Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project (review)

The Federal Writers' Project (FWP), created in 1935 as one of several efforts by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to find useful employment for writers, artists, and actors, is best remembered for creating a series of engaging guidebooks to all the American states and territories. It also produced many other volumes devoted to regional folklife and memoirs of ordinary lives, notably including narratives of ex-slaves and figures active in the labor movement. Although several helpful books already exist on the subject, this one breaks new ground by providing a careful analysis of the guides in relation to American tourism, by examining the considerable amount of ethnographic material that remained unpublished after the program gradually shut down between 1939 and 1943, by exploring the genesis of oral history as a sub-genre within the FWP prior to the program developed at Columbia University after World War II, and by looking in depth at the life histories collected by William Terry Couch, who became Southeast regional director of the FWP.

The book touches upon several disciplines in recreating the manifold emphases of leading FWP administrators. Hirsch emphasizes the objective shared by many in the program to call attention to cultural pluralism and diversity in the United States, even while striving to highlight a mode of "romantic nationalism," an effort at reconciliation that is needlessly repeated throughout. As a consequence of this symbiotic tension between the national and the local, Hirsch gives pertinent attention to the strains between professionals overseeing the program in Washington and amateurs with lesser skills and narrower vision at the state level. As with all of the arts projects, discontinuities between the two levels were problematical. Hirsch provides a good discussion of Sterling Brown's struggle to raise awareness about the lives of African-Americans and Morton W. Royse's determination to achieve greater depth in social and ethnic studies. As Hirsch points out, for FWP leaders, "social work experience had been part of their education, part of their effort to fuse cultural, humanitarian, and political concerns and to learn how others different from themselves actually lived" (26).

Hirsch has interesting material regarding the influence of the program on Franz Boas and his anthropology students, and concerning debates late in the 1930s about the usefulness of information gathered from ordinary people by the FWP to sociologists. A prime issue, for example, involved the representativeness of the material and whether it served as "propaganda" in support of reformist social policies on behalf of "victims of the depression." A valuable chapter concerns Congressman Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of the FWP for having a leftist agenda deemed unpatriotic at a time of growing concern about communism.

The largely neglected folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin emerges as an admirable figure with a prophetic vision for a new form of interdisciplinary social history, produced by collaboration between historians, egalitarian folklorists, and the people themselves, "in which the people are historians as well as the history, telling their own story in their own words—Everyman's history, for Everyman to read" (121). Although that vision was never fully realized, Hirsch looks ahead to a variety of ways in which, during the past decade or so, it has moved closer to reality in several different disciplines and institutions, including the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center and American Memory Project, and the efforts of the National Endowment for the Humanities to create regional humanities centers and online state encyclopedias. Although these efforts have achieved only partial fruition, they represent initiatives begun with the FWP that have been revived and may yet achieve validation.