Tang and Tone

Stephen Fender

  • Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project by Jerrold Hirsch
    North Carolina, 293 pp, £16.50, November 2003, ISBN 0 8078 5489 1

In the middle of the Depression, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on four Federal Arts Projects. The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) employed up to 13,000 actors, producers, stage designers and technical staff, and produced around 1200 plays. The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) set 6700 writers, clerks, typists and managers to work on schemes ranging from the collection of personal accounts by former slaves to an ambitious programme for American Guidebooks, which as well as conventional tourist information also covered the history and the cultural, social and physical geography of each American state.

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Vol. 26 No. 6 · 18 March 2004 » Stephen Fender » Tang and Tone (print version)
Pages 29-30 | 3112 words