A Stimulus Deal for Writers

Soul of a People
by David A. Taylor
Wiley, 260 pages, $27.95)

Writers and artists have "got to eat, just like other people," Harry Hopkins, director of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, observed during the middle of the Depression. The statement was true enough, of course, but Hopkins offered it defensively. With about 20% of the labor force unemployed in 1935, the WPA aimed to provide jobs to the millions of employable people on relief – including writers, artists, musicians and actors. The chief purpose of the Federal Writers' Project, as with the other WPA programs for the artistic downtrodden, was to sustain the individuals and, by giving them paid work, keep up their morale and their skills. Secondary was the hope of the Writers' Project's director, Henry Alsberg, and other idealists that the ultimate result of their work – principally, comprehensive guidebooks for each of the 48 states and Washington, D.C., as well as New York and other cities – would be an honest and even ennobling portrait of America.

My copy of the WPA Guide to New York is a treasure.

Alfred Kazin, in his 1942 masterwork, "On Native Grounds," hailed the WPA guides as not merely "a super-Baedeker" but "a repository as well as a symbol of the reawakened American sense of its own history."

The guidebooks "made up America's first self-portrait," says Mr. Taylor. He takes his title from a claim by Mark Twain that "when a thousand able novels have been written" about a people, then "there you have the soul of the people." Though the guidebooks were not novels and did not number 1,000, the enthusiastic Mr. Taylor fancies that the WPA writers engaged in "the kind of experiment" that Twain had in mind.

"one of the serious deficiencies" in the Federal Writers' Project (which at its peak in 1936 employed nearly 6,700 people) was "the sharply uneven distribution of literary talent throughout its forty-nine offices," noted Jerre Mangione in "The Dream and the Deal" (1972), which remains by far the best account of the Project. Not surprisingly, he said, "the ablest writers on the Project were to be found in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco – those traditional incubating centers of literary talent." There were, of course, exceptions, a notable one being Vardis Fisher, who wrote most of the Idaho guidebook and managed to get it published first of all the guidebooks – and to enthusiastic reviews from around the country. Mr. Taylor's chapter on Fisher and the Idaho Project is one of his most interesting.

... politics – communism in particular – played a big role in many of these writers' lives. Mr. Taylor acknowledges the often divisive Communist presence in the Project but says hardly a critical word about it. He devotes much ink to Richard Wright but fails to tell, as Wright himself did in his memoir "Black Boy," how after he broke with the Communist Party and joined the Writers' Project in Chicago, the many Party members in the Project ostracized him and tried to get him fired as an incompetent.

I read about that in Hazel Rowley's biography of Richard Wright.

as Jerre Mangione observed, the reawakening of Americans' interest in their own history that Alfred Kazin perceived in the guidebooks had to be postponed, because of World War II: "The guidebooks were virtually forgotten as a symbol and largely ignored for their practical value." But, as he and Mr. Taylor make clear, readers, especially writers and editors, who have discovered the somewhat outdated volumes in recent decades have found them useful and illuminating, and even inspiring.