Mirror to America

North and west of Pocatello, Idaho, U. S. highway 30 N enters the Snake River Valley, a wild region of fantastic rock formations, ghost towns, ice caverns, dinosaur fields, waterfalls, hot springs, reclamation projects, historic legends, lava beds. In some places, because of the underground rivers, "a person can put his ear to the ground and hear deep and troubled rumblings as if a mighty ocean rolled far under." Thirty-eight miles from Pocatello a three-mile side road leads to Emigrant Rock, where travelers wrote their names in axle grease as early as 1849. Forty-four miles on, another side road branches off to the Silent City of Rocks, 25 sq. mi. of massive granite fragments shaped like cathedrals, towers, skyscrapers, toadstools. Eighty-two miles from Pocatello is the largest potato-flour mill in the world. At Twin Falls, 42 miles farther, Shoshone Falls drops 212 ft. From the walls of Snake River Canyon, 32 miles on, Idaho's famed Thousand Springs gush enough water to supply all the big cities of the U. S.

Of such miscellaneous items of local color, scenic grandeurs, natural wonders and plain facts, the U. S. guides of the Federal Writers' Project are compounded. With 42 big books already published, 20 now on the presses and some 200 more planned or in preparation, the Federal Writers' Project has become in the last few months the biggest literary job ever undertaken.

Last month publication of the Maine and Vermont guides meant that four of the New England States* had been covered. This month, guides to Philadelphia, New Orleans, Mississippi, North & South Dakota are scheduled for publication. In February the Writers' Project will wind up New England with guides to New Hampshire and Connecticut and will publish its first big highway tour, U. S. 1, tracing the 2,000-mile road mile by mile, landmark by landmark, from Calais, Me. to Key West, Fla. Some time in the spring the Project will release Whaling Masters in Massachusetts, U. S. 30--The Oregon Trail, The Ocean Highway. Also scheduled are State guides that are to be brought out as they are completed until every State, Puerto Rico, Alaska and the Virgin Islands have been mapped, toured and described.

U. S. travelers whizz over the surface of their country, picking up such information as they can get from signboards, gasoline station attendants, road maps, Chamber of Commerce handouts. They race past the biggest factories on earth, rarely pausing to wonder what is made in them. They look out across scenery unparalleled, but only occasionally know the names of the mountain peaks or yawning canyons that take their breath away. They sail through little towns where battles have been fought, insurrections planned, U. S. history made, but usually see only what lies beside the highway as they watch for crossroads and glance at the rear-view mirror to see if a cop is overtaking them. There are few books that can tell them much about the country they travel. The last official U. S. Baedeker appeared in 1909. Written for European tourists, it contained such useful information as that carrying firearms was no longer necessary in the U. S., travel now being "as safe as in the most civilized parts of Europe." But it did advise Europeans to bring their own matches, buttons, ribbons, needle-&-thread, dress gloves.

Big Job-The Federal Writers' Project began its monumental task of giving the U. S. a more up-to-date "detail portrait of itself" in August 1935, when WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins picked a bespectacled, slow-speaking ex-lawyer, ex-newspaperman, ex-publicity agent, Henry Alsberg, as national director. The survivor of a helter-skelter career that included editorial writing on the New York Post, a year as secretary to the U. S. Ambassador to Turkey before the War, a post-War job as the Nation's foreign correspondent, a term as director of the Provincetown Theatre, Director Alsberg started his big job by picking State directors throughout the U. S., soon had a Writers' Project office in every city of 10,000, at least one writer or field worker in each of the U. S.'s 3,000 counties. State directors included 16 newspapermen and women, seven novelists, nine college professors and instructors, three historians, a poet, a bookseller, a dramatist.

Those who think of authors as being rent-free tenants of an ivory tower might be surprised at the list of well-known U. S. writers who have been glad to get on the WPA payroll: Poet Conrad Aiken, for example, who wrote the memorable description of Deerfield, Mass, in the Massachusetts State guide. Idaho director was impassioned, temperamental Novelist Vardis Fisher (In Tragic Life) who rushed out the 431-page Idaho guide ahead of all rivals, promptly started work on a comprehensive Idaho Encyclopedia, scheduled for publication this spring. For Louisiana the director was Novelist Lyle Saxon (Children of Strangers, Fabulous New Orleans), whose guide to New Orleans was complicated by the difficulty of writing about the city's famed red-light district, without giving names and addresses. For Arizona the State director was laconic Novelist Ross Santee, one-time cowboy and rodeo performer. For Texas it was J. Frank Davis, an ex-newspaperman, successful magazine writer and one of the authors of The Ladder, which lost money on Broadway for a year, cost its millionaire backer $1,300,000.

While State offices were being set up, many a veteran Greenwich Villager hotfooted it to Washington, started work in the gaudy Evelyn Walsh McLean mansion, where the Project's temporary offices were established. Although administrative work was handled by professionals like Alsberg's assistant, Reed Harris, or his chief editor, Biographer Edward Barrows (Great Commodore), or Architect Roderick Seidenberg, who designed The New Yorker Hotel, the detail work was done by a mazy mass 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, a sprinkling of first-rate professional writers who were down on their luck.

Nine months after the Project got under way there were 6,000 on the payroll. Now there are 3,000, of whom 1,200 are writers as distinguished from research workers, office assistants. They receive prevailing WPA wages, averaging $93 a month in northern cities, $85 elsewhere. Now so highly organized that its officials boast that in a week it can gather the material for a guide to any Federal highway, in its early days the Project had its temperamental riffles. In Manhattan Poet Orrick Johns had his jaw broken by a literary longshoreman to whom he had refused a job. In St. Louis radical Novelist Jack Conroy (The Disinherited) went on strike. Along with such editorial problems as deciding how much space strikes should take up in community histories, directors were also handicapped by the desertion of their best writers for other jobs; writers were hampered by the possibility that the project would be curtailed, or that the sale of a story would drop them from relief rolls.

Whether or not this literary travail would eventually bring forth a few small mountains or a mammoth mouse, the first U. S. guides evoked far more literary enthusiasm than official publications usually raise. Said Critic Lewis Mumford as the first volumes appeared, "These guidebooks are the finest contribution to American patriotism that has been made in our generation." Said New York Times''s Robert Duffus, as the full nation-wide scope of the Project appeared: "The guides . . . will enable us for the first time to hold the mirror up to all America." Although the Massachusetts guide was denounced by Governor Hurley for its reference to the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, less sensitive readers judged the books' objective viewpoint as fair enough, only wished more recent history had been included, fewer catalogues of colonial worthies, dutiful essays on wild life. In the attempt to fulfill their triple intention of being readable, authoritative and practical, the guides sometimes fall between two stools, sometimes overelaborate local wonders, sometimes tantalizingly skim the surface of some item of unfamiliar history. From the browsing reader's point of view, boldest and best of the books is the anecdotal Cape Cod Pilot, which includes a vivid account of the sinking of the submarine 8-4 off Provincetown, manages to treat old and new Cape Cod with the same good-natured detachment. Almost every book shows flashes of inspired writing. Even the pedestrian Lincoln City Guide of Lincoln, Neb. brightens up in its account of the temperance movement and the wonders of Nebraska weather.

And here & there in the mass of anonymous writing, individual passages stick in the memory: the description of industrial Lawrence, Mass., of the slums of Washington, D. C. that lie within sight of the Capitol; the list of Whitmanesque place names--Corncake Inlet, Money Island, Frying Pan Shoals--in The Intercoastal Waterway; the account of Fort Fisher, in the same volume, where the sea, nibbling away at the old Confederate breastworks, occasionally washes up the skeleton of a soldier.

Aside from such illuminating passages, the first volumes of the Federal guides show that the writers have been better at gathering the facts than in putting them across. But this gigantic job of holding the mirror up to the face of the U. S. is far from finished. Until it is, most U. S. readers will suspend their judgment of its literary worth. One thing the Federal guides can teach them already: how little they know their vast and uncharted country.

*The Federal Writers' Project to date has produced 116 publications, but 74 of these are brief, a few of only local interest, a few are mimeographed collections of folklore. Not all the Project's "big" books are guides, the list including such volumes as The Italians of New York and a book of creative writing, American Stuff.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.