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, 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.
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put it, of “unemployed newspapermen, poets, graduates of schools of journalism who had never had jobs, authors of unpublished novels, high-school teachers, people who had always wanted to write,” and so on.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.”
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. “It is the profuse disorder of nature and life, the dadaist jumble of the daily newspaper.”