The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was one of four New Deal arts projects, collectively known as Federal One, that were created as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 to provide work RELIEL for the unemployed. After conducting an occupational survey of families on relief, New Deal relief administrator Harry Hopkins realized the need for specific relief programs for white-collar workers, including writers and other artists. In addition to the FWP, the other arts projects were the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Art Project, and the Federal Music Project. Congressional hostility and defense spending priorities during World War II eventually led to the termination of the Federal Writers’ Project and the other Federal One programs.
The FWP, under the direction of former journalist Henry Alsberg, gave thousands of unemployed writers work on over a thousand publications on American topics during the Great Depression. Early questions arose as to what a government-sponsored writers’ project should do. The idea that FWP writers would simply work on government manuals and reports was quickly discarded as bureaucratic and mundane. Another option would have given writers freedom to select their own projects, including novels, short stories, and poems. This was seen as risky, however, because of the potential for controversial content. Ultimately, the FWP focused chiefly on nonfiction.
But the FWP was characterized by ambiguity of aims from its inception and was often criticized for pedestrian work. Bringing together ambitious young writers, librarians, journalists, and teachers, once-talented writers past their literary prime, and writers with very little talent or experience, the FWP involved a peculiar and precarious mix of individuals. Relatively few of its participants were creative writers, and pressure for instant results hastened the writing process, generating numerous books and pamphlets that later often made for dull reading, even though good editing in Washington improved much of the submitted work. The writers’ project was never intended to produce great LITERATURE, although a number of notable writers worked on the FWP, including Richard Wright. Peak FWP employment came in April 1936, with nearly 6,700 women and men on its payrolls, and the project employed some 10,000 writers in all.
FWP writers produced a popular collection of guidebooks, the American Guide series, for each of the states, major cities and counties, regions of the country, and interstate highway routes. As the published volumes of the American guides delved deeper below the surface of American life, the FWP progressed from a set of tour books, almanacs, educational pamphlets, and natural history books to introductory essays of the state guides, county and local histories, ethnic studies, and folklore studies that added to national self-knowledge. The FWP’s Life in America series contained some 150 volumes on a range of topics. Interviews with former slaves and life histories of southern black tenant farmers, farm and cotton-mill owners, and workers published in These Are Our Lives (1939) gave new perspectives to American history and more knowledge about the plight of the marginalized and dispossessed. Such attention to the downtrodden was a common theme in depression-era art and literature, and the FWP’s most productive period, 1935-40, was a time when the Great Depression inclined Americans to seek knowledge about the past and each other.
The need for a larger defense budget in the years leading up to World War II siphoned off federal dollars from the FWP, as did criticism from conservatives, including the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its chairman Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies. The Dies committee targeted the FWP as a “Red nest” and “a festering sore of communism.” By 1939, budget cuts had forced the project to scale down to 3,500 workers, although it was so popular that every state provided money to keep it alive when Congress reduced funding in 1939.
The Federal Writers’ Project was eliminated along with the WPA in 1943 and much of its unpublished work was lost or destroyed. Even so, the FWP left a substantial legacy in its American Guide and Life in America series and in its compilations of folklore and oral histories.
Further reading: Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972); William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Project Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1969).
—Joseph C. Gutberlet
World History
