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.)