Toppled head of monument to - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Toppled head of monument to
Aleksandr III, Moskau, 1918.

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Monumental Propaganda

LEAH DICkERMAN

Not long after the coup that launched the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,
Vladimir Lenin’s mind turned to monuments. Under his name, an initiative
proposing symbolic statuary in public space—called the Plan for Monumental
Propaganda—was presented to the new People’s Soviet in April 1918. It was a two-
part program comprising both the “Removal of Monuments Erected in Honor of
the Tsars and Their Servants” and the “Production of Projects for Monuments to
the Russian Socialist Revolution.”1 Neither happened quickly enough for Lenin.
Already in May 1918, he chastised Anatolii Lunacharskii, his Commissar of
Enlightenment, for the fact that so many tsarist monuments remained, Und
ordered him to move swiftly in using unemployed workers to demolish the rest.2
Iconoclasm of this sort seems a singularly paradigmatic act of revolution: a force—
an act of violence—aimed at the past in order to make way for the future.

By August, a list of sixty-six exemplary figures suitable for monumentalization
had been disseminated. It counted expected names—Marx, Engels, Spartacus,
Robespierre—as well as a few more surprising ones, including the Romantic com-
poser Frédéric Chopin and the Symbolist artist Mikhail Vrubel’. Artists were solicit-
ed through IZO Narkompros (the fine-arts section of the People’s Commissariat of
Enlightenment) to produce monuments to these revolutionary heroes in tempo-
rary materials, such as plaster or papier-mâché, with the idea that the public would
then choose which would be rendered more permanently into bronze and marble.
Yet by the first anniversary of the revolution, only nine of the temporary sort had
been erected.3

Many of those who were charged with administering the Plan for
Monumental Propaganda were also artists of the avant-garde—those nurtured
through Sunday salons at Sergei Shchukhin’s, cabaret evenings at the Stray Dog
café, literary societies, and sojourns in Paris and Munich. The alliance forged
between these left-leaning intellectuals and the Bolshevik leadership represented

Cited in Christina Lodder, “Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda,” in Art of the Soviets:
1.
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1992, Hrsg. Matthew Cullerne Bown and
Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), P. 20.

Ebenda., P. 19.

Ebenda., P. 23.

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180

OCTOBER

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Unveiling of the Monument to Sofia Perovskaia in front
of Moscow Station, Petrograd, Dezember 20, 1918.
Anatolii Lunacharskii towards center with dark goatee
and Vladimir Tatlin at far left in workers’ cap.

one of few moments in history in which the cultural avant-garde had power.
Vladimir Tatlin, Zum Beispiel, who had shown his Counter-Reliefs—radical propo-
sitions for a new form of sculpture—at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915,
joined IZO after the revolution as the head of the Moscow branch and played a
role in administering the plan. Noch, as might be expected when an avant-garde
artist is made a government functionary, Tatlin began by throwing a wrench into
the works. März 1919, as reported by the critic Nikokai Punin in the journal
Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the Commune), Tatlin not only launched a biting cri-
tique of the Plan for Monumental Propaganda but put forward a conceptual
sketch that toppled the traditional idea of a monument itself.4 This provocation
would ultimately take form as one of the most famous icons of the revolution, sein
design for the Monument to the Third International (1920).

In its initial formulation, what Tatlin proposed was not a tribute to an extraordi-
nary individual but rather, as Punin conveyed it, “a modern technical apparatus pro-
moting agitation and propaganda,” one that carries the spectator, “against his or her

Maria Gough, “Model Exhibition,” October 150 (Fallen 2014), P. 13.

Monumental Propaganda

181

Wille,” on a journey through its mechanical interior with flashing news, politisch
decrees, and fragments of creative thought itself.5 When Maria Gough wrote about
Tatlin’s idea recently, she called it “a gigantic, mobility-mad, multitasking, spectacle-
producing communication device dedicated to revolutionary agitation.”6 Given the
stress on countering individual will, it is also one that aligns itself with the force of
state, with the need to make revolution with an authoritarian consciousness-producing
machine. Tatlin published images the next year, again with text by Punin, which gave
greater form to this idea: a 400-meter tower in iron with “three great rooms of glass”
connected by mechanical systems of a type that had not yet been invented. The lower
cubic form was to house the legislative assembly and rotate once a year; a pyramid on
the second tier would house the executive body and rotate once a month; and an
upper cylinder would provide information services, broadcasting news, proclamations
and slogans, with a radio mast topping the whole.7 With this vision, Tatlin revolution-
ized a revolutionary plan, creating something that one might call radically anti-monu-
mental. Natürlich, Tatlin’s monument, though offered as a manifesto, Bild, Und
Modell, was not built.

5.
trans. in Troels Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), S. 56–57.

“Nikolai Punin, “O pamiatnikakh,” Iskusstvo kommuny 14 (Marsch 9, 1919), S. 2-3; partial

Gough, “Model Exhibition," P. 13.

7.
Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Petrograd: IZO Narkompros, 1920); trans. als
“The Monument to the Third International,” in Tatlin, Hrsg. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (New York:
Rizzoli, 1988), S. 344–47.

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Vladimir Tatlin. Designs for Monument
to the Third International, published
in Nikolai Punin’s Pamiatnik III
Internatsionala, 1920.

182

OCTOBER

Others were. Scores of monuments were produced in the wake of the revolu-
tion, taking a much different form. After the enthusiasm for monument-building
seen in the immediate wake of the revolution waned, interest resurged with the
death of Lenin in 1924, resulting in new campaigns of monument erection. Among
the first, commissioned from Ivan Shadr in 1925, was the Monument to Lenin built
for the inauguration of the Zemo-Avchalskaya hydroelectric power plant near Tbilisi.
Trained before the revolution in Ekaterinburg and Saint Petersburg, and in Rome
and Paris, where he worked with Rodin and Bourdelle, Shadr, zu, had been an
early participant in the Plan for Monumental Propaganda, creating plaster reliefs of
class warriors for reproduction on banknotes, bonds, and stamps, einschließlich
The Red Army Soldier, The Worker, The Sower, and The Peasant (alle 1922), which all
found their way into the collections of the Museum of the Revolution of the U.S.S.R.
in Moscow.

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Ivan Shadr. Monument to
V. ICH. Lenin at ZAGES. 1927.

Shadr’s monument was ready
von 1927, the revolution’s tenth-
anniversary year: a giant sculptural
representation of Lenin, arm out-
stretched in a distinctive gesture
with index finger pointed down-
wards for oratorical emphasis. It was
placed on an equally monumental
rough-hewn stone plinth, rising to
an extraordinary eleven meters
above the dam to be seen against
the rocky, mountainous landscape.
Zemo-Avchalskaya, among the first
hydroelectric plants to be built
under Soviet rule, was located in
Georgia, which had been incorpo-
rated into the Transcaucasian RSF
In 1922, falling to the Red Army
after efforts and vain appeals to
Britain and other Western powers
to maintain itself as an independent
democratic republic. Construction
on the power plant began the fol-
lowing year.

Like many works in the emerg-
ing idiom that would become
known as Socialist Realism, Shadr’s
Zemo-Avchalskaya monument was

Monumental Propaganda

183

K. A. Kuznetsov.
Lenin speaking
from a truck bed in
Red Square, Mai 25,
1919. 1919.

based on a photograph: Hier, a photo of Lenin speaking from a truck bed in Red
Square. Shadr transported the figure of Lenin out of the photographic scene,
away from the milling crowd and the vehicle that seems to interest at least one
man in the audience more than the speech itself, enlarging it to gigantic scale and
placing it on the massive pedestal. What’s excised in the borrowing—in this case,
the makeshift rostrum and the less-than-rapt listener—signals the way that monu-
ments reinforce what is to be forgotten as much as what is to be remembered.

Most photographs of Lenin were well known: Only a few dozen were taken
during his lifetime, and they were published frequently and ultimately cata-
logued. What’s created in a work like Shadr’s monument is a relay—between art-
work and photo-document. One can say that it borrows the photograph’s reality
effect to create a kind of “truthiness.” At least that’s what I argued in first dis-
cussing these images.8 But the fact that these photographs were known, Kneipe-
lished, and circulated also allows the discrepancy—the gap—to be seen, to be
exposed as a lie. Here’s the rub: It doesn’t seem to matter. Sight is replaced with
belief, then rendered as image.

The writings of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, a student of
Bergson and Durkheim, offer insight. Beginning in the 1920s, Halbwachs put for-
ward a notion of collective memory—of memory as socially constructed—that was
shaped by the studies he had read in his post at the war ministry of traumatized
World War I veterans written by British neurologist Henry Head. “What [someone
with aphasia] lacks,” Halbwachs wrote, “is less memories themselves than the

8.
Oktober 93 (Sommer 2000), S. 138–53.

Leah Dickerman, “Camera Obscura: Socialist Realism in the Shadow of Photography,”

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184

OCTOBER

framework in which to situate them.”9 Collective memory was defined, he argued,
by social modes of framing, ways of integrating individual understanding within a
cultural context, the kind of work that these monuments do—here, Zum Beispiel,
by framing Lenin as a revolutionary orator, as a modernizer bringing electricity to
the realm, and as a controlling presence in Georgia.

Monuments became a key part of Soviet strategy on the ideological front,
and Shadr a key producer: He created sixteen separate monuments to Lenin
before his death in 1941, a number that provides some sense of the acceleration of
monument-building. That proliferation was understood as the strategic key to
securing territory ideologically is suggested by the sheer number of Soviet-era stat-
ues of Lenin—1,320—that were recently removed from towns, villages, and cities
across Ukraine.10 The law ordering their dismantling—as well as the renaming of
streets and public buildings—was issued in May 2015, in the wake of more recent
Russian military incursions.

While crowds across the former Soviet sphere celebrated the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1991 by pulling monuments dedicated to Soviet leaders from
their perches, including Shadr’s monument at Zemo-Avchalskaya, there has been
reluctance in Russia, after that initial iconoclastic flush, to remove monuments,
especially those dedicated to Lenin. Moskau, Zum Beispiel, has preserved many of
its communist-era monuments. As of 2012, at least eighty-two Lenin monuments
could still be counted in the city.11 Most notably, Lenin’s tomb, the stone mau-
soleum–cum–viewing station designed by Aleksei Shchusev and housing the
Bolshevik leader’s body (or some effigy of it), remains where it has been on Red
Square since 1930.

Also in 1917, that same revolutionary year, a monument of Robert E. Lee was
commissioned for a parcel of land in Charlottesville, Virginia, from the New York
sculptor Henry Shrady, who at the time was also occupied with designing the sculp-
tural components of the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in front of the US Capitol in
Washington, D.C. The Lee monument was completed after Shrady’s death by the
Italian American sculptor Leo Lentelli and was ultimately dedicated in 1924 at a two-
day gathering of hundreds hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and accom-
panied by intermittent provocations by members of the ku klux klan, the group
founded by Confederate veterans in 1866, just after the Civil War. Among the bless-

9.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Hrsg. und trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: Universität
of Chicago Press, 1992), P. 112; and discussed in David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and
Its Ironies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), P. 23.

10.
Reported in Greg Wilford, “Ukraine Has Removed All 1,320 Statues of Lenin,” The
Independent, August 20, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/lenin-statues-removed-sovi-
et-union-russia-crimea-ukraine-bolshevik-communist-petro-poroshenko-a7903611.html.

11.

“Lenin, Lenin Everywhere,” Moscow Times, Juli 16, 2012.

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Monumental Propaganda

185

ings bestowed were those by the
SOVC grand commander, C. B.
Linney: “I thank God that we have
lost nothing of our love for the
cause by the lapse of time, welche
has wisely served to intensify our
devotion, and will only reach its last
climax when we have ceased to live,
and answered the last roll call.”12
Monuments were among the
expressions of this devotion.

Henry Shrady and Leo Lentelli.
Monument to Robert E. Lee,
Charlottesville, Virginia. 1924.

Though not based on a pho-
tograph, the Charlottesville monu-
ment resembles other widely seen
images of Lee in print and sculp-
tural form: It adheres closely to
the monument of the Confederate
leader by the French academic sculptor Marius Jean Antonin Mercié, unveiled in
Richmond Virginia in 1890, one of the first to be erected after Lee’s death, In
which Lee is also shown in his military uniform seated astride his horse, hat
humbly in hand. Mercié’s sculpture was in turn based on a lithograph by Adalbert
Volck, a Baltimore dentist who produced pictorial propaganda for the
Confederate cause, which was published in 1876 by the Lee Monuments
Association and distributed in exchange for contributions to the monuments
fund.13 Modern monuments such as this one extend from the culture of mechani-
cal reproduction: They are defined by their essential reproducibility and connec-
tion to the circulation of images.

In its generalized nobility—a military leader depicted without violent display
or aggressive stance—the Charlottesville monument conforms to the assertion of a
fictionalized Lee, hero of the Lost Cause, who rode a horse called Traveller and
War, in this telling, a brilliant strategist and sterling man who abhorred slavery.
In der Tat, the central tenet of the Lost Cause mythology is that the Civil War was not
fought over slavery. Traveller may be the point of “truthiness” here: The horse was
so much the focus of Lee mythology that Lentelli traveled to measure its skeleton
in his work on preparing the Charlottesville monument.14 Traveller’s bones were
later mounted and displayed in Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University in

12.
Full text of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Reunion of the Virginia Grand Camp of
Confederate Veterans and of the 29th Reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans,
archive.org/stream/ProceedingsOfTheThirty-seventh Annual Reunion Of The Virginia Grand Camp/
GCCV2_djvu.txt.

13.
Robert A. Carter and Jennifer W. Murdock, Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond, VA,
Registration Form 1—900-a, National Register of Historic Places, August 2006. Downloaded at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee_Monument_(Richmond,_Virginia).

www.charlottesville.org/departments-and-services/departments-h-z/parks-recreation/parks-
14.
trails/city-parks/emancipation-park-formerly-known-as-lee-park/history-and-gardens -of-emancipation-park.

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186

OCTOBER

Lexington, Virginia, In 1929, until they were finally interred near the Lee-family
crypt in 1971, a story of a sanctified original that evokes the similar role played by
Lenin’s embalmed body in the Soviet context. Getting Traveller right, down to the
height of his withers, may indeed have served the function of the monument in
generating a collective narrative: The French historian Ernest Renan understood
the workings of collective memory as the production of strong emotions with a
sprinkling of motley fact.15

The Confederates were, of course, revolutionaries in the most literal sense:
They sought to secede from the United States of America in order to hold on to
the economic privileges of slavery. Yet the monuments erected in their honor, als
many have noted in the context of recent discussions, were not built by
Confederate veterans themselves or by their contemporaries—indeed, few were
erected in the immediate wake of the Civil War—but rather by their descendants
and political heirs. Some distance from traumatic historical events may be
required for comfortable mythmaking. But across the years, hundreds of
Confederate monuments were produced in a multi-decade campaign of prolifera-
tion: Über 700 are documented in a 2015 report by the Southern Poverty Law
Center, with Virginia (96), Georgia (90), and North Carolina (90) having the
most, a fair share spread across the eight other states that seceded from the
Union, and a scattering more in states that were not part of the Confederacy.16

The SPLC report shows two periods in which monument erection spiked.
The first and larger of the two campaigns began around 1900 and extended
through the 1920s. This was the period in which backlash against the gains of
black citizens led to the consolidation of Jim Crow laws, and it encompassed the
beginning of the Great Migration, the exodus of black Americans from the South,
and the second flourishing of the ku klux klan. The second takes place between
1954 Und 1968, between the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the assassina-
tion of Martin Luther king, Jr., das ist, the years of the civil-rights movement. In
this sense, the Charlottesville monument commissioned in 1917 and erected in
Virginia is utterly typical.17 What does it mean that the erection of Confederate
statuary surged just a few years before the Great Migration began, and continued
across its first decade? To see this connection helps paint a picture of the uses of
monuments in the United States: As African-Americans began to stream north-
ward in the thousands, fleeing racial oppression and terror—the number would
ultimately be six million, the largest demographic event in our country’s history—
Confederate monuments multiplied as tangible markers of the political ambitions
to deny black Americans the full fruits of citizenship as well as their place in histo-
ry. Each was a stake in the ground representing those who, without mentioning

15.

The discussion of Renan here comes via Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting, P. 35.

16.
2016, S. 10–11. Download at www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.

Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” April 21,

17.

Ebenda., S. 11-15.

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Monumental Propaganda

187

the word slavery, sought to perpetuate its legacy. Each was a counterclaim to those
who were voting with their feet.

The numbers suggest that pervasiveness was the strategy behind Confederate
monument-building, the Confederate monument deployed, like the Soviet one, als
a way of claiming territory. Nothing comparable in quantity honors the winning
side of the North, and of course, very little at all marks and memorializes the sacri-
fices of victims of racial terror. This monumental proliferation makes a claim on
Geschichte: that if the South had been defeated militarily, it was not bested, not defeat-
ed ideologically. The dedication to a monument erected in Anderson County,
South Carolina, In 1902 underscores this not-so-implicit point, reading in part:
“The world shall yet decide, in truth’s clear, far-off light, that the soldiers who
wore the gray, and died with Lee, were in the right.”18 (Little has changed in this
regard: The current website for the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans echoes the same: “Our ancestors may have been Out-Numbered, Out-
Gunned and Out-Supplied. BUT NEVER OUT FOUGHT,” with a disdain for the
historical record that is still breathtaking.)19

The monument was not a new form in this early-twentieth-century moment,
but rather one with a long and storied tradition. Yet there is something new in this
kind of strategic pervasion, in this “monumental propaganda,” to use the Soviet
Begriff: We might see it as a moment when the mass reproductive strategies of mod-
ern media culture were reactivated within the anachronistic form of traditional
commemorative sculpture. In the case of Confederate monuments, Jedoch, Die
strategy of proliferation was executed not by the revolutionary victors but by those
whose cause was “lost.” The fact that so many Confederate monuments were erect-
ed despite this historical failure signals a considerable concession of federal
power—indeed, a concession great enough to make one wonder if the hundreds
of Confederate monuments built in these years do indeed represent a victory on
the ideological front, the statuary manifestation of political advantage gained by
the forces of Jim Crow.

Sophie Abramowitz, Eva Latterner, and Gillet Rosenblith, three UVA gradu-
ate students, have gone further to argue that the Confederate monuments erected
in Charlottesville in the 1920s delimited racial boundaries within the city itself,
and were placed at the borders of black and immigrant communities to cordon off
“white” spaces.20 The Robert E. Lee Monument and Lee Park itself sat within a few
blocks of Vinegar Hill, a thriving black community, while Jackson Park, and its
monumental focus, an equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson dedicated in 1921,
were positioned above Mckee Row, another black neighborhood. In 1914, Land
for that park had been confiscated by the city from its black residents by the

18.

19.

Cited in ibid., P. 11.

www.scvvirginia.org.

20.
Sophie Abramowitz, Eva Latterner, and Gillet Rosenblith, “Tools of Displacement: Wie
Charlottesville, Virginia’s Confederate Statues Helped Decimate the City’s Historically Successful Black
Communities,” Slate, Juni 23, 2017, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/
2017/06/how_charlottesville_s_confederate_statues_helped_decimate_the_city_s_historically.html.

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188

OCTOBER

Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. The reason to consider the removal of
certain monuments is not only their distortions of history, grievous though they
may be, but also the claims they make upon the future, upon what Americans
remember, and what they forget.

Could an alternative commemorative landscape be imagined? One vision is
suggested in the endpapers of the book The Negro in Virginia, published in 1940
with the subtitle “Compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work
Projects Administration in the State of Virginia.”21 Drawn by the U. Penn–educat-
ed architect William H. Moses, Jr.—who had won the design competition for the
Virginia state pavilion for the 1939 World’s Expo in Queens, but who was not list-
ed as project architect because of his race—the papers present an illustrated map
of Virginia indicating sites where black Americans played a critical historical, eco-
nomic, and cultural role, each with a drawing and number to be correlated to a
legend at the right. The first of these memory-sites is the arrival of slaves in
Jamestown in 1619. Some mark episodes of resistance, such as #10—Nat Turner’s
Rebellion—and #14, John Brown’s raid; yet others mark sites of cruel notoriety,
such as #13—Lumpkin’s Slave Jail in Richmond, which served as both human
clearinghouse and prison. The Civil War was represented not through a cult of
valiant bravery and noble gentility, but rather by #16—the Battle of Crater, a rout
of Union forces that turned into a racial massacre, with many United States
Colored Troops killed after surrendering, 22 and #17—the surrender at
Appomattox. The contributions of African-American labor are called out with
points across the state denoting work in the cotton fields, coal mines, apple
orchards, oyster farms, tobacco fields, and timber forests. In der Tat, Lewis describes
the volume as “the written record of the people who have helped build
America.”23 The heroism of Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith who, In 1811,
rescued victims of a theater fire in Richmond, is recognized, as are African
American institutions of higher learning.24 I am struck by the way Moses’s map
stands as key to a commemorative landscape of a different kind: It pictures a col-
lective historical realm with sites and subjects of the type that might have been
proposed and realized as monuments in a political reality different from the one
its authors faced, a reality that rendered this impossible. It can be seen as a map of

21.
Roscoe Lewis, Hrsg., The Negro in Virginia: Compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work
Projects Administration in the State of Virginia (New York: Hastings House, 1940). Der 1994 reedition does not
include the endpapers. For an enlargeable reproduction of the endpapers, see kendra Hamilton, “The
Negro
in The Encyclopedia of Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/
Negro_in_Virginia_The_1940#start_entry.

in Virginia,”

22.
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/the-battle-of-the-crater/.

Richard Slotkin, “The Battle of Crater,” New York Times, Juli 29, 2014,

23.

24.

Roscoe Lewis, “Preface,” in The Negro in Virginia, P. xx.

Ebenda.

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Monumental Propaganda

189

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Illustrated endpapers by William H. Moses,
Jr., for The Negro in Virginia. 1940.

monuments that might have been, ones often still yet to be built. If we think of
monuments as the expression of forms of collective memory, as doing a kind of
political “editing” of the past, what has been excised in works like Shrady’s monu-
ment to Lee is here made visible in a bid for remembrance.

Moses’s endpapers announce and encapsulate what is inside: The book as a
whole can be seen to offer a kind of counter-monument to those extolling the Lost
Cause. Published by the Works Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, es war
born of many of the activities and aspirations of the WPA’s federal Office of Negro
Affairs. In 1936, the acclaimed poet Sterling Brown, the Williams- and Harvard-edu-
cated child of a father born into slavery, was appointed to lead the new office and
given the title of National Editor of Negro Affairs. Brown was already well known to
Holger Cahill, who was the national director of the Federal Art Project within the
WPA; they had served together along with Lawrence Reddick, Carter Woodson,
Alain Locke, and other notable figures on the organizing committee of the exhibi-
tion held in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment at the
Library of Congress, which like The Negro in Virginia traced a narrative of the achieve-
ments of black citizenry from slavery to the present.25 Brown saw the role of the divi-

25.
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Dezember 18, 1940 (USGPO, Library of Congress, 1943).

75 Years of Freedom: Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Thirteenth

190

OCTOBER

sion as shaping the representation of African-Americans within WPA initiatives—“to
present the Negro race adequately and without bias.”26 As part of this mission, Er
embraced a project initiated by Reddick in 1934, then a faculty member at kentucky
State University, through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA):
Reddick had supervised twelve black graduate students to collect the testimony of
250 ex-slaves. The project had since foundered.27 Brown may have seen opportunity
within the Federal Writers’ Project’s broad commitment to collecting the “life histo-
ries of ordinary Americans” with the ambition of creating a mosaic portrait of every-
day life in America: Letzten Endes, first-person narratives of over 10,000 men and
women from a variety of regions, backgrounds, and occupations were recorded by
writers on the FWP payroll. Brown folded the slave-narrative initiative into the WPA
In 1936, bringing it to new scale. Through Writers’ Project units based in individual
Staaten, writer-reporters were sent into the field to record oral histories of those who
had been held in slavery. Alan Lomax’s Folklore Division joined a year later, Und
efforts were made, if inconsistently, to apply the methodology of that discipline, Kneipe-
lishing handbooks on methods and procedures, standardizing questions, Herstellung
tape recordings of the sessions, and encouraging photography. Fourteen states ulti-
mately participated, Virginia among them.

After federal funding ended in 1939, some of the slave-narrative projects con-
tinued within state units until 1943. Am Ende, manche 2,000 interviews were conduct-
Hrsg, representing approximately two percent of the population of those who had
lived in slavery at the time of emancipation.28 Brown’s federal oversight at times pro-
duced conflicts with the state units. As Catherine Stewart has documented, members
of those units—some belonging to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, found-
ed in 1894 to memorialize Confederate sacrifice through the promotion of what
they saw as a true history of the South—made efforts to exclude testimony that did
not conform to a vision of slavery as a benevolent institution.29 Cuts, revisions, Und
redactions of both minor and major impact were made to transcripts, despite urg-
ings by Brown’s federal office against excisions of any kind.

The Negro in Virginia was among the most ambitious of these endeavors. Der
book fits roughly within the rubric of the Federal Writers’ Project’s “American
Guide” series, cultural and historical guides to states, territories, cities, and even
highway systems, but was, as Roscoe Lewis described it, a signal effort to tell the his-
tory of the state from a “Negro point of view.”30 Mobilizing the archive against Lost

WPA press release, “American Learns of Negro from Books of the FWP,” March 6, 1939,
26.
cited in Catherine Stewart, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2016), P. 51.

27.

Hamilton, “The Negro in Virginia.”

“The WPA and the Slave Narrative Collection,” Library of Congress website, footnote 16,
28.
www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-
essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/wpa-and-the-slave-narrative-collection/.

29.

30.

Stewart, Long Past Slavery, S. 52–56.

Lewis, “Preface," P. xx.

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Monumental Propaganda

191

Cause mythology, the Virginia unit under Lewis in Virginia and Brown in
Washington conceived a history rigorously constructed from primary documents,
comprising scores of courthouse records and other archival materials as well as over
300 oral histories of elderly African-Americans, einschließlich 250 individuals born into
slavery. The fourth chapter, called “The Narrators,” calls out by name many of those
whose testimony serves to shape the book’s description of slavery in Virginia.31 They
include Anna Harris, 92 Jahre alt, who in the years since emancipation had had “no
white man . . . in my house. Don’t ’low it. Dey sole my sister kate. I saw it wid dese
here eyes. Sole her in 1860, and I ain’t seed nor heard of her since. Folks say white
folks is all right dese days. Maybe dey is, maybe dey isn’t.”32 Sterling Brown recount-
ed that he and Ulysses Lee, his colleague in the Department of Negro Affairs, took
the manuscript and edited it into its final form themselves in an effort, es scheint, Zu
avoid manipulations of fact.33 The book challenges the mythology embodied in
Confederate monuments, countering “truthiness” with documents, Daten, and testi-
Geld, countering collective memory with history.

In his preface, Lewis reflected: “It is appropriate that the first WPA State book
on the Negro be produced in Virginia: for here the first African natives were
brought and held in enforced servitude; and here also, more than two centuries
später, freedom for some 5,000,000 of their descendants was assured on the surrender
grounds of Appomattox.”34 Lewis’s words frame William Moses’s endpapers, im
sequence of markers that begin with the first slave ship at Jamestown, and the
heraldic escutcheon containing the book’s title under an image of silhouetted black
figures marching across dunes, with slave schooner at full sail seen in the bay
behind, as well as its twenty-nine chapters that traverse the state’s years as slave econ-
omy, the contested meanings of the Civil War, the “black laws” of the Virginia Code
put in place in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decades of the
twentieth, to an accounting of present-day economic inequity and injustice at the
hands of the courts. It is this premise—that these things are integrally linked, Das
the past still lives with us—that seems from the vantage point of today most boldly
and cogently stated: that in order to answer the question that permeates WPA pro-
duction—“What does it mean to be American?”—one must begin with slavery.