Magazine Tells of How Marie Bankhead Owen Almost Killed the WPA Guide to Alabama

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — In the spring of 1935, when the country was scraping out of its worst-ever depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s make-work New Deal policies were starting to take shape, the Federal Writers Project was born. When critics assailed the project designed to put unemployed writers to work, Harry Hopkins, the director of the Works Projects Administration, reportedly cut them off with a blunt, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”

First, administrators set about deciding what these writers would write about. Soon the idea of individual guides to each of the states, complete with highlights of their histories and accomplishments, won favor. In the spring 2000 issue of Alabama Heritage magazine, Harvey Jackson describes the involved and often contentious process administrators in Alabama went through to develop the state’s version of the project.

Myrtle Miles, a veteran journalist, was chosen to head up the Alabama project. Her first task was to find qualified writers, a difficult task given the fact that most good writers in the South already had jobs. She raised eyebrows from the start by hiring, among others, a socialist activist from the wilds of northeast Alabama, and an “ex-Honduran Brigadier General” who was said to be a famous writer and who stalked the halls of the Alabama FWP office, his “long hair falling over his forehead.” Managing this eclectic staff proved difficult, as internal friction reared its head almost from the beginning.

But Miles’ biggest problem was not her staff, nor was it developing enough material to see the project to fruition. Her biggest problem was the powerful head of the State Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, Marie Bankhead Owen. Author, lecturer, and eloquent exponent of the “accepted” interpretation of Alabama’s history, Mrs. Owen was a formidable figure in the state. The widow of Dr. Thomas Owen, the father of the State Archives, she considered herself a champion of historical accuracy and an opponent of sloppy scholarship.

And she was tough. Though she was selected as an adviser to the project, she was skeptical of its merits from the beginning, and she let it be known in no uncertain terms. In a letter to Miles responding to an early draft of the guide, Owen wrote that it was “full of errors from an historical standpoint” and added that she would “not be responsible in the public eye for material of this sort.” Miles responded in kind, noting historical errors in Owen’s books, and chiding her for presenting her comments “in the scolding manner of a person punishing an unruly or perhaps an idiot child.”

What followed was nearly four full years of wrangling, cajoling, and cold-warring between Owen, Miles, and various administrators and legislators. Miles finally left her post in 1939, but not before the project had enough momentum to make it to press in 1941 — with the notable blessing of none other than Marie Bankhead Owen.

Harvey H. Jackson, III, professor and head of the department of history at Jacksonville State University, is a frequent contributor to Alabama Heritage. He is currently working on a popular history of the state. This publication of Jackson’s article coincides with the spring 2000 re-release of Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South by The University of Alabama Press. For more information, contact the Press at P.O. Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380, 205/348-5180.

Alabama Heritage is a nonprofit quarterly magazine published by The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. To order the magazine, write Alabama Heritage, Box 870342, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0342, or call 205/348-7467.