About the Series
The Great Depression was the most serious national
crisis since the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their jobs.
Banks were collapsing. People could not pay mortgages and abandoned
their homes. The was America in 1933, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had
just been elected president. To alleviate the crisis in the country's
economic and political systems, Roosevelt quickly created the still
controversial Works Progress Administration (WPA) to put people back to
work, building roads, bridges and schools.
The Federal Writers' Project
One small section of
the mammoth WPA initiative was the Federal Writers' Project (FWP).
Instead of building roads and bridges, the FWP's formerly jobless writers
and artists helped to create a remarkable portrait in words of something
less tangible: the country's soul.
The purpose of the WPA was emergency aid. The Federal Writers' Project
was considered a "make-work" agency to assist in getting the economy moving
again. Nobody expected that such an agency would create anything as
meaningful as a snapshot of America at a critical moment: a time when old
ways were breaking down and new American stories were just emerging.
The Federal Writers' Project was responsible for the American Guide Series
of travel guides for every state and for interviews with former slaves and
thousands of citizens all across the U.S. in the 1930s. Driving along
the nation's back roads, these writers wrote the biography of America in the
1930s; they described the nation's buildings and festivals, detailed its
land and its landmarks, and recorded its people's stories.
