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How to See Colorado: The Federal Writers' Project, American Regionalism, and the "Old New Western History"
SUSAN SCHULTEN
One of the four arts projects of the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Writers' Project created travel guides to each of the forty-eight states. Colorado's distance from the national editorial office—both geographically and culturally—highlights the very real differences between local and national visions of Colorado and the West and offers rich material for studying the evolution of regionalism and western history.
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Between 1936 and 1941, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP)—one of the four arts projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—produced comprehensive guides to each of the forty-eight states, as well as Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. This guide project was a massive achievement, lauded by contemporaries for painting a fresh social, cultural, and historical portrait of the nation. Part travel guide, part reference work, part history book, the guides defied easy categorization, but they were clearly an attempt to expose Americans to the tremendous regional diversity that might be obscured by an increasingly homogenized mass culture. Alfred Kazin considered the project an "extraordinary contemporary epic" that contributed to the emerging "literature of nationhood." Bernard DeVoto argued it was a work of the greatest importance that could never have been undertaken privately, while Lewis Mumford deemed the guides "the finest contribution to American patriotism that has been made in our generation." Many of the guides remained in print for decades, and early editions continue to command high prices through book dealers and loving attention by collectors who still consider them unrivaled introductions to America's back roads and regional culture.1 |
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Earlier scholars of Depression-era culture treat the guides—usually in passing and collectively—as one of the many products of the 1930s that signaled the resurgence of regionalism, folk culture, and the advent of a more pluralistic national identity. All of these descriptions identify an important shift in the decade, but in treating the guide project collectively they miss the heart of the story, which is the actual production of the individual guides themselves.2 More recently, other scholars have delved deeply into the Federal Writers' Project, but still tend to focus on the instructions and stated goals issued by the national office of editors. While these goals illustrate the initial ideals of the project, they are but half the story, for the guides were produced through the interaction of the national and state offices. Each guide involved massive research on the part of locals in the states themselves, as well as frequent correspondence from the national editors in Washington, D. C., who were preparing the material for publication. In some cases this interaction is more interesting than the finished guides themselves, for it reflects a negotiation over the representation of each state. This is especially true for Colorado: the state's distance from the national editorial office—both geographically and culturally—as well as the relative inexperience of the state's writers highlights the very real differences between local and national visions of Colorado and the West, and offers rich material for studying the evolution of regionalism and western history.3 |
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