Rhymes, Jingles, and Little Poems: The World War II Rumor Project Collection in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress

"Rumor," wrote Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 2, "is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures / And of so easy and so plain a stop / That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wavering multitude, / Can play upon it." We here at P&PC don't know about all of that, but we've certainly had our fair share of rumor-related surmises and conjectures of late, all stemming from our recent forays into the World War II Rumor Project Collection in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Our time in the nation's capital is quickly coming to an end, but now that the lion's share of our proposed research about Edna St. Vincent Millay's World War II-era poem The Murder of Lidice is done, we just couldn't pass up an opportunity to find out what folks on the street were saying sotto voce around the same time. And you know what? It turns out that many of them were talkin' poetry.

The World War II Rumor Project Collection is exactly what it sounds like it is. Worried that Axis agents were infiltrating the U.S. and spreading false rumors with the goal of damaging national morale and the unity of the war effort, a certain Dr. Eugene Horowitz working for the Office of War Information did a pilot study coordinating the collection of rumors for analysis and counteraction. He collected them in two main ways: via designated, already well-placed individuals (hair stylists, cab drivers, etc.) who reported what they were hearing in their communities; and via teachers and students at a select number of high schools and colleges.

Much of the project's collection consists of rumor reports obtained via the first method, and this was the material we initially targeted, thinking how awesome it would be to go back home to Oregon with a  handful of the juiciest, choicest rumors that grandmas and grandpas in the Beaver State were passing along. Well, it turns out that Oregonians didn't have much of a taste for rumor or (what's more likely) the federal government—or perhaps they couldn't get their ground game up and running in time. Because we found a grand total of two Oregon-generated rumors. That's right. Two.
 

We were about ready to sigh, pack it all up, and move on to something else, but that's usually the sort of moment when something happens for us. Indeed. Just to be thorough and make sure our bases were covered, we decided to check out the student responses—all contained in the last three narrow boxes of the collection. And what do you know. There, right at the start, we found a template "speech" that each teacher was asked to give when administering a "standardized" rumor collection in class—you know, the "always use a #2 pencil" type of thing—and part of that speech instructed students to "write down five jokes, anecdotes, puns, rhimes [sic], or 'cracks' about the war." Rhimes? You can imagine our ears pricking up, and not just because of the unconventional spelling. And sure enough, later on, the speech reminds students to write down "any kind of story, joke, pun, toast, or jingle about the war." Jingle? Now you're talking. And wouldn't you know it, the entire instructional concludes with yet another reference to poetry. "If you can't remember the exact words of a little poem or jingle, give it as near as you can. Please write these down now—let's not take too long over it."

Rhimes, jingles, and little poems? Who today would even think to ask for rhimes, jingles, and little poems when trying to assess "what passes by word of mouth ... things which often fail to appear in print"? So, we started reading, and you know what? There were rhimes, jingles, and little poems all over the place, from rhyming slogans ("Pay your taxes to beat the Axis") to full-on, multiple-stanza verses about everything from Hitler's nether regions to sugar and shoe rationing.

But wait, there's more—there always is. Each student response is anonymous (the study never asked for names), but at Dr. Horowitz's instruction, each form (almost each, at least) contains a notation identifying the respondent's year in school, gender (M or F), and race (W or C/N [Colored/Negro]). And as we first read through—quickly, without method or clear goal—we started to feel like the African American students reported rhimes, jingles, and little poems more frequently than white students. How very interesting, we thought. What little archive have we stumbled upon? How can we tally up the numbers? How do we crunch and analyze them, and what might they reveal to us? It turns out that Dr. Horowitz's project never got beyond the pilot stage, but could we, almost seventy-five years later, use the data he collected to say something about the relative importance or unimportance of popular poetry to African American and white students nearing mid-century and thus, presumably, to the communities from which they came? How would we then map gender onto this? How about age? And how would all of this data intersect with the poems themselves? Might there be discernible patterns in who reported what types of poems?

We're a long way from answering all those questions, dear reader, but by now much of the data has been recorded for transport back to Oregon. We couldn't have gotten this far without further support from folks at the Kluge Center, who loaned us a real-live intern to help: Cooper Kidd (pictured here), a sociology major at Montgomery College who's just returned from a summer studying social responses to AIDS in San Francisco, and who's spending the Fall semester doing LoC research on poverty and trans women of color. Pretty much side by side in the Folklife Center for the past three or so weeks, we've been making spreadsheets, talking through what we've been finding, and sharing more than just a few rhimes, jingles, and little poems with each other.

Really, we don't have much data to make public at this point, but we can dangle this little morsel in front of you (and in front of all of you granting foundations out there): of the 2,250 responses we've recorded, about half are from African American students, and half are from white students. (We think this is statistically sound.) The percentage of African American students who report rhimes, jingles, and little poems is 28%, and much higher than white students, who report poems 14% of the time. Our initial hypothesis confirmed, we now prepare to move on—Cooper back to school, P&PC back to Oregon, and both of us deeper into the data. Please wish us safe travels, and make sure to check back for more breaking news—well, breaking as of 1943, at least—about "the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wavering multitude."

In D.C. with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and the Writers' War Board

This week, P&C is blogcasting to you from Washington, D.C., where we're in the process of wrapping up a short research trip to the Library of Congress and enjoying getting to know the city. We've been here twice previously—once for a couple of days back in the late 1990s for an AWP conference, and once around 2003 when we were visiting friends in Baltimore and took the train to the National Gallery of Art one afternoon—so we don't know the city very well. Suffice it to say, though, that we're totally lovin' it. Every day we get up early and head to the Library to do research on Edna St. Vincent Millay's relationship to the Writers' War Board. Then, come evening, we pack things up, return to our one-bedroom pad in Capitol Hill, change our socks and mindset, and head out for the night. We've enjoyed walking the H Street Corridor, the Eastern Market area of Capitol Hill, Dupont Circle, Foggy Bottom, the National Mall, the Shaw neighborhood, and Columbia Heights where we came across the section of V Street (pictured above) named "Langston Hughes Way."

So, here's the gist of our research. During World War II, the Office of War Information operated an outfit called the Writers' War Board, which was charged with recruiting American writers of all stripes for domestic propaganda efforts. Poets. Playwrights. Fiction writers. Journalists. Editors. Radio writers. Speech writers. Song writers. Cartoonists. Screenwriters. You get the idea. A propaganda campaign of one sort or the other—More Nurses Needed! Conserve Oil and Gas! Use V-Mail! Don't Waste Food! Join the Merchant Marines!—would come down the pike, and the WWB would find writers to help make it go. Need a fifteen-minute radio play pitching the way your average American can contribute to the war effort? Well, the WWB's got not just one but fifteen for you to choose from. But get this. Not all writers working for the WWB wrote explicit propaganda. The WWB archives show that office staff wrote to poets and pulp writers encouraging them to take up particular topics that would tie in with—and thus bolster the credibility and appeal of—current campaigns. When the WWB was tasked with encouraging Americans to do volunteer work on farms and orchards and thus increase food supplies, for example, it wrote to Berton Braley, Ira Gershwin, Edgar Guest, Oscar Hammerstein, Phyllis McGinley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ogden Nash, Cole Porter, E.B. White and others asking them to write about food and farming. "Will you spare the time," the WWB asked, "to turn out something on the joys of farm labor, of what you get from working with the green growing things of earth?"

P&PC has a specific story it's looking for—the story behind Edna St. Vincent Millay's long poem The Murder of Lidice that Millay wrote at the bequest of the WWB, that was published (in two different abridged forms) in the Saturday Review of Literature and Life magazine, that was broadcast nationally on NBC radio and translated into Spanish and Portuguese for shortwave broadcast to Europe and South America, that was issued in "pamphlet" form by Millay's publisher Harper & Brothers, and that was eventually put on vinyl as part of a three-disc set. After a week of looking through the WWB archives and Millay's own papers, we've now got scads of material to return home with and coax into some sort of coherent, white-knuckle story of how The Murder of Lidice came into being and unexpectedly went on to became what might have been up to that point the most widely circulated American poem of the century. Stay tuned, dear readers. You likely haven't heard the last from us on this topic.

As you can imagine, though, we're running across all sorts of other goodies. When the WWB wrote to George Bernard Shaw asking him to join the "Lidice Lives" campaign for which Millay wrote her poem, he replied, "No. I am not such a mischievous fool as to waste time in preserving the memory of atrocities of which we are all equally guilty." There are materials pertaining to Thurgood Marshall (then at the NAACP), Margaret Mead, Upton Sinclair, Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, H.L. Mencken, Bernard Malamud, and more. One of our favorites? The letter from Langston Hughes pictured here. Based on what we've seen in the WWB archives, we think that by the time he wrote this, Hughes had been involved with the WWB in other capacities as well, as he's listed as author of two radio plays ("Brothers" and "In the Service of My Country") in a lot of fifty such plays being circulated at one point by the WWB. (Other plays, btw, were contributed by Stephen Vincent Benet, Margaret Sangster, and Pearl Buck.) We love the idea that Hughes was collaborating with W.C. Handy, and wouldn't you have loved to have been there when the Benny Goodman Quintet introduced the "Go-and-Get-the-Enemy-Blues" and Jimmy Rushing of the Count Basie Band let 'er rip?

It's an interesting little letter, too, isn't it? Consider how Hughes makes sure that the WWB's Clifton Fadiman knows the difference between a concert baritone and a blues singer. Even more interesting is how Hughes skews the letter away from the subject of race and toward both "folk" and U.S. national identities. Indeed, he mentions the "folk quality" of Joe Turner in paragraph one, and the "folk manner" of "That Eagle" which he pitches to Fadiman in paragraph two. And is that "Theme for English B" we hear echoing in the background of the second paragraph? Whereas "Theme for English B" (which wouldn't be written until after the war, we believe) concludes

As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you're older—and white—
and somewhat more free

the rhetoric in this letter focuses on "how that eagle of the U.S.A. has got his wings over you and me." The poem makes race a constitutive part of the relationship between "you" and "me," but, as with Hughes's use of "folk," the letter to Fadiman elides explicit mention of race in favor of an American folk identity as the common ground of the WW II effort.

Of course, Hughes's willingness to contribute to the WWB can't but be made ironic by the fact that over a decade later (in 1953), Hughes would be called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy—testimony that Hughes began with the sentence, "I was born a Negro." As we all know, Hughes's interest in communism stemmed in part from the color-blind view of the world it promised—a color blindness that Hughes also imagines in his letter to Fadiman about the "folk-ness" of American identity out of which his song lyrics emerge and to which they appeal. As the beginning of Hughes's speech before the Senate suggests, the crime Hughes was called to account for may not in fact have been his affiliation with communism but of imagining a color blind America. Indeed, in his speech to McCarthy's Senate subcommittee, Hughes doesn't begin by explaining his connection to the WWB or his activities working on behalf of U.S. interests in WW II—both of which could have been used (in theory) to demonstrate his red-blooded American-ness. Rather, he begins ("I was born a Negro") by acknowledging race as central to American identity, inserting himself back into the dominant rubric of American culture and effectively renouncing or repudiating his former views, his dreams of a color-blind nation.

At 73,000 items, the WWB Archives are pretty huge. They're disorganized. They're sometimes mislabeled. But we think that for people interested in the role of the writer working on what the WWB sometimes called the second cultural front during WWII, they're just waiting for someone with less of a targeted agenda than P&PC has to come along and make something big out of 'em. We'll be back here for certain, as there's more about Millay to explain. But who knows what other stories are also waiting to be told?