to see it: “participants in the region knew how to fight, and they also had no difficulty identifying their adversaries” (75).
According to Gough, “the Federal Music Projects in the west facilitated the dissemination and promotion of changing interpretations about the region and its pasts… and in so doing influenced later understandings of this history” (75). It is in the matter of the influence of the work of the FMP in the west on later historians where Gough claims too much. He has no doubts about this influence: “So persuasive was the impact of Federal Music in the region that it both foresaw and informed the ‘New West’ history a half century later” (38). This is a large claim, for which Gough provides no support besides pointing to chronology and to significant similarities in approaches to the study of the west. The fact that the FMP preceded the New Western history does not by itself prove that it influenced that later development. Indeed, what Gough’s excellent work indicates is that the New Western history has helped him appreciate the work of the FMP. But all predecessors are not ancestors. It seems a misguided effort to try to add to the achievement of the FMP in the west by claiming that it led to the work of the New Western historians unless one can cite specific examples of how this worked in practice. Rather, the similarities between the work of the FMP and the New Western historians indicate the persistence of such issues as class and racial conflict in the west and that there have been recurring challenges to the hierarchies these struggles reflected. There is also the danger of losing sight of distinctive aspects of the FMP’s work by seeing it largely as a predecessor to the New Western history. The New Deal arts projects sought to reconcile romantic nationalism and cultural pluralism. In keeping with this goal, they also strove to celebrate the cultural creativity of diverse groups of ordinary Americans as seen in the expressive culture they had created. This does not seem to be a goal of the New Western history, so the FMP’s approach is still provocative, and this should prove more important to New Western historians and the rest of us than does an attempt to create a dubious lineage. The New Deal arts projects have a more challenging legacy to offer us than a sense of ancestry that merely ratifies recent work.
Gough in his justifiable enthusiasm regarding the FMP goes down an unhelpful road when he places the FMP’s achievements in competition with the other arts projects. This strategy ill serves his call for a reassessment and new appreciation of the FMP. It is instead his analysis of the work of the FMP that will contribute to the reassessment and appreciation of the FMP that Gough desires. His assertion that “the FMP proved to be the most successful of all WPA cultural ventures” is at best problematic (2). One wonders what he means by “successful.” Sometimes he is stressing the number of FMP employees, the number of programs they undertook, and the number of people they reached (2, 191). In addition, he sees avoiding political controversy as an achievement. Arguably, the political controversies surrounding the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) were badges of honor, the product of significant achievements. Each of the arts projects faced different challenges that make counting numbers and measuring political controversies in order to establish rankings of relative success misleading at best. Comparing their problems, however, could contribute to a better understanding of each of them. Dealing primarily in words, and often words about issues that had a contemporary resonance, it was inevitable that these projects would be controversial. If they had not been, that would have been a sign of their irrelevance. Gough also wants to emphasize “the [FMP] buttressed the New Deal goals [sic] to broaden and unify Americans’ changing perspective of themselves and their shared national heritage and vision” (191). Here it is necessary to point out that each of the projects made lasting contributions along these lines. For example, the Federal Arts Project’s Index of American Design is a work of lasting importance to American culture and a monument to the New Deal’s cultural goals. So, too, for example are the FWP’s American Guide Series, oral history projects, interviews with former slaves, and folklore collections, much of this still waiting full assessment and much of this still unpublished. The extraordinary innovations of the FTP, such as the Living Newspaper productions, still speak to issues about what a vibrant theatre could add to American life and culture, to democracy and culture.
The fact that Gough sometimes overreaches in some of his claims does not change the fact that his book is a major addition to the work on the New Deal arts projects.
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[Review length: 2651 words • Review posted on March 9, 2016]