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  • The Visual Production of Citizenship:Children's Literature of the Works Progress Administration, 1937-1942
  • Victoria Grieve (bio)

In 1937, second graders in some "problem" New York City elementary schools read Christopher Lazare's The Crows and the Doves, a story illustrated by artist and printmaker Henry Glintenkamp. Lazare's story is an allegory of American race and class relations in which the animosity between black crows and white doves prevents cooperation to solve shared problems:

"Look at those doves. Look at them," argued Mrs. Crow. "Some birds have all the luck. They have nothing to worry about, they'll never starve. Someone is always feeding them. Someone is always taking care of them. And why? Because they're white, and soft, and stupid. Think of us. We fly all the time. We work and fight for what we eat. And because we do, other birds think we're ugly. It isn't fair." "No, it isn't fair," Mr. Crow agreed.

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Glintenkamp's illustrations—stark black-and-white woodcuts—enhance the atmosphere of discord described by the narrative. This story is remarkable not only because it was written in 1937 for seven-year-old students, but also because it was produced by employees of the federal government under the auspices of the New York City Works Progress Administration (WPA) in partnership with the NYC Board of Education. This extraordinary New Deal partnership created a series of more than two hundred remedial readers for New York City elementary classrooms between 1937 and 1942.1

The New Reading Materials Project (NRMP) resulted from an unprecedented intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural trends in the early 1930s. Interest in reading and literacy had been on the rise since World War I, leading to increased research in remedial reading diagnosis and correction. By 1924, literacy had become so urgent a priority that the National Society for [End Page 26] the Study of Education devoted its entire twenty-fourth yearbook to the topic. In the late 1920s, the New York Board of Education began to revise the state curricula to adopt some principles of progressive educational theory widely promoted by Columbia University's Teachers College. A "child-centered" curriculum stressed meeting the needs and interests of individual children rather than inculcating a body of knowledge (NYC Supt. of Sch. Rpts. 190). The city's program fits into a broader educational trend away from rote memorization and toward an emphasis on teaching the whole child, following individual paths to knowledge, and encouraging flexibility in the classroom. In the early 1930s, the board published its report, which stated, among other things, that "there were more functional illiterates in New York City than in any one State of the Union except Texas." Experts suggested a remedy: provide children with books that they found interesting and entertaining (Zeitlin 138-39).

Established in 1934, the city-funded literacy program was linked not only to a national focus on illiteracy, but also to the large number of second-generation immigrant children in the city who struggled with standard English texts (Campbell). Beginning in 1936, the program was funded in part by the Women's and Professional Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). L. R. Alderman, the National Director of Education for the WPA, pointed out that "retardation of school children was greatest where parents were illiterate" ("4-Year Drive" 12). Efforts to combat illiteracy peaked in the 1930s as part of New Deal initiatives to democratize education across class and racial lines (Fass 124-27). The child-centered NRMP was part of these broader state and national efforts (Zeitlin 136, 164-65, 168).

The NRMP was the brainchild of Arthur I. Gates, an educational psychologist at Teachers College who had been among the leaders in reading research since the mid-1920s. His research suggested that children would be more likely to read if supplied with a wide variety of interesting materials (Havighurst). As unemployment among city schoolteachers rose steadily in 1930, Gates proposed to Assistant Superintendent of Schools George Chatfield that the WPA hire unemployed teachers, writers, and illustrators to prepare new reading materials for both the adult literacy programs and the remedial projects. In a New York...

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