Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach

The Spunky Little Woman—You Can’t Be One If You’re White: Race, Gender, and a Little Bit of Class in Depression Post Office Murals

The Spunky Little Woman— You Can’t Be One If You’re White Race, Gender, and a Little Bit of Class in Depression Post Office Murals sue bridwell beckham S adie burke, the executive secretary, prime mover, and sometime lover of Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, is a plucky little woman. So are Joanna Burden, the activist daughter of a transplanted Yankee in Light in August, and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. And so is the female farmer in Carson Davenport’s design for a Chatham, Virginia, post office mural (Fig. 1), who seems to dance across the surface as she literally “plucks” the corn in her abundantly producing field. In an age when plucky little women were a favorite of popular culture, all four of these women were rejected by Americans as unfit for southern living. Each of these women was created by a white southern artist as in some way representative of the “modern” South of the 1930s. All of their creators would undoubtedly have considered themselves somehow not susceptible to the assumptions inherent in southern culture. Each in one way or another stood apart from the society she or he wrote about or illustrated and created from outside. Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and Margaret Mitchell have for decades been recognized for their critical insight and their ability to penetrate the veneer of the southern cultures they experienced (even while, some would argue, Mitchell glorified it). And yet, each fell prey to some of the very assumptions they sought to expose. White author Lillian Smith, whose depictions of black responses to Caucasian-dominated society are often recognized by African Americans as exceedingly perceptive for a white observer, was aware of that pitfall and used that awareness to criticize her society. Although she wrote her novel Strange Fruit, like her nonfiction work, to criticize the culture she observed, her characters reflected the accepted artistic view of black and white female gender behavior. Artist Carson Davenport was in a different situation from these artists of the written word; as a muralist for the government program to “embellish” new 100 fig. 1. Carson Davenport, design for Chatham, Virginia (National Archives). federal buildings, he had more than the hegemony to deal with. His mural was not his creation alone, nor was it his initial reflection of the culture he painted. His work—and that of most of the other artists who painted murals for new federal buildings in the South during the Great Depression—was done in collaboration with a government agency and often with people of the community in which his art would be displayed as well.1 Once selected to paint a mural for a federal building, an artist was required to submit a design. It was only when the design was approved that a commission was official. The program responsible for the largest public art program in United States history and to which Davenport submitted his design was the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. It placed nearly twelve hundred murals and other works of art in new federal buildings between 1935 and 1942. This agency, unlike the more famous WPA Arts Project, sought to hire only excellent American artists to decorate federal building walls—usually small-town post offices; in so doing it hoped to edify and inspire the spunky little woman—you can’t be one if you’re white 101 1. More information about the relationship between artists and the Section of Fine Arts can be found in several works from the 1980s and early 1990s: Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); and Barbara Milosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). For information about the particular relationship between artists who painted for the South, the agency which commissioned them, and the communities they painted for, see Sue Bridwell Beckham, Depression Post Office Murals and Southern Culture: A Gentle Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1989), on which much of the present work is based. sue bridwell beckham 102 2. Park and Markowitz, 5. the people...