ASHFALL INSTITUTE | SUBDUCTION ZONE
Building Bridges — Episode Eight
THE LAST DECADE IT WAS POSSIBLE
P. A. Moore
Ashfall Institute | Subduction Zone
Written under the collaboration disclosed in Time Is a Wheel and We Are the Ground. Concept, argument and judgment: P. A. Moore. Research and composition: Claude Opus 5.
Do the arithmetic with me for a moment, because the arithmetic is the whole reason this episode exists.
Slavery ended in 1865.
A person who was ten years old that year — old enough to remember it clearly, to have worked, to have been sold or to have watched someone sold — was born in 1855.
In 1936 that person was eighty-one years old.
In 1946 they were ninety-one, and almost none of them were left.
There was a window. It was not going to be open long, and nobody had scheduled anything to happen inside it.
In 1935 the federal government created something called Federal Project Number One.
It was the arts arm of the Works Progress Administration, and it had five divisions: writers, theater, art, music, and a survey of historical records. At its height it employed around forty thousand people.
Now — I know how that sounds. In the middle of the worst economic collapse in the country’s history, with a quarter of the workforce out of a job and men riding freight trains looking for work, the government hired writers.
You can hear the objection because it was made at the time and it is still being made. Painters and actors and novelists, on the public payroll, while people were hungry.
And I want to concede the strongest version of it. There is no spreadsheet on which this makes sense. No return on investment. No jobs multiplier anybody could defend in a hearing. The Federal Theatre Project was eventually killed outright by a Congress that had decided it was subversive.
Every practical argument was against it.
Here is what came out of it anyway.
The Federal Art Project produced something on the order of two thousand five hundred murals and a hundred thousand paintings, and it paid the rent for a generation of American painters before anyone had heard of them — Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, de Kooning, all of them on relief wages.
The Historical Records Survey went into county courthouses across the country and inventoried what was in the basements. Some of those inventories are now the only evidence that certain records ever existed, because the courthouse later burned.
The Federal Writers' Project produced the American Guide Series — a guidebook to every state in the union, written by people who lived there. Not a tourist brochure. A description of what the place actually was: its industries, its music, its immigrant neighborhoods, the way people talked, what they ate, what they remembered. Some of those volumes have never been superseded, because nobody has since been paid to do that work.
And between 1936 and 1938, interviewers went out and recorded more than two thousand three hundred conversations with people who had been born into slavery.
I want to stop on that, because it is the thing I keep coming back to.
Nobody made a business case. There was no constituency demanding it. The people being interviewed had no political power, no money, and in most cases no formal education. Many of them were living in poverty in the rural South, in their eighties and nineties, and would be dead within a decade.
A government office decided the country should have their testimony, and paid for it, and sent people out with notebooks.
We have it. Two thousand three hundred first-person accounts of American slavery, held at the Library of Congress, free to anyone who wants to read them.
And there is no other way we could have gotten them. That window closed in the 1940s and it does not reopen. Whatever was not written down by then is gone permanently, and the amount that was not written down is nearly all of it.
Now the honest part, and it is worse than most people who invoke this program are willing to say.
The collection is compromised, in specific and documented ways.
The interviewers were almost all white Southerners. The effort was directed by John Lomax — a folklorist, a Mississippian — and the people he sent out were largely local white writers on relief.
Think about what that means in practice. An elderly Black man in Alabama in 1937, living under Jim Crow, dependent on white neighbors, opens his door to a white stranger from the government who wants him to describe what slavery was like.
There is quantitative research on this now, and it finds what you would expect: what people said varied with who was asking. One study takes its title from a line in the collection itself — “I ain’t tellin' white folks nuthin.”
Then there is the transcription. Lomax instructed that “truth to idiom be paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary,” and a great many interviewers rendered speech in a heavy phonetic dialect that reads today as caricature — a way of marking the speaker as other, applied to Black speakers and almost never to white ones.
And the worst of it, to me, is editorial.
The editors frequently removed the interviewers' own remarks from the transcripts. The observations, the asides, the notes about how the conversation went — cut, so that each narrative would read as a clean, objective, first-person account.
Which means the record was deliberately edited to conceal the fact that there had been a white Southerner in the room asking the questions.
The single most important thing a reader needs in order to weigh that testimony was taken out, on purpose, to make it look more authoritative.
I have written a great deal in these essays about who is permitted to give an account of themselves, and who gets to convene the panel that decides whether the account counts.
Here it is again, in the archive.
The testimony was taken from people whose standing was disputed, by parties who had an interest in the answer, and then edited to hide that the parties were there.
That is the same machine. It is not a metaphor for the same machine. It is the machine.
And here is why I still say Federal One was the right thing to do.
Because the alternative was not a better record. The alternative was no record.
Everything wrong with that collection is knowable, correctable, and openly discussed by the historians who use it. You can read the interviewer’s name. You can find out that she was white and local. You can compare what people said to Black interviewers with what they said to white ones, and researchers have. The flaws are in the material, which means they can be worked with.
An absence has no flaws. It also has nothing in it.
If that program had not existed — if someone in 1936 had said, sensibly, that the methodology was inadequate and the interviewers untrained and the framing compromised, and that we should wait until it could be done properly — we would have waited until every one of them was dead, and we would have nothing at all.
The perfect version of that project was never on offer. The choice was between a flawed record and silence, and someone chose the record.
So: what is the version of that now?
I said in the second episode that the honest case for computation is specific, and I meant it, so let me be specific here too.
And I want to start with the one that is closing fastest, because I can see it from where I am sitting.
There are women alive right now who can tell you how to raise a garden that feeds a family through the winter. Not a hobby garden. The winter.
Who can cut their own patterns and dress a houseful of children in clothes sewn on a treadle machine.
Who washed the family’s clothes in a wringer washer.
Who sewed closed a deep cut, on a child, because the doctor could not be reached.
Who could read the weather off the sky, or off the way the birds were flying, and be right often enough to plan around it.
Who kept bees. Who made cottage cheese by hanging curdled milk in cheesecloth on the clothesline.
None of that was ever counted as work.
And I want to be exact about why, because the reason is not that people failed to notice. The reason is that the accounting was built to exclude it.
When the national income accounts were designed, household production was placed outside the boundary of what gets measured. Marilyn Waring laid this out in 1988 in a book called Counting for Nothing, and the conclusion is as blunt as it sounds: by the conventions of gross domestic product, a woman doing her family’s laundry is not producing anything. The same laundry, done for wages, counts. Done for her own children, it vanishes.
That is not an attitude anyone held. It is a definition somebody wrote down — which is the sixth or seventh time in this series we have arrived at a sentence in a document doing the work everyone blames on the world.
And now that life is being sold back to young women as a paradise.
I have watched this happen, and it is being assembled by people who never lived it, for an audience that has no way to check.
So let me put one fact in the middle of it.
“Wringer arm” was coined as a clinical term in 1938. It describes what happens when an arm goes into the rollers of a powered wringer. The New England Journal of Medicine published a paper on how to treat it in 1952. One hospital series counted four hundred and eighty-three children under the age of sixteen admitted for it over twenty years, with injuries ranging from abrasion through crushed tissue and nerve damage to loss of the limb.
That machine is in the photographs. It is on the porch, in the sunlight, with a woman smiling behind it.
And go back to the other item on the list — the deep cut sewn closed at the kitchen table. That is not a charming skill. That is a description of a place with no doctor in reach, told by a woman who had to do it anyway and was frightened the whole time.
I am not saying the life was worthless. I am saying it was work, and it was hard, and some of it was dangerous, and the women who did it were not serene.
They were competent. That is a different thing, and it is the thing being erased when the competence gets repainted as contentment.
Here is what makes this the same argument as the narratives.
The women who actually did that work are in their eighties and nineties now. Some are older. They are dying, at a rate, this year.
And the account of their lives is being written by other people, with an interest in the answer, while they are still alive and have not been asked.
That is the machine again. Testimony taken from a party whose standing is disputed — except this time we have skipped the taking, and gone directly to the editing.
The window on this one is roughly as wide as the one that closed in 1946. And unlike the men in that government office, we do not have the excuse of being broke.
What else is currently disappearing that will be impossible to recover in twenty years?
Trade knowledge. The people who know how the systems actually work — not the manual, the reality — are retiring in enormous numbers. The lineman who knows which substation in the county has the quirk. The water plant operator who knows the pump that sounds wrong before it fails. Almost none of that is written down anywhere, and when those people go it is re-derived from scratch by someone twenty years younger, expensively, and often after a failure.
Institutional memory in government. Agencies lose the record of what they tried. A program is attempted in 1974, fails for a specific reason, is forgotten, and is proposed again in 2004 by people who have never heard of it, and fails the same way. That is not hypothetical. It is the ordinary condition of public administration, and it costs a fortune.
And the ordinary testimony of ordinary people, which is what the Guide Series was for and which nobody is collecting. What it was like to work in the plant before it closed. What the neighborhood was before the highway. Who arrived when, and from where, and what they found.
Here is my formulation of what a machine is actually good for, and it is not the one you usually hear.
Not doing your job.
Remembering what went right and what went wrong.
That is the thing no committee does well and no career does at all. People rotate. Administrations change. The person who knew why the 1974 program failed retired in 1991 and is dead now. Institutional memory in this country is carried almost entirely by individual human beings who eventually stop, and when they stop it goes with them.
We have, for the first time, the capacity to hold that quantity of specific, cross-referenced, decades-deep detail and have it available at the moment somebody proposes the same thing again.
That is not a threat to anyone’s job. It is the county engineer being told, before the meeting, that this was tried in the next county in 1988 and here is exactly what happened.
So the ask for this episode is smaller than the others and I think it may be the most valuable.
One. A national recording program. Trades, utilities, public works, manufacturing — the people who know how the physical country actually operates, interviewed before they retire, on the public record, freely available. It is the Guide Series, updated, and it would cost a rounding error.
Two. A working memory for public agencies. Every substantial program evaluated, and the evaluation kept, indexed, and searchable — including the failures, especially the failures. Not an archive nobody opens. A thing that speaks up when the same idea comes back around.
Three. And the discipline that Federal One did not have: keep the metadata. Who asked. Who answered. Under what conditions. What was left out, and by whom. The 1930s stripped that out to make the record look cleaner. We should keep it, because a record you can interrogate is worth more than a record that looks authoritative.
I will end where I started, with the arithmetic.
Somebody in 1936 looked at a group of elderly people in the rural South and understood that a door was closing, and that nothing in the budget, the politics, or the economics of that moment justified doing anything about it.
They did it anyway. It was the last decade it was possible.
We have our own doors closing, and we know roughly where they are, and we are not doing very much about any of them.
The difference is that we have no excuse. They were broke.
Next time: the frontier — who does the dangerous work, in every century, and what it might mean to move the dirty part of industry off the planet entirely.
Sources: Household production and national accounts: Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, 1988. Wringer injuries: the term “wringer arm” dates to 1938; “The Treatment of Wringer-Arm Injuries,” New England Journal of Medicine, 1952; hospital series of 483 children aged 16 and under admitted over a twenty-year period, with outcomes ranging from abrasion to limb loss; “Wringer washer injuries in children,” Annals of Plastic Surgery. Federal Project Number One established 1935 under the Works Progress Administration; five divisions — Federal Writers' Project, Federal Theatre Project, Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, and the Historical Records Survey. Slave Narrative Collection: more than 2,300 interviews conducted 1936–1938, held by the Library of Congress as “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938.” Direction of the collection by John A. Lomax; his instruction that “truth to idiom be paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary.” On interviewer race and candor: “I ain’t tellin' white folks nuthin': A quantitative exploration of the race-related problem of candor in the WPA slave narratives.” On editorial removal of interviewer commentary from the transcripts: scholarship on the construction of the collection. American Guide Series, Federal Writers' Project. Federal Theatre Project defunded by Congress, 1939.
Building Bridges is a fourteen-part series. Previous: Episode Seven — Twenty-Five of Thirty. Next: Episode Nine — A Factory You Cannot Enter.
P. A. Moore is the pen name of Pamela King, philosopher and artist. Available through the Ashfall Institute.