Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States

PROGRAM NOTE

In the 1930's, facing economic contraction at such a staggering rate as had never been seen in this country, members of FDR's cabinet hatched a plot to put millions of Americans back to work. This program, which was to be known as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was governed by the notion that if workers could simultaneously execute projects useful to the country at large, while reclaiming a sense of pride through gainful employment, that it would be doubly successful. While many Americans know at least something about the infrastructural projects that were taken on by the WPA, the achievements of the Federal Writers Project remain largely unknown.

Gabriel’s Guide takes as its text excerpts primarily from the American Guide Series, a project of the WPA (and more specifically of the Federal Writers Project) which set unemployed writers to the task of creating travel guides for their respective states. In total, forty-eight state guides, as well as several others devoted to major metropolises, were issued. As both historical record and literary achievement, these volumes are a largely unsung American treasure. While the prevailing policy for the Guides was to offer little or no attribution to the authors involved, recent scholarship has shown that literary luminaries—including Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Cheever—made crucial contributions to the guides. Bellow, for instance, is credited (only thanks to historico-academic detective-work) with having written the vivid essay on Chicago for the Illinois guide, excerpted and repurposed here.

In turning their gaze toward their homes, these writers created manuals that were not only practical resources for tourists and residents, but offered, piecemeal in their pages, a new mythology of a country exiting adolescence and entering maturity. Meanwhile, for the contemporary reader, the Guides serve as a time capsule of a very different America than the one in which we now live. Using these texts as a framework, Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States is, I hope, at once a celebration and interrogation of the United States.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2013

LISTEN

I. San Franciscans at Work (California)

Knee Play II - I Boycott the World

PURCHASE