 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Terry, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this virtual book lecture with Scott Borscher, author of Republic of Detours, a new book about the New Deal project to employ writers on the State Guide series. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, June 17th at noon, we'll hear from Peter S. Canellos, author of The Great Decentre, The Decentre of Justice John Marshall Harlan, broke with his colleagues on the Supreme Court and became the nation's prime defender of the rights of black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the United States. And on Tuesday, June 22nd at noon, author Les Standerford will tell us about his new book, Battle for the Big Top. Standerford reveals the stories behind three men, James Bailey, P.T. Barnum, and John Ringling, who created the American Circus. The Federal Writers Project was just one of the New Deal agencies established to help the nation out of the Depression, and they all created a large amount of records documenting their work. The National Archives now holds those records, and for the Federal Writers Project alone, you may find administrative records, photographs, posters, and even radio scripts. The Writers Project was, according to its supporters, the biggest literary project in history. This New Deal project sought to put unemployed writers back to work, much as other relief projects provided construction and forestry jobs, and a great many of those writers set to work on the American Guide series. These books covered every state, going beyond traveler's basic needs to include histories, folklore, and even recipes. Together, the guides give us a vivid portrait of America in the late 1930s. Scott Burschert, the author of The Republic of Detours, is a writer and editor based in New Jersey, and a former assistant editor at Farah, Strauss, and Garoo. His work has appeared in the Southwest Review, Monthly Review, Brooklyn Magazine, and other publications. Joining him in conversation today is Susan Rubenstein-Demasi, the author of Henry Alsberg, The Driving Forest of New Deal Writers. Now let's hear from Scott Burschert and Susan Rubenstein-Demasi. Thank you for joining us. Good evening and welcome. Thank you to the National Archivist for the introduction, and also to the National Archives and the Living New Deal who were in partnership for this event. It's wonderful to be here with Scott Burschert, author of The Republic of Detours. And as was mentioned, this book tells the story of a WPA New Deal agency called The Federal Writers Project, founded in 1935, to give jobs to unemployed writers. So first, Scott, congratulations on the book's publication, and also on the wonderful reviews that have already come out in The New York Times, LA Times, and New Republic. Well, thank you very much, and I should say also thank you to National Archives for hosting me, along with the Living New Deal. Both have been very valuable resources for me while I was working on my book. And thanks to you, Sue, for being here and talking with me, and I'm looking forward to it. It's a pleasure. Do you want to tell a little bit more about the Writers Project for some people who might not be as familiar? Sure, absolutely. And if we can start the slideshow, we have some images from the book that are going to be scrolling by on the side. If you want to take a look, it'll just be on a loop, showing some of the key figures I talk about in the book, some of the publications and that sort of thing. So once the slides are going, we can start. And I'm going to just kind of situate everyone by describing the Federal Writers Project instead of reading from the book, which will be a little boring since we're on a video chat here, I'll try to paraphrase it. And I'll try to kind of describe it the way I do in the book a little bit. So you can imagine in the mid to late 1930s, these travel guides started appearing. And there are guides to different states, to cities, to certain regions, to routes like U.S. one or places like Death Valley, and they were published by commercial publishers. They started coming out, they showed in bookstores, people would buy them. And if you look at these books, you might be expecting something that was kind of a typical travel guide, it would tell you how to get from one place to another, some of the main sites to see where to stay, where to eat, that sort of thing. But if you open up one of these books, you find something that was very different and very surprising. These books were these sprawling, overstuffed, sometimes bizarre, sometimes kind of beguiling, chronicles of life in all the different states and the other places that they covered, from the past to the present, hovering people's daily lives, their folklore, their art and literature. Sometimes they're religious beliefs, different ethnic groups that lived in the state or the place, the industry, the local government, all sorts of material that is very fascinating on its own, but it's not necessarily of any use to someone who's driving around on a trip and wants to know what to see or where to go. Nevertheless, it's all in these books and they're really kind of astounding and frustrating and a little weird. But they all started coming out, people were buying them, a lot of people like them. But what was so remarkable about these books is that they weren't being published by a travel association or some kind of obsessive compulsive editor at a publishing house. They're actually being published by the federal government. They're created by the Federal Writers Project, which someone mentioned before was the, you know, the literary division of the WPA, I call it, which is the Works Progress Administration. And that was kind of the cornerstone of the new deal and the effort to create jobs for people who didn't have them during the Depression. Millions of people were out of work. And so the Roosevelt Administration kind of went on this at the time very revolutionary course to employ people directly. The federal government would hire them and put them to work doing kind of different socially useful things in an effort to not only just keep them alive and carry them through the Depression, but to try to preserve their skills in certain ways and to do things that weren't being done otherwise and that could benefit the entire society. So the Federal Writers Project was kind of a strange and bizarre version of that. It was pretty small compared to the rest of the WPA, which as a lot of people know, constructed roads and sewers and all kinds of things that we typically consider like hard infrastructure. But they also had education classes, sewing projects, all kinds of things. There's been a lot of books about that will give you the whole story. But the WPA was a very vast effort that included all different areas, not just construction. And the Federal Writers Project was part of this, along with a few different arts projects that were all kind of bundled together under this one section of the whole WPA called Federal One. And to put it in comparison, the whole WPA employed about 2 million people a month. We're working on it at any given time from 1935 to about 1942 or 1943. And the Federal Writers Project only employed, I have it here, 4,500 to 5,200 people on average. And the peak was about 6.5 thousand people, maybe 12 or 10,000 ever worked for the project during the entire time it existed. So it was pretty small. But when you look at the record of the project, they created, you know, there's a guidebook to every single state, many cities and towns, regions, all kinds of other books on different subjects, which we'll get into a little bit more later. So there are probably around a thousand publications that the project put out during its lifespan from 1935 to 1943. In addition to that, there's tons and tons, literally tons of manuscript material that the project collected. And that's all deposited today in the National Archives and the Library of Congress and an archives around the country and states and in some universities. It's all over the place. But the bulk of it is in Washington, DC, and people can go visit it and look through it. And if you do that, you'll find all kinds of, you know, just kind of raw material that the federal writers worked up while they were out there in the field kind of trying to chart America. Information on towns, local customs, history, folklore, like I mentioned before, and especially first person narratives from people who would, you know, speak to federal writers, tell their story, what they did in their life, who'd never really spoken to anyone who was interested in hearing what they had to say or telling their story. And that included people who had been enslaved, who were born into slavery, and were still alive in the 1930s and were able to tell those stories. So that's a very prominent part of the Federal Writers Project that a lot of people still look at today and as a, you know, it has this kind of complicated aspects to it, but it's very valuable for historians and for any kind of curious citizen who wants to look at it. But the guidebooks were kind of the key thing that the Federal Writers Project was doing in terms of things they wanted to publish and get out there to the public and actually sell through commercial publishing assets. And so my book kind of focuses on the story of these guidebooks, how they came to be, how the project came to be, and then some of the people who worked for the project while they were creating them. And we'll go through that a little bit later in this talk, the different people I talk about and why. But when you look at the, you know, the roster of writers and non-writers also who were part of the Federal Writers Project, it's in some ways kind of a who's who of American literature in the 1930s. You have these, you know, Saul Bellow, John Chiever, Zora Neale Hurston, Arger Walker, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, all these people who would go on to, you know, become some of the most famous people in American literature, all either got their start or were already, you know, established but needed the work when the Federal Writers Project came around and they worked for it and they contributed to the, you know, the guidebooks and to the other publications. That's pretty much what I'm trying to do in this book is to tell the stories of some of these people and to explain where the project came from, how it worked, what they did, how they created these books and then what happened to it in the end because they ultimately face a lot of opposition from people who were not very happy with the idea of, on the one hand, the whole WPA, the kind of New Deal efforts to employ people directly to put them to work for the social good. But other people who didn't like what the Federal Writers Project was doing and how it represented America and its idea of creating kind of a more inclusive portrait of America, which had its flaws too, which we can see now from our perspective in the 21st century, but at the time, was making a really strong argument against, you know, the rising forces of nativism and fascism, which were very strong at that time. And so the Writers Project was very controversial for these reasons and ultimately it kind of was destroyed by its enemies and it folded up in 1943. So that's part of the story too and we'll get into that in a little more detail, but that's what you'll find in this book and that's what we're going to talk about in our webinar. Okay, that was an excellent description. As a fellow Writers Project enthusiast, I'm always interested to know how other people discovered the project. I know for me it was totally by accident, serendipitously, you know, researching something else. It was Jackie Robinson, actually, and suddenly I come across this thing that I never heard of and I'm like, why haven't I ever heard this? This is so cool. So can you talk about how you came upon the Federal Writers Project and what drew you in enough that you wanted to write a book? Sure. So I will explain it this way, which is kind of a roundabout way, but my story with the Federal Writers Project begins in July of 1942, when a man named Fred Bord, who was, he was young, he was 25 years old, he was in Cincinnati for business and he went into a bookstore, was looking around, he liked books, and he found the Kentucky Guide that the Federal Writers Project had published actually not that long before that. So he bought it and he liked it, and he started buying other guides that you see in bookstores and he became just totally enamored with these Federal Writers Project publications. And over the course of his life, he ended up buying all the guidebooks that he could find. It took him about 20 more years to do that, and then he started buying as many other Federal Writers Project publications as he could find, and he became a really enthusiastic book collector. He amassed this huge collection of other kinds of books, miniature books, all sorts of things, and he filled up his house with them, and he lived his life with his best Federal Writers Project collection. And he was my great uncle actually, and I knew about this a little bit. I wasn't very close to him when I was young growing up, but I knew him obviously. I go to his house sometimes and visit, and so I knew he had this collection. It was all very interesting, but I just was kind of dimly aware of the significance of it all. And unfortunately he died in 2005, but after he died, the Federal Writers Project guides ended up with me. My parents kind of knew that they had an appeal to me and would be interesting, so they kind of ended them over to me and said, you know, do with them what you will. Maybe you'll just want to read them or something like that. So I ended up with this whole set of guidebooks, and some of the covers we'll see now here were showing in the slideshow. So I had these books sitting around for a while, and I would dip into them sometimes. I thought they were totally fascinating, but I wasn't sure what to make of them or anything like that. And I remember pretty distinctly in 2008, 2009, you know, when the Great Recession was starting and the economy was kind of on the verge of collapse, all these people were talking about the idea of a new, new deal. Barack Obama had just been elected, so there are some people who thought that maybe this is a new FDR figure and we're on the verge of another new deal that could resurrect some of the programs from the 30s to address the current moment. And that didn't really quite happen, but you know the idea was out there, and I kind of got into my head, and I kept thinking, you know, these guys are really relevant. They're not just these musty old artifacts from the past. And I kept thinking about them and thinking about them. And then finally, I just started researching the project and how it was created, and I decided that I wanted to write a book about it. And you know, of course other people have written about the Federal Writers Project in the past. If you look at my book, I have a note in the end on further reading and sources that have directed a lot of the great things that people have written, and it's all really valuable and absolutely worth checking out. And it was very helpful for me when I was working on my book, but I thought I had a, you know, a different perspective on it, and I could tell the story in a slightly different way than what other people had done by kind of taking a deep dive into the experiences of a handful of people and filling out a lot of the context for what was going on in the United States when the Federal Writers Project came into being. So I wanted to talk about the political context, the literary context, and just kind of the mood of the country, how it was affecting all these different people who kind of ended up working for the Federal Writers Project who probably never expected to do such a thing, but they did, and they brought all these different strains of the National Mood with them, and that affected, of course, how the project developed and the kind of books that they put out. There's a long way of describing it, but I started with my great uncle buying the guidebooks, and I inherited them. And a point I like to make is that, you know, and going to National Archives to really throw this home for me, but the Federal Writers Project is something that we all kind of have inherited in a way, you know, the legacy of it belongs to everybody, and everyone should check it out and has a right to check it out and to make it what they will. And so that's kind of what I wanted to do with this book. Okay, you might have answered this already. The American Guides are not quite travel books. I mean, they have the tours, but they're more than that, and I liked your take on the place of the guides in American literature. I think you showed how the cultural and political themes of that era converged, and there was a quote in the book you said the American guides sat at the heart of a kind of new literature. Did I get that right, or I don't know if you've already No, yeah, yeah. So I think what happened was that when the Federal Writers Project was created, people came up with this idea of doing guidebooks, and they thought it would be just like a regular travel guide, and you know, that's all there would be to it. But the specific people who ended up working in the Federal Writers Project at the top level was the kind of architect of the project really had this vision of creating these books that were much more expansive and encompassing than just a travel guide. And so you ended up with these guides, the New Jersey guide right here, which has most of the guides have three sections. The first section, these are pretty long. You can see it's all essays on different subjects. So you have industry, the arts, history, commerce, agriculture, flora and fauna, that sort of thing. And then the middle section of the book is all dedicated to profiles of towns and cities. And the last section of the book are the tours. And these sound like just regular old driving tours, but they're actually these sort of bizarre. They're my favorite part of the guides, but these bizarre trips through American life and the American mind in the past and the present and real and the imagines and the myths and the prosaic and everything. It's all thrown in there. You never know what you're going to find. It's almost like a collage of a psychic collage or something moving through the space of estate. You know, it's not just going to say, look on your left and you'll see a great canyon and look on your right and you see an old house or something. Although that's in there, but it will tell you all these stories from the time and things you would never expect to find. So what I think I was trying to say in this book and what you're getting at, Sue, is that the books are really part of a trend that was going on in all of American literature, where you have writers kind of partially because of the depression or in a big way because of the depression, suddenly re-interested in examining American life and American history and just the experience of living an American being an American and what that all meant. For a long time, you had writers who were kind of oriented towards Europe and they thought that the great works of art were in Europe, the great history of literature and everything happened in Europe. America had a few high points, but it wasn't, it didn't quite match up with the great things in Europe and antiquity. But that kind of started to change at a certain point when people thought, no, there really is a great literary tradition here, a folk tradition, a musical tradition, and it bears examining. And part of the reason for that was because the depression suddenly threw everything into question and I think forced a lot of people to look at American society and how it reached the state it did. And that made people think, you know, there are questions here that are worth asking and things that are worth searching out in the American past and in the American experience that we maybe had been overlooking for a long time. So you had all these different books coming out, literary studies of, you know, the 19th century American writers, Mel Bill, Hawthorne and all of them. You had local more journalistic books coming out about how ordinary people in America lived how especially the poor and marginalized were living outside of the view of, you know, like media attention and the powerful. So all these things were happening at once and the American guides were kind of a feature of that. I think what the quote that you picked up from the book Sue is, I'm referring to the great literary critic Albert Cazan in his book On Native Grounds which came out in 1942 right when the Federal Writers Project was kind of wrapping up, its guides were all coming out. He identified this great turn towards, you know, American interest and called it American literature that is a literature of nationhood and the whole idea is that people are trying to chart and grasp America in a way they never really did before, trying to bring it all and embrace it, representing somehow on the page. And so the Federal Writers Project is really part of that. It wasn't just guidebooks that went off the rails to some extent. You know, it was part of this literary trends that was affecting all parts of American society and bringing in all different writers, you know, who had nothing to do with the New Deal but a lot who did. And so that's really the context I think where the American guide, you know, that it fits into. Okay, good. Thank you. One of the things I liked about the book and I like many things about the book, I liked everything about the book. I like the way you sent at each chapter around certain important figures from the Writers Project, not all of them are well-known. Some of them are like Richard Wright. Can you tell us why you chose these specific people and maybe a little bit about them? Sure. So that was a big question when I was trying to figure out how to set up the book. And I talked about this with my editor as well. He had a lot of great ideas. Alex Starr at FSG, I should thank him for that. We decided, you know, a good way to do it is to focus on these individual people, but in a way where I could still tell the story of the Federal Writers Project somewhat chronologically and also by looking at different states, different geographical areas and also picking up different themes. So of course I had to start with Henry Olsberg who was the director of the Federal Writers Project and tell his story about how he got to the project and, you know, his contribution that he made to it which is really astounding. He, of course, is not a very well-known figure compared to some of these writers who are famous before their books, obviously, but he really deserves to be and we're lucky that Sue is here tonight because she is Henry Olsberg's biographer. So I thought before I turned to the other people, maybe she can say a few words about him in his life and, you know, how he ended up at the Federal Writers Project and why he was so really fascinating. Okay. I'm always happy to talk about Henry. What intrigued me at the beginning of my research about him was that he had been sometimes portrayed as sort of this bumbling character and what I found was a man who was more of a crusader and a visionary and much more savvy than he was than he'd been depicted. When he was appointed to the directorship he was 53 years old. He'd already spent years as a foreign correspondent and a human rights activist in Russia and Eastern Europe and Europe in the 1920s and he put his life on the line more than once. He had a real sensitivity to the poor and the marginalized a sense of social justice. He was also part before that he was part of a diplomatic mission and at one point it was I thought this was so interesting was even invited to speak to the U.S. Secretary of State about a proposal for a peace plan during World War One. So he brought all of those experiences to the Writers Project along with the idea that the guidebook should embrace high literary standards. That was really important to him. Someone called him the guiding light of the Writers Project and I think that was for good reason and as his biographer I'm glad he's getting more attention. I called him the man who wrote America which I think kind of describes him and the Writers Project in its effort to promote social justice kind of personifies his Henry Alsberg himself. So I think that's my take on him and I'm glad he's included in your book because I think he does deserve some attention. Yeah, definitely. And if you are if you go and read Sue's biography you'll see the whole scope of his life and he was kind of emblematic of that turn that I just described before where he was so focused on Europe and he spent more time in Europe probably than he did in the United States for big stretches of his life when he was younger. Right. He spent a lot most of the 1920s in Europe. So that's true. Yeah. And so he you know he was more oriented towards Europe than he was to the United States. And so when he was back here and he started working for the Roosevelt administration right before the Federal Writers Project was created he was working for a different agency. He was still thinking about Europe and he was even I think there's a letter he wrote to Emma Goldman as the famous anarchist was a really close friend of his and they stayed in touch and sometime around that point maybe you remember he wrote to her and he was like said something like I you know I don't know if this is for me I think I might come back and visit you in Europe and stay in Europe for a while. Like he was ready to leave. He was ready to cross the ocean again before he ended up. Yeah. Yeah. Probably safer for him to stay here I think. Exactly. Yeah. No it turned out to be the right decision. But you know right before he took over the work of this yeah you know a huge effort to write. I keep calling it kind of a national self-portrait of America. He was thinking about leaving and going to Europe. So he really paid him eyes that. So yeah he was he's really the main figure in the story of the Federal Writers Project. There are a lot of great characters in it known and unknown but he's kind of the crucial person at the center of it all. And so I wanted to make sure that he played a big role in the book and tell his story. Here he is in this photograph here with Catherine Callak who is another important editor in the Washington D.C. office. She kind of ran the tours section and shaped those and gave them a lot of their sensibilities. So she had a huge role to play as well. Yeah. Also again Catherine Callak and other people in the Washington D.C. office are the first part of the book. And then I tell the stories of a few different other people. There's Vardis Fisher who is the director of the project in Idaho. And something I should mention I don't think I said this before the way that the whole project was structured is that you had an office in Washington D.C. which is the national office. And then every state was considered its own product. So there's an Idaho project a Delaware project. They all had a central office with the director and then often had satellite offices which could be pretty small. Just a couple of people. And then federal writers are kind of fanned out all over the state doing their work. So Vardis Fisher actually shown there in that last picture was the director of the Idaho project. He was a novelist from Idaho originally. He grew up in this kind of hard scrabble almost frontier kind of existence which at that time in history was kind of disappearing very rapidly but he almost had this kind of ninth century upbringing where he lived on a homestead with his family and they lived off the land and farmed a little bit. But he ended up becoming an intellectual. He went to college and then went to Chicago the University of Chicago about a PhD in literature. He was a professor at a few different places and he started writing novels and then kind of developed a literary reputation. So when the depression happened he was pretty successful from a critical point of view but he wasn't that financially successful and he was really worried about supporting his family and being able to just make ends meet. So he was kind of a natural candidate for the project and he ended up directing the Idaho project which was the first state to put out a guidebook against the wishes of Henry Allsberg and the people in DC which is a very kind of fascinating story because Bernard Fisher was a colorful character and he kind of wanted to do things his way and he wasn't going to take instructions from anybody when it came down to it but he was also pretty talented and he kind of wrote the entire guidebook himself which if you think about it went against the whole spirit of the project where these were supposed to be these cooperative efforts. He thought no one in his office was really competent enough to handle it so he drove around the whole state himself did all the tours took all these notes did a bunch of research and he did have some help it wasn't all of him but he really did write you know the vast majority of the book and if you go and read it today you can really see that because his voice comes through and it's the kind of thing you would never expect no offense to Idaho but you'd never expect the guidebook to Idaho to be the kind of book you could sit down and read cover to cover but you can it's it's fantastic. So I tell his story and that's kind of the beginning of the American guys that was the first guy that came out and despite all the hardships and the fighting they had with Fortis Fisher which has got very intense at times the book came out to rave reviews and it kind of proved that the federal writers project could do this it could pull off this this effort of you know creating guidebooks to America in this kind of very unusual and experimental way and they would be books that people would want to read so that's the first story I tell I'll go through pretty quickly the rest Nelson Aldrin is that's a big right focus on the green novelist from Chicago he worked for the federal writers project he was still kind of young he was kind of part of this movement which I discuss in the book too trying to fill out this context in the 1930s where you had a lot of writers who were turning toward what they and other people called proletarian literature they were radicalized by the Depression a lot of them joined the Communist Party or in its orbit or joined other radical groups the CIO was on the rise a little later at that time but there's a huge you know upsurge in union organizing and the Roosevelt administration the kind of very strong reform efforts they were making was encouraging a lot of people who want to see everything go a lot farther so you had this kind of radical upsurge and Nelson Aldrin was part of that he wrote this novel where he went out on on the road and you know writing on the rails throughout the southwest of the country had all these kind of like grim experiences put it all into the book wrote it brought it back it came out it got some pretty good reviews from people who would be sympathetic to that sort of book but didn't sell very many copies and that was it and he realized he couldn't make a living as a writer and he you know he was suicidal he really felt like he was at the bottom like he hit the bottom of the of the hole there so the federal writers project really rescued him and he would say years later that it saved him it saved other people were in the same situation from killing themselves basically and we know that was actually true of him so I try to tell in this chapter a little bit of a story about how Nelson Aldrin wasn't just someone who got the project and he gave him a paycheck and kept him alive and then he could go on to do his pretty work after that which is sort of how he would represent it sometimes later on but then he really contributed to the project in a big way he worked in the office in Chicago which is the center of the Illinois project and he wrote a guide to Galena, Illinois he did all kinds of research on the ground he was editing a lot of things he was he worked for the union as part of the union an active union politics in the office and so it really made a big contribution to his development as a writer I think so I tell that story a little bit in that chapter and then and been a while since I wrote this book I have to think of who comes next Zora Neale Hurston it'll come back to you yeah Zora Neale Hurston comes next and she was someone who was at the time of the federal writers project was already pretty well established in terms of her reputation but she couldn't necessarily make a reliable living as a writer and she was you know she's this brilliant figure she's one of the great writers in American history really who by the 1930s was an anthropologist contributing folklore in academic journals collecting folklore and all different under all different kind of auspices writing autobiographical words collecting you know stories and lore from the south where she grew up and publishing in this kind of accessible popular form then of course she was writing fiction too and her great other she is in that picture her novel there as we're watching God came out right before she joined the federal writers project because at that point you know the novel was this huge kind of critical success you know within limits at the time but she just couldn't earn enough money doing what she wanted to do to support herself so she had to join the project and she wasn't necessarily then enthusiastic about it and there aren't a lot of records of her experience on the project so we kind of have to interpret them a little bit but you know a big part of that is because the Florida project where she worked was segregated formerly segregated where white workers were in the main office in Jacksonville their black colleagues were in a totally different office across town and they didn't really work together but Geronio Hurston mostly was able to work at home because she was a like a field worker who was collecting information from the field and sending it in so she didn't have to be in the segregated office but she was still part of that whole segregated structure and she was someone who was qualified to run the entire project in the in Florida she was probably more qualified than a lot of the state directors were but it was never even a question of whether she would be allowed to or not because she couldn't because it was the gym grossed out so this story I think is a little is kind of emblematic of the compromises that went into the federal writers project and the entire new deal around the question of rates and white supremacy and that's something that has gotten a lot of attention in more recent years but it was all part of the equation back then too where you know the Roosevelt administration understood that they wanted to pass these really robust reform measures they needed the support of Democrats in the South and the Democrats in the South were a solid block that wouldn't allow them to really undermine the racial order as it was so that's a really important story and I tried to tell that in this chapter through Zora Neale Herson's experience and then after her is Richard Wright who I talked about he was kind of part of the same cohort as Nelson Oliver and they were friends in Chicago they they were part of the same radical group the John Reed Club they knew each other they worked together on the Chicago Project and then Roy left for New York and he joined the project out there obviously he had a very different upbringing than Nelson Algren he was born in the South and the Jim Crow South as well he escaped he went through a lot of terrible experiences there shaped his thinking about American about literature and would inform everything that he wrote after that and in New York his story is really important because he ended up being part of this kind of experimental creative writing unit that allowed some people on the project to do their own creative writing fiction and poetry on project time kind of under the radar because this wasn't really part of the mission of the Federal Writers Project and Henry Osberg who was really you know the kind of main force behind this idea knew that they were probably getting trouble with if certain people in Congress knew that they were doing this and the tax dollars were going to work towards this but he really wanted to make sure that they could take these writers who had so much talent and give them the opportunity to use their talent to the full extent but Richard Wright when he was in New York worked on the guidebooks he did the regular you know office work that other people were doing and then he switched to this creative unit and it gave him the chance to go spent his time working on you know his own fiction and the main script he was working on was Native Son and that book came out right after he left the project so the Federal Writers Project really launched his career and he won a contest that was for WPA workers that really like put his name you know on the map for a lot of people and one of his great pieces The Ethics of Living Jim Crow was in this book that the Federal Writers Project put out called American Stuff which was a collection of off-time creative work it was like fiction poems sketches that sort of thing that didn't fit into any of the guidebooks but that you know Allesburg and other people thought were really valuable and they wanted to publish with you know the official FWP imprimatur on it so Richard Wright contributed to that and you know it kind of raised his reputation and the whole project really helped launch him as editor of Native Son wrote a letter to I believe it was Allesburg or someone else in the WPA saying you know when this book comes out it's going to be a feather in the cap of WPA like look what this program did in terms of his contribution to American literature and he's just one example he's maybe one of the most prominent examples but he's just one example of how that unfolded for all different people so those are the main people I talk about in the book there are a lot of other characters who come in who worked on the project some other writers were famous some people who are are not famous at all but whose stories are interesting and tell us something about how the project worked so in its limits and it's also a great you know promise in terms of how it could encourage people and give them the opportunity to do great work that they couldn't do otherwise and then the last person who kind of comes up I don't cover him quite as as much as Martin Dyer's Jr as a congressman in Texas a Democrat who supported the New Deal initially but then began to turn against it throughout the 30s and like a lot of Southern Democrats he was in favor of certain kind of like populist reform measures but he was very suspicious of anything that seemed vaguely collectivist or anything that kind of smacked of socialism in any way and he was also a pretty staunch nativist he introduced legislation to restrict immigration he introduced a lot of anti-communist legislation to ban the communist party another sort of similar thing so those were his kind of driving concerns and eventually he came to see the federal writers project and the federal theater project as well as you know hotbeds of radicalism and subversion and so after a few different efforts in Congress to investigate alleged subversion in different areas he put together this committee that was really the first iteration of the House and American Activities Committee which a lot of people know would go on for years and years investigating people from all walks of American life for all different reasons and so the federal writers project was one of their first targets and they really went after Alice Berg and other people on the project Richard Wright in particular and the hearings that they conducted kind of are the climax of this book and kind of the life of the project they led to and well we can talk about this a little bit more later but it led to changes in how the project was structured Alice Berg was fired the project was kind of broken down into onto a state-by-state basis and it never really recovered the federal theater project at the same time was demolished completely that was abolished in 1939 after these hearings and so the story of the federal writers project really ends with the DICE committee as was called then and Martin DICE and other people who just wanted to see this thing wiped off the face of Europe basically they thought it was a terrible idea and they wanted it to stop and they succeeded but we're still talking about it today so that's the important part that's right Martin DICE really is you know if you have an antagonist he's the one he really did kind of bring the end about what I one thing I wanted to ask you is about since we're talking via the National Archives the amazing amount and the breadth and depth of documents there I know is essential for me along with a Library of Congress when I was researching my book do you want to talk a little bit about your research there sure um so when I went down to the Archives I made my first trip there I kind of needed a little time to orient myself um I wasn't able to really figure out what exactly I needed to ask for when I got there in terms of how much was there I knew there was a lot there so I thought I'll go there and speak to someone and I'll figure out my plan and what to do so I got there and I and then Narkovist who was very helpful he kind of like he laid the land told me where to look for everything and um as I was kind of determining which boxes to ask for you know and they'll bring out on the cart for you to go through he asked me how many boxes from the Federal Writers Project records I wanted to look at eventually for all my research and I just kind of said you know all of them eventually and I just saw his eyebrows go up and he said something like oh you know you're going to be here for a very very long time um yeah and he was right there's a there's a ton of stuff at the Natural Archives and at the Library of Congress too if you look there um and I realized early on it would be impossible for me to go through everything I know there's um you know Robert Carroll the great biographer researcher has this line about you know you should turn every page if you want to do the proper research you need to open every box and turn every page of every document and that's right I think in a lot of ways and it's great if you have a decade or more to write a book but if you're trying to do it on a shorter deadline you have to kind of figure out what's important and what you want to look at so I really focused on um the states that I write about in the book like for instance Sorino Hurston working in Florida so I looked at all the Florida records I looked at you know it's organized in a pretty good way where you can zero in on different um aspects of the administrative records so I spent a lot of time doing that and one thing about all of these federal writers project records is that you'll go through something and you might find you know you might think you're looking through a stack of memos and then all of a sudden there's a book review or something or there's a transcript of a telephone call so you get the sense a little bit that when the project was being very hastily shut down there were workers in offices just stuffing whatever they could find into boxes and shipping them all off and that you know some archivists had a very tough job trying to organize it all and they mostly did a great job but you'll still find some gems in there um when you're looking around so you really do have to kind of sort through everything and you're often surprised by what's in there that's all I find yeah and you I'm sure you know too it's like you have to accept the philosophy of you're not ever going to be able to see every single document so you have to just kind of get a feel for what you are seeing and try to extract the most important information right right it was sort of overwhelming but then you would find like you said some gem and you're just wow it's amazing so yeah it's great I do some work with an organization called The Living New Deal which we talked about before which is um apart in partnership for this event and the National Archive Records have been vital to their this group's cataloging New Deal sites around the nation so I'm just gonna I just want to mention you know I urge people to take a look at their website livingnewdeal.org so I think you know they'll get a lot out of that too I second that okay moving on as some people know legislation meant to create a new federal writers project sort of a reboot I guess is being proposed in Congress and I wonder what it would take to make a writers project in today's world and is there anything we can learn from the 1930s model of the federal writers project yeah that's something that really took me by surprise while I was finishing up the researcher that spoke in the writing um um yeah there's a sudden you saw well you're talking about this before this surge of interest in the federal writers project to the extent now that as you say there's legislation that's been introduced in the house by representatives Ted Lu and Teresa Ledger Fernandez from New Mexico and Ted Lu from California to create a new federal writers project for the 21st century and the idea behind this legislation is sort of as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and from what I understand the focus is more on collecting oral histories and narratives from people who've you know lived through the pandemic but also just about the shape of American life today the stories people have to tell you know we haven't done something like this on a national scale really since the federal writers project and we have all these people who are alive today who live through the civil rights movement and all the other great you know high points and low points of American history of the last 70-80 years so we should really get their stories and take them down and put them in a public repository somewhere so I think that's kind of the thinking around the new legislation but of course all this is as a response to the crisis in the arts that was I would not say created but exacerbated by the pandemic when everything shut down in 2020 people who made their living in the arts you know different kinds of cultural workers really you know had the burden placed on them in a really big way as it as many other people obviously but if you were an actor or a musician and you couldn't perform then you know that was it you had no other options really but what I think people are realizing is that there's been a crisis in the arts that's been going on for quite a long time for many different reasons because of the kind of demands of the gig economy and the digital revolution has changed the you know the architecture of how the whole arts economy works and people were struggling to adapt that already in addition to all the kind of rampant inequality that all workers are facing and precariousness that people in all kinds of jobs are trying to deal with right now so it's not unique to cultural workers with people in the arts but there are there is a distinct set of circumstances that people are grappling with that suddenly became much much more dire during the pandemic and so seeing all of these people kind of calling for new arts programs that would echo the new deal programs the new federal writers project there are other kind of supports from musicians and actors and people in you know theater and all of that kind of thing so it's all happening and all these different people are calling for different forms of this you know these efforts to address the situation but I think what's important to keep in mind is that what happened in the 1930s which you know we talked about a little bit in the beginning it was primarily a jobs program it wasn't just a matter of injecting funds into the existing arts infrastructure and trying to help struggling organizations it was it was really a matter of hiring people directly opening a a brand new operation created as part of the federal government saying we're going to hire people that work for us and they'll work on these collective projects with other people who we hire and we'll do it all across the country in every state so that it has a national reach and it kind of you know reaches down into every aspect of American life in every part of the country from coast to coast so you have this kind of vast encompassing jobs program that was also a literary program and a cultural program at the same time and I think that something like that would be very hard to recreate today obviously the political climate is totally different kind of ideas about what people want to see in terms of government action have changed since the 1930s but more and more people are looking at these programs as a kind of guiding light or something that to be emulated and obviously there are there were limitations the original federal writers project it wasn't as representative as it could have been in curbs of the federal writers themselves you know like whenever we talk about the famous or kind of illustrious writers who are part of it there are these you know this great group of black writers who went on to great things and are some of the you know most important black writers in the 20th century all were for the federal writers project not represented very well among all federal writers among all the workers in all their place so that's something that obviously needs to be addressed we'd have to figure out how to adjust the kind of you know projects that a new iteration of the FWP would work on in terms of the digital age that you have all these people today being you and everyone we're constantly documenting our daily lives and putting it on social media and recording it one way or another so in a sense people are already doing this it's already happening how can you harness all that towards some kind of coherent collective project that could be accessible to everyone without you know obviously there are a lot of privacy questions that would get involved in that but how could this be kind of a formal project that would show how people live today what we're thinking what we're concerned about the experiences we have that sort of thing in a way I'll kind of echo what the federal writers project did in the 30s and I don't know I mean these are all big questions I know you you followed this as well so yeah has anything jumped out at you that seems like it's very promising or very well we we did get another big question actually separately from the audience so I'm going to ask you that our efforts such as the writers project and the federal theater project only relevant during periods of economic downturns or should we use them during prosperous periods as well that's a great question when the federal writers project began there was kind of a feeling among the top editors in Washington that what they were doing you know was technically a temporary thing the you know the act that created the WCA would have to be renewed every year so it was like an emergency response to the depression but they thought that this could be a permanent thing one editor called it he said it would be like you know comparable to the census it should be you know unending government function that would basically capture information about the country process it and then put it back out to the people in the form of books and other kind of publications and it should just be a standing government office and they had a lot of optimism that it would become something like that my personal opinion is yeah sure if we're doing something like this I think it could you know it can serve a function that wouldn't otherwise happen and that's something else that people recognized when the federal writers project was kind of coming under attack there was a group of I think it was 44 different publishers like commercial publishing houses and all the big ones some of them are still around today who signed a joint letter and they published it saying that federal writers project is great like it's given us a huge boost it's giving the printing industry a huge boost in booksellers and it's contributed to the national literature by creating these books that never would have been created otherwise no single private commercial publishing house could have created a book like the you know the New Jersey guide something like this it took hundreds of people to put this together and it just wouldn't happen unless you had this kind of vast collective effort that the federal writers project was kind of spearheading so and they were and they were looking yeah quite looking and they were fast I have the the book about the 1938 hurricane here you can't really see one of it but they did this the hurricane was September 1938 the book was in bookstores by October and they had four printings by November which is amazing so they were really quite talented at what they did but before it gets too late let's talk about the House Committee on Un-American Activities or UAC which at least partially led to the downfall of the writers project killed the theater project and you and I like you you gave some history of what led up to the creation of that of that committee so I don't want to talk about that so most people think of Joe McCarthy and UAC but this was this was before that this was the precursor right yeah this was all this was all before McCarthy um and yeah the the first you know the dyes committee the UAC committee um is yeah it didn't come out of nowhere this wasn't because this one congressman really had an issue with the federal writers project and wanted to take it down it was a part of a long process of congressional groups investigating what they thought was subversion in the United States and also looking at very real threats from you know like Nazi groups fascist groups and you know what they thought was like a communist menace from you know being kind of imported from the soviet union so when these initial investigative bodies were first looking at basically like sabotage and you know kind of what they considered to be like spying that was being stirred up by foreign powers they quickly morphed into looking at what American citizens were doing in terms of what they were thinking what they were organizing around and their political activities and the focus from fascist and pro- Nazi groups really shifted to a focus on the left especially the radical left and that happened with the dyes committee where you had some people who supported it in the beginning quickly turned against it when they realized that the investigations they were doing into Nazi groups was kind of perfunctory and the bulk of their time was being spent looking into radical groups and especially the communist party so that kind of set the tone for the proceedings all sorts of things got pulled into it like the boy scouts and campfire girls and every Catholic group and you know all kinds of people came into their crosshairs especially organized labor but the federal writers project was one of the things that drew the most attention in the press because it was seen as part of the New Deal apparatus and so any kind of criticism that's being directed on the project was something that you know you could extend to the entire New Deal on the Roosevelt administration so this became just a huge issue in the press you know it was lots of reporting and kind of breathless stories about reds in control the FWP and it was a there's a headliners a nest of reds and that sort of thing but those criticisms have been part of the you know attacks on the federal writers project from it's very inception too so that wasn't entirely new but it kind of reached to crescendo with the dyes committee and so after the committee had their hearings they brought Henry Osberg out he defended it as best he could some other people from the WPA defended their projects Harley Flanagan who was the director of the federal theater project came out it should give this kind of legendary performance to the committee where there's this kind of famous line where he's talking about Christopher Marlowe the playwright and someone on the committee says who is this Marlowe fellow is he a communist and she said no he's he's well just tell us who he is for the record and she said oh he was the something like the greatest dramatist of the era preceding Shakespeare or accepting Shakespeare or something like that and everyone left but she was thinking to herself you know this is absurd but this whole project is going to be destroyed because we're arguing about these silly things and all these people are going to lose their jobs and that's exactly what happened she was right so after that committee wrapped up the federal writers project kind of became a target of the House Appropriations Committee when they were deciding how to structure the next relief bill in terms of how they would fund the WPA and they changed the whole structure of the program Allsberg was fired it kind of devolved operations to the states so that each state office had its more autonomy in terms of what they can do and they had to come up with more of the funding from other sources so the quality of the new publications after that point kind of dropped off even though a lot of the guides hadn't come out yet but they were all still kind of into the work so they came out eventually but you started to see the states doing more kind of boosterish stuff or pamphlets on kind of boring subjects or things that local chambers of commerce wanted them to write about and it just wasn't quite the same and then what really finished the project off was the Second World War so after Pearl Harbor everything changed the entire WPA sort of became oriented towards the war mobilization and the whole structure of the federal government changed in terms of how the relief operations were housed under different agencies and it became very clear that the whole project was going to be different from that point on and Catherine Kella who I mentioned earlier who is the Taurus Editor he was one of the last remaining people to stay with the project through the whole thing and she has a diary that's it's in her papers actually in the Library of Congress but she writes about what it was like during the final months and it was a pretty grim scene and it was pretty sad and she knew it too she had colleagues who just couldn't accept the idea that the project was dissolving like as they were still working on it and they were just trying to wrap things up and put everything in order as best that they could you know knowing that it was going to end and then the last director of the project this guy named Merle Colby who was who had worked on it and there's a whole story within but we probably don't have time for it but he ended up being the kind of last person who you know shut everything down put a stamp on it and he wrote in his final report that you know here's all the material that we're giving over to the Archives and Library of Congress it's all going out there it'll be available with people to see and he hopes that in the future people will go and look at it and I think his phrase was you know they'll see it and they'll take fire from it they'll do something with it so that was kind of the charge that you left all of us I think after the Federal Writers Project was gone he said all this material is there belongs to everyone it's like I said before kind of our public inheritance and everyone should go look at it and do something with it if you so desire it's there for that purpose and I think another part of that is which I don't think we had a chance to talk about were the slave narratives which were interviews did we talk about that? no no we didn't people who were who were slaves and they were in their 80s and 90s and and it was kind of a weird time pressure to talk to them you know before they died and there were a lot of oral histories from there and a man named Benjamin Botkin I think helped archive those so that's important and those are you know you could people can look these up and a lot of it's digitized but I'm wondering if we're if we're getting towards the end in closing is there anything you want to leave viewers with before we go? I think I've said a lot I want to say one thing I want to say was when Henry Olsberg was fired he wouldn't leave it he took him about a week for they had to you know really push him out but he really wanted to get things wrapped up and and help finish so he was fired but he wouldn't leave for about a week so that was kind of interesting yeah I guess maybe maybe the last thing I can say real fast just on that was you know throughout the whole time that he was working there you know in the beginning they had this idea of creating one guidebook for the United States they thought it would be a single book maybe split into regional volumes but it would be considered one big thing and that's like a unitary text that they would publish people would buy it yet and quickly their idea changed and they decided to do these different guidebooks to the state to the different states and then all these kind of proliferating proliferating smaller guides and they always kind of had this idea like someday we'll condense it we'll do this one big guide and they never really did it so then after Henry Olsberg left or was fired from the federal writers project he got a job at a Hastings house publisher and they wanted him to put together this final book and they would just publish it themselves so he brought together a few different people from the federal writers project Dorothea where I believe was her name his assistant during all those years he was kind of his loyal assistant who became his really close friend she worked with him there as an editor a few other people who had been part of the FWP came back and helped him with it and he ended up putting out this one really huge guide to America it was massive he was very happy with it I think it was the best seller when it came out and I kind of end the book on this idea like it was this good accomplishment that he he was finally able to do this but there's just something missing when you look at this one book about America and compare it to the federal writers project publications that are just this sprawling unending open series of investigations into America that you know aren't they're very full and encompassing but they're not necessarily definitive they don't close the story and they kind of imply that the story of America is open and still unfolding and it's still something that people can add to you know and keep keep telling basically so that's kind of the philosophy of the federal writers project that I saw embodied in all these different books and the diversity of the books that you don't really get if you try to condense all of America or the idea of America into one thick book between two covers it just loses something and I think your book is continuing to help tell this story and I think we could probably talk about it for another two hours but we're pretty much coming to the end of this so thank you for this wonderful conversation for writing this I think it's really an essential book on so many levels and to viewers thanks for watching and I would say get ahold of this book thanks a lot thank you very much and thanks again to you International Archives and Living New Deal for presenting this and thank you everyone who is watching thank you