RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IN DEPRESSION, MEMORIES WERE YOUR BIGGEST ASSET

* The Federal Writers' Project not only put people to work, it collected and preserved the first-person accounts of hundreds of ordinary Americans.

By rights, I should be writing about that Irish fellow who did the best thing a man could possibly do: He killed all the snakes in Ireland. Most history books say he drove the snakes off the island. Don't believe it. He took after them with a hoe. He would have used a self-propelled lawnmower like the rest of us, but God hadn't created self-propelled lawnmowers when Patrick was around. I'm pretty sure I'm kin to Patrick.

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I read a lot of magazines. I even read some magazines I don't like, just because I owe it to myself to see how other folks' minds are being twisted around.

One of my favorite magazines is Smithsonian. This month's issue has a fascinating story about the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s that provided jobs all over the country to just about anyone who could read and write. Participants in the project wrote, among other things, state guidebooks that are still considered to be treasures today for travelers along our two-lane highways.

Members of the Federal Writers' Project also collected and compiled first-person histories during the 1930s. Remember, there were plenty of people around then who could remember the Civil War.

Not all of the writers in the Depression-era project stuck with literary endeavors once the war started. Some of them got real jobs. Others became some of our best-known authors.

What fascinates me the most about the Federal Writers' Workshop are the first-person histories. The Library of Congress has a Web site where you can read all 2,900 of these recollections from ordinary men and women.

I checked the Web site (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html). I wanted to see if there were some accounts from Southeast Missouri. Their aren't. There are only two from Missouri. By the way, the site if fully searchable.

One of the Missouri histories is from a woman near Kansas City who recalled the days when her family owned slaves.

It was the other one that was so intriguing. It is from Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom Rose describes simply as a "writer of books for children." Yes, that Laura Ingalls Wilder. The one who wrote the "Little House on the Prairie" classics. Too many Missourians don't know that she spent most of her life in the Ozarks near Springfield.

In 1938-39, Rose wrote a letter that went into the Federal Writers' Workshop collection. It is absolutely fascinating, not because it is a lofty literary work, but because it sounds like something one of my aunts would write if they would ever take the time to put their memories on paper.

Rose describes the flight from the Dakotas "during the panic of '93." That would be 1893, of course. The Wilder family had homesteaded for seven years, but failed crops and 36 percent interest on farm loans drove them away.

Here is an excerpt:

"Forty years ago I lived through a worldwide depression; once more I am living through a depression popularly believed to be the worst in history because it is worldwide; this is the ultimate disaster, the depression to end all depressions. On every side I hear that conditions have changed, and that is true. They have.

"Meanwhile I have done several things. I have been office clerk, telegrapher, newspaper reporter, feature writer, advertising writer, farmland salesman. I have seen all the United States and something of Canada and the Caribbean; all of Europe except Spain; Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq as far east as Baghdad, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan. California, the Ozarks and the Balkans are my home towns.

"Politically, I cast my first vote on a sample ballot for Cleveland, at the age of three. I was an ardent if uncomprehending Populist; I saw America ruined forever when the soulless corporations in 1896 defeated Bryan and Free Silver. I was a Christian Socialist with Debs, and distributed untold numbers of the Appeal to Reason. From 1914 to 1920 -- when I first went to Europe -- I was a pacifist; innocently, if criminally, I thought war stupid, cruel, wasteful and unnecessary. I voted for Wilson because he kept us out of it.

"In 1917 I became a convinced, though not practicing communist. In Russia, for some reason, I wasn't and I said so, but my understanding of bolshevism made everything pleasant when the Cheka arrested me a few times.

"I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better -- and more productive, even in material ways -- than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends.

"Personally, I'm a plump, middle-western, middle-class, middle-aged woman, with white hair and simple tastes. I like buttered popcorn, salted peanuts, bread-and-milk. I am, however, a marvelous cook of foods for others to eat. I like to see people eat my cooking. I love mountains, the sea -- all of the seas except the Atlantic, a rather dull ocean -- and Tchaikovsky and Epstein and the Italian primitives. I like Arabic architecture and the Moslem way of life. I am mad about Kansas skies, Cedar Rapids by night, Iowa City any time, Miami Beach, San Francisco and all American boys about 15 years old playing basketball. At the moment I don't think of anything I heartily dislike, but I can't understand sport pages, nor what makes radio work, nor why people like to look at people who write fiction.

" But aren't you frightfully disappointed?' " I asked a stranger who was recently looking at me. 'Oh, no,' she said. 'No, indeed. We value people for what they do, not for what they look like.' "

I think I would like Rose Wilder Lane a whole lot.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.