The Utah Writers' Project and Writing of Utah: A Guide to the State

The Utah Writers' Project and Writing of Utah: A Guide to the State

By RICHARD L. SAUNDERS

The 1930s are almost defined by the economic recovery programs of the Roosevelt administration. Midway into the national recovery process, in 1935, a sliver of relief work was budgeted to put unemployed writers, researchers, and office workers into meaningful employment. The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) employed less than 1 percent of the nation's public relief rolls—and garnered criticism inversely proportional to its size. To politicians, the FWP was merely one more strategy to put people into paying work; anything actually produced was a side benefit. To those who actually led the work, however, it represented an opportunity to generate literary monuments that would stand alongside the parks, trails, and watercourse improvements built by other relief projects. Drawing upon a European tourist tradition, the Baedeker guidebooks, the FWP envisioned its crowning contribution to American culture as a series or guidebooks, which would describe the country geographically, historically, and culturally. 1

Despite protests from those in opposed to public relief work of any sort, a central state office of the Federal Writers' Project was established in Ogden late in 1935. Maurice L. Howe, a graduate of the University of Utah and staff writer for the Ogden Standard Examiner, was recruited to establish and supervise twin divisions, the Writers' Project (WP) itself and the Historical Records Survey (HRS). 2 The Writers' Project was charged with descriptive writing and editorial work, while the Historical Records Survey was a documentary agency established to catalogue public and social records in the state, such as the contents of county courthouse vaults. In 1936 national policy split the HRS from the WP and established the HRS as an independent research and resources agency under Federal One, the overarching funding structure for relief projects. During its seven-year operation, the FWP in Utah researched and wrote histories of the U.S. Forest Service in the state, a history of grazing, newspaper and magazine articles on local culture and history, radio programs, and all of its own publicity materials and campaigns. Nevertheless, from 1935 until publication of a guidebook in 1941, the primary goal of Utah's FWP (and its successor, the Utah Writers' Project) was the creation of a manuscript for the American Guide Series.

As project director and editor, Maurice Howe faced the daunting task of generating usable research files and beginning to compile the guidebook at the same time that the national office was trying first to decide and then to communicate what the Writers' Project would do and how its work should be done. To make a reasonable beginning, Howe dispatched his people to work in several directions. Some of his twenty- to thirty-member HRS staff began by generating survey forms for workers (usually no more than two in a county; some counties had no workers) to use in inventories and descriptions of county records. Others began compiling bibliographies of published works that contained data on specific counties or transcribing or abstracting significant works and dividing the transcripts into topical files.

Almost as soon as the project office was established in Ogden, the Writers' Project staff set to work outlining potential sections of the guidebook. Within a month, half a dozen were completed and filed. Writing effort soon shifted toward expanding outlines into drafts. The staff also began a preliminary page-length estimate and layout on the Utah guidebook. In May 1936 they completed a page-makeup dummy and a full-scale outline allotting space for essays and specifying the number and placement of illustrations, and they dispatched these to the national office. The dummy was followed in July by preliminary drafts of several sections for the forthcoming volume. 3

While work progressed on the narrative sections of the forthcoming guide, a handful of other workers were dispatched throughout the state to drive county roads and highways. They recorded mileage between intersections, listed sites of historic or scenic value along roadways, noted driving conditions and resources a traveler might need, and weighed the merits of one route over another. Their reports, edited and presented neatly in sequence, eventually resulted in a detailed set of in-state road tours covering every nook and cranny of the state and occupying nearly half the completed guidebook.

The WP staff was comparatively small in any one state, but each project employed dozens of people with a wide range of skills (and competence levels) who occasionally demonstrated the will to work at cross purposes. 4 The writing process was hampered by three major flaws foreseen by FWP officials at the inception of the program: widely diverse abilities, interests, and writing styles of those employed; staff turnover; and the stylistic choppiness that inevitably resulted from the first two. The solution to these problems had been to centralize the review and approval processes for anything intended for publication. Central review fostered stylistic coherence, but the turnaround for manuscripts sent to the Washington office became a chronic problem almost immediately. The delays were compounded by director Henry Alsberg's desire to have the final editorial approval on everything the country produced. A guidebook section was first drafted, edited, corrected, and retyped at the state office before carbons were distributed to outside reviewers and forwarded to the national office. Here, each section was reviewed, edited for language and theme, forwarded to director Alsberg for the same process, and then returned to the state office—theoretically. In reality, because of the veritable avalanche of material pouring in from the state offices, the Washington office became a bottleneck for drafts at all different stages of approval. State materials risked loss within the cogs of bureaucracy and Alsberg's frenetically paced organizational style. 5

Through 1936 and halfway through 1937, the Ogden office forwarded draft chapters eastward for review and approval as quickly as they could be written. But since fifty other states and territories and several cities were doing the same, Utah's material only added to an unmanageable deluge of manuscripts. Being a small western state, Utah did not rank high on the national priority list. The Washington staff largely ignored its submissions, and drafts from Utah eventually eddied into the quiet backwaters of file drawers. Unaware of this, the FWP office staff back in Ogden busily continued compiling data, organizing research files, and drafting essays.

The desire for process and stylistic similarity among the guides was frustrated further by the tangle of conflicting instructions, formats, outlines, and forms that spun out of the national O&LCQ like a spider's web. It was quite possible for a state office to submit a chapter and have it returned "approved with minor corrections" in its first stage of review—and then to have the whole corrected draft rejected as unsuitable when it was resubmitted a month later. For instance, one particular set of Utah tours was submitted in February 1938. The manuscript lay untouched in the DC. files until August, when it was returned without editorial comment; then, the following January, it was discarded as unacceptable at Washington's insistence. 6

While Howe busied his staff in Utah, the first volume of the American Guide Series was issued. It was not, as had been planned, the Washington, D.C., volume. The Idaho FWP director, novelist Vardis Fisher, had ignored directives and regulations, written the text mostly himself, offered the manuscript to a commercial publisher (Caxton Press), and gotten the Idaho guide into print in early 1937. This was not merely an issue over who was able to release the symbolic first book. By federal law, government publications were to be printed by the Government Printing Office and distributed at nominal charge. This regulation had always been a sticking point in the plans for the American Guide Series. Fisher had avoided the issue by having the Idaho secretary of state sponsor publication of the guide. After discussing it among the staff and tweaking FWP regulations to create a loophole, Alsberg and the Washington office instructed other projects to follow suit. State offices were to find nominal public sponsors for the guidebooks from within the state. This move meant that the guidebooks would not be strictly federal relief projects, and thus they could avoid the federal printing restriction. 7

Rather than pitch state guidebook manuscripts to publishers individually, as Fisher had done, Alsberg hit upon a plan for national publishers to bid on state guide manuscripts grouped in small lots. In this way, states like the Dakotas would have the same opportunities for quality manufacturing and national distribution that the New York or Massachusetts guides would. Utah's guidebook wound up, along with those from Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas, in the hands of Hastings House of New York. 8

In Utah, the search for a state sponsor, a painful and drawn-out process, was the responsibility of Writers' Project editor Charles Madsen, one of Howe's original tour-writing crew and the manager of daily activity in the WP office. Madsen presented the sponsorship plan to the Ogden and Salt Lake City chambers of commerce, receiving a good deal of excited interest, but neither body was in a position to advance sponsorship money. He then approached the State Road Commission and the Utah State Historical Society, but their refusals also cited money as the issue. Madsen even floated the idea of distributing production costs among local printers and publishers, and he asked for a cost estimate from printer and amateur historian Charles Kelly at the Western Printing Company. "All feeling favorable to Guide," noted an internal publishing report for early 1937, "but no funds." Potential distribution of the as-yet-unpublished guidebook was about as encouraging. Howe personally wrote to every store in the state that carried books. Only six responded that they would be interested in carrying such a volume. 9

At the end of June 1938 Maurice Howe was summoned to Washington and appointed to the Federal Writers' Project central editorial staff. But he retained directorship of the Utah project, supervising the writing and editorial work by correspondence until June 1939. Howe was then reassigned, and Utah's HRS and WP offices became independent projects with separate management. Law student Dee Bramwell was appointed to head the Utah HRS, and Charles Madsen became head of the Writers' Project. Because of his personal interest in the research and activities in Utah, Howe remained connected as an official (but to right, are Mr. and Mrs. Clarence unpaid) project consultant and advisor. 10

Lee, Robert Clark Tyler, and Buck Utah's leadership change was symptomatic Lee. of the recurring challenge that plagued research and writing staffs nationwide. Since the Writers' Project was a relief program, turnover in the project staffs was steady, even among the members not on relief, due both to migration into better paying private-sector jobs and to regulations limiting the time a worker was allowed to remain in a relief position. Beyond a few key "noncertified" positions (hirees not on work relief, some of whom had part-time appointments) both the HRS andWP were required to put into service anyone who was sent them—not always to the best effect. The Utah project faced a specific challenge in Howe's replacement. Charles Madsen had been involved with the forthcoming guide almost since the beginning, yet with the loosening of Howe's direction, work on the Utah guidebook ground quickly into low gear. Madsen was well-respected for his ability to create the tours that would go into the guide, but as an administrator he cloaked himself and entangled his staff in petty office politics. Wittingly or unwittingly, Madsen played staff members against each other, creating an atmosphere in which it was difficult for workers to trust each other sufficiently to draft, critique, and edit work productively. 11 Similar situations that frustrated WP work in other locations were addressed from the central office, but, intent on pushing guidebooks to completion in other states, the central FWP office seemed not to notice these issues in Utah.

By the fall of 1938, many of the state guides were at the manufacturing stage. The national office at last realized that it should be concerned about the Utah volume, and the regional and state supervisors were finally willing to admit that, despite two and a half years of work, little had actually been accomplished. To stimulate Utah's writing process (and evidently unaware of the drafts already buried in their own files), a visiting member of the national staff solicited Vardis Fisher, head of the Idaho Writers' Project, to push out an acceptable guidebook manuscript for Utah. 12

In Washington, Maurice Howe forcibly pried from the grip of the national office the material that Utah's project had submitted to date and returned it to Salt Lake City. Much of it had been "in review" for more than a year and was still in editorial limbo. Vardis Fisher made a trip from Boise to Salt Lake City in April 1939 to find near-chaos among the assembled drafts. The first batch of tours and descriptive essays he discovered to be incomplete. Most had notes like "See Madsen for this material" and "This to be added later" sprinkled liberally throughout the pages. Checking randomly a second, third, and fourth batch, he discovered that incompletions were not limited to discrete sections of the drafts; most or all were incomplete and, with isolated exceptions, in no condition to be edited for publishable copy. 13

Several months later, in mid-August, the national reviewer, a woman cited only as "Mrs. Isham," again came West unannounced and demanded from Fisher an assessment of the Utah project. He was not complimentary. Yes, drafts were still incomplete, but the editor's cooperation had been difficult for him to secure. Having worked with the Utah essays since spring and having been in the Utah offices for several weeks, Fisher laid primary responsibility for Utah's lack of headway squarely on state editor Madsen, who had regarded Fisher's appointment as a personal affront. "I do not think it reasonable to expect even an efficient staff here to get the Utah book ready before the first of the year," Fisher reported. "There's simply too much to be done yet. Too much copy is in the rough." He was giving up. Both the FWP official and state WPA administrator Darrell Greenwell, who had disliked the Writers' Project from the first, asked if Fisher knew of someone who would be a better director. He did not. 14

In a private letter to Howe written a few days later, Fisher reported the rounds of intrigues and posturing ambitions that plagued the Utah WP office and asked, "Do you know of anyone who could whip the book out? First thing you know G[reenwell] will be closing this project." 15 Greenwell, knowing that Howe himself was caught in the flux of a shakeup in Washington and the dismissal of Federal Writers' Project head Henry Alsberg, also wrote to Howe suggesting he return to Salt Lake City to again head the Utah project. Howe responded with encouragement, noting that Fisher could write well but tended to overreact. Admittedly, Madsen was not a careful editor, but, Howe told Greenwell, he had earned a solid reputation with the national office for consistently generating good tour materials. He had done a great deal of work and should be allowed to finish the task. Howe did welcome Greenwell's suggestion that a new supervisor be found. 16

Fisher submitted his formal report on the status of the Utah guidebook, including estimates on the time needed to complete various parts, on August 29, 1939. In the report Fisher also suggested that in order to streamline the process the Ogden office be closed and that relief positions located elsewhere in the state be relocated in Salt Lake City. He proposed that the Utah WP secure the services of Montana's tour editor and suggested hiring an office manager to take managerial responsibilities out of Madsen s hands, allowing him to concentrate on writing. Both suggestions were veiled swipes at Madsen. Fisher now said he saw no reason that a complete guidebook manuscript could not be approved by January 1940. 17 Though the offices were consolidated a year later, most of his recommendations were ignored.

In addition, the Utah office was working with larger complications looming overhead. National Writers' Project director Henry Alsberg had been dismissed in May. In addition to the uproar connected with this firing, everyone had been distracted by congressional wrangling over Congress's authorization for the national project and the potential fallout if the FWP was left without funding. Through the late spring and into the summer of 1939, the work pace in Utah had lagged appreciably as the HRS in Ogden and the WP in Salt Lake City marked time, working on tasks and files that could be completed quickly and dropped if the funding plug were actually pulled. Writing on the Utah guide was slowed dramatically or not done at all. Francis Harrington, the national relief-project administrator, even ordered offices closed nationwide after June 30 (the last funded day) until the vote on the pending Relief Bill resolved the final status of Federal One. 18

Writers' Project funding survived the congressional vote tally, but the compromise bill that passed required several drastic, immediate changes. First, the idea of guidebook sponsorship was expanded to apply to the state projects as a whole. Some states had already published their guidebooks and closed their offices, but the Writers' Project offices still functioning were required to obtain partial support from sponsoring bodies within their respective states. In Utah, Charles Madsen made hasty arrangements to slide the Writers' Project under the rubric of the Utah Institute of Fine Arts (UIFA), the state cultural resources office. This provided the state's orphan guidebook with a parent at last (a co-sponsor was later found in the Salt Lake County Commission). A second funding condition was that, rather than merely accumulating topical research files, each office must secure sponsors willing to underwrite some of the costs of the research and distribution of individual writing projects. Writers' Project work would center on what could be funded. The legislation also transferred administration from the national level to the states themselves, a process that recreated the various state WP offices as federally subsidized research-for-hire units. 19 Utah's guidebook, conducted under the UIFA sponsorship, became merely one of several large-scale projects envisioned by the Utah WP, among which were a major history of grazing in the West (completed but never published) and a history of the Forest Service, which became entangled in sponsorship negotiations and was aborted before writing was begun. 20

On the same day that Fisher dated his report, the Utah Institute of Fine Arts signed a lease on the old Elks Building at 59 So. State Street in Salt Lake City, intending to renovate it as a community arts center and offices for the Utah Writers' Project. Within the week, the project sponsorships that the staff had scrambled to draw together were judged sufficient to merit continued federal support, and President Roosevelt signed the necessary papers. In preparation for the move to the Elks Building, Madsen traveled to Ogden in mid-September to notify the staff that offices would be centralized in Salt Lake City. By the last months of 1939, the Ogden office of the Utah Writers' Project had closed. 21

The new Utah Writers' Project was now reasonably secure, and attention returned to the flagging state guidebook. Under renewed pressure from state and national administrations, Madsen began pushing his writing and editorial staff to produce. The pressure backfired badly. Staff members, still stressed by internal dissension, were now also suspicious of their supervisor, and they accomplished little useful editorial work. By the third week of September, Madsen knew he needed help, and he quietly offered HRS historian and editor Dale L. Morgan a job on the Writers' Project staff. Morgan was close to beginning a manuscript on the State of Deseret that he wanted to write and was putting out HRS county historical sketches with regularity. His attention had been drawn to Farrar & Rinehart's Rivers of America Series as well. In fact, on the first of October he wrote the firm proposing a volume on the Humboldt River, and he was still writing to advertising firms throughout California seeking permanent employment. With his capacity for writing already strained by what he wanted to do, Morgan declined the offer, feeling that he could not take on another large-scale writing or editorial project like the Utah guidebook. 22

With Fisher gone and Madsen still playing office politics, the Utah Writers' Project was left with an incomplete guidebook manuscript, a writing staff almost paralyzed by intrigues, and an editor in a quandary over precisely how to proceed. Impatient, the national office moved preemptively and informed the Utah office in December 1939 that a consulting editor was being dispatched from Washington. Not knowing quite what to expect, in late January Madsen asked Morgan to at least review and critique the historical essay, which had already been through one round of approvals. Morgan agreed. After several days with the material, though he felt that on the whole the work was "ably written," he returned a devastating factual critique. His catalogue of factual errors or faulty interpretations ran to thirteen closely-typed pages. "My principle [sic] objection," Morgan wrote to Howe, a close friend, "is that the [guidebook's] emphasis lies too greatly on event, on political history, and too little on the people." 23

Less than two weeks later, national Writers' Project editor Darel McConkey arrived in Salt Lake City and set about reviewing drafts and discussing with the staff what yet needed to be done. Like Vardis Fisher months before, McConkey was not impressed with the Utah Writers' Project's collection of written material, and he confronted Charles Madsen about the state of the office and the project. Earlier in Washington, Howe had quietly suggested that McConkey get Dale Morgan involved with the guide, or at least the historical essays. Against this backdrop, out of Madsen and McConkey's meeting came an idea to borrow rather than to draft Morgan away from the HRS. Within days, McConkey was camped in WPA director Darrell Greenwell's office insisting that Morgan's services were required if the guidebook project was to be salvaged at all. Greenwell tentatively agreed and summoned Dee Bramwell. The HRS head scrambled to plead his own case. His arguments were identical to Madsen s, namely that "without [Morgan] the H.R.S. would be behind the 8 ball." After some discussion, Bramwell returned with a compromise proposal to lay before Morgan. Greenwell, Bramwell, and HRS editor Hugh O'Neil (who had been included in the discussions by this time) agreed that Morgan would work on both the Writers' Project and the Historical Records Survey. Since it fit within his own interest area, increased his salary, and gave him at last a genuine full-time job, Morgan agreed to the plan and began a new work schedule. In the mornings he worked for the Writers' Project as an editor for the state guidebook essays; the afternoons he devoted to the Historical Records Survey to complete work on the "State of Deseret" manuscript, an Ogden city history, and various historical essays for the county inventory volumes. 24

Morgan's prodigious memory (and personal accumulation of duplicate transcript files) made the process functionally possible, but the time-sharing further complicated an already awkward arrangement. When Morgan and other HRS writers had transferred to the office in Salt Lake City, their voluminous research files had remained in the depopulated Ogden office. Writers would request specific subject files and the files would be transferred between Ogden and Salt Lake City on daily commuter trains. Morgan wrote to Howe that he began working on the text for the central essay, the state history, on or near the first of March 1940. But it was not long before Morgan's copious need for sources demonstrated how awkward the file-transfer arrangement was. His requests for file material from Ogden were so taxing that Greenwell finally acted on Fisher's earlier suggestion, had the cabinets shipped to Salt Lake City, and closed the Ogden office for good. 25

While the rest of the WP staff worked furiously on converting field notes into tour manuscripts, Morgan pounded away on the state history. By the end of April he had an eighty-nine-page manuscript ready for review. He mailed carbons to Howe and McConkey and then dived back into the HRS compilation of a Carbon County bibliography, the Ogden city history, and several other small projects. While the Washington office's reviews of this and the guide's other main sections were in process, and before the inevitable round of corrections and emendations were begun, Morgan determined to make a research foray into Nevada to support his Humboldt River book. 26 Morgan, Nevada native Dwight Jones, and another friend departed for their road trip on June 20. Morgan returned two weeks later to find McConkey finished with the essay and suggesting that it be cut extensively.

There were other changes, as well. Having gotten the WP writing process moving in Utah, Darel McConkey was preparing to return to Washington. Before leaving, he lobbied intensely both the state and national offices to act on Fisher's earlier suggestion that the Utah Writers' Project be restructured. Hugh O'Neil of the HRS was one possibility for the directorship. O'Neil had been with the HRS almost since its beginning, and the national office considered him to be a competent editor and administrator, but O'Neil had seriously compromised the appearance of his objectivity at the state level by writing a negative article in the anti- Mormon newspaper Light on Mormonism, published in Ohio. Morgan's personable style, coupled with an obviously gifted mind and an ability to push out a superior body of writing on short schedules had attracted attention from the state and national administrations. McConkey met little resistance when he suggested that the state appoint Morgan to the Writers' Project directorship and that the national office approve the appointment. The day after Morgan left for Nevada, Darel McConkey excitedly wrote to him that he was "IT!" McConkey went east, but not before seeing that a complete first draft of the guidebook manuscript was mailed to the national office ahead of him. Morgan assumed duties as the WP director and state guide editor on July 8, 1940. Despite his interpersonal style in the office, Charles Madsen had carried the project through some difficult straits. In acknowledgment of his hard work, former WP editor/director Madsen was kicked upstairs to a non-supervisory post in the WPA administration. 27

By the time Dale Morgan assumed the state editorship, Utah's guidebook was slated to become one of the last books issued in the American Guide Series, which finally gave it priority in Washington's review process. Morgan had about two weeks in July of 1940 to settle into his new position before the reviewed and corrected drafts that had been sitting in Washington office files for months (some of the tours, for years) finally arrived from the national editors. He immediately divided the manuscript between his staff and set them to work on revisions. As general editor, he oversaw the revision process between July and September and was also responsible for cutting the manuscript to fit the estimated page count allowed by the guide's publication contract with Hastings House. He was also thrown bodily into playing the state agency politics inherent in the cooperative sponsorships that had become the project's lifeblood.

Morgan inherited one specific problem as well. The national office had rejected the entire first draft of the guide's opening essay, "The Contemporary Scene," and Vardis Fisher's rewriting as well. Darel McConkey had produced a revision when he was in the state himself, but the new Federal Writers' Project director, Alsberg's replacement John D. Newsom, still did not approve of the result. While the balance of the Utah guide manuscript returned to Salt Lake City, the opening essay was given to sociologist and ex-Utahn Nels Anderson. Anderson returned his revision in late August 1940. Newsom remained dissatisfied.

The primary issue behind the dissatisfaction with the lead essay was how it might be regarded by one particularly sensitive, historically rich resource. A delicate relationship existed between the public writing projects and the LDS Church Historian's Office, whose library was then the largest in the state. Morgan and Dee Bramwell of the HRS had carefully cultivated relations for more than two years, and for the moment church cooperation delicately tipped in the project's favor. Both the state and national offices were extraordinarily sensitive and went to great lengths to excise any possible slight, misperception, or misstatement that might upset the church department's research cooperation. Concerned that the opening essay might upset the balance, Howe turned to Morgan for help. "While I am very busy and have my hands full, I will do anything to get the Guide out more quickly," Morgan wrote in response. "Tell them to fire the damned essay out here in all its versions, and I'll have a crack at it." When the balance of the guidebook's final manuscript was shipped in September to the publisher, Hastings House in New York, the opening essay went back west to Morgan. 28

In the midst of negotiations for project sponsorships, routine supervisory and office work, reviews of edited manuscripts, and meetings, Morgan squeezed out a draft of a new "Contemporary Scene" essay in a little more than a week. The draft, which by now he wryly referred to as "The Contemptuous Scene," returned to Washington on the second of October. It was, he stated to Howe, about four-tenths Dale Morgan, two-tenths Maurice Howe, two-tenths Darel McConkey, one-tenth Nels Anderson, "and maybe an additional paprika sprinkling of Vardis Fisher." 29 This version was finally accepted.

With the final guidebook manuscript at last in the keeping of Hastings House, the publisher calculated the book's finished length. It was then handed off to J.J. Little and Ives, a New York typesetting firm. On November 15, 1940, Maurice Howe wrote hastily to Morgan telling him the glad news that type was being set. While their work was being committed to type, the Utah Writers' Project staff turned directly to other enterprises. Morgan devoted his time primarily to soliciting sponsorships for new writing projects, but he again picked up work on HRS county histories. 30

Unfortunately, the scheduled publication for the Utah guidebook hit a snag almost immediately. Hastings House shuffled its priorities, and printing of the Utah guide was held up in favor of the Louisiana guidebook, which the publisher hoped to have available in time for Mardi Gras. This twist of fate threatened to push publication of the Utah guide from early January 1941 well into February or March. Hastings used the downtime to send the Utah manuscript back to Washington to have it cut by an additional hundred pages. After this edit, Howe apologized profusely to Morgan. Most of the deletions were quoted material for which the Utah staff had spent months getting permissions. 31

The first long sheets of galley proofs arrived in Washington and Utah just after Christmas. Morgan read and corrected the Utah set himself, then he collated corrections line by line as they came from Howe and other readers. Initially, Howe complimented Morgan on how well the text flowed (he had begun with Morgan's essay), but within a few sheets both men were appalled by the choppy overall quality of the writing. Howe began sending daily airmail letters of galley corrections to Morgan, who for his part admitted that he was wielding a heavy pencil. "There is no semblance of uniformity in organization of the information; each essay is a damned law unto itself," Morgan complained. The galley corrections went beyond factual errors to the heart of the real issue—the writing-by-committee process that had produced the text. Sections had been compiled, written, edited, reviewed, and approved by dozens of different people at different times over the past four years. Before the galley stage, even the editor had seen the whole thing only in its constituent pieces. 32

For years, the effects of its own convoluted approval process had been lost entirely on the national office, but in the midst of Howe's review a heated battle erupted in Washington over the propriety of national staff editing guide manuscripts that had been approved by the state projects and their respective sponsors. Since the central office had been editing manuscripts since 1936, this should have been a non-issue. Perhaps the time Howe had lavished on the Utah book made it an issue, however, and he quietly informed Morgan that he might not be able to complete his reading. 33

The last of the galleys were hustled back to the printer in time for the Utah offices to host a reception and promotional dinner showcasing their work to Utah legislators. The party was an important public relations move for the arts projects, as Utah's legislators generally disapproved of the whitecollar relief initiatives sponsored by the federal administration. Staff members entertained questions of all sorts that evening, and most legislators left that evening expressing positive opinions of the project's accomplishments. 34

With the guide at last at the press, marketing became the top priority. Through February 1941 the office staff worked on a largescale advertising campaign, writing radio spots of different types and promotional newspaper articles of varying lengths. Darrell Greenwell wrote a circular letter reminding employees to boost the book at every opportunity. Morgan or his lieutenants approached theSalt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, and Salt Lake Telegram asking the papers to feature the book, not just advertise it. He also put in place a plan for the one major labor remaining on the volume: the index. Coming at the end of the process, indexing is always the most intensive, time-driven part of publication. Once corrected page proofs arrived in early March, the index consumed an entire week of twelve-hour days for the whole WP office. As the last of the index cards were being written up, a telegram from the publisher on Saturday morning announced that Hastings needed the typed index manuscript in hand by the following Tuesday if it was to keep a publication date of April 1. Several of the staff completed the necessary work in straight thirty-six-hour stints through the weekend; the index was mailed Monday morning. 35

Their work paid off. A single copy of Utah: A Guide to the State, in its blue and yellow dust jacket, arrived in Salt Lake City from Hastings via air express mail on March 28, 1941. The book was handed carefully around the Utah Writers' Project office, since this copy was supposed to be presented formally to Governor Herbert Maw the next day. This formal presentation was made to the governor by UIFA director Gail Martin and Ruby Garrett, head of the Utah WPA's Women's and Professional Projects section. 36 No one from the Writers' Project was invited. The staff held their own publication party a few days later when the crated books began arriving. Presentation copies of the guidebook were given to the Utah Institute of Fine Arts board members, select state officials, and the Utah State Historical Society and Salt Lake City libraries. Morgan made certain that inscribed copies were given to the entire staff of the LDS Church Historian's Office and to church president Heber J. Grant. The project writers and editors who had produced the book were required to buy copies on their own. 37

The day after the April 1 publication date, the Utah guide appeared on store shelves, and the staff activated the promotional campaign. Since much of the guidebook was geared toward automobile travel and sites reachable by road, the staff had hunted up an old "horseless carriage" automobile. The car was used in a promotional stunt to carry the first copies of the guide to the downtown stores and to present a book to Salt Lake City mayor Ab Jenkins. Building on this "horseless carriage" publicity, Mayor Jenkins and the Writers' Project offered a copy of the guide to any owner of an automobile built before 1920. The only catch was that a car had to be driven to the Arts Center in order for its owner to claim a volume. 38 Copies of the book were displayed prominently in the downtown Arts Center the same day.

Retail interest in the capital city was said to be considerable. The downtown stores immediately absorbed 7,500 small promotional flyers sent west by Hastings. ZCMI's staff hurriedly mimeographed an announcement of their own and sent it to affiliated stores in the southern part of the state. Elsewhere in the city, anecdotal sales reports were exciting as well. The books were said to be selling rapidly in Deseret Book Store, ZCMI, and Auerbach's book department. At an office machine store where he worked, Morgan's brother Bob sold his own copy right off his desktop, even before he'd had a chance to look at it, to a customer who had walked into the office. The Writers' Project editor was entertaining the heady idea that the entire press run might sell out within the state alone. The reaction of critics fueled his optimism. Even among the American Guide Series books, which were generally praised, the Utah guide was acknowledged to stand apart for its scope, narrative quality, and readability. Morgan was pleased to catalogue very little negative opinion but was pained over nine or ten typographical errors that had slipped through the review process. 39

Despite exciting initial reports, within a few days of the book's release it was evident that actual sales figures were modest. Discrete inquiries revealed that virtually nothing had been done to market the book beyond handing out the publisher's brochures and ZCMI's flier. Hastings House had failed to do direct mailings as promised, either to Latter-day Saint congregations or to the Utah State Historical Society membership list.

Local stores had failed to use the marketing materials supplied by the project, and some had not used in-store advertising or created book displays at all. The Writers' Project staff, who had produced the book and generated an ad campaign, now had to make promotional contacts, sales calls, and billing arrangements in order to market the edition themselves. The staff visited or wrote to school libraries throughout the state, touting the guidebook's suitability for general use. They approached the Continental Oil Company (Conoco) about featuring the guide in appropriate issues of its Travelaid brochure series. They even took it to the Alta Club, where the wealthy, conservative club officers were impressed with the book and praised it warmly, feeling that it would benefit the state's businesses. However, the Republican party members among them declined to allow the club to underwrite its advertising on the grounds that they did not want to be perceived as supporting the offshoot of a Democratic program. 40

By the middle of May, the war in Europe occupied more and more headlines, and despite the best efforts of project personnel to push sales, few retailers responded. The book was a seller, but not the spectacular sellout that Morgan had hoped for. Deseret Book Store, which had not bothered even to feature the book with in-store advertising, sold a hundred copies quickly but dawdled over reordering. Another store owner did not order copies at all until the book had been out two weeks, and then he wanted only half a dozen. They were gone almost instantly, but he placed a second order just as small. No store in Provo carried the guide, and newspapers south of Salt Lake City failed to carry stories or advertising despite the almost-weekly press releases the project office sent out. Reinforced by a positive article on the WPA guides in the Journal of the National Education Association, WP publicist George Hunter wrote an article on the guide's production process at the invitation of the Utah Educational Review editor. However, when copies of the magazine came out, Hunter could not find the article at all. It had been dropped from the contents to make space for last-minute advertising. The editor apologized and promised that the article would run in the next issue. Hunter inquired when that would be. Sometime in the fall, he was told. 41

Guidebook sales continued steadily despite the setbacks. Unaware of the inattention among distributors, Ogden's Standard Examiner concluded that "interest [in the guide] was light" 42—even though contemporary comments imply that sales were good among those who knew about the book and could locate a copy in the stores. On the first Sunday in July, fully three months after its release, the Salt Lake Tribune at last ran a full-page illustrated story on the book. The story came late enough that the writer could comment on what seemed to be the guide's slow sales. To boost awareness in the state, the Arts Project put together a traveling promotional exhibit that was featured not only in the Salt Lake City offices but also in Provo, Price, and Helper. 43 By this time the excitement of publication had passed, and the Utah Writers' Project staff turned their attention to other projects in a fight for the program's continued survival. Morgan tried mightily to convince the state to adopt the project as its public relations and development arm, without success. 44

Six months after release of the Utah guide, the final book in the American Guide Series, the guidebook for Oklahoma, was issued. By September 1941, the fifty-one-component showpiece of the Writers' Project was complete. Utah's guide had been released mere weeks before the first peacetime draft began drawing men for military training. As the U.S. entered the Second World War, Morgan and his staff continued to promote sales of the Utah guide, devoting more energy to placing eversmaller numbers of books. When the Writer's Project was disbanded in 1943, the copies remaining in the project's hands were probably parceled out by the publisher to various stores as remainders.

In the years immediately after the war, as young servicemen and women returned home to begin families, buy new cars, and spend disposable income in leisure pursuits, sales of the American Guide Series picked up again. A compilation of tours from the guide series was issued in five-volume regional and one-volume national variations in 1954, and Utah: A Guide to the State was reprinted virtually without changes in 1945, 1954, and 1959. Now sixty years old, the WPA guidebook has been superseded by newer, more up-to-date titles, including revised versions of itself. In 1981 the guidebook was subjected to a "second edition," and a third followed in 1998. 45 These describe more national monuments and parks, larger cities, and an interstate highway system. The first-edition books are gone from the holdings of most public and school libraries, but the volume remains interesting reading and can still guide a reader along many of what have become Utah's back roads. However, buyers must look hard for one, because the original imprint, if it is in good condition and sports the increasingly rare illustrated dust jacket, finds eager buyers in the rare book market. Curious, isn't it? The treasures coddled by modern rare-book collectors are a far cry from the everyman's guide to the country first envisioned by Henry Alsberg.

NOTES

Richard L Saunders is the curator of Special Collections at the University ofTennesee at Martin His most recent book is Printing in Deseret; currently he is at work on a biography of Dale Morgan

1 Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the DeahThe Federal Writers' Project, 1935—1943 (2d ed.; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 46-49 The FWP also produced several regional and city guides, but the guides for the forty-eight states and the territories of Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii were the main focus The widespread criticism of the FWP in the conservative press is considered in detail in Mangione's book

2 Howe began work in November 1935, but the appointment was not made official until the beginning of the next year; Robert Greenwell to Maurice L Howe, January 1, 1936, Dale L Morgan papers, Bancroft Library, microfilm reel 26, frame 1824 Hereafter, citations of the Morgan papers are made by reel and frame number of the 1989 microfilming, as "26:1824." Howe functionally directed both offices until 1939 Much of his correspondence as head of and consultant to the Utah project is now in Series 7 of the Dale L Morgan papers, as Morgan inherited Howe's correspondence at the latter's untimely death in 1945. These are found on reels 26-28. Other arts projects were established in Utah at the same time as the FWP, including the Theater Project, Art Project (which designed the covers for HR S publications), Sewing Project, and Music Project All fall beyond the scope of this article; none has been considered historically

3 Outlines for "Manufacturing and Industry," "Transportation," and "Hotels" may be found in Morgan papers, 26:1796, 1802, 1811; "Prehistoric Inhabitants of Utah" was dispatched to Washington as early as June 10,1936; seeWPA papers,"Final Copy," 80, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City (USHS)

4 Mangione, Dream and the Deal, chapter 4

5 Mangione, Dream and the Deal, 13-14. Maurice Howe commented privately on Alsberg, calling him "a punk [i.e., poor] executive and marvelously evasive"; Maurice Howe to Darrell Greenwell, Morgan papers, 27:164.

6 Howe to Darrell Greenwell, August 25,1939, Morgan papers, 27:165

7 Mangione, Dream and the Deal, 202-207, 220-22 The title page of the Idaho guide was dated 1936, but the volume was actually published the following year

8 Mangione, Dream and the Deal, 230—32.

9 "Publications Report," 1937, Morgan papers, 26:1861; Howe to Morgan, May 13, 1941, Morgan papers, 26:879

10Robert Slover, Circular Letter no 7, June 2, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:64; Charles Madsen to Hugh O'NeilJuly 2, 1938, Morgan papers, 26:1988

"See statements about Madsen by office workers in Morgan papers, 27:1100-112 Comments on Madsen's feuds are discussed in Fisher to Howe, August 17, 1939, 27:146; Fisher to Howe, August 20, 1939, 27:152; Howe to Greenwell, August 25, 1939, 27:165; Fisher to Greenwell, August 29, 1939, 27:169; Fisher to Howe, October 18,1938, 26:2057

12 Mangione, Dream and the Deal, 201-208; Dee Bramwell to Dale L Morgan, August 15, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:142;Vardis Fisher to Howe and Fisher to Henry Alsberg, October 18, 1938, Morgan papers, 26: 2057, 2052; Salt Lake Tribune, August 30,1939

13 Fisher to Howe, August 17, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:146

14 Fisher to Howe, August 17, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:146; Fisher to Darrell Greenwell, August 27, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:169.

15 Vardis Fisher to Maurice Howe, August 17,1939, Morgan papers, 27:146

16 Greenwell to Howe, August 22, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:159; Howe to Greenwell, August 25, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:164

17 Fisher to Greenwell, August 29, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:169

18 Fisher to Howe, June 2, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:65; O'Neil to Morgan, June 24, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:86; Bramwell, Circular Letter No 10, June 30, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:89; Mangione, Dream and the Deal, 13-16, 329-30

19 Mangione, Dream and the Deal, 20—21, 330

20 Smaller projects included publication of Provo: Pioneer Mormon City and a book collecting the texts from state historical markers titled Utah's Story. A "dictionary of Utah altitudes" nearly made it to press with University of Utah sponsorship, as did a Salt Lake City almanac with help from the county One project that was discussed but never got off the ground was a history of Utah's mining industry; another was a history of the Great Salt Lake. Dale Morgan later wrote such a book privately.

21 Salt Lake Tribune, August 29, September 6, 1939; Madsen to Howe, September 12, 1939, Morgan papers, 27:192; Howe to Morgan, October 11, 1939, Morgan papers, 26:575

22C. C.Anderson to Morgan, [July 1940], Morgan papers, 27:1101; Morgan to Howe, September 26, 1939, Morgan papers, 26:245.

23Morgan to Howe, January 24, 1940, Morgan papers, 8:915 and 27:303

24 Howe to Morgan, January 19, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:611; transcript of undated conversation in the hand of Dee Bramwell and perhaps Hugh O'Neil, Morgan papers, 27:738—43; Morgan to Howe, February 20, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:304 The last two projects were completed as "The State of Deseret," Utah Historical Quarterly 8 (1940): 65—239, and A History of Ogden (Ogden, UT: Ogden City Commission, 1940).

25 Morgan to Howe, April 6, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:313

26 McConkey to Morgan, April 26, 1940, Morgan papers, 14:1318; Howe to Morgan, April 26, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:675

27 "The Mormon Communistic State," Light on Mormonism, July Sept 1938; McConkey to Morgan, June 21, 1940, Morgan papers, 14:1319; Morgan to Howe, July 6, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:340

28 McConkey to Morgan, September 3, 1940, Morgan papers, 14:1347; Morgan to Howe, September 11, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:361 McConkey also reported that despite the work that had been lavished on the manuscript, in the final review he had been required to rewrite the preface, removing many deserved credits. It was a spatial, not a political, decision, he noted to Morgan; McConkey to Morgan, September 22,1940, Morgan papers, 14:1350.

29 Morgan to Howe, October 2, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:368

30 Howe to Morgan, 26:757

31 Howe to Morgan, December 4, 1940, Morgan papers, 26:770

32Morgan to Howe, January 5, 1941, Morgan papers, 26:392

33Howe to Morgan, January 13, 1941, Morgan papers, 26:815.

34 Morgan to Ruby Garrett, January 30, 1941, Morgan papers, 27:475; cf 27:764, 948, 950

35 Morgan to Howe, March 10, 1941, Morgan papers, 26:404

36 Salt Lake Tribune, March 29,1941

40 See various correspondence between April 3 and June 15, 1942, Morgan papers, sect 7, for comments on the topic, particularly 27:662, 863, 974,1001,1145,1161, 1190,1229

41 Morgan to Howe, May 10, 1941, Morgan papers, 26:423; Journal of the National Education Association 27 (May 1938): 140-41.

42 Ogden Standard Examiner, undated clipping, Morgan papers, 80:1316

43Darrel McConkey by Ruby Garrett to Florence Kerr for John Newsom, June 16, 1941, WPA papers, 79: "Correspondence," USHS

44 Morgan to Howe, May 1, 1941, Morgan papers, 26:418; Morgan to Ora Bundy, October 14, 1941, 27:578

45 Ward Jay Roylance, Utah: A Guide to the State (Salt Lake City: Utah a Guide to the State Foundation, 1982); Barry Scholl and Francois Camoin, Utah:A Guide to the State (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998)