I want our government to pass an emergency relief act to employ people. It's been done before. In 1935 Congress passed an emergency relief act and funded the Works Project Administration or WPA. The goal of the WPA was to employ the unemployed until the economy recovered. Most of the money allocated was for workers to build highways, roads and streets.
     My Grandma Marg from Pennsylvania said some called the WPA “We Poke Along”. She noticed in Appalachia where she lived that men worked on the roads in groups of three. They took turns digging, one dug while the other two leaned on their shovels. It wasn't laziness. These were hard working men. They adopted the strategy of taking turns so that workers could keep their jobs for as long as possible. It was desperate times, desperate measures during the Great Depression. It wasn't a waste. Public places got built, parks with buildings like the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Aquatic Park and Maritime Museum in San Francisco.
     The WPA provided jobs for artists too, especially writers. The WPA set up a Federal Writers' Project and paid over 6,600 writers from 1935-1943. It employed writers like John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston to name a few. Like these writers, who collected the peoples' oral histories, I want the federal government to pay me to collect oral histories of working people and their struggles. I'd capture the voices and the lives of today's working class people and write their stories.
     The WPA hired musicologists, John and Alan Lomax, to collect folklore and songwriter, Woody Guthrie to write songs. Woody Guthrie wrote great songs like Pastures of Plenty and Ramblin' Round during the time he worked for the WPA.
     Alan Lomax collected more than 17,000 sound recordings during his lifetime and he first began gathering the recordings during the time of the WPA. One on my favorite people Alan Lomax recorded was Sarah Ogan Gunning. She was born Sarah Garland, born about the same time as my grandma, Marg. And like my grandma, Sarah grew up in coal camp towns, the daughter of a coal miner and union organizer. And like my grandma, underage Sarah eloped across state lines to Cumberland Gap and married a coal miner.
     In 1937 Lomax recorded dozens of Sarah Ogan songs. One of her song titles got changed in the 1950's to I Hate the Company Bosses.It sounds good but her original song is more to the point. It's called I Hate The Capitalist System. Imagine the government funding a project that recorded a song like this:
I hate the captalist system
I'll tell you the reason why
They cause me so much sufferin'
And my dearest friends to die.
Oh yes, I guess you wonder?
What they have done to me.
I'm goin' to tell you, Mister,
My husband had TB.
Brought on by hard work and low wages
An' not enough to eat,
Goin' ragged an' hungry
No shoes on his feet.
I guess you'll say he' s lazy,
An' did not want to work.?
But I must say you're crazy,
For work he did not shirk.
My husband was a coal miner,
He worked an' risked his life,?
To try to support three childern,
Himself, his mother and wife.
What can we do about it?
To right this dreadful wrong?
We're all goin' to join the union,
For the union makes us strong.
What can I do about it?
To these men of power an' might???
I'll tell you mr. captalist?
I' m goin' to fight, fight, fight.?
     So like Sarah Ogan, one of the ways to fight is to tell our stories. We can sing it, write it, or tell it. We have to do it because if we don' t do it, nobody will. Telling our stories is a revolutionary act. It matters. When the historical events of our lifetime are written our voices need to be included.
     Here's a bit of mine inspired by Sarah's tune:
I once had a husband
Who served in Viet Nam
Because of Agent Orange
He got cancer
And now he's gone
Now I have a husband
Who is a trade union man
Together we fight for labor
It's there we take our stand
We look forward to hearing your stories. Thank you.
Â
© 2012 Margaret Cooley
Â