People & Mountains Arthurdale Eleanor Roosevelt’s Mountain State Dream West Virginia Humanities Council’s Official PublicationFall 20252 People & Mountains Every issue of People & Mountains requires me to set aside time and review our ongoing work— what we’ve accomplished so far, what’s left to be done, and how we’re measuring up to our annual goals. In a normal year, our grantmaking would be in full swing. This has been far from a normal year. We know from our history that West Virginians always meet resistance with resilience. And thanks to you, the Humanities Council is doing the same. From the Executive Director As the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), we bring federal support directly into West Virginia communities. We were founded in 1974 to be the NEH’s partner in delivering and supporting outstanding historical and cultural programs throughout the Mountain State. Our grants and programs are locally developed and delivered, and represent the individual needs of communities statewide. And we meet that commitment by raising a minimum dollar-for-dollar match for every federal dollar given to our work, immediately doubling its impact here at home. In April, DOGE canceled $450,000, representing half of our congressionally appropriated funds for FY2025. This efficient, effective funding model had sustained our work for 50 years. Our Council’s modest reserves gave us a short-term window to adapt to the immediate conditions, while the Federation of State Humanities Councils, with help from the Mellon Foundation, provided us with emergency stabilization funds to help navigate the near term. But in the first four months of this situation alone, you and hundreds of other donors rallied to contribute nearly $120,000 to our work, greatly extending our runway and ensuring program delivery for months to come. To be sure, we aren’t the only organization to face this disruption. But today, several months on, I can say with gratitude and humility that we are one of the more fortunate ones. And so, in this issue, all I want to say—to our donors, program partners, grantees, and collaborators in West Virginia and beyond—is this: Thank you. Your support has given us the necessary breathing room to outlast what we hope, looking back, will have been a significant but temporary interruption. Your investment has ensured that educational programs in history, culture, the arts, and West Virginia’s living traditions continue to thrive. Every contribution, large and small, has been a testament to your belief in the power of the humanities to improve not only our individual lives, but the collective health of our public and civic life. Although new grantmaking continues to be suspended—unless and until congressionally approved federal funding is restored to us—we’ve been able to honor every outstanding grant award to which we had committed prior to April of this year. Together, we’ve already made good on our annual commitment to reach every county in West Virginia with grants or programs, from rural towns to population centers. Fall 2025 3 “West Virginians always meet resistance with resilience.” Wonderful to say, your faith in our work has also allowed us to continue delivering original programming. As of this writing, Council legacy programs—including History Alive!, e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia Online , the West Virginia Folklife Program, Little Lectures, and the McCreight Lecture in the Humanities—remain active and running at full steam. These accomplishments are as much yours as they are ours—more so, since your investment, as always, allows us to leverage additional support for our work. Present circumstances have also allowed us to spread our story to new partners and boosters. Any organization with our longevity eventually endures periods of crisis. We are certainly enduring one now; the path to restoring and repairing our federal support is long and complex. But we’re mobilized and in it for the duration. In the meantime, we’re as well-positioned as we might hope to weather this storm. West Virginians don’t back down. We adapt, create, and find solutions. This comprehensive resilience and capacity for sustaining our work would not have been possible without your belief in our mission. When you’re in the middle of a difficult time, it’s easy to lose sight of progress. It’s easy to say, “Wait, let’s not celebrate too quickly, there’s more to be done. Let’s not take our eyes off the prize.” But it’s important to recognize the small wins that set us up for greater success, and the milestones we reach on the way to that goal. It’s important to communicate that gratitude and joy. Hard work gets us part of the way there, but so does a little luck. And no organization can claim to be luckier than ours, thanks to the friends and supporters we’ve gained through the years. To return to the main point: Thank you for standing with us, and for making this transformative work possible. There is a long path ahead, to be sure. But let’s not let pass the chance to celebrate how far we’ve come, or to recognize the positive impact we’ve had, working together, on behalf of West Virginia’s cultural life. It is our greatest privilege to partner with you all. With profound appreciation, — Dr. Eric Waggoner The West Virginia Humanities Council’s Historic Headquarters4 People & Mountains Board of Directors The West Virginia Humanities Council is a nonprofit institution governed by its Board of Directors. The next Board meeting is October 24 in Charleston and is open to the public. George “Gib” Brown, President, Clarksburg Paul Papadopoulos, Vice President, Hurricane Elliot Hicks, Treasurer, Charleston Leslie Baker, Secretary, Beckley Bob Bastress, Morgantown Matt Bond, Charleston Gregory Coble, Shepherdstown Cicero Fain III, Huntington Ann Farr, Frankford Patrick Felton, Wheeling Rita Hedrick-Helmick, Glenville Charles Ledbetter, Charleston Paula Jo Meyer-Stout, Morgantown Susan Mills, Shepherdstown Michele Moure-Reeves, Mathias Amy Pancake, Romney Jane Peters, Charles Town Katrena Ramsey, Ravenswood Lisa Rose, Morgantown Tom Sopher, Beckley Pam Tarr, Charleston Bryson VanNostrand, Buckhannon Lydia Warren, Fairmont Jill Wilson, Charleston The Board of Directors welcomes four new members who were elected at the April 18 board meeting in Elkins: Bob Bastress, Susan Mills, Paula Jo Meyer- Stout, and Jill Wilson. In addition, Jane Peters was elected as a new member at the July 11 Board meeting in Parkersburg. Matt Bond, Cicero Fain III, and Rita Hedrick- Helmick were elected to additional terms. We would like to thank departing Board members Laurie Erickson, J. Dan McCarthy, Megan Tarbett, and John Unger for their dedication and years of service. We welcome two new citizen members to the Council’s Program Committee. Beth See Bean of Hardy County is a retired educator and former heritage outreach coordinator. Hannah Hedrick of Ohio County manages print shop operations at the Mother Jones Center for Resilient Community. These committee elections were held by public ballot presented in the winter issue of People & Mountains. The Council welcomes nominations for the Board of Directors . Board members are chosen from all parts of West Virginia and serve without compensation, although expenses are reimbursed. We also welcome nominations for Program Committee citizen members, who are elected by the readers of this magazine. The Program Committee oversees Humanities Council programs and recommends grants for approval by the Board of Directors. Please send recommendations with brief biographical information to Erin Riebe at riebe@wvhumanities.org. The deadline for nominations is December 19, 2025. Every October, National Arts and Humanities Month provides us the opportunity to celebrate the profound importance of arts and humanities in shaping our lives, communities, and country. Consider joining us at an event or making a donation to celebrate!Fall 2025 5 History Alive! is taking new bookings! The popular program, which has been around for 35 years, was paused from April through June due to the NEH funding freeze. Thanks to your donations and the Federation of State Humanities Councils, with help from the Mellon Foundation, History Alive! returned to full capacity in July. Interested organizations may visit wvhumanities.org/programs, email warmack@wvhumanities.org, or call 304-346-8500 for booking information. Immigrants All: Viet Thanh Nguyen and the Voices of American “Others” Arthurdale: Eleanor Roosevelt’s New Deal Experiment in West Virginia WV Folklife Apprenticeship Pairs at New Deal Fest 2025 The Broad Side 6 10 14 18 On Cover: Eleanor Roosevelt makes a “talkie” newsreel, at Arthurdale, 1934 Photo by H. B. Allen, courtesy of WVU Libraries, West Virginia & Regional History Center6 People & Mountains Viet Thanh Nguyen and the Voices of American “Others” By Kyle Warmack F ifty years ago, in April 1975, the United States suffered a blow to its collective pride and international prestige when communist North Vietnamese forces and Viet Cong irregulars marched into the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon and collapsed the U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam. Four presidential administrations—two Democrats, two Republicans—had poured countless lives and money into the Vietnam War for more than a decade. Now it was over. Photographs and news footage of the desperate evacuations during Saigon’s fall are seared into American memory, especially for the generation that fought and died overseas to prevent such an outcome. Photos depicting lines of South Vietnamese refugees on rooftops, captured with high-shutter clarity, sprinting for helicopters whose rotors carved black arcs in the skies overhead, rank among IMMIGRANTS ALL: “Without these origins, without my double who is and always will be a refugee, I would not be a writer.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and To Destroy A South Vietnamese family in Saigon during evacuation exercises Photo by D. L. Shearer On October 23, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen will deliver the 2025 McCreight Lecture in the Humanities at the Capitol Theater in Charleston. This Council program—over 40 years strong—is free and open to the public.Fall 2025 7 the war’s most traumatic images. Not until the long War in Afghanistan came to a similarly ignominious conclusion in 2021 did the U.S. again encounter hubris-shattering images of American troops and equipment in headlong flight ahead of a victorious enemy—pulling out with civilians literally clinging on for their lives. The centrality of Americans in these indelible images is the point, however. The war killed, maimed, or displaced millions of Vietnamese, yet these people are only a small part of our national imagery’s background landscape. American movies and literature focus almost exclusively on the American soldier’s experience—whether through the lens of the soldier himself, or the journalist embedded alongside. The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Forrest Gump, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and the musical Miss Saigon: these and a handful of other titles generally encompass the average American’s cultural understanding of a conflict that has shaped far more than the decades in which they are set. And in all of these, most Vietnamese “characters,” if the term can be applied, are faceless and nameless. “The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don’t understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars—many of which this country has had a hand in.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, Our War Never Ended This effacement is ironic, given that the fall of Saigon laid the foundation for a new American community of Vietnamese refugees. Some 130,000 Vietnamese escaped during President Gerald Ford’s initial evacuations. Subsequent waves dramatically expanded these numbers in the years to follow as more people fled communist reeducation camps and the 1979 Chinese invasion. Through the mid-1980s, perhaps as many as two million Vietnamese fled their homeland, prompting international involvement and the formation of the U.S.’s Orderly Departure Program, which provided legal means for such refugees to gain residence in the United States. Since the late 1990s, the Vietnamese American population has hovered between 1 million and 1.5 million. Their communities, big and small, exist in most U.S. states (California and Texas have the most; West Virginia currently has about 1,300 residents of Vietnamese descent). And not until recently has that presence been felt in a wider literary sense. Vietnamese American authors have been writing all along, of course—their voices were just not broadly heard outside their immediate communities. That has been changing over the past decade. As author Eric Nguyen writes in May 2025, “Now, 50 years after the end of the war and the start of a mass movement of refugees, it seems like we are in a Vietnamese diasporic renaissance.” “I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer A South Vietnamese woman & her child during the evacuation Photo by D. L. Shearer8 People & Mountains Enter this year’s McCreight Lecture in the Humanities, to be delivered in October by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. Despite being his first published novel, The Sympathizer catapulted Viet Thanh Nguyen to literary prominence a decade ago with a Pulitzer Prize. It has been compared favorably to the works of Joseph Conrad and John Le Carré for its spy thriller elements and warped mirrors- within-mirrors psychological twists. Nguyen knows something of the refugee community in which most of the narrative originates; when he was four years old, his family fled to the United States during the fall of Saigon, and he was briefly separated from them after a tenure in a government refugee camp near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was eventually reunited with them in San Jose, California. For a first novel—indeed any novel—it covers an incredible amount of territory, gliding from expat Los Angeles communities of South Vietnamese yearning to reconquer their country from the communists to action movie sets in the Philippines; from panic-stricken military compounds on the eve of Saigon’s fall to interrogation rooms in reeducation camps at the war’s end. For such a wide-ranging and tragicomically absurd text, it’s also deeply grounded in research and experience. Nguyen calls out many of his references in the novel’s acknowledgments; his depth of research is further borne out in his other works of fiction (The Committed, The Refugees) and nonfiction ( A Man of Two Faces, To Save and To Destroy). More than any other book, The Sympathizer is reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s seminal classic Catch-22: the protagonists of both are caught within a pinball machine-like “We are a nation of refugees. Most of us can trace our presence here to the turmoil or oppression of another time and another place.” –Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to the U.S. House of Representatives, 1979 “I think that when the New York Times Book Review says The Sympathizer gives voice to the voiceless, it is inaccurate. There is, by now, a significant body of Vietnamese American and Vietnamese literature translated into English. The Vietnamese people and Vietnamese Americans have voices. It’s simply that Americans as a whole tend not to hear them.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015 interview with poet Paul Tran Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyenfreed from bondage. When the Vietnam War ended over a century later, the United States extended support and citizenship paths to many Vietnamese who had resisted communism and were subsequently forced to flee their homeland. Such constitutional amendments, immigration statutes, and even executive branch actions expanded or restricted the movement of new people into the country based on world events and the political zeitgeist of the age—and in turn affected when and by what means our ancestors arrived. Nguyen’s body of work speaks directly to this experience—and to the phenomenon of still being regarded as an “other” long after he arrived on America’s shores. “As some refugees have noted,” he writes in his most recent nonfictional work, To Save and To Destroy, “determining when one ceases feeling like a refugee can be difficult, even if one is no longer a refugee in fact and by law, as in my case.” The humanities, at their best, highlight these connections between people and ideas, experiences, and concepts. The siren’s call to oversimplify, to tune out, to streamline is often present. The humanities remind us to engage in the betterment of active thought, to reject the deception of the easy solution. Perhaps most of all, they remind us that each of us contains multitudes, both as societies and individuals. Complex creatures all, none of us can be summarized by a hyphen or a capitalized label. If we’re doing it right, we’re all Others in America. Or none of us are. Kyle Warmack is the program officer for the West Virginia Humanities Council. To support our programs, you can donate online at bit.ly/donatewvhc or by mail at 1310 Kanawha Blvd E, Charleston, WV 25301. maelstrom of events and institutions, ricocheting between ideological holes, flippers, and bumpers that propel the characters too unpredictably for agency—and too violently to keep hold of their humanity. It’s important to hear what Nguyen has to say in 2025. The 10 th anniversary of his first definitive work will no doubt bring new insights from the author, who has continued to elaborate on The Sympathizer’s themes in the intervening decade (the title of Nguyen’s autobiography, A Man of Two Faces, feels like an intentional nod to the work that made him famous). Just as important is the aforementioned 50 th anniversary of the war’s traumatic conclusion, with which America continues to reckon after all these years— whether through ongoing conversations about how we treat veterans returning home, or how we accommodate refugees from the countries in which the United States has waged war. This latter point is a particularly urgent part of the American cultural dialogue. Questions of who is eligible for residence, citizenship, and due process are once again central to our national debates, as they have so often been throughout our history. They form the core of recent court decisions impacting millions. Elected officials in our towns and in Washington weigh support for, or against, actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal bureaus involved in deportations. Questions of “who belongs” are hardly new to our nation. After the Civil War, a Republican U.S. Congress created the 14 th Amendment to make citizens of millions of Black Americans recently Next >