Federal Writers Project

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Barack Obama wants to pump money into public works projects like roads and bridges, much like the old Works Progress Administration from the 1930s.

And Mark I. Pinsky recently had a really interesting essay in The New Republic about another program from that era, and that was the Federal Writers Project.

And he urged reviving that.

Now, Grant, you know about this project. This employed more than 6,000 out-of-work reporters and editors and other kinds of writers to produce some really fascinating stuff, like, for example, oral histories from freed slaves.

And it gave a lot of writers a chance to practice their craft, people who turned out to be Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck.

I think that this would be a really great message to send, that this is another kind of infrastructure that merits that kind of investment.

I don’t suppose that the reception to that would be any different now than it was then, Martha.

I do know about this. At the time, there was a great outcry. People saw it as the pointy heads getting a free ride on the government.

And there was much criticism, even of the people who were doing jobs for the WPA that involved a great deal of manual labor, crushing rocks to build roads or erecting buildings and working in the woods, that sort of thing.

Just hard manual labor. People just saw them as being lazy.

I mean, it wasn’t a universal opinion, but there certainly were divided camps on whether or not it was a good idea.

Right. What, these people were just sitting there typing or something?

I mean –

Well, yeah.

It’s even harder, though, to justify in the minds of most people, at least at the time it was, it was hard to justify paying salaries to people for something that seems so slight.

I know a lot of magazines that have that same problem, that same attitude.

Believe me.

Yeah, it hasn’t much changed since then.

But I would love to see something like that. There’s a great deal of work that is still undone from the original WPA.

You’ve heard me talk about the lexicon of trade jargon, right?

Oh, yeah, right.

This was a federal writer’s project that was never completed. It was never published.

The manuscript lies there in the Library of Congress. A handful of people have consulted it.

Eventually, I hope to finish it and publish it.

But, you know, that would be a great thing to try to revive and maybe update so you could compare the 1930s to the 2010s.

And this is jargon from various vocations?

That’s right.

They went around. They interviewed people. A lot of it happened in New York City, as a matter of fact.

They went to union work halls and just buttonholed people and found out what the language they used on the job was.

Well, if you want to talk about language, writing, editing, the origin of words and phrases, grammar, slang, pronunciation, you name it, call us.

The number is 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.