The New Deal and Texas History: Saving the Past through Hardship and Turmoil by Ronald E. Goodwin (review)

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) played a key role in the New Deal's attempt to combat the nation's chronic unemployment problem during the Great Depression. While many elements of the agency's efforts are well known—its extensive construction projects that contributed to the improvement of the nation's landscape and infrastructure, and many non-construction initiatives to provide work for unemployed actors, musician, and visual artists—the WPA also created less publicized work to pay the unemployed to preserve state and local history, as well as to probe communities in order to capture snapshots of Great Depression life for posterity. It is these activities that serve as the focal point of Ronald Goodwin's new book.

For this undertaking, Goodwin extensively mines the Federal Writers' Project and Historical Records Survey files among the Texas WPA Records housed at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. The book is not an administrative history but rather a chronicle with analysis of the workers' collective findings. The most familiar initiatives conducted by the Writers' Project—its travel guides and slave narratives based on interviews with surviving freedpeople—receive extensive coverage, but so do the agency's "life histories" based on interviews with old-timers remembering their years in Texas; "folklore interviews" seeking to preserve stories of local history, customs, and mythology; "military guides" that provided basic military installation histories; and the "automobile tours" in which writers describe treks along country roads and major highways. The efforts of the Historical Records Survey to catalog and preserve valuable local records such as wills, land deeds, old newspapers, church archives, and birth, marriage, and death records also receive adequate treatment.

The work does have some organizational, writing, and secondary sourcing issues. Coverage of different aspects of the slave narratives, for example, appear in three separate chapters rather than in a centralized location. Much of this material was originally published in their entirety as essays elsewhere, and readers would have been better served if an attempt had been made to unite the slave narrative information and analysis into a single integrated chapter. Another quibble is with a tendency to provide too many details from many of the files, such as the list of facts provided for the fort histories, instead of simply summarizing their contents. Such analysis would have offered a more efficient use of space. Finally, a perusal of the book's secondary sources reveals a noticeable lack of recent scholarship on the New Deal in Texas. In many instances, newer works should have been cited (and several missing sources should have been included), especially in an early overview chapter on the Depression in Texas. While the basic facts provided in the synopsis are correct, much has been written on the New Deal in Texas since Lionel Patenaude's Texans, Politics, and the New Deal (Garland Publishing, 1983), which Goodwin uses extensively as a source. Other aspects of the New Deal are explained but accompanied by questionable source choices in the endnotes, notably when Goodwin cites T. R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (Wings Books, 1991) as a source on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in Texas (full disclosure: this reviewer published an entire book on the subject in 2005). Although there has been a relative shortage of New Deal Texas scholarship over the years, the past two decades have witnessed noticeable improvement on this front, and authors now publishing need to demonstrate familiarity with this literature.

Despite these issues, this volume adds much to our knowledge of the WPA's efforts in Texas and of the greater New Deal determination to guide the Lone Star State out of the grips of the Great Depression, while, as Goodwin reminds us, documenting Texas culture and preserving its history along the way.