Are Artists Workers? Discussion

The Federal Writers Project (FWP) undertook the most ambitious effort ever in the field of American history, fanning across the country to interview
town inhabitants and prepare forty-eight critically acclaimed state guidebooks (plus Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.) called The
American Guide Series, which are still classics today. The Writers Project recorded 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery that were donated to the
Library of Congress and assembled in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States. The 6,600
writers in the Federal Writers Project, who came from unemployment rolls, indexed newspapers and compiled local histories, oral histories,
ethnographies, children’s books, and other works; interestingly, their editors were not required to be eligible for relief! Among the writers who got
their start on this project were Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Loren Eiseley, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, Studs Terkel, and Richard Wright.
The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), established in August 1935, put vaudevillians, actors, directors, playwrights, musicians, dancers, box office
staff, ushers, designers, and other theater workers on relief rolls to produce performances relevant to local and regional areas. New York City had
units for classical theater, new plays, vaudeville, children’s plays, puppet shows, and caravan productions; most of the productions toured to rural
areas. The FTP also included African American, Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, French, and German units. At first the theater offerings were billed as
“free, adult, and uncensored” and were noted for some of the most innovative stagings of the era, but tumultuous times led to radical left-wing
productions. Living Newspaper plays focused on current issues like farm policy, syphilis testing, and housing inequities that provoked a backlash
and resignations. Funding for the Federal Theatre Project was cancelled in June 1939, but not before helping to establish careers for Arthur Miller,
Orson Welles, John Houseman, Martin Ritt, Elia Kazan, and Marc Blitzstein, among the 12,700 people employed. Approximately 5,000 FTP
playscripts and documentation related to 2,500 titles are in the Library of Congress, with 13,000 online images of stage and costume designs, still
photos, posters, and more.
One other New Deal program inadvertently opened the door to America’s greatest rediscovery of its people’s origins and development. When the
Social Security system was created in 1935, birth information was required for millions of citizens, to determine their eligibility. The Census Bureau
hired the Rand Corporation to devise a coding system based on Soundex—a phonetic indexing system created in 1918—as an aid in researching
the 1880 census records. Soundex allowed an easy search across early records that were wildly variable in spellings and immigrant dialects. In a
massive effort, hundreds of WPA workers created Soundex indexes for the 1880, 1900, and 1920 censuses, including the ages of each family
member. Today, at the National Archives, where the census records are housed, these Soundex indexes are the point of departure for every person
embarking on a genealogical search for family members barely remembered or lost to history. Perhaps no New Deal program has done more to
connect Americans to their own histories and to the nation. Thanks to the Soundex workers in the 1930s, Americans continue today to discover the
richness of America’s development as a nation, one family at a time