The Magpie Sings the Great Depression:
Selections from DeWitt Clinton High School's Literary Magazine, 1929-1942

Reading A Previous Generation:
Using Student Literary Magazines in the Classroom

DeWitt Clinton High School, photograph by Herbert Anhalt (January 1938)

In his novel "Tis", Pulitzer Prize winning author and retired New York City school teacher Frank McCourt describes how his students were inspired to write after reading the work of a previous generation:

While my classes are taking the midterm test I explore the closets at the back of the room and find them stuffed with old grammar books, newspapers, Regents exams, and hundreds of pages of uncorrected student compositions going back to 1942. I am about to dump everything in the trash till I start reading the old compositions....

Many of McCourt's students had familial ties to the composition writers, eliciting a strong emotional reaction:

While I read the essays there are tears. Boys run from the room to the toilets and return red eyed. Girls weep openly and console one another...They are suddenly interested in compositions with the title "My Life," and I want to say, See what you can learn about your fathers and aunts and uncles? Don't you want to write about your lives for the next generation?

McCourt's story shows how motivating student writing can be. Our goal was similar. To better understand the events of the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal, we wanted to offer Dewitt Clinton High School students an alternative to the standard encyclopedia or internet based research project. The focus of our project was to investigate the Great Depression and it's impact on young people in New York City using a selection of writings from the The Magpie, Dewitt Clinton High School's literary journal. A long forgotten collection from the days when it was an all boys' school, our goal was to review these documents, written during the years of the Great Depression, to gain insight into the events of the 1930s and to understand their impact on the everyday lives of young people growing up in New York City.

We worked with 11th graders from Arnie Mansdorf's honors level class. For their participation, students received credit for the required term project. Students attended four after school sessions on the major events of the Great Depression and the policies of the New Deal and were required to write a three page essay based on two or three articles from the Magpie that shared a common theme.

The selections we used for this project, dating from 1929 to 1941, give the reader a panoramic view of life for a young boy living and going to school in New York City. Topics covered in the magazine vary from traveling the subways and dating to poverty in America and the coming of war in Europe. At first, it seemed overwhelming for the students to choose their research topics. A great deal of preparation time had gone into selecting documents that were relevant to a specific topic. But after several sessions of reading and discussing groups of essays, stories and poetry, students choose their topics and research material.

To help students develop their ideas for their essays, we broke the process up into a series of steps. The first was to ask the question "How do the authors' feelings, opinions, or actions as reflected in this document relate to your topic?" A list of several ideas and quotations were produced for each article. The next step, where they seemed to encounter the most difficulty, was formulating their thesis statements. They had trouble narrowing their focus to one aspect of student life during the thirties.

The greatest challenge seemed to be realizing that their research material was from a very specific source. Dewitt Clinton during the early twentieth century was an elite public school that attracted a mostly middle class student population. They could not follow the typical format of the "The Great Depression was....". With a concise thesis, they could build their essay on the authors' ideas reflected in the documents and use this information to create and develop their own new idea. After much discussion back and forth in each group, a thesis was selected.

Writing the actual essays, meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays after school for one or two hours, took nearly a month, twice the amount of time anticipated. Several factors were involved. Conflicts in schedules with after school jobs and other extracurricular activities and the difficulty in sharing written material among students in work groups were somewhat resolved as students began to utilize the internet to swap documents with each other and the instructor.

Deadlines for draft assignments were soft and for some groups no progress was made between the after school sessions. At the end of April, we made a field trip to Columbia University and Teachers College. Perhaps it was the change of scenery or the serious atmosphere of a university computer lab that motivated them. That day and the following week, they were serious and focused on writing a good essay.

The last part of the process was editing and revisions. Some students had a hard time having their work closely scrutinized. A compromise was reached by exchanging documents between groups and they made comments on each others' work. Final drafts were reviewed by Mr. Mansdorf before they were submitted for publication on the New Deal Network website.

My personal goal for this project was that the student participants experience doing "real" historical research. Too often teachers assign the same standard project because there is too little time or too few resources to follow a new format. I hope that the archive and this project model will make it easier for teachers to give more meaningful assignments.

Documents such as those found in the Magpie archives are valuable teaching tools because they demonstrate that which is common to all generations. The writing reflected the way some students viewed the world around them. Young readers can see themselves reflected in stories or can empathize with a description of struggle. Historical facts, which would otherwise blend into the textbook page, have a face, name or a story to which a student can connect.

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