WPA Writers' Project workers captured snapshot of pioneer Oregon

IN 1935, IN the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress passed what's sometimes called the "Second New Deal." It was a $4.88 billion investment into getting Americans through the Depression.

The original New Deal, launched in 1933 just after Franklin Roosevelt won the Presidency, had prevented people from starving in the streets; but Roosevelt agreed with some of his critics who felt giving able-bodied working people dole money was demoralizing and demeaning. The 1935 Emergency Relief Appropriation Act tried to fix that by pivoting away from direct dole payments for people who could work, instead launching projects that could employ the unemployed in their own lines of work.

The philosophy behind this new New Deal push was to let unemployed workers earn their way by putting their existing skills to use, rather than treating them like charity cases or giving them make-work jobs raking leaves or doing litter patrols.

It's an idea that never worked perfectly; but it worked far better than anything else that has been tried, before or since. Professionals and highly skilled workers especially found receiving dole payments profoundly demoralizing and, of course, the government got nothing out of it. Bestowing huge taxpayer-funded gifts upon giant corporations in hopes that they will use the money to employ more people (rather than paying out bonuses to their executives or buying back stock shares) is, if recent experience is any guide, an even worse idea; at least workers receiving a dole payment can be depended on to use it to buy things.

But maybe the best benefit of this "put 'em to work building stuff for the future" approach is, we all got something out of it. Projects like Timberline Lodge, the improvements at Silver Falls State Park, and the Dee Wright Observatory are still around and in use today, and skilled craftsmen proudly brought their best work to the job despite being paid pennies on every dollar their talents would command during more normal times.

One category of skilled workers who are often unemployed during hard times is writers and artists. So a comparatively tiny sliver of the WPA's funds went toward "Federal Project Number One," a group that included the Federal Writers' Project, Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, and Federal Theatre Project.

In Oregon, the Federal Writers' Project was especially interesting, because in 1938 - when most of its work was done - there were actual Oregon Trail pioneers still alive.

The WPA set up an office in Portland, and staffed it with a roster of top-flight writers who had been temporarily embarrassed by the Depression. Sara B. Wrenn, Andrew Sherbert, Clair Churchill, Walker Winslow, and William Haight were frequent contributors, and each brought their own particular flair to the job. Their stories fell into six formal categories: Agriculture, Folklore, Occupations, Transportation systems, Recreational Opportunities, and Ethnic Groups.

The basic operating plan was for the writers to find an interesting person and conduct an oral history with him or her. Writers went to various places in the country and recorded on paper the stories of particularly interesting, colorful and/or elderly citizens.

In addition to these oral-history interviews, there also were travel guides, song lyrics, educational materials for schoolkids, and a free annual "Oregon Almanac." They also produced radio programs and research guides to county archives.

The project hit some rough headwinds toward the end, as political pressure mounted. Lots of conservative politicians considered such projects as make-work boondoggles, and as rumors of Soviet Russia's infiltration of the American intellectual world in the 1930s started increasing in intensity and believability, the House Un-American Activities Committee got involved. The project's national leader was fired in 1939, and then of course when the Second World War broke out it was basically abandoned on the spot.

Because of the war, there was never really a proper winding-down of the WPA writers' project. Boxes and boxes were simply filled with the work and placed in storage. To this day, what's publicly available is a sliver of their total output.

It's a bigger sliver than it was before 1999, though, in Oregon at least. That's when librarians at the State of Oregon Library, cleaning up after a flood, stumbled across several boxes crammed with thousands of pages of Writers' Project files. Scholars Tom Nash, Twilo Scofield and Nancy Appling Salucci volunteered to go through them, photocopying old yellowing typescripts on new acid-free paper and compiling an index to the contents.

These are all available at the state library today. A few of them have been digitized and can be browsed on line at the library's Digital Collections Website. In addition, a collection of 100 or so have been digitized by the Library of Congress and can be browsed on line.

The Folklore Studies manuscripts may be the most interesting of the lot, from a storytelling standpoint. The story in the sidebar to this article is a great example, albeit one cherry-picked by Yours Truly for maximum entertainment value. But, there is lots more where it came from.

IN THE FINAL analysis, anyone with half a day to spend getting reacquainted with old Oregon as it existed in the pre-war years can benefit from the work of these old-time folklorists and history writers. A simple search for "Oregon WPA" at the Library of Congress's Website will bring up nearly 30,000 items, mostly newspapers and books; but if you click the "Manuscripts/Mixed Material" link at the left side of the page, you can browse through 118 of these articles written by the WPA writers in the late 1930s; and another 40 or 50 more have been miscategorized as "Books," so you can find them there as well. It's a drop in the bucket, really; but the color and character of old Oregon shines through in them, and who knows - they may whet your appetite for more!

(Sources: "Federal Writers' Project in Oregon," an article by Tom Nash published Aug. 26, 2022, in The Oregon Encyclopedia; State of Oregon Library digital collections; Library of Congress digital collections)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: finn@offbeatoregon.com or 541-357-2222.