When the Government Supported Writers
When we think
about the Works Progress Administration and the millions of jobs it provided,
we tend to imagine heavy labor: men with pickaxes chipping away at rock for new
roads, strapping masons hauling stones to construct courthouses or schools,
or—the biggest dig of them all—the seven state Tennessee Valley Authority which
built 16 hydroelectric dams. The WPA was an essential part of Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the infrastructure it provided is still used today. Yet, those
structures were a fringe benefit compared to its main purpose: employment. By
the time the WPA was created in 1935 it was obvious that the fiscal crisis that
began on Black Tuesday in 1929 was not a mere recession: unemployment was at 20
percent and many Americans were losing hope of ever finding work again. The
projects we now associate with the WPA are often masculinized and remembered in
terms of structures alone, but much of the innovation of the New Deal was in
recognizing that employment in America had fundamentally changed: moving away
from purely industrial labor. In order to fully restart the economy, the
country would also have to invest in knowledge workers.Embracing creative
types in 1935 was not straightforward. With people starving on Dust Bowl farms
or crowding urban soup kitchens, there was little sympathy for anyone with ink
stains rather than callouses on their fingers. The new book Republic of
Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott
Borchert explores the Federal Writers’ Project. While the FWP gave work to
luminaries of the age like Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison,
Nelson Algren, and a young Saul Bellow, it also provided a steady paycheck to
“teachers, beat reporters, clerks, lawyers, librarians, people laid off from
advertising firms … white-collar workers whose jobs had disappeared.” It
guaranteed a paycheck for the many people in the United States who did not work
with their hands while also expanding the definition of who was a “creative.” These
authors worked mainly on the FWP’s largest project: creating guide books for
every state. They were definitive histories that avoided American triumphalism
while also building a sense of pride and curiosity, imbuing local history with a
lyrical depth that went beyond where to find a sandwich and some gas. Borchert,
through a series of biographical chapters on some of the best-known authors,
engrossingly shows how the New Deal recognized art as labor and why that model
should be reinvigorated today. In the past year, artists have struggled to put
together Zoom theater and brand their writing on sites like Patreon, whereas in
the 1930s the FWP provided a framework for continued employment and collective
endeavors for artists. With its reminder that creative labor was once seen as
worthy of federal protection similar to a strategic reserve of fuel, weapons, or
medical supplies, Republic of Detours mobilizes New Deal history to help
us imagine what our society would be like if federal tax dollars supported a
reserve army of muralists, poets, and oral historians.When the
Federal Writers’ Project began in 1935, it was headquartered in an old theater
with a pipe organ in Washington, DC. It was a good fit for its director, Henry
Alsberg, who was a dramatist, author, and friend of Emma Goldman. Alsberg set
the tone for the new agency that worked alongside other New Deal cultural
programs such as the Federal Art Project and the Federal Theater Project. He
was gay (in as open a way as the times would allow), left wing, and a talented raconteur
with a Harvard degree but unconventional grooming standards. Under Alsberg, the
agency would eventually open offices in every state, spending $6,288,000 over
eight years.Like their
boss, the employees were not exactly company men (although they were, for the
most part, white men). Borchert emphasizes the ideological diversity amongst
1930s reformers: “trustbusters and Bryanite agrarians and classical
laissez-faire Democrats and progressive Republicans and assorted socialists,
mingling with the usual careerists and patronage seekers.” Eventually Alsberg
got the DC office upgraded, taking over the mansion of a prominent family who
owned the Washington Post but had fallen on hard times and were forced
to rent it to the government. The image of scruffy writers reading copies of
the New Masses with their feet on the furniture delighted supporters of
the New Deal and infuriated the aristocrats of the old order. The artists
employed by the FWP were writers in a very broad sense: They were hotel clerks
who composed poetry in between check-ins, ad men, and some who already had
national profiles. One man came to the DC office telling FWP employees that he
was a “twenty-pound poet.” Responding to their quizzical expressions, he
explained that he had a 20-pound suitcase filled with poems he hoped to publish
through the new department. The FWP used experience to decide which writers
should be managers and which should join the rank and file. Those in need of
relief were officially unemployed knowledge workers who could be supported with
jobs, while more experienced writers were hired in smaller numbers as editors
without having to show they were in poverty. The system tended to turn more
credentialed and educated creatives into gatekeepers for semi-professionals,
although some of the “bosses” came from uniquely hardscrabble backgrounds
reflecting the spirit of the times. Vardis Fisher,
the editor of the Idaho guide, was one such outsider who, despite holding a PhD
from the University of Chicago, was not a member of the literati. He came from
a family of rural homesteaders near the Snake River and found his way to high
school and university by intense autodidacticism and voracious reading. His
first wife killed herself in front of him and their children when he announced
he was leaving her, and his work often reflected a deep sense of melancholy.
After teaching at a number of universities he was relieved to return to Idaho
in order to work for the FWP. Like many writers of the time, he was finding a
uniquely Western literary style that celebrated grand open spaces without
cowboy sentimentality (a trait passed on to his student Wallace Stegner). In
the Idaho guide, which he wrote nearly single-handedly in a frenzy of trips
around the state, he begins with an arresting first paragraph, unusual for a
guidebook. “The lusty and profane extremes” of the American frontier, he wrote,still live
nebulously in the gaudy imbecilities of newsstand pulp magazines and in cheap
novels … But these villains with their Wild Bill mustaches, these
apple-cheeked heroines agog with virtue, and these broad adolescent heroes who
say “gosh ding it” and shoot with deadly accuracy from either hand are remote
in both temper and character from the persons who built the West.Fisher’s Idaho
guide with its bold—borderline acerbic—style was in fact the first to be published,
in 1937. It was rushed to press far from the DC central office against the
wishes of Henry Alsberg, showing how, despite the New Deal’s desire for more
coordinated national government, federalism still reigned supreme. Like the
subsequent guides, it retained the editor’s vision, even when that meant sacrificing
consistency across the series. The second
guide to appear was for Washington DC. Writers had operated in a tempest of
information gathering from the FWP central office to produce it. The original
unedited version clocked in at over one million words. When FDR received the
final version—a greatly reduced but nonetheless 1141-page volume—he quipped
that it should come with a steamer trunk. Indeed, the scope of the guides—from
travel advice to history to cultural encyclopedia—embraced a maximalism that
seemed to wish away the scarcity of the Depression. The depth of historical
research and the meticulous mapping of each state appeared in itself to be an
argument for bigger government.Richard Wright’s time at the FWP was marked by a honing of his
literary craft toward a new kind of modernism that was unabashedly political.
The FWP was
also a state-led response to a more grassroots phenomenon: The 1930s was a time
of burgeoning output from magazines, even when the writers did not get paid.
Nelson Algren, who worked in the Chicago FWP office, spent the early 1930s writing
articles for “mushroom mags”: new magazines that sprang up overnight to address
the political economic issues on all Americans’ minds, often in a more radical
register than established newspapers. Algren brought social realist content to
the FWP: Immediately before joining, he had been riding the rails with homeless
men in boxcars and sending dispatches that provided a literary version of Dorothea
Lange’s photographs. Richard Wright
was also a member of the Chicago office (and later worked in the FWP New York
office with older luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay).
Along with Algren and others, his time at the FWP was marked by a honing of his
literary craft toward a new kind of modernism that was unabashedly political.
In the only volume of the project that was dedicated to purely creative work, American
Stuff, he authored a sociological essay called “The Ethics of Living Jim
Crow.” It detailed the racial terrorism of his boyhood in the Deep South including
the deeply codified and ritualized interactions of white domination. The
chapter, a masterpiece of form and a prelude to Black Boy, was a
gripping reminder of how the FWP presented a kind of artistic patronage scheme very
different from other programs.Yet it would also
provoke a renewed assault on New Deal ventures by “red hunting” reactionaries. Conservatives,
including members of FDR’s own party, had WPA projects in their sights from the
beginning. The Mississippi Democrat Senator Theodore Bilbo had learned of a
mixed race gathering held by Alsberg and called it this “off-colored party of
mental prostitutes,” continuing that, if this has had happened in Mississippi,
“those who perpetrated it would have decorated the tallest magnolia tree
available.” With antagonists like that, FWP officials had to tread lightly when
it came to their Southern guides, in which an accurate telling of state history
could be explosive and potentially expose writers to personal danger.While “Negro
Units” existed in Northern states to research African American life and history
(including by taking invaluable oral histories of former slaves), Black writers
were less common below the Mason Dixon line. One notable exception was Zora
Neale Hurston who worked in her native Florida. Forced to take a lower position
than her exceptional reputation as a folklorist warranted, she nevertheless
embraced the project with aplomb, sending dispatches from rural portions of the
state. Florida, despite growing tourism and real estate economies, was hit hard
by the Depression with the most people on relief per capita of any state.
Borchert notes that Hurston was in a difficult political position in Florida: Pressure
was already building on the FWP to sanitize American history and focus on “palm
trees and bathing beauties.”Hurston herself
was more inclined to focus on ethnographic details of African American
communities, inspired by her research with the pioneering anthropologist Franz
Boas, rather than on Jim Crow and white supremacy. Hurston wrote about citrus
pickers, lists of local sayings, and even about a “supernatural alligator” from
her hometown of Eatonville. Indeed, her unwillingness to condemn life in the
South had already earned her a feud with Richard Wright who said that her novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God “voluntarily
continues…the tradition which was forced upon the Negro…the minstrel
technique.” If Hurston’s “aim was to bestow a poetic dignity” on the South,
Borchert writes, Wright’s “was to reveal—and sometimes sensationalize—social
decay.”Despite
criticism of the FWP as a hotbed of communists, Hurston’s prominent role in the
Florida project shows a wide ideological spectrum. She would go on to criticize
the FWP and all of the New Deal in the 1940s as her political sympathies
shifted rightward. The ferocity of the arguments held within FWP offices
and the feuds between writers was used by opponents to portray an agency
succumbing to chaos, but it also showed a healthy amount of debate and
introspection within an institution that could have been little more than a
government mouthpiece.The dam finally
broke for the Federal Writers’ Project when a Democratic Congressman from Texas,
Martin Dies Jr.—who had formerly supported FDR—went after artists in a red
baiting role he would reprise in the postwar era. Starting in 1938, he began
subpoenaing Alsberg and his staff, finding many Communist Party memberships and
workplace debates about Trotsky versus Stalin. While the project continued
until 1943, Dies was instrumental in hobbling it permanently. Other programs
would follow, most notably the National Endowment for the Arts (begun in 1965)
but they would take a fundamentally different approach: Rather than direct
employment, they provided grants, which did not secure the same level of
stability for writers and artists, Borchert makes
clear that the FWP represented a visionary part of the New Deal. It never
served as a propaganda unit for FDR, despite giving him some good press,
avoiding the tendency of strong governments to conscript artists merely as
boosters. Instead, the FWP was part of a broader push to communicate between
citizens and the government in order to build knowledge and restore trust. The
didactic nature of the state guides sets them apart from later tourism books
such as Fodors and Lonely Planet, which communicate local history and culture
in digestible and forgettable boxes of text. Like FDR’s Fireside Chats, FWP
guides were meant to reassure Americans that they were from a resilient country
which had gone through previous hardships while giving them a lesson on politics,
economics, and history. While the message could be a bit paternalistic, it
focused on diversion and amusement in troubling times. Their aim was to spur
low cost and local tourism when happiness was in short supply. Today, we may
be prone to think about federally-funded infrastructure in the terms provided
by Donald Trump’s Infrastructure Week: a pageant of backhoes and monster dump
trucks with a boondoggle of lucrative contracts for private companies. No
question, the United States needs new roads, rails, and dams but it also needs
public libraries, murals, community theater, and archivists to document local
history. Infrastructure must be redefined to encompass what makes a healthy
community and not just how many sticks of rebar a bridge needs to stand up for
the next 60 years. A new Federal
Writers Project could employ creatives and harness their energy to build civic
dialogue. A new Federal
Writers’ Project could employ creatives and harness their energy to build civic
dialogue. Arts infrastructure could be provided by staging skits about carbon
capture at local libraries; making Tik Tok videos about mRNA vaccine
innovations; disseminating Instagram poems about local landmarks; or bringing
together retirees to learn how to write autobiographies from an unemployed
journalist.The FWP guides
are a blueprint for two kinds of nationalism. One is a locally based experience
of history beyond state fairs and historic home tours. The trips are
inexpensive and do not involve long airplane journeys (some could even be done
on a bicycle), producing a more democratic form of tourism. They also celebrate
America without expunging the many tragedies of American history. The second
kind is a belief that government can solve problems: that federal jobs can
forge a unique sense of national purpose and can produce useful products. Not
just solar panels and commuter rail but creative outputs that recognize a
society that engages in many different kinds of labor.
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