AMERICAN MADE

A snapshot of America’s past.

Trubek, founder and publisher of Belt Publishing, gathers 26 interviews with workers across the country, selected from more than 10,000 that were conducted for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. Employing 6,500 interviewers, the FWP talked with a wide swath of men and women, including fishmongers, housekeepers, and butchers; construction and factory workers; doctors, newsboys, and farmers. Many of those interviewed were first-generation immigrants who recounted their experiences of coming to America. Some entered illegally, like a fish-seller from Poland, who was smuggled into Germany, made his way to Cuba, endured an agonizing boat trip to Key West, Florida, and finally united with relatives in Chicago. For years, he was unable to bring his wife and child over, until a new law made it possible. Another example: Twenty-four-year-old Marge Paca tells of the inhuman conditions of her work in Chicago as a meatpacker, sometimes in a room with a temperature of 60 degrees below zero. Some respondents were interviewed in their homes, others at union headquarters. As labor reporter Kim Kelly notes in her introduction, unions offered significant protections for workers, as well as camaraderie. Being a union organizer, though, meant standing up to managers’ intimidation. Some respondents deplored high rents, unsanitary living conditions, and being displaced by new machinery. Bernice, a Black immigrant from Bermuda, worked as a domestic until she found that she could make more money renting her Harlem apartment for Saturday night parties, which involved poker, liquor, and prostitution. She got a cut of the earnings, “a good racket while it lasted,” she admitted. Among the interviewees, too, is a Black doctor, living in Miami, who waged a campaign against tuberculosis; a Black thief who could make himself invisible; and the adventuresome, well-traveled Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A panoramic portrait of a changing nation.