LEGACY FROM OUR PAST

...his period photographs of the principals are equally fine...

...These essays reflect the renewed sense of an American destiny, the cultural nationalism that we see now as one of the chief legacies of the Thirties...

...He harbored romantic notions of hiring and encouraging creative people to produce important work under the Government's patronage, while at the same time he was forced by the exigencies of bureaucratic life to show some kind of steady work and production and to hire, often, people who were only dubiously writers or editors, but who were indubitably indigent and unemployed...

...In 1938, as part of a plan to discredit the New Deal, the Dies Committee, forerunner of the House UnAmeri-can Activities Committee (HUAC), launched its attack on the WPA Projects as a boondoggle generously laced with Communism—effectively killing the Theater Project and, despite Als-berg's tacking with the new wind, seriously crippling the Writers' Project...

...Several of the guides contain classic essays, such as Conrad Aiken's on Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Sterling A. Brown's milestone essay on the history and plight of the Negro in our nation's capital...

...Because of his personal involvement in the Project—he was coordinating editor in the Washington office from 1935 to 1939—he knows much at first-hand and is indeed able and willing to tell all...

...Mangione is not willing to draw a conclusion on the question of government subsidy of the arts...

...On the other hand, Henry G. Alsberg, the Project's first, most important, and most colorful director, enthusiastically embraced the fact that "for the first time in the history of the United States writers are working for the Government as writers...

...The Series, which had the virtue of providing steady work for many people, was rather epic in its conception and execution...

...The same can be said with even more assurance about the two other great achievements of the Project: its folklore collections and the collected narratives of 2,000 former slaves...

...And if the work hadn't been done when it was, most of the material would have been lost—in that same limbo with so much of our past...

...Mangione's book is a kind of companion piece to Hallie Flanagan's, yet it is much more...

...Despite the recent boom in solid works about the period, too much is still clouded by partisan passions, self-serving nostalgia, or Kitschy-Camp...

...Despite waste, confusion, ineptitudes in Washington and the states, venomous ideological conflicts between Stalinists and Trotskyists in some offices, bitter office politics and power plays, kooks and freaks of all kinds, and the indifference or hostility of the public and many Government functionaries towards artists—despite all these drawbacks, the Project must be accounted a considerable success...

...In our era of $90 million atomic submarines, NASA, ITT, and defense budget rip-offs of the public treasury, do we dare question the bargain we received from those dedicated souls of the 1930s, or the need to remember the hope they had of discovering the country and having it tell the truth to itself so that it might know itself and live...

...The sense of living, non-plastic souls, from Alsberg on down, is wonderfully and often saltily conveyed by Man-gione...

...The last state guides were completed by 1941...

...In addition, thousands of people—including many who went on to distinguished careers—found work and self-respect during the Depression years for salaries that ranged from $50 to $103.50 monthly for writers and from $2,200 to $2,900 annually for supervisors and directors...

...More to the point, it never resolved one of the basic problems of its origin...

...There are Guides to all the states, several territories, and the District of Columbia—fifty-one in all...

...Chametzky is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and editor of The Massachusetts Review...

...It became expedient in 1939 for the Federal Government to turn the program over to the states—a fate long opposed by Alsberg because he believed the program would then succumb to political control, with patronage and hack work sure to follow...

...reviewed by Jules Chametzky Jerre Mangione, novelist and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a history of the Federal Writers' Project that is a welcome and indispensable aid to recovering part of the lost legacy of the 1930s...

...Mr...

...The slave narratives (which have been used for effective volumes on slave life) are only now being published in toto, providing invaluable support for the notion of the survival of a black ethos even within the dehumanizing conditions of slavery...

...Botkin (and others) have culled material from the folklore collections, but much remains still unprocessed in many libraries and repositories...

...It gave work during hard times to needy people—nothing to be sneered at, especially when we recall some of the better known writers thus aided: Nelson Al-gren, Jack Conroy, Arna Bontemps, Lionel Abel, Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosen-feld, Richard Wright, Willard Motley, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Fearing, Ralph Ellison, and Harold Rosenberg...

...At a total cost of $27 million, more than a thousand books, pamphlets, and monographs were published or...

...Yet time and research, aided by a sane and warmly human disposition, have enabled him to assess judiciously the Project's many successes and its lamentable failures...

...collected...

...The best studies for helping one to see the period whole, such as Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left, Studs Ter-kel's marvelous Hard Times, and a breathtaking synthesis by historian Warren Susman (The Thirties), are supplemented by such specialized and individual histories as Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years, his story of the Group Theater, and Hallie Flanagan's Arena, her splendid account of the rise and fall of the WPA Theater Project...

...Alsberg and his office fought for a uniform format and for the general cultural essays in each book...

...On the worth to the nation of this specific episode in our cultural history, there can be little question...

...The chief ornament of the Writers' Project was the American Guide Series...

...Some of these, as I have indicated, assuredly make a permanent contribution to our national self-definition...

...In panoramic fashion the Guides capture, said H. L. Mencken, "the unity and diversity of the American landscape...

...The Project itself was freakish from the start—"fiscally unorthodox" and "administratively unprecedented," as one sober scholar has put it...

...The program lingered on until 1943, but it was effectively over once the war began...

...To Harry Hopkins, who had as an afterthought included creative people in the relief programs (after all, they had a right to eat, too), the primary purpose of the four Projects for artists (Arts, Music, Drama, Writers) created in the WPA Act of 1935 was to provide jobs for unemployed people...

...Each book provides introductory essays on the physical, social, historical, and cultural components to a state's character and includes tour guides...

...anything else that might be produced was gravy...