We Need a New Federal Writers Project

It’s never been a great time to be a writer or artist, but in 2026 it’s especially dire. DOGE’s attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts threw people out of work and snatched grants out of the hands of people who were counting on that money to write or perform or create. Even prior to the second Trump administration, public funding for culture in the United States was woeful in comparison to most European countries.

Our illiberal enemies have made it very clear that they don’t want to ignore the arts: they want to weaponize them. NEH grants this year prioritize right-wing political objectives such as “classical humanities,” a buzzword that is clearly just an attempt to re-center literature and history back on to Europeans. The NEH was also roped into the 250^th celebrations, mostly to focus on how important religion allegedly was to the Founders (please ignore any of their own complicated views on the subject).

But we have a historical model for how to respond to this, one that we can both draw on and improve upon: the New Deal and its assorted cultural programs, such as the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Art Project, and the Federal Theater Project. At a time when the humanities and arts are either being threatened or weaponized against liberalism, there are compelling reasons to make use of that past.

Writers and artists during the Great Depression might look at our current era and feel a certain sympathy for the creatives of the 21st century. As Malcolm Cowley recalled, 

The 1920s were the bohemian period in American literature. Young writers went to Greenwich Village or Montparnasse and lived partly on the bounty of their relatives, but chiefly by their wits. They found odd jobs, mixed their own gin, rolled their cigarettes at home and talked their way out of paying bills; but they also wrote books reviews and magazine articles and worked on their first books with the help of advances from hopeful publishers. Their successors, the young writers of the 1930s, were not so lucky. They came to New York at a time when the most hopeful publishers had gone bankrupt and when there were few jobs to be found.

During the Great Depression, operas, theater companies, and symphonies went bankrupt as wealthy philanthropists pulled back funding. Record sales declined by 90% between 1927 and 1930. Musicians were dropped en masse by labels that soon went out of business. White-collar employment more generally was in crisis. Two hundred thousand teachers lost their jobs, along with college professors, ministers, and lawyers. There were limited attempts to fold them into state-level Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) projects, but they were ad hoc: they depended on the individual interest of a state-level administrator. 

The formal proposal for a Federal Writers Project came in 1935. The aim was practical: writing a series of guidebooks for the entire country. They were a mix of handbooks for tourists but also critical essays on the states’ history and culture. Other projects soon came into the mix, such as oral histories and record inventories, but the guidebooks were always the centerpiece. 

The FWP was mirrored by a Federal Music Project, a Federal Art Project, and a Federal Theater Project. The people at the very top of the federal government—President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harry Hopkins—didn’t have strongly held ideological reasons to support the arts. In explaining his support for a writers’ program, Hopkins said, “Hell, they've got to eat just like other people.” The administrators of these programs, however, did have deeply held beliefs about the importance of the arts and culture, and about diversity as a source of strength in American democracy. As a collective project, these programs were intended to catalog, transmit, and reflect back the various strands of American folk culture and folklife. Benjamin Botkin, who led the folklore division starting in 1938, said that 

“In its belief in the public support of art and art for the public, in research not for research's sake but for use and enjoyment by the many, the WPA is attempting to assimilate folklore to the local and national life…The WPA looks upon folklore research not as a private but as a public function, and folklore as public, not private property.” (quoted in The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, p. 50). 

The guidebooks created by the FWP weren’t propagandistic. Sterling Brown, an African American literary critic who worked on Washington, D.C.’s guidebook, wrote that “In this border city, southern in so many respects, there is a denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant.” Reviewing the guidebooks that had been produced by 1939, Robert Cantwell said that “The America that’s emerging from the Writers’ Project books is like nothing we’ve ever seen…it is a grand, melancholy, formless, democratic anthology.” 

Authors great and soon-to-be-great passed through the FWP: Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Richard Wright are counted among its alumni. But most of the thousands of people who worked for the FWP were not literary luminaries. FWP director Henry Alsberg had been determined that the program employ people who were just starting out as writers, because it was supposed to be an accessible training exercise: it would jumpstart their careers by giving them a real view of how Americans lived. 

Not every guidebook was beautifully written. It was a collective project, which meant that some contributions were better than others. Their size could be intimidating: when presented with the Washington, D.C., guidebook, FDR asked whether it came with a steamer trunk. Other projects started by the FWP were left frustratingly unfinished: America Eats was a program to collect information on regional cuisine, gather recipes, and document disappearing foodways, but it was never completed and the archive left scattered. 

There have been calls to revive something like the Federal Writers Project. In 2021, Ted Lieu expressed interest in such a project, but it went nowhere. When we still had something like a functioning NEH and NEA, maybe there was less visible need. But these New Deal cultural programs aren’t forgotten: they’ve gotten favorable remembrances in the last few years from The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Jacobin, but those remembrances tend to focus on the FWP’s left-wing politics or rhapsodize on how great it would be to give writers stable work. 

But I wish to emphasize how the FWP was a defense of the country’s diversity, one reflecting a belief that diversity was a source of strength for democracy. The FWP was organized at a time of rising fascisms in Europe that wished to homogenize and flatten and slaughter until they gained an unthinking obedience from every particle of society. Alsberg and Benjamin Botkin, who led the WPA’s Folklore Division, saw their purpose as making explicit the country’s pluralism. (The Conservation of Culture, p. 7). That meant addressing the country’s ugly history, and it also meant engaging Americans’ sense of curiosity about themselves. The guidebooks were about pushing people to engage with the large, complex, flawed, and nevertheless beautiful country that they inhabited. It’s not a coincidence that these ideas show up in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.” 

Let’s do the same thing now. We don’t even need to wait to take back the federal government. This can start to happen at the state level. There’s historical precedent for that, too: Roosevelt’s idea for the Civilian Conservation Corps began with the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration in New York, begun when he was governor. He tested the ideas for what became the CCC there. 

It’s beyond the scope of this essay to outline a detailed plan for public arts and humanities programs. Better people than I can and should make those decisions. But here’s one thing I’d love to see included as a foundational project: documenting all of the abuses and brutality and crimes of ICE and the mass deportation regime. One of the seminal products that came out of the Federal Writers Project were the Slave Narratives, oral histories done with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, documenting bloody crimes and righteous resistances both, an invaluable service to real knowledge of this country.

We’re going to need a Truth and Reconciliation Committee when this is all over, but hauling people in front of televised hearings or livestreaming their sentencings won’t be enough. We need writers and artists to help people understand this cruelty and to process it. We need historians to collect the stories of what happened to people, both of those who got taken away and those who were left behind. Our first act of collective atonement can be remembrance.

Featured image is The Federal Writers' Project