Established May 6, 1935 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s $5 billion New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was an agency established to provide work for the roughly 11 million Americans left unemployed by the Great Depression. In the eight years it operated, the WPA put over 8.5 million Americans to work, building more than 4,000 new school buildings, 130 new hospitals, 29,000 bridges, and 9,000 miles of storm drains and sewer lines.
The primary aim of the WPA – which in 1939 was renamed the Work Projects Administration – was to secure employment for “unskilled men” through public works and infrastructure projects. Yet President Roosevelt, believing that those “less suited” to the manual labor of other WPA projects – e.g. artists, musicians, actors, and writers – had an equal right to employment, initiated Federal Project Number One as part of the WPA in the summer of 1935. Colloquially referred to as Federal One, it included the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Art Project, and the Historical Records Survey. Of the WPA’s total budget, $27 million was set aside for these projects; at their height, arts programs employed as many as 40,000 artists, musicians, actors, and writers.
Federal funding for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) specifically was approved in June 1935, and Henry Alsberg – lawyer, editorial writer, foreign correspondent, and playwright – was chosen as the program’s national director. From its establishment in 1935 to its closure in 1943, the FWP had between 4,000 and 6,500 writers on its payroll, including such luminaries as John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Studs Terkel. Though FWP writers conducted projects in the field, gathering oral histories and collecting local folklore, the most well-known product of the Federal Writers’ Project was the American Guide Series. The series, which served as both guidebook and almanac, combined travel information with essays on geography, architecture, history and commerce. Guides were created for every U.S. state and territory (except Hawaii), as well as major cities, including Washington D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Philadelphia; for several major highways (U.S. 1 and the Oregon Trail); and for select towns, villages, and counties across the United States.
In Oregon, Harold L. Davis – a native of Douglas County, Oregon, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Honey in the Horn – was originally suggested as the state’s first Writers’ Project Director. Ultimately, however, Alfred Powers – Dean of the General Extension Division of Education for the University of Oregon, and author of the History of Oregon Literature – was selected. In Oregon, between 20 and 54 writers, administrators, and staff were employed by the Writers’ Project. In addition to the State Guide, writers in the Oregon program worked on city histories, historical biographies, and news articles. Information about historical records were gathered as part of the Historical Records Survey, and architectural drawings were drafted for historical structures as part of the Historical American Building Survey (HABS).
In October 1937 Powers resigned, and J.V. Edmonds, journalist and Oregon WPA Assistant for Women’s and Professional Projects, took over as Director, a position he held until 1942. Having readied the Oregon Guide for press by late 1939, the same year that federal funding for the program was cut, Edmonds urged for a shift in tone of the products of the Oregon Writers’ Project (OWP). Chambers of Commerce, he argued, should be left to “cover their own dunghills with rosewater”; his writers should “’go to town’ where the sweat and smoke and strain is.” The shift in tone Edmonds had called for in 1939 came to fruition in the early 1940s, as the Oregon Writers’ Project focused its energy on supporting the war effort through thinly-veiled propaganda pieces.
Though done without official approval from the Writers’ Project national office at first, these wartime projects were eventually authorized for all state Writers’ Project offices by January 1942. In June 1940, the OWP published one of the first of these new projects, a brochure on the state’s wartime resources. The next year saw the publication of radio scripts and press releases for the Army and Navy. Among these was the popular Soldiers of the Air! series. Claire Churchill, who had served as Assistant Editor and Field Supervisor on the writing of the Oregon Guide, was the primary author of this radio series.
The broadcast of the first season of Soldiers of the Air! resulted in record enlistment numbers, according to the Army recruiting office in Portland. The program was so well received, in fact, that soon other states expressed interest in the program; this success lead to a second season of Soldiers of the Air! and to three subsequent series: Keep ‘Em Flying in August 1941, The Dinners’ On You in September 1941, and Air Base Skits in late 1941.
As the United States moved ever closer to ending its ostensible neutrality in World War II, the country could ill-afford programs such as the Federal Writers Project, and many of the more skilled writers had already been drawn away in support of the war effort. In July 1941, Oregon Writers’ Project staff was cut from fifty to twenty-five. In December 1942, the records of the Oregon Writers’ Project were delivered to the State Library at Salem, effectively ending the program. Three months later, the national writers’ office was closed as well.
[Sources for this biographical note include the Library of Congress, the Oregon Secretary of State, the Oregon Encyclopedia, and Thomas Ptacek’s “The Federal Writers’ Project in Oregon, 1935-1942: a case study.”]
Author: Rachel Lilley
