Paying American geniuses to write
When I wrote about the Depression-era Federal Writers Project on a recent Sunday, it was in the context of discovering a reprint of the huge “California in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the Golden State.”
There were a lot of unemployed writers about in those days, same as there were a lot of unemployed everybody elses. Some of them got hired to produce a massive volume that gives the reader of today a wonderful picture of a sparsely populated state that is only geographically comparable to the place we call home in 2021.
They were on the payroll of Washington, D.C., and wrote beautifully, if also sometimes fancifully, and always as if they were being paid by the word, which perhaps they were.
I hadn’t really thought about a contemporary Federal Writers Project. Government prose is like government cheese — nutritious enough, but not very tasty. And government poetry
does not exist.
But after my column ran,
I got a note from the superb writer who had edited the WPA reissue, David Kipen, of Libros Schmibros bookstore and lending library fame.
“Larry, thank you so much for your lovely column about the WPA Guide! It’s well-timed, too. I’ve been working for the last year to revive the Federal Writers’ Project, and Rep. Ted Lieu’s office has now drafted language to make it law!,” David wrote. He sent me a link to an L.A. Times op-ed he’d written on the idea, and a separate piece from the Columbia Journalism Review. “Rest assured that the spirit of the WPA Guide is alive, and that Southern California is leading the charge to reinvent it.”
The CJR piece, by Jon Allsop, goes into the history of the other state guides written on the federal dime. The first template was actually a 1937 guide to Washington, D.C., with an essay by Sterling A. Brown, a poet and literature professor at Howard University. In it Brown gets off some remarkably frank comments on D.C.’s “early status as the ‘very seat and center’ of the domestic slave trade ... ‘In this border city, southern in so many respects, there is a denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant,’ Brown wrote.”
Presented with a copy of the thousand-page guide to the city, President Franklin Roosevelt reportedly quipped: “And where is the steamer trunk that goes with it?”
Lieu’s bill, called the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project, was introduced in May. It calls for spending $60 million, doled out by the Department of Labor, in funding to nonprofits, libraries, news outlets and communications unions, Lieu’s office has said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated layoffs and position reductions at many news outlets, and many freelance and gig writers have also seen opportunities shrink away,” Lieuwrote in an email to the Times.
“We can leverage their unique abilities to capture the drastic and unrelenting cultural shifts that are occurring throughout our nation due to the pandemic and the many years of cultural shift that will follow,” he added. “Not only will this program serve as a jobs program for many talented people, it will also supplement the national narrative and capture invaluable stories that may otherwise go untold.”
As they say when things only cost $60 million, that’s not even a rounding error in the federal budget. But there will be a lot of blowback nevertheless on the plan to spend taxpayer money on unemployed writers.
Still: Gwendolyn Brooks, May Swenson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and John Cheever got their first writing gigs from the FWP. If we valued such genius as much as we do stealth bombers, we’d sign that check, pronto.