About the Federal Writers Project
In passing the Emergency Relief Act of 1935—the authorizing legislation for the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—Congress provided the Roosevelt administration with its most comprehensive tool for combating unemployment through government relief. Included among the provisions for publicly funded projects of all sizes to improve the nation’s infrastructure was a clause calling for “assistance to educational, professional, and clerical persons; a nation-wide program for useful employment of artists, musicians, actors, entertainers, writers...and others in these cultural fields.” (Mangione 39) With Harry Hopkins, FDR’s chief advisor on federal relief, the first WPA administrator, Jacob Baker, organized four “arts” relief programs—for artists, dramatists, musicians and writers—known collectively as Federal One.
“So began a governmental adventure in cultural collectivism, the like of which no nation has experienced before or since.” (Mangione 42) The main objective of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) was to provide relief for out-of-work writers of all stripes. The actual mission of the project was secondary and the subject of considerable debate during its first few months. Suggestions ranged from the bland production of government manuals and reports to permission for authors to decide on their own projects, be it fiction, non-fiction or poetry. Ultimately, acting on a suggestion from the future tours editor, Katharine Kellock, Baker charged FWP director Henry Alsberg with creating a sort of “public Baedecker”. As plans became reality, Alsberg and his Washington staff modified the goal from creating a single American Guide to creating a series of state and regional guides produced by field offices in each state.
As described in a 1938 issue of the magazine Pathfinder, the staff organization of the Writers Project was not unlike that of a big daily newspaper:
The Washington office is the city editor, the state offices are desk men, and the county field workers are the ‘leg men.’ Most of the actual writing is done in the state office. In Washington, where there are unlimited research facilities, each fact is checked three times. The Washington office includes a policy editor whose duty is to watch for possible libel and make sure that WPA’s socially conscious writers top at describing slums, instead of going on to theorizing about what has caused the slums.
The description of a newsroom is apt in terms of how the FWP operated as well. There was much antagonism between the state offices and the editors in Washington, mainly resulting from a lack of clear direction from the top and a certain amount of chaffing over the insistence by Alsberg and his staff that they should have editorial control over the guidebooks. This wrangling—combined with ever-looming deadlines, the vagaries of Congressional approval and the burden of administering a bureaucracy that at its peak involved 6,686 employees—made for a somewhat chaotic operation (Magione 9).
The first director of the Pennsylvania Writers Project (PWP) was Logan B. Sisson, who was replaced within a year by his assistant, Paul Comly French. French’s term was marred by an acrimonious relationship with Alsberg and, among all the state directors, was one of the few to constantly balk at the editorial dictates of the Washington staff (Mangione 143). In a letter dated June 23, 1939, French appealed to the executive director of Pennsylvania’s Historical Commission, Maj. Frank Melvin, for assistance in convincing Alsberg to finally publish the state’s guide. He accused the national office of being overly concerned with details, citing “the copy cannot be considered final because our margins are an inch and a quarter, instead of an inch, and our indents for paragraphs are ten rather than five spaces.” French was also unable to broker a truce between the Newspaper Guild and the Writers Union, two leftwing labor organizations with writers on the PWP staff that eventually conspired to oust French in 1939.
By the summer of 1939, shifting political winds had left Federal One out to dry. The previous year, both the Dies Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and the House appropriations committee attacked the FWP for being a hotbed of Communism, accusations based mainly on the radical leanings of some writers in the project’s frenetic New York City office. Alsberg successfully defended the FWP from the trumped-up charges, but negative publicity during the hearings left a bitter aftertaste in the public’s mind.
More significantly, the Roosevelt administration began de-emphasizing New Deal relief programs, focusing instead on policies that would prepare the United States for the coming war. The WPA was re-organized as the Works Projects Administration and stripped of its independent status under a new administrator, Col. Francis Harrington, who regarded the arts programs as a nuisance. Harrington replaced Alsberg with John Newsom, who had been directing the Michigan Project (Mangione 289-326).
The Emergency Relief Act of 1939 forced the Writers Program, as it became known, to find state sponsorship that would cover 25% of the costs. In Pennslylvania, the Univeristy of Pennsylvania and The State Historical Commission stepped forward to co-sponsor A Guide to the Keystone State. The bill also forced all current WPA personnel off of the relief rolls for six months, a measure to circumvent an attack by labor unions over the scaling back of the program. Ultimately, all of the state guides under production at the time were completed by 1941, but without direction from Washington or support from Congress, most unpublished manuscripts, including many local guides, ethnic studies and folklore collections withered on the vine.
