Class Ventriloquism: Women’s Letters, Lectures, Lyrics—and Love

Abstract

In his introduction to Down & Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, historian Robert S. McElvaine remarks on the difficulty of gleaning a sense of life among the downtrodden during the 1930s because “the sources of traditional history—governmental records, organization files, collections of personal papers, diaries, memoirs, newspapers—yield only spotty information.”¹ As a historian McElvaine echoes poet Muriel Rukeyser’s assertion, “There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.”² In order to retrieve the buried and lost, he argues, and obtain “such immediate testimony” one might “examine letters written to public figures during the 1930s[:] The words of men, women, and children as they described their problems to persons they believed to be concerned” (McElvaine, 3). Lorena Hickok attributed the unprecedented number of letters personally addressed to President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor to his weekly radio addresses and Fireside Chats, during which he encouraged listeners to write to him, as he often referenced letters received and answered by his staff. Listening to the voice of the president or his wife over the radio was a new experience for the vast majority of working people in the United States.