Kansans showed spunk during Depression

On Saturday evening about a dozen local history buffs turned out to hear Lorraine Madway in a Kansas Humanities Council-sponsored talk on “Struggle and Resilience — Kansas during the Great Depression” at Allen County Historical Society Funston Meeting Hall.
Madway is an archivist and curator of special collections at Wichita Statue University.
While cataloguing collections at WSU, Madway recognized that the “university holds a major Works Progress Administration Writers Project collection.”
The WPA was a government program instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the extreme unemployment of the Great Depression.
Known primarily for its construction projects, building highways and infrastructure in national parks and across the nation, the WPA also sponsored artist “projects” that employed photographers, writers, illustrators and painters to capture the face of the nation during an unprecedented time of hardship.
The writers project put to work teachers, journalists, secretaries, lawyers — “Anyone who could handle a typewriter,” Madway said — in recording the stories of the common people.
In each state, writers were hired to prepare guides to chronicle the culture, history, geography, agriculture and byways of that state. The books became widely popular, especially during the prosperity after World War II, Madway noted, when they were “popularized and purchased as a celebration of America.”
Madway noted some stories wax poetic, while others are more straight forward in nature.
“The writers that went around were fascinated with the stories people were telling them,” she said. In Kansas, writers talked “to pioneers, farmers, former slaves, a tramp.” In cities such as Wichita they also featured ethnic communities, she noted.
Madway was surprised that the tales were not all woe.
“In the process of going through these materials, it was clear to me that, in the case of Kansas, the struggle is matched by resilience. In Kansas, there is a real record that crisis brought out the best in people.”
Kansas during the 1930s was already struggling before the depression, Madway noted, due to ongoing drought and subsequent economic downturn.
“Agricultural productivity dropped 63 percent,” as billowing clouds of black dust rolled across the state, seeped into houses and made breathing and outdoor work all but impossible, she said.
Still, Madway noted, neighboring states fared worse.
“Oklahoma suffered a great deal” more, she said, but “here in Kansas is was hard enough.”
What comes through from the records of the writer’s project, she said, is that in Kansas, “There is a sense that people are determined to deal with this and find a life that is worth living.”
Throughout the Depression, Kansans held county fairs when they could, danced and met with neighbors to share meals and entertainment, Madway said. Although some left the state, she said, many stayed because they had history here.
“You come to respect the love the people have for this state,” she said.
Images from early Kansas history can be found at wichitaphotos.org