Episode notes: POWER: The Power of Quilts

Tennessee Valley Authority Appliqué Quilt Design of a Black Fist, 1934. Designer: Ruth Clement Bond, Maker: Rose Marie Thomas. Museum of Arts and Design, New York; gift of Mrs. Rosa Philips Thomas, 1994.

Publication date:

August 6, 2025

This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house.

Episode listening links:

Listen on Apple podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• Images of Ruth Clement Bond’s quilts from the Museum of Arts and Design
• Learn more about Janneken at Janneken.org, where you can access a website devoted to her recent book, A New Deal for Quilts. 
• Janneken is also the host of Running Stitch, a QSOS Podcast, which draws on an archive of oral histories with quiltmakers, discussing the cultural history and contemporary quilt scene with guests. 

Transcript:

INTRO:
Eira: Welcome to No Time for Fear, the New Deal History Podcast, where we examine how the United States’ ambitious response to the Great Depression can provide a blueprint for improving Americans’ lives nearly a century later. Today we’re talking with Janneken Smucker, who is a professor of history at West Chester University. I first saw mentions of Janneken’s book, A New Deal for Quilts, on Instagram while I was writing my own publication, A Green New Deal for Archives. And it turns out we have a mutual archivist friend who connected us. I’m also a relatively new quilter, so it was a lot of fun to talk about quilting during the New Deal with Janneken. On this episode, we talk about:

• Rural electrification’s impact on quilting.
• Some incredible quilts that came out of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
• Our shared enthusiasm for the New Deal’s spirit of experimentation.

INTERVIEW:

Janneken, thank you so much for joining us today. I want to hear, as our first question, if you can share how you first became interested in the New Deal.

Janneken: Sure, and thank you so much, Eira, for having me as a guest. I’m really delighted to be here. Well, I mean, I’ve studied history for a long time, you know, since I was, well, certainly even back in high school when it was the football coach who was teaching social studies. And the New Deal was one of those things we’d always learn about, and you’d have to memorize all the alphabet soup of agencies and administrations and laws and all of that. And I knew, you know, as a student of history, the importance and significance of so many of the things, the legacy of the New Deal. We still live with so many aspects of it, from Social Security, for example, to the union protections. I’m a union member at the faculty union at my university. So in lots of ways, we continue to live with the New Deal.

I really became interested as not just a student of history, but as a scholar, a researcher, when I realized that there were these images of women making quilts. Anytime I was working on some quilt-related project that I needed an old-timey picture of a woman making a quilt or posing with a quilt, anywhere I could find one in the Farm Security Administration photo archives. So this is part of that alphabet soup, the FSA, Farm Security Administration. Interestingly, had this historical division with the mission of photographing everyday Americans across the country who were experiencing the Great Depression. And in part, this was a propaganda program to demonstrate the success of New Deal programs, to show the positive impacts that the Roosevelt administration was having on the lives of ordinary Americans. And it also was to document the plight, particularly of farmers, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, many migrants who were moving, kind of the classic moving west through the Dust Bowl. And there are tens of thousands of photographs. At first, I just thought there were a handful that had quilt-related images, and then I kept finding more. And as I also learned about this photography project and learned about the ways it was trying to communicate the propaganda aspect, and I say I’m not using propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s really the definition when the government is creating communicative messages in the form of photographs, in this case, and sharing them with its public as a way to influence them. That’s propaganda. It’s not some nasty, evil version necessarily, but it is governmental messaging. So the government is using photographs of women making quilts to communicate about the success of New Deal programs. And I started to think about this. Why quilts? Did the government care about quilts? And on one hand, quilts were really popular during the 1920s, 1930s. Their quilts were really having a heyday. But it made me want to learn more about how quilts fit into this larger project of helping the American economy and the American people recover and reform during the Great Depression.

Eira: Yeah, I think I’m so glad you talked about the FSA photograph because that’s been something that I have spent a lot of time looking at as well. And there’s just so much, so many cool moments from people just living, you know. Yes, there’s, as you talk about in your book, there’s, and in your work, you know, a lot of times these photographs are posed, but there’s also just so many incredible photographs of people just living very normal lives. And even during the Depression, which we think of as this very melancholic period, there’s a lot of moments of joy. I was looking in the FSA archives recently, at least the material is digitized online. And I was just, I was like, I need some summer images. So I was finding all these pictures of kids eating ice cream from FSA photographs. So, yes, I’m I like hearing about how that was sort of the portal. Yeah, I really love that. Everyday moments.

Janneken: And as it turned out, there were hundreds of photographs that feature quilts. And in part, it’s what you’re talking about. There’s domestic scenes, whether it’s a small town, a family in a house in a small town or in a Farm Security Administration temporary labor camp or a sharecropper’s cabin in the deep south or perhaps a governmental house that was built in a planned community. You can catch this glimpse. It’s like you’re spying on these intimate moments, which I was, you know, scouring all these photographs to see what kind of quilts they had on their beds. And that’s really informative. And that way, it’s not necessarily posed. This is like the objects that they are living with.

Eira: Yeah. Well, since the current season of this podcast is focused on power and electrification and you’re also a quilt historian, I am curious if through your research, if you found whether the arrival of electrification in rural areas because of New Deal programs, if that changed quilting practices in the 1930s. And I think for the non-quilters in the audience, they don’t realize how much technology really influences quilting. So maybe you can speak to that for the non-quilters who might not be sensitive to quilting technology.

Janneken: Sure. Very much quilts are a product. American quilts are a product of industrialization from the fabrics that are produced in factories to the equipment quilt makers have used over time, whether that’s a needle that was forged from metal in the 19th century, the sewing thread itself and sewing machines. Domestic sewing machines were really available following the Civil War, but those were treadle powered sewing machines powered with your foot. And really, by the time we’re in the Great Depression, it’s in this transition stage. Electrical sewing machines are available. They haven’t really replaced treadle machines completely. But the Farm Security Administration itself had a catalog of household domestic goods. And as the rural areas were becoming electrified, whether it was through the Tennessee Valley Authority or through the REA, again, I have to remember what all these acronyms stand for, the Rural Electrification Administration. People homes had access, were starting to have access. It’s really in a transition stage, though. So the catalog, in fact, that the Farm Security Administration published, they feature a treadle machine and say that it also comes in an electric version that you need to plug into ACDC outlet. And they even mention the wattage and all these things. What’s really interesting because of this transition stage, if we go back in time before the Great Depression, the roaring 20s, as we often call them, was the time when consumerism was really, well, roaring. It was booming. And home economists, which is a new profession of the early 20th century of the progressive era, one of their main tasks is educating women about how to use all this new machinery, all these new appliances that are available for the modern home. So this is why you need a toaster oven. This is why you need an iron that plugs in rather than one that you fill with pieces of coal from your wood-burning stove. So they’re transitioning women into using these appliances, and that continues into the Great Depression as more rural families, rural homes are electrified. But it’s still very much this transition stage and people are living with things from the before times as well as afterwards. And rural electrification is also sort of this uneven process that it’s not happening. It’s not blanketing, let’s say, the rural South all at once. It’s in fits and starts. And honestly, there are a lot of white landlords that won’t electrify the homes that their Black tenants are living in because they don’t feel that that’s necessary for the Black families that are renting from them. So it’s not like all of a sudden a light switch turns on and everyone has electricity throughout the South. So sewing machines are very much part of the quilt-making process. But we’re still in a stage where some people are going to have treadle machines. Some people are going to perhaps have the kind that plug in. And a lot of people are also hand sewing.

Eira: Well, and one of the agencies we’ve mentioned already in our interview today is the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority. And that’s part of how I became familiar with some of your work, is your work around some of the quilts associated with TVA. So we often think of the TVA being like dams and large-scale public works. But you’ve written about the quilts designed by Ruth Clement Bond, who is an African-American teacher and artist who is married to TVA administrator Max Bond. And I’d love to have you share more about those particular quilts, which we will put some links in the show notes because audio alone cannot do justice to how incredible they are. But how can those quilts that Ruth Clement Bond helped design, how do those help us look at the TVA’s legacy beyond just that of public works infrastructure?

Janneken: Sure. Ruth Clement Bond and her husband, Max Bond, are really interesting individuals. They’re African-Americans who’ve lived predominantly in the North, products of the Great Migration, also live in LA and the West for a time when one of them was at UCLA. And when Max takes this job with the TVA, he’s the highest, most senior African-American employed by this agency. Basically, he’s the personnel director for Black workers. The government and federal programs across the New Deal, including the TVA, espouse that they were race-neutral and that the benefits would be bestowed upon both white people and African-Americans in the South. However, they also had this caveat that government agencies would defer to local custom. And that is coded word for, oh, but we will also practice Jim Crow segregation because that’s what people are comfortable with in the South. So African-Americans are hired as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority. And think of this really as this is a massive construction project. They’re building dams on the Tennessee Valley or Tennessee River. And they’ve also created villages for the workers to live in. African-Americans disproportionately are not employed up to that. I mean, there are parts of this rural South where African-American population is quite high, but they don’t get these governmental jobs in the numbers that the white neighbors get the jobs. And the villages themselves, these worker villages are segregated where on one side of the river is the white village that has more permanent housing structures, a big recreational facility, a big cafeteria, all of these amenities. And then on the other side of the river is a small kind of temporary housing village for African-Americans without all of those amenities. So you can see it’s still very much a segregated life. And this is kind of new for the Bonds because they’ve been living in the North. Not that the North was perfect by any means in terms of racism, but it wasn’t Jim Crow segregation in the North. And so they arrive here and they’re these educated people who’ve been living in the North. Ruth in particular wants to help the wives of the African-American workers figure out how to sort of embrace the TVA as part of their identity. She encourages the women to create TVA rooms in their temporary houses where they could celebrate the local culture. They could use willow plants to create furniture. They can recycle feed sacks and flower sacks into quilts. They could make things that sort of were cheerleading for the TVA. And that’s what these quilts essentially are, part of this project she calls her home beautification project. And I like to think of these women as like an auxiliary club for the TVA in some ways. So Ruth designs these patterns for quilts and please do take a look at these images because these are nothing like other quilts of the 1930s. They’re nothing like quilts that you would see anywhere. These are very modernist pieces of art. In many ways they look a lot like Aaron Douglas’s paintings from the time period. In fact, very near the Tennessee River at Fisk University, Douglas has a major mural and you can see how some of the images have to be directly inspired. In an oral history interview many decades after the fact, Ruth says she’s not familiar with Aaron Douglas’s work but you’ll see from the quilts and the murals that she has to have at least somehow had these ideas filtered down to her. Anyway, she designs these very complex patterns. These are not easy quilts to piece and she distributes the patterns among the African American women in the various villages where the construction is taking place along the Tennessee River. And these women have quilt making skills. Ruth, in contrast, has never made a quilt in her life. But the women that she’s interacting with as part of this home beautification project do have quilt making skills as many women in the rural South would have at that time. But they would have been making very typical patterns of the day or perhaps making scrap quilts that were sort of improvisational, not quilts, these figurative applique quilts that look like works of modern art. So one of the images, for example, is of a man where he’s being pulled on one side by the arm of the government. It looks like Uncle Sam’s arm. And on the other side, it’s a guitar and the arm of a woman pulling him. And so the idea of this quilt, the imagery in this quilt is that the African American man is conflicted. Should he rely on governmental assistance or should he follow the life of leisure? That’s just one of the interpretations of this. There are a couple interviews with women when they were elderly looking back on these quilts, sort of recalling what they meant, what the imagery meant to them back in the 1930s. And it’s hard to say exactly, but they are very powerful pieces. There’s another one where a fist is coming out of the ground holding a lightning bolt, which in fact was really based on the logo of the Tennessee Valley Authority. There was speculation at the time there were interns working for the TVA from Fisk University. Fisk was an HBCU. So these are African American young people who supposedly call, that’s a Black Power quilt. I think it’s too much of a leap to say that we get the Black Power fist from the quilts made in the 1930s as part of the TVA. But it’s a really interesting, powerful imagery. These quilts are about empowerment, not just electrical power. One of the quilts actually shows a crane and a worker, and it’s so complex. I feel bad for this quilt maker who gets this pattern. She’s like, what? I was going to just make a nice bread and plate quilt, and now I’ve got this crazy imagery of a crane and a worker and a dam being built. Anyway, it’s very much about empowering the African American worker from Ruth Barnes’ perspective. She wanted African Americans to feel that their contributions were really valuable.

Eira: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for describing what’s going on in those quilts, because they are just so stunning and just so unlike other kind of quilts that I’ve seen. And yes, the Black Fist quilt is truly a remarkable image, so we’ll put that in the notes. I’m glad that you mentioned sort of the interviews with women who, you know, in their elderly ages, but reflecting back, because I think one of my sort of, I guess, meta projects as part of this podcast is really trying to communicate how radical a lot of the work of the New Deal is, because it’s so hard to really communicate that in today’s context. And so I was really struck by some of what you wrote in the opening pages of A New Deal for Quilts, because you talk about the comparisons between the 1930s and working on your publication at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. And for listeners, I showed Janneken right before we started the first quilt I made, which I happened to make during the pandemic. So I am also one of these, you know, COVID quilters. I have quilters in my family, but I never actually made my own until the beginning of the pandemic.

Janneken: And you were not alone. There were so many people who took to quilt making. So many.

Eira: And you have this incredible passage that I just want to read for listeners from some of the first pages of A New Deal for Quilts, because I think it gets at this real challenge of communicating how powerful the New Deal was. So you write:
“Yet here in the 21st century, some aspects of the New Deal that I was reading and writing about continued to feel completely foreign. As I remind my students regularly, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. There, the government paid Americans to make quilts. The government paid writers to paint pictures of quilts. The government paid writers to interview other Americans about their quilts. The government paid out of work Americans to learn how to silk screen so they could print patterns of quilts. In 2020, Americans began to make and love and obsess about quilts along with sourdough. But the government did not seem to invoke crafting as part of its master plan to lift morale and incomes the way that it did in 1936.”

And so, Janneken, I’m curious when you talk about the New Deal and talk about this very concept of how radical it was that the government was paying people to make art and craft and write about things. And when you talk about this to different audiences, because I know also you’re a professor, do you find that there’s a generational difference or geographic difference in how people perceive all of this? Because sometimes I feel like when I’m talking to people, like they almost cannot believe what I’m talking about.

Janneken: I think there might be some generational difference to some degree. This stuff does seem very foreign and crazy, but it also does to me. I mean, I was born in the 70s and like these are also not things that I would have experienced during my own lifetime. So we’re talking in 2025 here and the government is undergoing some dramatic changes. Right this morning, there’s the Senate’s voting on the major bill, which will end up cutting a lot of services and programs. We’ve gone through months of doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. And it’s easy to see that there’s just a lot of, you know, weird things that the government pays for. We didn’t hear anything about quilts, however, in any of the programs being cut because the government has not been paying for quilt related things for quite a while. I like to use the analogy sometimes about the public library. If we in 2025 decided that we should have a place where community members could come and borrow books that were shared by shared ownership by the local community, it would never happen. That alone is such a foreign concept. If we didn’t already have public libraries, we wouldn’t be able to create them. There was a different sort of kind of experimental mood in the 1930s where Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s administration was willing to try things. And a lot of things got shot down. We know of things the Supreme Court overturned. There’s other programs that lasted for a while and then sort of failed. Not all of the things have endured the way, say, Social Security has endured from the New Deal. But they had a spirit of experimentation at that time that we presently don’t have. And I was just I just heard an interview with someone that was speaking to this idea, in fact, not to get too overly political, but we just had the primary for the New York City mayor was last week. Zarhan Makmadi, I might not be saying his last name correctly, has proposed, among other things, public supermarkets, public grocery stores as a way to kind of have a price check on groceries, which has been an ongoing complaint about the price of eggs, you know, has been a major issue in our recent election. Inflation has really ramped up in these years post-COVID. So the interview actually was talking about like, well, yeah, but he is he’s pitching this idea as just a pilot, a proposal. And he said, if it doesn’t work, we’ll scrap it. And that is precisely the attitude that Roosevelt’s administration had during the New Deal. They were willing to try all kinds of things and it was OK with them if some of them failed. They had a spirit of let’s just see if this helps. If it helps, it’s great. It might just be temporary. But we have to do something. Let’s get caught trying to fix this situation. And that is almost what is most foreign, this willingness to try kind of radical ideas. I mean, aside from the passage that you just read talking about how the government paid quilters, paid people to interview, all these things. I mean, I think of the Federal Theater Project, which is another program of the New Deal. It was quite a controversial one where playwrights and community theater practitioners would put on these shows. Sometimes they were very much ripped from the headlines. They were regarded as sort of these radical plays. This just blows me away. I feel like the past is a foreign country when I hear about things like this. Like the idea that the government was willing to try this out. We just need people to have a paycheck. And so let’s pay them to put on this crazy theater production in their small town. That’s pretty wild. And the same thing was happening, you know, paying women in Works Progress Administration sewing rooms to stitch quilts. Kind of crazy. So to your initial question about how do audiences perceive this, I think there is some generational difference. But I also see it as, unfortunately, in our 2025, again, we have a very polarized political atmosphere. And so some people think the government shouldn’t be paying for anything except basic services. Other people think we should have a big government that is experimental, that creates a large safety net, that creates lots of opportunities for people. And these are very divergent visions for what a government should do. And I almost see the divide more so along those lines of, like, big government versus small government.

Eira: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the Federal Theater Project because the arts projects are so amazing. And there’s a famous quote within the small circle of New Deal history nerds that is a quote I love from Harry Hopkins, who is one of the New Deal administrators. And someone was like, well, why are we paying artists? And he was like, hell, they’ve got to eat just like everyone else. And I always think about that. The spirit of experimentation is, I think, I think you really hit the nail on the head with that spirit of experimentation, that idea of let’s get caught trying. And so that is a perfect setup for my final question for you, which is that if New Deal era policies were once again politically viable, which program or initiative would you most want to see revived? Or what brand new policy in the spirit of the New Deal would you propose?

Janneken: Well, I’m going to perhaps kind of cheat a little bit in saying Federal Project One, which was the name of the umbrella organization within the WPA that administered all of the arts projects. So that’s the Federal Art Project, which was community arts centers, which was paying those artists that Hopkins was talking about to paint paintings. I really draw on the Index of American Design in my research, which was a project in which our unemployed artists and illustrators were paid to paint these hyper-realistic watercolor paintings of pieces of folk art and decorative arts, including quilts. It was also the Federal Writers Project, which employed out-of-work journalists and other creative writers to conduct interviews with everyday Americans, including many people who had grown up enslaved. And that’s one of the major accomplishments, the major resources in how we know about what life during slavery was like. They also produced the state guidebooks, which recounted lots of really intriguing local culture from the time period. It was also the Federal Theater Project, which I’ve already described a little bit of. I mean, it’s easy to say this right now. I work in the humanities and the arts, and we’ve just seen the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts basically be gutted. So when I think about this project, Federal Project One, that was paying artists, it’s not just the artists that we have today who don’t have enough money to create the projects that they would want. These are unemployed people, and they poured so much money into supporting people who were out of work. across the board. Didn’t matter what living you had been making, they still wanted people to have a paycheck. This is part of the process of priming the pump, of course, where if you have money in your pockets, you can support the consumer economy. But I think about so much of the, it’s not just the art that would be generated by all of these projects, but it’s about the community building that occurs through those processes. You put on a theatrical production with your friends and neighbors in your small town, it’s going to build community. There was a proposal, this was again during COVID, there were a couple federal legislators who suggested that we revive the Federal Writers Project in particular because of the way it recorded the everyday experiences of people living during the Great Depression. And they wanted there to be a parallel to that, recording the stories of people experiencing, surviving this pandemic. I wish it would have happened. I mean, I would love to see oral history funded at that kind of level anywhere. But those sorts of programs that remind us of our humanity, remind us of our connections to one another, of the things we create, our cultural heritage, our regular everyday practices. I love that the government was interested in preserving those stories, and I wish it was again today. Now, you know, I had an NEH grant that we’d lost the rest of our money on. And I know so many people and organizations, institutions who are in a similar boat. So we don’t even have the little bit of pocket change that has been available for the last several decades through the NEH and the NEA anymore. And it would be quite amazing if the federal government recognized that as an important part of not just a safety net, but of what government can do.

Eira: Yeah, yeah. Could not agree more. Federal Project Number One, it encompasses so much. And I wrote a little bit about it in what I wrote, A Green New Deal for Archives, because one of the Federal Project Number One projects was the Historical Records Survey.

Janneken: Oh, that’s right. That’s another important one. That would never happen.

Eira: Yeah, and it was originally under the Federal Writers Project. And the thing that I just kept having to fact check myself like 20 times in a row was at one point during the height of the Great Depression, I think it was after the Historical Records Survey became an independent entity. It was still under Federal Project One, but not under the Writers Project. And at one point, they hired more people to do archival work than we have working as archivists in the United States today, which is just like…

Janneken: Wow, that’s mind blowing.

Eira: Mind blowing, mind blowing. So that’s why I’m always like, anytime people like us or the potential future mayor of New York, Mom Dani, is talking about these things, it’s like, it is not unprecedented. We have done some pretty cool things before in this country. A lot of it was in the 1930s. So let’s try in the spirit of experimentation, let’s try it again. Let’s try it again.

Janneken: Yeah. Yeah.

Eira: Janneken, thanks so much for being on the show today. Can you tell us if people want to follow your work? Because you are very generous with sharing your knowledge out in the world. So can you share how people can learn more about you and your work?

Janneken: Absolutely. You can find me online a couple different places. One option is to find me on Instagram. It’s just my first name. So if you can spell it, you can find me J-A-N-N-E-K-E-N. That’s also my domain name, janneken.org. And you can find links from there to… I have a sub-site that’s devoted to A New Deal for Quilts. And in the spirit of public collaboration, I’ve tried to make as many of my primary sources available there. Because I’m studying governmental projects, most of them are in the public domain. So you can find a collection of lots of photographs, a lot of quilts, newspaper articles, all kinds of other things through janneken.org. If you follow links to A New Deal for Quilts. You can also find me pretty easily on Blue Sky. I’ve got an unusual name. So if you know how to spell it, you can generally find me around. I do have some great content on Instagram specifically for the quilt lovers. I did a series of posts for Black History Month. And you can find a pinned link in my stories that you can see all of those commentary on African American quilting, including the TVA quilts. Speaking of the TVA quilts, you can also find my article that was published in Southern Cultures a couple years ago about the TVA quilts as well.

Eira: Awesome. We’ll put links to all that in the show notes. Thank you, Janneken, for being on the show.

Janneken: It’s been my pleasure, Eira. I really love that you’re doing this podcast devoted to one of my favorite time periods in history.

OUTRO:
Thank you for listening to this episode, and thanks to Janneken for being a guest on the show. You can find links to her work in the show notes. If you like what you hear and want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, please visit notimeforfear.net. Please share this episode with a friend and consider making a donation if you’re in a position to do so so that I can keep making the show. A couple of our early listeners have already made donations. Thank you to Sean and Kate for their generosity. This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tanzi, founder and manager of the archival consulting company Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house. I’ll see you next month when we’re back to talk more about the history of the New Deal.