Richard Toler lived at 515 Poplar St. in Cincinnati, during the summer of 1937 when a young white woman named Ruth Thompson knocked on his door.
Toler was somewhere around 100 years old at that point in his life, but he couldn’t say for sure. What he did know is he was born in Campbell County, Virginia, to George Washington Toler and Lucy Toler, two black slaves who were the property of a wealthy plantation owner named Mr. Henry Toler — the family had taken the baron’s surname before Richard’s birth.
Richard Toler sat on the porch of his two-room shack at 515 Poplar in the summer of 1937 and told Ruth Thompson what he could remember about life as a slave.
He told matter-of-factly about the three or four black people whipped to death in front of him, about Henry Toler’s sons pouring salt on the raw backs of young girls, and about sleeping on the dirt floor of a cabin behind the Big House.
“The dog was supe’ior to us,” Toler told Thompson. “They would take him in the house.”
Ruth Thompson wrote down every word — phonetically, just like she had been taught — and later typed it up and submitted the four-and-a-half page life story of Richard Toler to her bosses in Washington. Thompson, you see, was an employee of the Federal Writers’ Project, the white-collar offshoot of the Works Progress Administration.
Over the course of three years in the middle of the Great Depression, Thompson was one of 300 otherwise unemployed writers who travelled the country and chronicled the lives of 2,300 former slaves. Their stories were eventually digitized and are posted online and free to read, like so many blog posts about kittens.
This is a problem for me. Or rather, it’s a problem for the part of my mind in which I keep the apparatus that supports my political beliefs. The stories themselves aren’t the problem, of course; it’s the fact they were blessedly recorded by people working for the federal government.
As anyone who reads this column might have picked up, I’m a firm believer in the power of markets to eventually solve pretty much any problem. Governments can game markets; they can alter the calculi of players in markets; they can even turn markets black through prohibition. But markets exist outside and independent of government, which means they always win — they supersede government’s authority because they, unlike democracy, are rooted in the human condition.
But then I come across this thing, this treasure trove of incalculably valuable human stories recounting a period of our national history that would have certainly been lost to the ages if not for a federal welfare program that put hundreds of Ruth Thompsons in the homes of thousands of Richard Tolers. How does an equivocating anarchist like myself reconcile the modern day value of something like the WPA’s Slave Narratives Collection with my belief in market value? There’s just no getting around the fact that government produced something marvelous in this instance that the market would not have, at least not in time.
My first inclination was to try and find an individual on which I could pin the golden star for conceiving such a prescient project, and of course there was one. A man named John Lomax, a Texan with a passion for southern folklore, was largely responsible for redirecting federal resources toward the ex-slave interviews. But that’s a bit of cop-out. All those interviewers were still paid with federal tax dollars.
The more honest response, I think, is to admit that governments are sometimes uniquely positioned to preserve history — to hit a historical home run, if you will, like Mr. Lomax did. And the other side of that coin, for those of you nodding emphatically right now, is to acknowledge that government’s batting average is pretty far south of the Mendoza Line.
But still, there’s this:
“I sho’ is glad I ain’t no slave no moah,” Richard Toler said to Ruth Thompson, closing their interview. “Ah thank God that ah lived to pas’ the yeahs until the day of 1937. Ah’m happy and satisfied now, and ah hopes ah see a million yeahs to come.”
It’s doubtful the old man saw many more summers past that one. But his story is a permanent part of history now, and we’ve no choice but to thank John Lomax, Ruth Thompson and, yes, the U.S. government for making it so.
NATE STRAUCH is a reporter and columnist with the Herald Democrat. Email him at nstrauch@heralddemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter at @NStrauchHD.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Stop Signs Are Forever: When Uncle Sam gets one right