In 1820, Hawthorne wrote “The Gentle Boy,” the story of Ilbrahim, who, too pure and fragile to survive the cruelties of the world, dies young. “His gentle spirit … from Heaven” chastens his “fierce and vindictive” mother, teaching her true religion. Here, in one of the earliest stories of the saintly child, we see the basic pattern for hundreds of stories that were the favorite reading of nineteenth-century America—the confrontation between an innocent child and. a corrupt society, and the demonstration of the ultimate power of innocence. For the modern reader, the saintly child stories offer a valuable insight into the tastes of our recent ancestors: they enjoyed the most heavy-handed sentimentality, the crudest pathos, a sickly religiosity, and a trumped-up mysticism. And sex, though banished from these works, frequently sneaks back into the stories—albeit unconsciously—often in incestuous forms.

In the spring of 1935, while the United States was still reeling from the economic collapse of 1929, and while the Democratic administration was attempting to ward off opponents on both the Right and the Left, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established by executive order an independent governmental agency charged with the task of alleviating one of the nation's most chronic and deep-rooted social ills: widespread rural poverty. The Resettlement Administration (RA) was largely the brainchild of Rexford Guy Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt's inner circle of advisers who had been serving as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, and Tugwell was made head of the new agency. The Resettlement Administration was not lavishly financed (its funds derived from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of April, 1935, which specifically appropriated money “for rural rehabilitation and relief in stricken agricultural areas”), but it quickly found itself dealing with a large number of diverse and frequently intractable programs and problems. As originally set up, The Resettlement Administration had a threefold mission: (1) the establishment of a land use program that would deal with such problems as soil erosion and flood control; (2) the inception of resettlement projects in both rural and suburban areas; and (3) the establishment of a loan and grants program for impoverished farmers. Soon after it got under way, the RA was given the task of working out a program of debt consolidation and adjustment between farmers and their creditors, and it also took on the job of improving conditions in migratory labor camps.

The author is grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for a Grant-in-Aid, which assisted in the preparation of this portfolio of photographs, and to the Library of Congress for its cooperation.

A well-known biblical writer complained several millenia back that there was no end to the making of books. Lord knows what he would have said had he lived into the post-Gutenberg era. And there is also no doubt that there is no end in sight to the making of lists of books. Every few years a list is compiled of the “Best Books” of some period or subject. Some of these lists achieve distinction and permanence, such as the Grolier Club's list of “One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature,” published in 1903 and still a guide to the foundation of a gentleman's library. More recently, Cyril Connolly, the late critic of modern literature, published a list entitled “The Modern Movement,” which also contains 100 books he believed to be the touch-Stones of modern literature. This list, still in its infancy, has already become another classic guide.