Editor’s Letter

Federal Writers Project Redux?

On July 7th, Scott Borchert, writing on the editorial page of The New York Times, reported that Representatives Ted Lieu (DCA) and Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) had introduced legislation to create a 21st century version of the Depression Era, Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). An expert on the long forgotten original version of the FWP, Borchert is the author of “Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America,” a history of the Federal Writers’ Project.

“Inspired by the New Deal arts initiatives — which produced government-sponsored guidebooks, murals, plays and more,” Borchert wrote, “their bill is a response to the havoc unleashed by the pandemic on cultural workers in all fields.”

Via the US Department of Labor, $60 million in grants would be distributed to newsrooms, libraries, academic institutions, literary organizations and more. Those organizations, in turn, would hire a new corps of unemployed and underemployed writers who, like their New Deal forebears, would fan out into towns, cities, and countryside to observe the shape of American life.

“They’d assemble, at the grass-roots level,” Borchert wrote, “a collective, national self-portrait, with an emphasis on the impact of the pandemic. The material they gathered would then be housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.”

Given the congressional tribalism that exists today, along with the fact that the bill’s coauthors are both Democrats, it’s an easy call it would pass the House on a party line vote and run into the usual partisan roadblock in the Senate. On the other hand, it may also be fairly predictable that those Senators who opposed the bill could struggle with second thoughts about explaining to the segments of their constituency who would have benefitted from such a beneficial undertaking, which would have carried with it some decent revenue potential for writers.

“The best reason to support a new FWP is also the most obvious,” Borchert writes. “Like its predecessor, the project would be an economic rescue plan for writers, broadly defined: workers who have been grappling with a slowly unfolding crisis in their industry for at least a decade. Even before the pandemic, the combined stresses of the digital revolution, the so-called gig economy, severe cutbacks to local journalism outfits, and other related developments made writing a precarious business.”

Despite the predictably precarious future of the project, if I can be permitted an absurd level of optimism that the FWP will make it into law, you can count on me to show up with three dozen, or more, issues of Natural Traveler Magazine, drop them with a serious thud on the desk of whoever is allocating funds in this project and making the case that staff writers on this magazine have the clearly demonstrable abilities to take on these assignments. Hell, we’ve been covering that territory for three years now.

--Tony Tedeschi