“The Federal Writers Project Was Among the Wisest Things the United States Ever Did.”

From a Los Angles Times story by David Kipen headlined “85 years ago, FDR saved American writers. Could it ever happen again?”:

Kristen Hare is a reporter with a grim beat in the time of COVID. She tallies the carnage of newspaper layoffs for the Poynter Foundation. “Every day I add them,” she says, “and the next day it starts all over again.”

To which millions of Americans right now would be more than entitled to say: Boohoo. As did skeptical Americans during the Great Depression when, 85 years ago today, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Works Progress Administration into existence. But today, we look back on the WPA — and the Federal Writers Project, which FDR authorized 10 weeks later — as among the wisest things the United States ever did.

If the Writers Project had only ever kept young, broke writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Kenneth Rexroth and John Cheever off the dole, it would have been enough. Picture Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright around the same Chicago office coffee urn, griping about going underappreciated. Years later they would be honored with a Nobel, a Pulitzer, a National Book Award and a U.S. postage stamp, respectively. . . .

The program “made writers go out into the world,” says Dagoberto Gilb, the award-winning L.A.-born novelist. They learned “what unseen working people who might not read much think and say” — people who “told beautiful human stories to writers who recorded them. Like fables.”

Don’t take Gilb’s word for it. John Steinbeck called the American Guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together.” Thomas Pynchon — nobody’s idea of an easy grader — wrote that the guides “make instructive and pleasurable reading. In fact, there is some stuff in the [guide to the Berkshires] so good, so rich in detail and deep in feeling, that even I was ashamed to steal from it.”. . .

The natural suspects to pull off a new Writers Project would be the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In March they received $75 million apiece under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. (For five years, I led literary initiatives for the NEA out of what’s now a 7th-floor suite in the Trump Hotel.)

Reached at her office, NEA Chair Mary Anne Carter sounds as busy as a battlefield surgeon. “Helping arts and literary organizations at this time really means helping them survive,” she says. “We hear talk of a Phase 4 bill and the Congress has asked us various questions, but any new programs … would have to be written into the legislation.”. . .

Should any trade publisher ever want to help revive the Project, their first call should be to Matt Weiland. Vice president and senior editor of W.W. Norton, the only major employee-owned imprint in Manhattan, Weiland independently published “A New Deal for New York” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He also co-edited “State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America,” a collection of essays by Gilb, Susan Orlean and 48 others consciously modeled on the WPA Guides.

“I would relish a revitalized Federal Writers Project, of any scale, for our time,” says Weiland. “Vast portions of our country remain shockingly underdescribed, and vast numbers of its citizen-writers remain underemployed. What better time, what fitter moment to engage loads of them in meaningful work and create a detailed and lasting portrait of America in (let us hope) the wake of the pandemic.”. . .