Notebook : Federal Writers Project

In May of 2020, David Kipen, formerly book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Director of Literature for the National Endowment for the Arts who created the “Big Read” program that spawned a legion of “One City/One Book” reading initiatives (when he left the Chronicle for the NEA in 2009 he opined with foresight that he was unlikely to be replaced), wrote an editorial calling for a revival of the New Deal-era Federal Writers Project. He argued that a new FWP (to resort to one of the moment’s many acronyms) would not only be a lifeline to a nation of writers threatened with penury by the pandemic and the collapse of job opportunities in journalism, but that putting an army of writers to work recording the unprecedented moment in American life could “help reintroduce a divided country to itself” and restore some of our lost social cohesion. His proposal was embraced by US Representative Ted Lieu in May of 2021, when Congress was considering what would become Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, who introduced a “21st-Century Federal Writers’ Project Act” (reintroduced last year), dedicating $60 million to be administered by the Department of Labor through nonprofits, libraries, news outlets, and communications unions, to employ writers documenting “the current state of the American experience.” As David A. Taylor said of the original FWP in a 2009 Smithsonian documentary on the subject, Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story, “the New Deal was not just about construction, it was about the arts: the country wasn’t just hurting economically, it was hurting emotionally.” (We wrote about cultural infrastructure during the debate about the 2021 infrastructure bill.)

The original FWP was a tiny (0.002 percent) sliver of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) budget, established in 1935 to employ writers in creating a national set of guidebooks to introduce Americans to the breadth of the land. The existing “American Baedeker” was not adapted to the growing American car culture, which was making possible travel beyond train and steamship stops. Its mission as a relief program opened it to a broad swath of Americans: of its eventual six thousand participants, only a tenth of them were professional writers at the outset. Indeed the Author’s Guild groused that the feds were serving amateurs and wannabees. It “helped make writers out of people who otherwise might never have had the chance,” David Kipen offered in his opening pitch. As Soul of a People relates, the FWP’s “subject was what made America America. Its authors were a pauper’s army.” The program expanded the ranks of both the observers and the observed: it “made writers go out into the world,” says novelist Dagoberto Gilb. They learned “what unseen working people who might not read much think and say.”

Although the FWP in its hectic four years spun off hundreds of books and pamphlets in addition to the guides, its expansive goal cannot be said to have been fully met almost a hundred years later. “Vast portions of our country remain shockingly underdescribed,” says publisher Matt Weiland, who independently published Mike Wallace’s A New Deal for New York and co-edited State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, an anthology of consciously modeled on the WPA Guides.

As FWP historian Scott Borchert has written, the program was not just accidentally eclectic, it was “anti-fascist by design”: looking the Nurnberg laws and swelling nationalism in Europe, and their fellowship with rising nativist groups in the US like the Klan, the project’s creators aimed to buttress an alternative, inclusive democratic vision. For example Roosevelt enlisted Black poet and Howard professor Sterling A. Brown as part of a “Black Brain Trust,” charged with ensuring that “the Negro [was] not neglected in any of the publications written by or sponsored by the Writers’ Project.” FWP beneficiaries included Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, and Claude McKay; the grant enabled Richard Wright to conclude work on Native Son; the fieldwork Zora Neale Hurston did connection with the Florida guide became the seed of the Library of Congress’s landmark collection of slave narratives. (A trained anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston had already collected materials in Georgia and Florida with folksong researcher Alan Lomax, whose son John became the first folklore director of the FWP. When Roosevelt appointed Archibald MacLeash Librarian of Congress as the FWP was shutting down under political pressure, MacLeash saw the importance of the documentation collected in connection with the guides and created a home for them in the Library of Congress). As Ralph Ellison put it, “you couldn’t find the truth about my background in [official] history. And one of the things that the WPA did is to allow that intermixture between the formal and the folk. The real experience of people as they feel it … we are creating American history.” (Another thing it did was make unlikely roommates of Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow, who remained friends for life.) David Kipen has said that the FWP “invented the discipline of oral history” as it is practiced today.

In another echo of contemporary headwinds, the FWP faced ideological opposition of its own. Representative Martin Dies of Texas, leader of what would become the House Un-American Activities Committee that echoed Joseph McCarthy in the Senate, trained his sights on the FWP as a breeding ground for subversives. “These books were detested by Mr. Roosevelt’s opposition,” wrote John Steinbeck. “In some states the plates [for the American Guides] were broken up after a few copies were printed.” Dies’s committee called the FWP “a splendid vehicle for the dissemination of class hatreds.” Investigators from his committee were caught planting Communist literature in the FWP’s New York office.

The resulting American Guides have remained a durable, if not exactly roadworthy, national document. A collection of them was reissued as a series in the 1980s by publishing legend Andre Schiffrin at Pantheon, just before he was fired by higher ups in a signal moment at consolidating Random House. (He would go on to found the nonprofit public interest publisher, The New Press.) As it happens, one of his successors at Pantheon, Lisa Lucas, was just laid off at the end of May in yet another “reorganization,” and Tracy Sherrod of Little Brown was laid off this week, wiping out three (with Dana Canedy of Simon and Schuster) of the recent major publishing hires of Black women to address racial inequities in publishing. Lisa Lucas tweeted on her way out the door, “I kind of like leaving like Schiffrin.”

The crisis informing David Kipen’s 2020 proposal may seem to be behind us, but it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that it’s not. The catastrophe in local newsrooms that so alarmed him has only deepened: the 2018 acquisition he cited of the Los Angeles Times by biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong eventuated in mass layoffs earlier this year. A number of states in recent years have introduced legislation to protect local journalism, creating tax credits for individual subscriptions, to offset reporters’ wages, and for advertising in local media, including by the government (one less noted source of income loss for local news is the migration of required “public notice” government advertising to free digital platforms). In April New York became the first state to grant newpaper payroll tax credits. Other initiatives include California’s Creative Work Force Act, and its proposed federal analog; the Community News and Small Business Support Act, introduced by a Congressperson whose family ran a local newspaper; tax credit legislation in Maine, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia, and Washington and executive orders in New York and Chicago. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich and inspired by the WPA, provides grants to journalists covering the realities of working life and inequality. Report for America underwrites training placements for beginning reporters in local newsrooms. But most of the legislative initiatives have stalled and the nonprofits labor against an overwhelming tide.

Another threat to writing incomes, relatively unforeseen at the time of David Kipen’s original appeal, has been the arrival of large-language-model artificial intelligence. AI—based, in its most visible current iteration, in language itself—poses threats to writing that are multiple. AI searches are replacing links to writers’ income-producing work with robot-written summaries; it is filling up writing spaces, online and even in print, with AI-written spam; it is gobbling up writers’ originally researched work to repurposes as its own branded information; it is increasing the outputs of those few writers still employed by outlets, enabling staff cuts; and it is taking over jobs that have forever paid writers’ bills, like consumer copy-writing, advertising, corporate writing, copyediting, and proofreading.

The small number of men who are plotting the direction of AI have long expressed enthusiasm for “Universal Basic Income” (UBI) as a response to inevitable job loss it is expected to precipitate in many areas of the workforce. Just two weeks ago neural network pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” advised the UK government to adopt UBI because, although AI would increase productivity, the gains would not be realized by the many who would lose jobs “and that’s going to be very bad for society.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made waves two weeks ago when he adapted his longstanding commitment to UBI to say that recipients should not receive a check from the government but rather a share of his own product, “compute.” Author and tech observer Cory Doctorow recently told a gathering of the copyright-skeptical Authors Alliance that “individual creative workers” lack the “bargaining leverage” to wield copyright to their advantage and that writers and artists would be better off appealing to labor law and advocating for their rights collectively as workers.

Sam Altman has waved vaguely utopian answers to income loss for writers and creative people. “Humans are going to do cool shit and society is going to find some way to reward it,” he reassures, “maybe financial or maybe in some other way.” In the AI future, he opines, “there will be a huge premium on [handmade things]. Even when machine-made products have been much better there has always been a premium on handmade products and I expect that to intensify,” without apparently developing any concrete steps to that end. His cavalier attitude toward the interest of “creators” was illustrated last month by his very public fleecing of robot-portraying actress Scarlett Johansson; as we learned from the #metoo moment, movie stars have a singular ability to dramatize systemic problems. If the marketplace has lost the capacity to remunerate and incentivize writing—to gauge and reward writing of quality and integrity—is the solution just to pay writers as workers, or remove writing from the world of remunerated “work” altogether? A nice hobby for some among the vast seas of unemployed people receiving monthly checks underwritten by the last (tech) companies standing, as their kingpins absorb more wealth.

Finally, as Eric Klinenberg has written, and our strangely truncated election-year discussions of “the economy” reflect, the covid cataclysm itself is hardly behind us, our readiness to remove it from public consciousness notwithstanding. The ideas about threats to “social infrastructure” that Eric Klinenberg developed in his beautiful book, Palaces for the People, which informed our Notebook on infrastructure and a lot of my thinking about books and contemporary culture, are the starting point of his new book about the pandemic, 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, which I long to read, which makes the case that the trauma of those years is very much with us, both as an experience and in its aftereffects in our lives in a shared society. He employs precisely the sort of close listening and documenting of regular people that were the bread and butter of the Federal Writers Project. “The sad and hard lesson that I learned from the Great Depression is that it takes a long time to recover from this,” says Jason Boog, author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today. Infrastructure scholar (and Book Post writer) David Alff recalls that “the Roman version of opera publica included “circuses, works of devotion, recreation, and commerce that represented a broader commitment to what Cicero called cura urbis (care of the city).” In an editorial calling for the inclusion of “social infrastructure” in the 2021 infrastructure bill, Eric Klinenberg asked “why, when the United States is struggling with problems of social distrust, division, and isolation, the proposal includes so little direct investment in civic and social infrastructure.” David Kipen calls a new FWP a “public works project,” a bulwark against the tide of “despair lately threatening to engulf us all.”

The idea of a new Federal Writers Project seems to me to pose a two-sided question: do we need taxpayer supports for writing as short-term relief and sustenance of writing and general knowledge, or do we need to restructure how writing is compensated? And how do we create a literature that speaks for and unites Americans across our inflamed differences? Are these projects the same? To me the prospect of a contemporary “American Guide” that might do both is a wonderful editorial thought experiment. My own instincts have gone in a more plural direction: support libraries, bookselling, publishing, distribution, to create financial opportunities that allow audiences and writers to respond more organically and nourishingly to each other. But the impulse to recover, however vexed or self-skewering a problem it might be, a sense of shared national purpose and mutual attention through writing and reading …

The project seems inevitably one of both multiplicity and unity. The effort to “preserve regional traditions and regional differences being wiped away, by corporate-spawned conformism, by the leveling effect of the Internet, by the declining appreciation for history,” as David Shribman described what a new FWP might do, seems a gesture to unite through the honoring of difference. Writing is both private and public in its very nature, just as infrastructure is the stuff we make as a body to enable our separate households to live richly togther. Federal Writers Project director Henry Alsberg wrote, “the purpose of the American Guide is to put it into the hands of people who don’t realize that wonders exist at their own door.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has formulated a program within its current budget proposal modeled on the FWP, which will be debated as part of the 2025 federal budget. Let your senator or congressman know if you support federal funds for writers and writing about America.

Find out about David Kipen’s other project, the bilingual Los Angeles lending library, Libros Schmibros.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can find her (my) Notebooks for Book Post here.

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