Nailing a Freight on the Fly: The Federal Writers' Project in Nebraska

I find Carol Ahlgren at her office near the Omaha jail and when we meet I can tell she understands my quest. On her desk lies her personal copy of Nebraska: Guide to the Cornhusker State. She says she has used it in travels throughout the state, as if it were the latest from Fodor's and not the Federal Writers' Project guide from 1939. Carol describes herself as a "New Deal junkie"; she admires the epic scale of the New Deal efforts that sent architects and writers and interviewers fanning out over the countryside to take the gauge of America, with eyes to where it could be better.

Carol grew up in Wisconsin, where she learned about fdr from her grandfather. "He saved our farm," he would tell Carol as a girl. After ten years in Nebraska, she feels she's just beyond being a newcomer.

I'm in Nebraska to explore the Federal Writers' Project legacy sixty years later. At the time, the Project kept talented minds working in cities from New York to San Francisco, and gave a life raft to thousands of refugees from the collapsed publishing industry. In Chicago alone it fostered the careers of Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel (his first radio writing job), Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, choreographer Katherine Dunham, and Nelson Algren. But what about the rest of America? Did the Project mean anything to people in smaller cities and towns, or was it simply a make-work effort for urban intellectuals? It seemed a question whose answer might say something about shrinking public arts budgets in our own time.

I planned to retrace Tour #1 in the WPA Guide: down U.S. Route 75 along the western bank of the Missouri River and its rich seam of history: the Winnebago and Omaha (now famous for recreation vehicles and insurance), Lewis and Clark's stop at Blackbird Hill, the Underground Railroad, American farm life and the Dust Bowl, and the Stategic Air Command's Cold War mission.

A telephone call to the Nebraska Historical Society, which reprinted the Nebraska guide, is not encouraging. Most of the state's records about the Writers' Project are buried in deep storage. Any contact with surviving staff will be a fluke, and my information on them is sketchy.

The Project's office in Lincoln didn't escape the cronyism rampant in larger cities, according to Jerre Mangione, who worked in the Washington, DC office and later documented the Project in The Dream and the Deal. For state director, a Nebraska senator appointed his friend's ex-mistress, who proved to be incompetent and paranoid. According to Mangione, her desk was eventually moved out (she continued to collect a salary) and editorial duties went to Rudolph Umland, a young man with no editing experience. The Nebraska guide lists Umland as Assistant State Director.

Besides the state and city travel guides, the Nebraska staff of two dozen also interviewed all kinds of people for their life histories, over 300 of which are on the Library of Congress website. You can browse memories of a farmwife in Dakota City, the songs of a hobo in Lincoln, or a cattleman's tale of driving stock to Omaha. Meatpackers tell how they made a new life in a place where they could own their own home for the first time. Some of those voices still sound very much alive; others suggest how fossilized our own views may sound in a few decades. Cornhuskers of the 1930s were conflicted about all the new technologies. "There were some good, lovely little towns in those days that the automobile ruined," a Plattsmouth resident mourned. An Omaha handyman was more optimistic, and laughed at his memory of crusty old farmers pulling on the reins to calm their horses. "They would swear plenty at the autoists," he said.

Those words cross my mind on the morning I drive north...