American-made: the enduring legacy of the WPA : when FDR put the nation to work by Nick Taylor

Author:Nick Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Job creation, Job creation - United States - History - 20th century, 20th Century, General, United States, Job Hunting, Business & Economics, Political Science, Economic Policy, Public Policy, Fiction, Careers, History
ISBN: 9780553802351
Publisher: Bantam Book
Published: 2008-02-26T17:47:54.543000+00:00

13. THE AMERICAN GUIDES: IDAHO VERSUS WASHINGTON, D.C.

The American Guides were slowly beginning to take shape. Even the dueling radicals came to understand that they had to show some progress if the project was to continue and they were to keep their jobs. The field supervisors were in charge of whipping various state operations into shape, and the prodding by hard-nosed supervisors such as Katherine Kellock, who was determined to see the guides fulfill her original vision, began to produce results. The territory Kellock oversaw was the Southeast, from which she wrote fiery memos describing inaction and incompetence. One of her first actions was to jettison the American Guide manual as impractical. She told the state director in South Carolina to ignore the 1,500-word weekly writing requirement in favor of producing hard information. And the information, she emphasized as she moved from state to state, was to be lively and engaging. Her biggest challenge was to convince some state directors they weren’t producing dry government manuals that would gather dust but books, real books, books meant to be used, to be read for pleasure as well as information, and to be talked about.

The Federal One headquarters were now located in mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean’s former mansion in northwest Washington. Crystal chandeliers hung over the desks occupied by the Writers’ Project editors, who at last were starting to receive, in scuffed manila envelopes bearing postmarks from across the country, the troves of information they had anticipated at the outset. Alsberg and his staff saw just how rich the guides could be and felt vindicated. Tom Fleming at the Bancroft Library, writing his sketches of California history, was one small cog in what was now a functioning machine, and other writers and researchers—at Bancroft, across the bay in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, moving throughout the state—were adding more and more material. They were looking at California’s past and its present; at its geology and conservation programs; its climate, flora, and fauna; its Indian tribes and archaeology; transportation; agriculture; industry, commerce, and finance; labor; education; public health and social welfare; sports and recreation; newspapers and radio; folklore; literature; music and theater; art; architecture; and, uniquely in the case of California, movies.

Other writers were compiling pictures of the state’s major cities, with descriptions of their landmarks and points of interest. Still others drove between cities and small towns, watching the car’s odometer as they made notes and measured driving distances for a series of tours that ranged the 780-mile length of California and touched the borders of Oregon and Mexico. Photographers were recording contemporary scenes; archivists searched files for historical photographs and prints; draftsmen drew the kinds of maps that would allow urban explorers to make the correct turn at the right corner.

Work like this was going on all around the country. Until the Federal Writers’ Project, America had been defined largely from abroad by writers such as Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America and Englishman Findlay Muirhead in the Baedeker United States.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.