| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project. By Jerrold Hirsch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiv, 293 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2817-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5489-1.)
In several ways, Jerrold Hirsch is heir to the New Deal "liberal intelligentsia" of whom he writes (p. 24). In evaluating their direction of the Federal Writers' Project 1935–1943, he demonstrates similar optimism, zeal, and, I think, blind spots. Hirsch focuses on national editors as the key visioning team: the director, Henry Alsberg; the folklore editor, John Lomax, and his successor, Benjamin Botkin; the social-ethnic studies editor, Morton Royse; and Negro affairs editor Sterling Brown. Separately and together, these men attempted to reconcile romantic nationalism and cultural pluralism, designing publications to document America's diversity—by race, ethnicity, class—and foster a new national identity.	1
Hirsch presents this vision as a powerful and heretofore undervalued riposte to 1930s totalitarianism in Europe and 1920s xenophobia and racism in "an America that defined itself as white, Protestant, middle-class, and rural" (p. 39). He makes a passionate, persuasive case, but it relies on two troubling elisions. He virtually ignores ten thousand project employees across the country, hired off the relief roles to research and draft project copy, who often resisted centralized mandates from the Washington, D.C., editorial office. And he virtually ignores women, giving short shrift to the tours editor, Katharine Kellock, a woman so powerful that male editors complained about her for decades after. Her priorities—progressivism, travel, education—fitted neither their homosocial community nor Hirsch's thesis.	. . .

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