1935 Putting unemployed writers to work during America’s Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was among the most visionary pieces of legislation brought in as part of Roosevelt’s reformist New Deal.
Some of the 6,600 writers employed by the FWP (up to 25 per cent, falling to 10 per cent after 1936) could be recruited from the ranks of professional writers – journalists, novelists and the like – whether or not they were out of work. The rest had to be the actual unemployed on relief. This meant teachers, librarians, bank clerks – almost anyone who could put together a coherent paragraph.
But for FWP director Henry G. Alsberg, invoking the best Popular Front spirit of collective egalitarianism, these very disadvantages could be given an ideological spin. Writers needed to get away from the idea that their art was ‘sacrosanct’, he thought. Instead ‘cheap books, less fuss about our sacred personalities, and more service to the common cause in the fight against fascism … would bring us very much closer to the masses’.1
What did they write? Best remembered are the American Guide series, one devoted to each state in the union. Though providing itineraries for car tours, along with suggested places to eat and stay, these were far more than guide books, offering histories, cultural surveys and even the folklore of the states covered.
More useful in the long run were the FWP’s oral histories, begun after the state guides were completed. 2,900 of these life stories have been filed in the Library of Congress; thousands more remain in state collections. They cover every occupation and region, from cowboys in Texas to fishermen in Maine, including tenant farmers and even ex-slaves in the South.
Among the many American authors to be given their first chance, or an early break, by the FWP were Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow, John Cheever and Frank Yerby. Studs Terkel turned the life histories into his life’s work. His Division Street, America (1966), Hard Times (1970) and The Good War (1984) presented the voices of Chicagoans talking about their jobs and their city.
Black writers gained most. Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, Richard Wright in Chicago and Ralph Ellison in New York – all found their material and voices while working for the project. Hurston finished three novels, Wright wrote Native Son (1940), and Ellison’s experience in gathering oral history in New York gave him the key to black speech in his masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952).
1 Henry G. Alsberg, speaking extemporaneously at the Second American Writers’ Congress, 1937, in Henry Hart, The Writer in a Changing World, New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937, p. 245.