[The goal of a new Federal Writers Project would be economic and
cultural, putting writers to work capturing stories of the pandemic
and this broader moment, while also serving as an archive for the
existing work of local newspapers and non-profits.]
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THE ENDURING LESSONS OF A NEW DEAL WRITERS PROJECT
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Jon Allsop
December 22, 2020
Columbia Journalism Review
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_ The goal of a new Federal Writers Project would be economic and
cultural, putting writers to work capturing stories of the pandemic
and this broader moment, while also serving as an archive for the
existing work of local newspapers and non-profits. _
, Library of Congress
IN 1937, STERLING A. BROWN, a poet and literature professor at Howard
University, published a forthright essay charting the history of Black
life in his hometown of Washington, DC—from the district’s early
status as the “very seat and center” of the domestic slave trade
through the present-day effects of disenfranchisement and segregation.
“In this border city, southern in so many respects, there is a
denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant,”
Brown wrote. “Social compulsion forces many who would naturally be
on the side of civic fairness into hopelessness and indifference.”
The essay was not the sort of thing you might have expected to find in
a guidebook—let alone one paid for and published by the federal
government—yet that’s exactly where it appeared: as a chapter
in _Washington, City and Capital_
[[link removed]],
an early publication of a New Deal program known as the Federal
Writers’ Project. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration
founded the project two years earlier under the aegis of its Works
Progress Administration, a relief program now best known for putting
unemployed Americans to work building roads and bridges, but which
also hired writers, actors, artists, and musicians—supporting
creative labor while also launching programs in arts education,
documentation, and performance. The guidebook—which was compiled as
a template, of sorts, for similar works across the country—was
hardly practical. It ran to more than a thousand pages; upon receiving
a copy, Roosevelt reportedly quipped, “And where is the steamer
trunk that goes with it?” But the reviews were positive
[[link removed]].
At its peak, the Writers’ Project employed more than six thousand
people. Some of its hires—Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Richard
Wright, Saul Bellow, and Studs Terkel, among others—were celebrated,
or would become so, but most qualified by dint of their economic
circumstances. The result was an eclectic staff—“a mazy mass,”
as _Time _magazine put it, of “unemployed newspapermen, poets,
graduates of schools of journalism who had never had jobs, authors of
unpublished novels, high-school teachers, people who had always wanted
to write,” and so on. Putting writers on the public payroll was
controversial, but as Harry Hopkins, the administrator of the Works
Progress Administration, said at the time, “Hell, they’ve got to
eat just like other people.”
Credit: Library of Congress
The project’s overseers ruled out putting its writers to work on
government reports; in the words of Jerre Mangione, its coordinating
editor, wasting talent on bureaucratic drudgery would only have added
“to the depression of the writers and the nation.” Granting them
unfettered creative discretion was also ruled out, lest they crank out
Marxist literature. Federal managers eventually settled on the idea of
a guidebook with five regional volumes; in the end, different states
and localities produced separate guidebooks, which included event
calendars and tour itineraries. They also included essays like
Brown’s. “This is not the well selected, carefully sculptured
mosaic of formal history or geographical description,” one reviewer
wrote, of the guidebooks’ style
[[link removed]].
“It is the profuse disorder of nature and life, the dadaist jumble
of the daily newspaper.”
The guidebooks weren’t the end of the project’s output: it
commissioned hundreds of other works, from oral histories to
ethnographies and collections of folklore. One staffer went on
assignment to Puerto Rico, reporting back on the rise of fascism
there. In Wisconsin, members of the Oneida Nation were employed to
record the language and history of their community
[[link removed]].
In the course of their guidebook work, writers in various states spoke
with formerly enslaved people, and their interviews inspired a
separate, broader initiative: an archive of more than two thousand
first-person narratives about slavery
[[link removed]].
The archive was a “revolutionary opportunity to invite African
Americans—not just as formerly enslaved individuals, but also as
writers, as editors, as clerical staff—to be part of a federal
project supporting this documentation of the past,” Catherine A.
Stewart, a history professor at Cornell College, in Iowa, who has
written a book about the project, says. “There was this idea that it
was a rare moment to get the last generation to speak about the legacy
of enslavement and emancipation.”
A photograph of Julia Ann Jackson, taken as part of the Federal
Writers’ Project’s ex-slave narratives. Credit: Library of
Congress
While the project’s stated aim was to offer an economic lifeline to
the unemployed, its managers had loftier cultural ambitions. Its first
director, Henry Alsberg—a former journalist for the _New York
World_ and _The Nation_ who dabbled in law, theater, progressive
activism, and diplomacy, and who spent time in the nascent Soviet
Union after the First World War—believed that the project could make
a significant contribution to American letters by “seeing what is
really happening to the American people” and documenting it. It was,
by turns, a literary, anthropological, and sociological experiment. It
was also radically journalistic—an exercise in sending reporters out
into a misunderstood country and capturing the stories of people whose
voices typically went unheard. The project paid close attention to
style but also prized accuracy.
In September 1938, a hurricane devastated New England. Project
staffers on the ground sprang into action to cover it; by the end of
the following month, they’d published a book, _New England
Hurricane_, that tracked the storm’s path up the coast in vivid,
town-by-town detail, alongside photographs laying bare the damage.
Readers learned that the Long Island Rail Road tracks at East Hampton
had been “squeezed into bulging loops of steel”; that the
passengers on a train “stalled at the very brink of catastrophe”
in Connecticut spent the night drinking beer in the dining car; that
the denizens of a Rhode Island athletic club found a live fish on the
premises and kept it as a memento. One Rhode Island man “sat in a
rocking chair on what bore some resemblance to a back porch, puffed at
his pipe, and directed a crew of men sorting out the jigsaw puzzle
that was once his home.”
Writing years later [[link removed]], Daniel M.
Fox, of Harvard, likened _New England Hurricane_ to the output of
Henry Luce’s magazine empire, which had launched _Life_ as a photo
magazine in 1936. “It is an American guide to devastation,” Fox
wrote, of the hurricane book, “based on the conviction that the
people who were conquering the most severe economic depression in the
nation’s history had sufficient determination and vitality to
recover from the onslaught of nature.”
EXPERTS CREDIT THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT with germinating some
of America’s great literary works. Its oral histories helped
inspire
[[link removed]] Dave
Isay’s audio project StoryCorps [[link removed]]; the
author Colson Whitehead read the interviews with formerly enslaved
people when he was researching his novel
[[link removed]] _The
Underground Railroad_. The project’s guidebooks remain in use, and
have many dedicated fans.
One is David Kipen, a writer and former director of literature at the
National Endowment for the Arts who now teaches at UCLA. Kipen
discovered the guidebooks in college via the work of Thomas Pynchon (a
fellow Writers’ Project devotee) and scoured secondhand bookstores
to build his own collection; later, when the University of California
Press reissued the state’s guidebook, Kipen wrote the introduction.
After the pandemic hit, Kipen noticed the similarities between the
period in which the original project was born and the present moment.
“The situation of writers was not all that great to begin with—for
years I’ve been saying the Great Depression is already here for
writers,” Kipen told me recently. “It hit me that maybe some
reinvention of the project—which would put writers back to work but
also reintroduce the country to itself, because it seems like half of
America seems so clueless about the other half and vice versa—would
serve a double benefit.”
Kipen started lobbying for a new Writers’ Project in opinion
columns
[[link removed]] and
letters to lawmakers. One US congressman—Rep. Ted Lieu, a California
Democrat—wrote back to Kipen expressing interest in the idea, and
now hopes to introduce a bill in the next Congress. The timing and
exact details of the bill have yet to be finalized, but Lieu’s
office says that a new project could be anchored within the Department
of Labor or a cultural agency, and run as a grant program administered
through existing community institutions, including news outlets. As
with the original, the goal of a new project would be both economic
and cultural, putting the next generation of talent to work capturing
the stories of the pandemic—those of the elderly, for example—and
this broader moment, while also serving as a national archive for the
existing work of local newsrooms and nonprofits.
In Kipen’s conception, the new project would produce a multimedia
mix of journalism and literature. “I like to think journalism, on a
good day, can be literary,” Kipen says. “I think there should be
cross-pollination, and something better than either should emerge.”
Even if a Federal Writers’ Project 2.0 doesn’t pan out, other
bills that already enjoy the backing of numerous lawmakers could, at
least in some small way, replicate the story-telling spirit, if not
the centralized bureaucratic structure, of the original—by providing
federal support for the media business, and in particular for local
outlets, which are increasingly under-resourced and yet remain
uniquely well-placed to document the country. “More than in the
1930s, those local newsrooms do have an infrastructure that could be
used to both connect with the writers who need it the most, but then
also to make sure that those funds are spread as widely as
possible,” Jason Boog, the author of a recent book about the
Depression-era literary scene, says. “By plugging in to those
networks, they would be reaching tons of working writers and
journalists all across the country.”
A couple of the journalism bills under consideration
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that would allow newsrooms to band together to negotiate with Big Tech
and another that would make it easier for outlets to convert to
nonprofit status—predate the start of the pandemic, and focus on
regulatory relief. Bills drafted in the months since
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putting federal dollars on the table—by mandating that the federal
government take out more advertising in local outlets, for instance,
or by creating a series of tax credits
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local-news subscribers and advertisers, and to help fund reporters’
salaries.
“I think what the pandemic has done is broadened awareness beyond
just a small cadre of policymakers,” Penny Muse Abernathy, a
professor at the University of North Carolina who is a leading
authority on local-news deserts
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told me, referring to the industry’s financial plight. “We’ve
begun to get almost a grassroots recognition—among philanthropists,
among community organizers—that something is going on here and it
needs to be addressed.” Abernathy says that staffers for Sen. Maria
Cantwell, a Washington State Democrat, have discussed with her the
possibility of a federally subsidized “universal subscription” for
local news, with additional financial support for news initiatives in
areas that currently lack a local outlet. (Cantwell’s office did not
provide comment.)
Earlier this year, many news organizations were able to claim
forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program
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a general relief mechanism for small businesses, though local papers
owned by large national chains weren’t eligible. At the time of this
writing, Congress was still negotiating a second package, but some
observers have warned that short-term relief will not be enough to
save journalism from its failing commercial business model. “Those
with the most clout want to do things like treat chain newspapers as
local businesses to get the same benefits,” Craig Aaron, co-CEO of
the media advocacy group Free Press, says. “That’s a Shake Shack
bill… not a rethink-the-system kind of bill.” The media-specific
proposals presented in Congress to date—the tax-credits bill, in
particular—go farther, but still fall far short of radical systemic
reform to the media industry, or the boldness of a related new
initiative such as the Writers’ Project.
Come January, however, the US will have a Democratic president again.
Joe Biden, traditionally a moderate, has sought, of late, to style
himself as a latter-day FDR
[[link removed]]—and Kipen, for one, sounds
optimistic that the new administration will be receptive to ideas like
reviving the Writers’ Project. Earlier this year, Kipen served on a
committee that advised the Biden campaign on arts policy; he says that
he used his perch to push his proposal, and that there was some
enthusiasm for it among his peers. (Kipen also tried sending one of
the original project’s guidebooks to the Bidens’ home as a gift,
but it was returned to sender. Biden’s transition team did not
return my requests for comment about the Writers’ Project or
Biden’s plans for the media generally.)
“I think this could be a very hopeful enterprise. And I think
America is as short on hope these days…as it’s short of liquidity
and health and all the other things it’s obviously running low
on,” Kipen says. “There is America enough to cover and writers in
need of work enough to cover it.”
THERE WAS MUCH ABOUT the Federal Writers’ Project that is unworthy
of replication. While managers at the federal level pushed state
offices to hire Black staff, state officials were often reluctant to
do so, and Black writers were often forced to work on segregated
teams. “They were the last to be hired and the first to be fired,”
Stewart, the historian, says. The project’s interviews with formerly
enslaved people are a precious resource, and interviewees usually
found a way to speak their truth for the historical record, Stewart
adds—but the writers the government hired to interview them were
mostly white; some were descendants of slave-owners, and a few were
even members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Often,
interviewers would transcribe quotes in a racist approximation of
Black Southern dialects.
While Alsberg was a visionary, he was also, by all accounts, a lousy
manager. The Writers’ Project was often beset by bureaucratic
infighting and by friction between the federal leadership and state
offices. Nor was the project’s cultural philosophy without
controversy. Many Americans distrusted the government’s involvement
in storytelling; as the writer David A. Taylor has noted
[[link removed]],
in parts of the Southwest, project writers came to be known as _el
Diablo a pie_, or “the Devil on foot.” Critics on the left
disdained the project as a counterrevolutionary endeavor designed to
co-opt and suppress intellectuals’ radical political instincts.
Right-wing politicians, by contrast, saw its output as a radical
threat to American values.
While the project was progressive in many respects, it was premised,
too, on a conservative view of cultural exceptionalism and unity.
(Speaking in the 2009 documentary _Soul of a People_
[[link removed]], the historian Douglas
Brinkley referred to it as “an orgy of Americanism.”) Still, in
the late thirties, the newly formed House Un-American Activities
Committee targeted the project, citing Alsberg’s past dalliances
with the Soviet Union and supposed subversive material in the
guidebooks themselves. Alsberg lobbied to keep the project alive, but
even some of his colleagues felt he didn’t do enough to stand up to
Martin Dies, the Texas congressman who chaired HUAC. Dies’s
smears—amplified in headlines nationwide—spawned broader
congressional pressure targeting other New Deal arts programs. In
1939, lawmakers killed the Federal Theater Project (on its final night
in New York, actors brandished “WANTED” signs accusing a prominent
congressional critic of murdering Pinocchio). The Writers’ Project
got a stay of execution, but only on the condition that it source more
funding from state governments going forward. Amid broader personnel
changes, Alsberg was ousted, and the project eventually petered out.
Many of the manuscripts it had been working on were only catalogued
years later.
Henry Alsberg, director of the Federal Writers’ Project, speaks to
the House Un-American Activities Committee. Credit: Library of
Congress
Today, we find ourselves in a new era of congressional wrecking
tactics, toxic propaganda, and institutional distrust—not least of
journalism. Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political
economy at the University of Pennsylvania, sees a direct line from
then to now—Red-baiting, he says, helped lock in a cultural fear of
government intervention across the economy. The potential for a
well-developed, publicly funded media system, of the type that exists
(and thrives) in many other democracies, has been one casualty of that
legacy, he says. (The Corporation for Public Broadcasting funnels
public funds to NPR and PBS, though its stations are mostly funded
privately. The corporation got a small emergency funding boost in the
spring
[[link removed]]; Aaron
[[link removed]] and others
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argued that Congress should substantially increase its appropriation,
and could also use it as a conduit to fund nonprofit and commercial
outlets.)
Many journalists have internalized the notion that it’s
inappropriate for the government to fund their work and are not
necessarily keen to accept public cash. As Susan Smith Richardson, the
CEO of the Center for Public Integrity, wrote recently for CJR
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that mindset is seen as a “badge of honor” across the industry.
Richardson noted that the CPI’s receipt of a federal loan under the
Paycheck Protection Program didn’t prevent it from later
investigating that scheme, but other outlets have balked at the
specter of a conflict of interest—_Axios_, for instance, took a loan
but returned it following public criticism
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Pickard, though, thinks industry attitudes about public funding are
slowly shifting. And for all that Trump and his allies have done to
smear the national media, lawmakers from across the political
spectrum tend to have a more favorable view of local journalism
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“Even among conservatives who hate ‘the media,’ they still
typically will have warm, fuzzy feelings about their local media,
whether it’s their local newspaper or their local broadcaster,”
Pickard told me. “And I think that’s a potential leverage point:
Americans across the ideological spectrum do care about local
journalism.” Indeed, many of the media bills proposed in Congress
have at least some bipartisan support. Rep. Doug Collins
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a Trump loyalist from Georgia, and Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand
Paul
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the Senate majority leader and his fellow Kentucky Republican, have
signaled their support for antitrust exemptions for news outlets
negotiating with Big Tech. Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of the cosponsors of
the tax-credits bill, is also a Republican.
Clearly, there are many complex dynamics at work here. Republicans
generally seem motivated more by the prospect of giving Big Tech a
bloody nose than steering federal dollars into local-news coffers, let
alone a new project modeled after the New Deal—and that’s assuming
they intend to legislate at all under Biden’s presidency, and not
just obstruct, snarl, and smear from the sidelines. Democrat-led state
governments that could pick up the slack in funding journalism,
meanwhile, have more demands on their cash than they have cash to go
around. (Though the state of New Jersey will soon begin distributing
journalism grants following a campaign spearheaded by Aaron’s group,
Free Press.)
At the very least, Pickard says, ideas like the Writers’ Project
should feature in the public discourse around saving journalism.
“The by-product, which I think is almost as important as the
immediate aim, is to broaden our imagination about what’s possible,
and to be able to point to these things that we did—that Americans
did, in our own history,” he says. “If nothing
else, _rhetorically_ we should really be pushing on this.”
Boog notes that the original project came about as a result of writers
forming unions and marching alongside other working-class interests;
in 1935, writers’ groups picketed repeatedly in New York, carrying
placards with slogans like “Children Need Books. Writers Need A
Break. We Demand Projects.” Today, journalists tend to work at a
remove from their colleagues in the printing plant and distribution
hub [[link removed]].
But within newsrooms, media unions have been increasingly assertive in
recent years—including some affiliated with the NewsGuild, which
was founded in 1933 [[link removed]], in the crucible
of the Depression.
“You have to reach the point where writers are marching in the
street every day, alongside all of these other people who are
suffering, and saying, _We need help_,” Boog says. “When it
reaches that point, that’s when help comes.”
LATE LAST YEAR, C. ZAWADI MORRIS decided to shutter _BK Reader_, the
hyperlocal news outlet she ran in Brooklyn, after a long struggle to
make it financially viable. A couple of ad placements kept the site
running through the early months of 2020, but when the pandemic hit
New York, Morris saw the writing on the wall. “I was like, _Oh,
forget about it, we’re closing_,” she says.
But _BK Reader_ didn’t shut down. Morris successfully applied for
various sources of emergency philanthropic funding. And she quickly
saw the pandemic as a unique storytelling opportunity. Her mind turned
to the many individual perspectives that risked going unheard,
particularly those of vulnerable or marginalized groups. For many
Black residents of Brooklyn, the early uncertainty surrounding the
pandemic “was not entirely unfamiliar,” she wrote later
[[link removed]]. Now “the rest
of America had been swindled into the existential crisis its Black
citizens could have given CliffsNotes for, if asked.” When we spoke
recently, Morris asked me if I had read Sun Tzu’s _The Art of War_.
“You can understand a person’s character by what tools they choose
to fight with in the midst of crisis,” she said. The pandemic, she
thought, was “gonna be a snapshot of what our character is.”
Inspired by the Federal Writers’ Project, Morris launched the
COVID-19 Writers’ Project, a multimedia effort to document the
pandemic stories of Brooklyners from different walks of life: medical
experts, high school students, the formerly incarcerated. Working with
another editor, Morris interviewed subjects over Zoom, a constraint
that initially disappointed her but came to feel appropriate. Later,
after receiving grants from groups including the Pulitzer Center, the
National Geographic Society’s Emergency Fund for Journalists, and
the American Medical Association, she was able to expand the team
working on the project. It was eventually published
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a nonprofit site affiliated with _BK Reader_ (which is for-profit).
Morris and her team organized the COVID-19 Writers’ Project into
chronological phases, and ended it, in September, on the theme of
recovery. “We hoped that there wasn’t going to be another
spike,” Morris said. “But of course, here we are now in another
spike.” She told me she’d like to have continued tracking the
lives of the people she interviewed, had she had access to continued
funding—one of her subjects just lost their mother; another had to
move for financial reasons. For now, _BK Reader_, at least, continues
to cover the pandemic. “But of course, I’m fearful,” Morris told
me. “When COVID goes away, what’s the sustainability of
grants?”
I asked Morris whether she would accept public funding, should the
government make it available to her—putting the “federal” in her
COVID-19 Writers’ Project. “Oh, absolutely,” she said.
“That’s awesome. That would be so progressive if they did
something like that.”
Any public money would have to come with a guarantee of editorial
independence, she said. But “at the heart of it, journalism is a
public service, kind of like teaching. And it should be treated that
way.”
_JON ALLSOP IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST. HE WRITES CJR’S NEWSLETTER
THE MEDIA TODAY. FIND HIM ON TWITTER @JON_ALLSOP
[[link removed]]._
_Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us
by joining CJR today
[[link removed]]._
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