The WPA Federal Writers' Project & HIST 1302-004

Earlier this week, I was leading my cheerful survey class through the Great Depression/New Deal chapter in Nash, The American People, 5e. Somehow, the Federal Writers' Project came up. Today, in the NYTimes, Douglas Brinkley wrote a nice piece about the Writers' Project. Through the magic of the Internet, I posted the article to my WebCT Bulletin Board for my students. Sadly, few will bother to read it, but I am pleased that I can add to a classroom experience immediately. Waiting until next week would be inappropriate because — in a survey course during the summer — there really isn't time to back up. There is a major test on Monday and we move on to post-1945 U.S. history for the remaining week+ of the term. We're waist deep in the Big Muddy and the fool says, Push On!

August 2, 2003

Unmasking the Writers of the W.P.A.

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

NEW ORLEANS, Writers are usually unabashed about claiming authorship for their work. So it's curious that many of the alumni of one of the most significant American literary projects of the 20th century were ashamed of it: the Federal Writers' Project, a program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.

Created in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, the Writers' Project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and researchers during its four years of federal financing. When the government funds expired, Congress let the program continue under state sponsorship until 1943. Although grateful for even subsistence wages in a time of economic despair, few participants deemed it a badge of honor to earn $20 to $25 a week from the government.

But the Library of Congress takes a different view. With little fanfare, it has been unpacking boxes of extraordinary Writers' Project material over the last few years from warehouses and storage facilities. After an arduous vetting process, much of it is now available to the public.

What is becoming clear, says Prof. Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State University, in Kirksville, Mo., is that the editors of the project believed that they could build a national culture on diversity. "They faced a great challenge coming out of the 1920's, where white supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K. and anti-immigration laws, held sway," Mr. Hirsch said. "In the Federal Writers' Project, ethnic minorities were celebrated for being turpentine workers or grape pickers or folk artists."

John Cheever was one of the program's unenthusiastic participants. A child of proud Massachusetts Republicans who had called the W.P.A. short for "We Poke Along," he was ashamed of working as a "junior editor" at the program's Washington office. He once described his duties as fixing "the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards."
Nonetheless, Cheever's experiences at the Writers' Project provided the material for many of the best scenes in his 1957 novel, "The Wapshot Chronicle."

Cheever wasn't the only one who found inspiration at the Writers' Project. Others included Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright and Frank Yerby.

These federal employees produced what would become the renowned American Guide Series, comprising volumes for each of the 48 states that then existed, as well as Alaska. The Writers' Project also turned out many other regional, city and cultural guides, like Algren's "Galena, Illinois" and Wright's "Bibliography of Chicago Negroes." All in all, it published more than 275 books, 700 pamphlets and 340 "issuances" (articles, leaflets and radio scripts).

Eudora Welty even served as photographer for the Mississippi guide. W. H. Auden called the whole project "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state."

Cataloging the output has been a long project. John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, has been working on it since 1978, when he first read Jerre Mangione's seminal study "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943."

"The Library of Congress has its work cut out," Mr. Cole explained in a telephone interview from his office on Capitol Hill. "It's an amazing collection. The Federal Writers' Project helped us rediscover our heritage in a more detailed and colorful way than it had ever been described. I'm thinking here of both the state guides and all of those other publications that they put out ? the collection offers the best examples of local history and oddball anecdotal stories ever amassed."

Nearly 3,000 of the oral history interviews are now available on the Library of Congress's W.P.A. Life Histories Web site:

WPA Site

with more to come.

In the last few years, some good biographies of the most notable alumni have been published. But no one has yet tackled a broad-based study of the thousands of untested but talented young writers who fanned out across the continent in search of a collective self-portrait of America. Recently, though, a number of scholars and researchers have begun to track the literary paper trail, unearthing documents and writings that have been packed in boxes for decades.

Pam Bordelon, a writer in Pensacola, Fla., for example, has spent the last 10 years editing interviews and compiling artifacts from the project's Poets Recording Expeditions Into the Floridas. She has traveled all over the state, searching for Writers' Project work done by Hurston, who was hired to collect folklore during the 1930's.

"I was just blown away by the richness," Ms. Bordelon recalled. "The voices in Florida alone are unbelievable."

David A. Taylor, a writer, and Andrea Kalin, a Washington filmmaker, have begun work on "American Voices," a documentary focusing on the Writers' Project in four states: New York, Florida, Illinois and Nebraska. One discovery is unpublished correspondence between Cheever and Ellison, who met at the project.

"The F.W.P. was much more than guidebooks and oral histories," Ms. Kalin explained. "It was where social and economic history met the individual imagination in literature."

But it is difficult to trace authorship for the W.P.A. guides. Mr. Bellow, for example, left mention of his Writers' Project work at the Chicago office out of his entry in Who's Who in America. In "Bellow," his biography of the author, James Atlas writes that Mr. Bellow was humbled to be toiling alongside hard-drinking literary heroes of the proletariat, like Algren and Jack Conroy, editor of the leftist journal The Anvil. Mr. Bellow explains in the book, "I rather looked up to them, and they looked down on me."

Mr. Bellow, whose first Writers' Project job was inventorying Illinois periodicals at the Newberry Library, was later assigned to write 20-page profiles of writers like John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell. Mr. Atlas discovered the essays only a few years ago when he was researching "Bellow."

"They're incredible essays, very advanced for somebody 21 or 22 years old," Mr. Atlas said. Mr. Bellow, he said, was ecstatic to reread them recently, amazed that they still existed.

Wright and Walker were also first published while employed in the Chicago office. Studs Terkel, another veteran, used the oral history techniques he learned in the late 1930's as his model for books like "The Good War" (1984) and "Working" (1974). And Albert Murray, perhaps Ellison's closest friend as well as the author of classic works like "South to a Very Old Place" (1971), maintains that without the Writers' Project, Ellison would not have written Invisible Man.

"It was because of the Writers' Project that I first got to read pieces Ralph was writing on his own," Mr. Murray recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Harlem. "It pulled him away from music and focused him on writing. It put writers and artists in touch as they had never been before. It was even more intense than the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout `Invisible Man' there are sketches and caricatures of people he met during the Federal Writers' Project."

Ellison himself is quoted in a Library of Congress document as saying that the Writers' Project helped him better understand the powerful connection between serious literature and folkways. "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded," he notes in the document. "I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings."

But Ellison, like many of his peers, didn't like to talk much about his days as a government employee. "He wanted to move away from it," Mr. Murray said. "It was his training ground. But he had higher concepts of art than the W.P.A. Guide Series."

Yet to many, the guide series are treasures. William Least Heat Moon said he wouldn't have written "PrairyErth: A Deep Map" (1991) without the Nebraska guide. When John Gunther hit the road for his memoir "Inside U.S.A." (1947), his suitcase bulged with W.P.A. Guides. So did John Steinbeck's when he set out to write "Travels With Charley: In Search of America" (1962).

"The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it," Steinbeck writes in the book. "It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating."

Steinbeck points out that many of the printing plates for the guides were smashed in the wake of a late-1930's witchhunt by Representative Martin Dies Jr., Democrat of Texas, who insisted that the W.P.A. was a Communist plot. But the Library of Congress has hundreds of boxes of the guides' raw material: correspondence, interview transcripts, slave narratives, research notes and photographs. It is one of the most underused and untapped historical collections in America.

With help from the library staff, Ms. Bordelon, for instance, unearthed tape recordings or transcripts of recordings of these Florida sources: Earltha White, who ran a soup kitchen in the slums of Jacksonville; a Cuban cigar maker from Ybor City; white squatters in the Everglades; Izzelly Haines, a midwife, who recalls delivering her first baby; and Norberto Diaz, whose tale of the race-related murder of a friend in Key West inspired Stetson Kennedy, a project folklorist, to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

"Whenever anyone asks me what it was like working with the Works Progress Administration and recording Florida folk songs back in the 1930's for the Library of Congress," Mr. Kennedy once said in a radio broadcast, "I tell them we were as excited as a bunch of kids on a treasure hunt."

In "On Native Grounds" (1942), Alfred Kazin said the Writers' Project, originally a "drive toward national inventory which began by reporting the ravages of the Depression," ended with triumphant "reporting on the national inheritance." He concluded that it changed the course of American literature forever.

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at the University of New Orleans.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company