The Food of a Younger Land Read Online Free

organizations in visits and letters. After she became plagued by an accusation in the Hearst newspapers that she was a Communist, Alsberg called her in from the field and gave her a job supervising from Washington. The accusation was largely based on the fact that her husband was a correspondent for the Soviet news agency, TASS.
    A small woman with a giant voice, she was often abrasive, but it was widely recognized that all she wanted was to produce great guidebooks. She believed it was important for Americans to finally start examining America. She often told workers not to worry about the writing but to just send in the information. She hungered for particulars on agriculture and history and pushed the books into a richness of detail.
    It was often said that Kellock developed an appreciation of the Baedeker guides while traveling through Europe, which sounds like she was on a vacation. In fact, she had been traveling through southern and central Europe with Quaker relief organizations trying to stave off starvation in areas that had been devastated by World War I.
    Baedeker had done its last guidebook on the United States in 1893 and last updated it in 1909. It had been written by an Englishman for the English. There was no guide to America for or by Americans. Many, including Henry Alsberg, believed that this could be extremely important work—the first detailed study of America, its people, culture, and ways. The Depression had awakened in Americans a deep interest in the country and for the first time in its history it was becoming fashionable to examine and look for the meaning of America and what it was to be American.
    This new self-searching was clearly expressed in two 1940 songs. First there was Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which was repeatedly bellowed on the radio by the ungentle voice of Kate Smith. Finally, a twenty-eight-year-old singer named Woody Guthrie—named after Wood-row Wilson, who was elected the year he was born, 1912—could not stand hearing Kate Smith anymore, and he wrote an antidote called “This Land Is Your Land.” It is a melodic song celebrating, as does the Berlin song, the diversity and natural beauty of America. Originally the last line of the chorus was “God blessed America for me,” but Guthrie later changed it to “this land was made for you and me.” Guthrie’s song, unlike Berlin’s, also asked questions about the people who were being locked out of the American dream—the hungry, the people in welfare lines—and he asked this question toward the end of the song: “Is this land made for you and me?” Today the critical final stanza is almost never heard.
    These two songs reflected a growing split in American culture, and one that would continue. Two Americas emerged out of the early twentieth century, and in 1940 each got its anthem. Kellock’s idea for the guidebooks was for them to be a Guthrie song, not a Berlin—really examining and not backing off from the hard social issues.
    Because they pleased local chambers of commerce and tourism interests, the guidebooks were able to garner more support for the FWP than most writing projects would have yielded. Even conservative newspapers that attacked the New Deal would accept the Federal Writers’ Project because it gave work to their newspapermen who had been laid off. But this meant that these local interests had leverage to exert influence on the projects. The local chamber of commerce kept a discussion of labor disputes out of the guide to Pittsburg, Kansas, removing one of the few contentious issues in the book. Local pressure eliminated all historic debate from the description of the siege of the Alamo in the San Antonio Guide. Because the FWP was a government agency, conservative congressmen also had a say, forcing the New Jersey Guide to remove a reference to tear gas being used against striking workers. And labor issues in Butte were removed from the Montana Guide.
     
     
     
    F WP employees