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STUART PATTERSON Project title: "Performing Middle Class Affiliation in the New Deal"
My research deals with the ways that the families on these communities encountered and negotiated the various plans the government undertook for shaping their lives. Very often, the homesteading families found themselves constrained to 'perform' on the communities according to practices and values that could seem quite alien. The paternalism and instrumentalism that many scholars have noted as aspects of reform efforts, particularly in the Southeast and Appalachian regions, were frequent sources of contention and negotiation between homesteaders and government officials. At the same time, the material and social benefits of these projects to their member families were great when viewed against conditions that held sway in rural areas across the country during the Depression. I maintain that the government's interventions, beyond the simple provision of resources, took the form of enlisting the homesteaders in performances of family life and value orientation. When considered in a broader historical framework, these scripted lifeways and values seem to have clear continuities with what has been charted as the rise of a basic set of 'middle class' practices and mores. My research should provide insights into the contours of class affiliation, both as it is currently understood by historians of class in America, and into the ways that class affiliation can be scripted, performed and contested. In addition, I am looking at the quasi-religious dimensions of class affiliation, insofar as these communities also take many of their social and historical bearing from the long and rich tradition of utopian experimentation in America and the U.S. in particular. The salvific dimensions of these communities are clear, and not simply for the families directly involved. The attention of the nation and more particularly the emerging federal bureaucracy of the 1930s paid careful attention to the planning and operation of such projects as they represented attempts to emerge from a sense of loss of mastery following the Depression beginning in 1929. In addition to these strictly historical concerns, my research deals with contemporary attempts by still-living residents of these communities to commemorate their special historical status. In this part of my research, the notion of performance becomes sharper, as I look into the continuities and disjunctures between the communities changing roles as staging grounds for history and particularly myths of family life. In their historical guise, the performances of the original homesteaders were ritualized enactments of reworked myths of American family life. These performances could take explicitly theatrical forms, as when groups of homesteaders were enlisted to stage a scripted performance of their arrival on the project for citizens of the area surrounding the project. Beyond this, most of the ritual enactment of lifeways and values on these projects was directed through government agent's oversight of virtually all of the homesteaders' activities, from religious worship, schooling, and recreational time to work and domestic life. In their efforts to commemorate the past of their communities (of whose identity they now seem on the whole quite proud), survivors of the original projects have undertaken to reproduce certain of these activities in 'living museum'-type recreations of homesteader life in the 1930s. With the mix of nostalgia, environmental theater and museumification of 'real world' sites that are requisite to such living historical ventures, the homesteaders on certain communities are now setting re-enactments of the prior enactments of class that I describe above. The recapitulation of performances of poverty rising to middle-class status, its direction by government agents, and the resistence within an interested appropriation of resources seems to replay an earlier staging of myths of American family life. Comparing the historical moments which provide contexts for these distinct performances should reveal changes and continuities in the status not only of class-based ideals, but also the contours of performed versions of class-infused family lifeways. My research involves examination of archived records of various government agencies connected with these communities, public statements and press, secondary literature (of which there seems to be surprisingly little) and individuals' collections of papers and material culture from the 1930s. Also, I have made a number of visits to each of the sites of my research; currently I am looking into three communities, out of a total of some 100 actually developed during the 1930s by a variety of New Deal agencies. These are the Cumberland Homesteads near Crossville, Tennessee; the Arthurdale Homesteads in Arthurdale, West Virginia; and Aberdeen Gardens in Hampton, Virginia. My research deals with other New Deal projects, but focuses mainly on these three. The first two, briefly, were settled first by coal miners and later for mill workers and farmers in southern Appalachia. The third was one of the few projects planned and operated (and certainly the most significant in terms of resources allocated) for African-American families. In visiting these sites I have conducted informal interviews with surviving homesteaders and their children (now all senior citizens) in preparation for more extensive interviews in the future.
"Constructing
Ideal Families in Ideal Communities: The Case of Arthurdale, West
Virginia"
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