A NATION BROKENA decade of soaring prosperity

in the 1920s left Americans

unprepared for the Depression.

For three full years after the

1929 Crash, companies fired an

average of 20,000 workers every

working day. Banks collapsed.

In Chicago, half of the working

age population lost their jobs,

and many lost their homes when

they couldn’t pay the mortgage.

Then-President Herbert Hoover,

like many others, insisted that

recovery was “just around

the corner.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt became

president in 1933 and quickly

acknowledged that the economic

and political system was on the

brink of collapse. When told that

history would judge him the

greatest president if he got the

country back on its feet and the

worst if he didn’t, Roosevelt replied,

“If I fail, I shall be the last one.”

A NEW DEALOn Roosevelt’s ambitious raft of

new agencies, the largest was the

Works Progress Administration

(WPA), which hired millions

of the unemployed to build

roads, bridges and schools. This

welfare-to-work effort became a

lightning rod for debate. News-

papers published cartoons

lampooning WPA workers for

“boondoggling,” wasting time

and taxpayer money. A nation-

wide poll in 1939 found that one

in four Americans ranked the

WPA as the worst part of FDR’s

government, more than for any

other issue. Yet the same poll

found that roughly the same

percentage ranked WPA relief as

the Roosevelt administration’s

greatest accomplishment.

A very small section of the

WPA—the Federal Writers’

Project (FWP)—hired white-

collar workers: jobless artists,

writers, musicians, and actors.

Administrators of the FWP

sometimes used a loose

definition of “writer” to help

applicants. For many workers,

documenting American life

in WPA travel guides was the

first time they were paid to

write anything.

A NATIONAL PORTRAITIN TRAVEL GUIDESThe main purpose of WPA work,

including the Federal Writers’

Project, was disaster relief,

but Henry Alsberg, the agency’s

director, also voiced higher

goals. “These writers will get

an education in the American

scene,” he said. “A great deal

of real American writing comes

out of seeing what is really

happening to the American

people.” In the WPA guides and

“life-history” interviews with

ordinary citizens, the WPA writers

assembled a portrait of America

on an unprecedented scale.

A LEGION OF BIOGRAPHERSThe WPA state guides,

containing tour routes and

chapters on local history and

features, revealed the many

cultures in America and where

they intersected. Interviews

of individual Americans added

to that picture. In Seattle, for

example, WPA writers noted

the city’s Asian communities

and episodes of anti-immigrant

backlash. In Chicago, they

found that white musicians

often learned the jazz musical

vocabulary from black

musicians (sometimes defying

a 1920s racial ban on playing

together). In Florida,

Zora Neale Hurston led WPA

workers in recording local

versions of Spanish songs

and Bahamian versions of

old English folk tunes. And in

Harlem, a young Ralph Ellison

marveled at the unexpected

intersections of race and

culture, and recalled later

that his “appreciation of

American cultural possibility

was vastly extended.”

SOUL OF A PEOPLEWriting America’s Story

The Great Depression was the most serious national crisis since the CivilWar. The Stock Market Crash of 1929spelled financial disaster for millions,reverberating for years and shakingAmericans’ view of their country as acan-do culture. Nationwide, one out of four Americans had no job. Familiesoften left town without a word toavoid debt collectors.

In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt created a series of make-work agencies,including the Federal Writers’ Project, to get the economy movingagain. The purpose was emergency aid.Nobody expected that such an agencywould create anything as meaningful as a snapshot of America at a critical moment: a time when old ways werebreaking down and new American stories were just emerging.

B.A. Botkin, director of the

WPA folklore division, urged

every interviewer to focus on

the interviewee’s “real feeling.”

For Botkin, the Writers’ Project

was a way to show “a living

culture” and its meaning “in

democratic society as a whole.”

When WPA writers delved

into uncomfortable issues such

as slavery and its legacy, local

scandals, and episodes of

corruption, the New Deal’s

opponents complained. Congress

created a committee to

investigate Un-American Activities

in 1938, and it criticized some

sections of WPA guides as

propaganda. Amid the furor and

belt-tightening as another world

war approached, President

Roosevelt slashed the WPA

budget. Nonetheless, all the WPA

state guides were completed,

funded mainly by the states.

left to rightWomen in front of rooming house, St. Paul,Minn., 1939. Courtesy of Library of Congress

President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaks from a train, Bismarck, N.D., 1936. Courtesyof Library of Congress

Poster publicizing “American Guide Week”Nov. 10-16 [1941]. Courtesy of Library ofCongress

Galena, Illinois, volume of the “American Guide Series.” Courtesy of Library of Congress

Zora Neale Hurston, Federal Writers’ Project author, 1935. Courtesy of Library of Congress

Family in front of shack home, OklahomaCity, 1939. Courtesy of Library of Congress

New York City Guide, American Guide Series. Courtesy of Library of Congress

ADDITIONAL READINGS

Banks, Ann. First-Person America.

New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

Bold, Christine. The WPA Guides,Mapping America. Jackson: University

Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2006.

Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’Project, 1935–1943. Boston:

Little, Brown, 1972.

Taylor, David. Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project UncoversDepression America. New Jersey:

Wiley & Sons, 2009.

Taylor, Nick. American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation toWork. New York: Bantam, 2008.

Weisberger, Bernard, ed.

The WPA Guide to America: TheBest of 1930s America as Seen bythe Federal Writers’ Project. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Willard, Pat. America Eats: On the Road with the WPA. New York:

Bloomsbury, 2008.

ON THE WEB

America Eats:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/

treasures/tri098.html

Images of the Great Depression:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

fsowhome.html

The New Deal Network:

http://newdeal.feri.org/

Timeline of the Great

Depression: http://www.pbs.org/

wgbh/amex/rails/timeline/

WPA Life Histories:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

wpaintro/wpahome.html

WPA Slave Narratives:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

snhtml/snhome.html

Soul of a People: Writing America’sStory is a major documentary

television program about the

Federal Writers’ Project produced

by Spark Media, a Washington,

D.C.-based production and

outreach company specializing

in issues of social change.

Soul of a People is being broad-

cast on the Smithsonian Channel

HD. Check local listings for

broadcast times or visit http://

www.SmithsonianChannel.com.

Programs supporting the

national broadcast of Soul of aPeople are being presented

in 30 libraries throughout the

United States, coordinated by the

American Library Association

Public Programs Office.

For a list of libraries presenting

Soul of a People programs,

please visit http://www.ala.org/

publicprograms

For further information, call

1-800-545-2433, ext. 5045.

Soul of a People programs in libraries are supported by a grant from the National Endowment forthe Humanities: great ideasbrought to life.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this brochuredo not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment forthe Humanities.

Soul of a People Documentary Producer and Director: Andrea Kalin, President, Spark Media,Washington, DC.

Brochure Author

David Taylor, Soul of a People Documentary, Co-Producer and

Co-Writer

Program Coordination

American Library Association

Public Programs Office, Chicago, IL

Brochure design

Silvio Design, Chicago, IL

LEGACIESGenerations of travelers have

been surprised by the portraits

of American culture in the WPA

guides. Journalist Alistair Cooke

gathered a large collection

of the guides and used them

to map a cross-country trip in

the early 1940s. Later John

Steinbeck used WPA guides as

he crossed the continent in

the early 1960s, a journey he

described in Travels with Charley.

Some writers from the Federal

Writers’ Project went on to

make remarkable contributions

to American culture. Richard

Wright wrote Native Son,

a novel that marked a new era in

social realist fiction, while he

was a WPA writer. Zora Neale

Hurston published her most

ambitious work, Moses, Man of the Mountain, soon afterward.

By the 1950s, books by former

WPA writers had won a

string of National Book Awards,

including Nelson Algren’s

The Man with the Golden Arm,

Saul Bellow’s The Adventures ofAugie March, and Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man. Other prominent

writers in the WPA included

novelists Eudora Welty, John

Cheever, and Jim Thompson;

poets Conrad Aiken, May

Swenson, Weldon Kees, and

Kenneth Rexroth; and

nonfiction authors Loren Eiseley

and Juanita Brooks. Still, the

stigma of working in the

WPA, arising from the earlier

“boondoggling” innuendo and

Un-American Activities

investigation, lasted for decades.

SOUL OF A PEOPLEWriting America’s Story

left to rightNelson Algren, Federal Writers’ Project author, undated photograph. Courtesy of Library of Congress

Unemployed man, Omaha, Nebraska, 1938. Courtesy of Library of Congress

Main Street, Twin Falls, Idaho, 1941. Courtesy of Library of Congress

Cover (top to bottom): Musicians in South Side Chicago tavern, 1941; Farm woman near Northhampton,Mass., 1939; WPA poster, 1936-41; California from the American Guide Series.All photographs courtesy of Library of Congress