The Infinite Dividend: The WPA · Episode 6 of 13 · 34 min
The Nation's Self-Portrait: The Federal Writers' Project and the Slave Narratives
The WPA hired roughly ten thousand out-of-work writers to describe their own country. They produced the American Guide Series, a guidebook to every state, and recorded more than 2,300 first-person interviews with formerly enslaved people between 1936 and 1938. The narratives are indispensable but carry limits shaped by who did the interviewing.
Who's who
- Henry AlsbergNational director of the Federal Writers' Project
- John LomaxFolklore adviser who pushed the ex-slave interviews and chose interviewers
- Benjamin BotkinFolklore editor who compiled the narratives in 1941
- Zora Neale HurstonNovelist and folklorist who shaped the Florida unit
- Ralph EllisonYoung New York FWP writer, later author of Invisible Man
- Richard WrightChicago and New York FWP writer before Native Son
- Studs TerkelChicago FWP writer who carried oral history into broadcasting
Where it happens
- Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Holds the narratives, digitized as Born in Slavery
Timeline
- 1935The Federal Writers' Project is established with Henry Alsberg as director
- 1936-1938Most Slave Narrative interviews are conducted across seventeen states
- 1938Botkin becomes folklore editor and begins organizing the narratives
- 1939The project is pushed to state sponsorship and renamed the Writers' Program
- 1941Botkin compiles seventeen bound volumes deposited at the Library of Congress
Still debated
Historians debate the reliability of the narratives given interviewer race, Jim Crow context, informants' age and uneven transcription. Whether the heavy dialect spelling reflects real speech or imposes a stereotype is also argued.