About the Guide
Although the FWP produced other types of material—from the data-rich accounting of a weather phenomenon in New England Hurricane to the oral histories in These Are Our Lives—Alsberg and his staff chose to make a series of American state guidebooks the centerpiece of their new enterprise. Because of their emphasis on state and local perspectives, the notion of producing guides with government funds had widespread political support and also ensured some level of longevity for the FWP.
Karl Baedecker, a German publisher, created the first guidebook for tourists in 1835, and his name has been synonymous with the genre ever since. Kellock found Baedecker’s guides invaluable while serving as a nurse in Eastern Europe and had long dreamed of producing a modern equivalent for the United States. Baedecker’s last American edition dated from 1893, and without any mention of the automobile, was clearly an outdated resource by 1935.
Tourists of the 1930’s did have other printed material available to aid them in their travels. As Jerrold Hirsch notes in his cultural history of the WPA: “Automobile touring had become a part of American popular culture, and oil companies, automobile makers, and auto clubs promoted this form of tourism.” (84) These books and maps varied in quality from the generally precise turn-by-turn directions of the automobile club tour books to the frivolous prose of a tour pictorial promoting a brand of petroleum products.
Of course, the intent of the American Guide Series was not only to guide American tourists across the country. In his introduction to a sampler of the series, Bill Stott describes the books: “A Guide reader encounters economic history as well as quaint amusements, social commentary as well as famous shrines....The Guides seldom gush and boost; they describe, analyze, criticize.” (qtd. in Hobson 3) Alsberg defended the quality of the text, which in the minds of the Project’s supporters, clearly set them apart from typical travel literature. “The tour form,” Alsberg said, “can contain as excellent material and skillful writing as any sonnet or ballad.” (Mangione 241)
The format of the FWP guides also distinguished them from other guidebooks. The Washington office developed a manual that laid out editorial guidelines on how the books should be written. These instructions called for three major sections to each work. Part I is a series of topical essays meant to give the reader a broad understanding of such issues as physical geography, history, ethnicity, religion, industry and culture. This section represented Alsberg’s aspirations for the books to be seen as more than travel guides. Although some of his colleagues felt that their length made the guides less practical, he insisted that their content provided some context “which could impart a sense of historical continuity and development.” (Mangione 358)
The second section of the FWP guides is devoted to describing a state’s principal cities and towns. A Guide to the Keystone State describes in depth the following cities: Allentown, Bethlehem, Carlisle, Chester, Easton, Ephrata, Erie, Gettysburg, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Reading, Scranton, State College, Wilkes-Barre, Williamsport and York. This list was not strictly based on size. Altoona and Johnstown each had larger populations than Ephrata, Gettysburg and State College combined in 1940, yet the latter were perhaps more popular as tourist destinations. Part II contains information about transportation, accommodations and recreation for each city, along with a street-level map locating the points of interest described in the text.
The heart of every guidebook could be found in Part III, the final section consisting of tours that crisscrossed each state via major thoroughfares, where writers employed evocative language to describe each village, town, geologic feature, historic site and tourist destination. Mileage, altitude and population are listed for habited areas, and space is also given to sites that require a detour from the main routes. As tours editor, Kellock sought to impose a strict discipline on how the state offices treated the tours and was notorious for sending back manuscripts exhorting the state branches to dig deeper for truly unique aspects of local culture.
Kellock was also instrumental for imbuing the guides with a modern sensitivity, a feat accomplished mainly by embracing the automobile and culture of motor touring that had steadily grown around during the first three decades of the Twentieth Century. The national office advised local writers, “the tour route is often a thread on which a narrative can be built with history, from the days of Indian occupation to the present told in geographical rather than topical or chronological order.” (Hirsch 86) In making the road a central device in the construction of the guides, the FWP was, intentionally or not, identifying their cultural product with a thread of American identity stretching back at least to Walt Whitman’s Song for the Open Road.
In general, taken as a collection, literary critics looked favorably on the American Guide Series at the time of their publication. In his history of the project, The Dream and the Deal, Jerre Mangione notes that the books’ “indigenous atmosphere, it was generally agreed, was somehow created by an amalgam of historical and contemporary data, geographic detail, and juicy anecdote.” (354) Book critic Ralph Thompson said in his New York Times column of September 14, 1938:
For when we of this generation are all dust and ashes and forgotten—sturdy individualists and collectivists alike, dirty radicals and true Americans, Hooverites and dangerous New Dealers, crackpots, spendthrifts, embattled suburban dames and craven takers of relief—the American Guide Series will be still very much in evidence. And not only in evidence, but in use: our children will be thankful for it, and their children, and their children’s children. It is certainly one of the most valuable series of books ever issued in the United States.
Some critics saw the potential for the WPA guidebooks to result in “a kind of second birth of national consciousness comparable in quality if not in degree with the awakening to nationhood that attended the War of Independence.” (Mangione 365) Unfortunately, such high praise was not enough to overcome the books’ relatively high cost, the decision by Congress to fatally scale back funds for the Federal Writers Project in 1939 and restrictions on travel brought about by World War II. As Mangione puts it, “the guidebooks were virtually forgotten as a symbol and largely ignored for their practical value.” (365)
Of course, scholars have since rediscovered the Federal Writers Project and given us fresh perspectives on the American Guide Series. John Gunther relied extensively on the guides for his memoir Inside U.S.A., as did John Steinbeck for Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Bill Stott, who lamented the lack of attention given the guides in his 1973 Documentary Expression and Thirties America, was still holding out for deeper exploration a decade later: “The Guides have contributed to the making of hundreds of books. They will contribute to countless more. They offer the richest composite word portrait we have of our country—an astonishing gift from a period of hard times.” (Hobson 11)
Recent scholarship includes Portrait of America, in which Jerrold Hirsch notes that although federal writers set out to maintain an apolitical, journalistic style throughout the guides, their writing instead is colored by a “picturesque pluralism” beseeching Americans to paradoxically seek out a national identity based upon a celebration of the diversity of America’s cultural landscape. In an earlier work, The WPA Guides: Mapping America, Christine Bold argues that the guides and other cultural products of the New Deal played a role in facilitating our own contemporary infatuation with pluralism. Both Hirsch and Bold have produced useful frameworks for understanding the FWP, but neither did more than scratch the surface of the vast quantities of published, let alone unpublished, materials produced by the Project. These are resources still ripe for study.
