TOUR ONE
HENRY ALSBERG, WASHINGTON, DC
“A COMPLETELY DEBACLED INTELLECTUAL LIBERAL”
On December 26, 1933, Henry Alsberg sat at his typewriter and banged out a letter. He was fifty-two years old—four months older than President Franklin Roosevelt—and living in his mother’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Roosevelt was rounding out his first year in the White House.) For years, Alsberg had been bouncing between Europe and West Ninety-fifth Street and a small cottage in the Hudson Valley. Overseas, he’d been a roving correspondent, a diplomatic aid, and a relief worker. In Manhattan, he wrote feature articles and book reviews and kept up a parallel, albeit dwindling, career in the downtown theater scene. In his Hudson Valley shack, as he called it, he lived between relaxation and procrastination: writing letters, stabbing at an autobiographical novel, staring into the low, forested hills. He was a bearish man with dark eyes and a small mustache, affable and irascible, prone to melancholy and to fits of whimsy. On that late December day in New York, he sat and typed, already feeling the weight of another uncertain year bearing down on him. He’d written to this particular correspondent many times in the past decade, and once more, he unburdened himself.
Dear E.G.: I was sure you didn’t want me to know about your coming, because you didn’t breathe me a word about it in any letter. Of course I heard about it, and am waiting with “spannung” [great eagerness] to greet you … Do come along soon. I will not consider any other possibility. During the last year since I saw you I have fallen into complete moral and mental desuetude. Nobody loves me any more, except perhaps you, my dear E.G. I need some moral and mental support. So when you come, I shall immediately begin to lean on you.
His “dear E.G.” was the world’s best-known anarchist, Emma Goldman. They’d met in 1920, inside the Soviet Union—Alsberg as a reporter with Bolshevik sympathies, Goldman as an exile struggling to find a place in the new Russia, which she increasingly distrusted. Alsberg was tagging along with Bertrand Russell, who was part of a delegation from the UK, when they ran into Goldman. “He brought with him a whiff of the best that was in America—sincerity and easy joviality, directness and camaraderie,” as she put it in her memoir, which, later, Alsberg would help her edit. He befriended Goldman and her companion, Alexander Berkman, whom everyone called Sasha.
During the twenties Alsberg grew close with the pair, visiting them in Europe when he could, writing when he couldn’t. He noticed their ideas shaping his inchoate radicalism, seeping into his sensibility. “I am passionately interested in freedom as an abstract proposition,” he wrote to Goldman in 1925, “and I am devoting my life to helping the acquirement of it along wherever I can”—but he was also “hopelessly christian in sentiment, although hopelessly sceptical” and “indolent in a sort of Buddhistic manner.” Alsberg could admire Goldberg and Berkman for their certainty and militancy, for the clarity of their thinking, but he could never match them—so he believed, anyway.
Goldman was only twelve years older than Alsberg, but the emotional currents of their correspondence nudged her into a maternal role. To Goldman, Alsberg was “old grouch,” “old lobster,” “dear old Henry,” sometimes “Hank”—even “old Hanky boy.” Her fondness for him was inflected with amusement and a small bit of irritation. They discussed friends and comrades and adversaries. They conferred over apartments and compared their unsettled living situations. Both of them could be touchy and aggrieved—Goldman forthright as a soapbox speech, Alsberg self-pitying and sarcastic—but tension between them always dissipated. They seemed never to discuss the intensely private matter of Alsberg’s sexuality, a fact held close for his entire, solitary life. Perhaps he felt they didn’t need to. They talked about Gandhi and the Russian Revolution and The Nation (“as smug and comfortable as any oily middle class sheet,” according to Goldman). For years they shared a running joke about gefilte fish.
As he composed his letter, Alsberg was excited by the thought of meeting his friend on Manhattan soil. Goldman hadn’t set foot in New York since 1919, when she, Berkman, and 247 other alien radicals were loaded onto a ship and booted out of the country. (That happened in another December, at dawn, Goldman peering bitterly through a porthole at the Statue of Liberty as the buildings receded and the bay opened into the gray Atlantic.) Alsberg was a stranger to her then. Now he was a friend, but he’d only sat beside her in foreign places, usually briefly, and he was eager to welcome her to town.
That night, the Depression was also on Alsberg’s mind. Their correspondence since 1929 hadn’t much brought up the economic crisis. They usually discussed Goldman’s manuscript—a commercial flop for Knopf when it finally appeared in 1931, another casualty of the 50 percent drop in sales that rocked the publishing industry in the years following the crash. In December 1933, as Alsberg wrote, the country was six months past the flurry of legislation known as the One Hundred Days, when the Roosevelt administration fed a compliant Congress a series of bills that sought to alleviate the Depression. In the short term, their efforts stopped the banking panic and boosted federal spending on unemployment relief. But the One Hundred Days also restructured the economy—agriculture, industry, labor, and banking—in ways that, six months later, were only beginning to be understood. Two new institutions, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Public Works Administration, inaugurated planned regional development and public works construction on an unprecedented scale—and signaled policies to come.
And yet 1933 was still a dismal year, likely the worst of the entire Depression. Gone since 1929: three quarters of the value of all financial assets, $7 billion in bank deposits, half of the gross national product. Hundreds of thousands of homes were lost to foreclosure. A quarter of the total workforce was unemployed. Marriage, divorce, and childbirth rates all plummeted—consequences of the Depression’s paralyzing effect on daily life. And even though Alsberg had been an intellectual adrift for years before the economic crisis—shuttling between continents, owning no real property, providing for no dependents, enjoying no steady employment—he felt the deepening misfortune around him acutely.
This country is in a fearful mess, of course. Nobody knows which way he is going or coming. But we are all hoping that a mysterious providence which takes care of drunken sailors and Americans will do something about something. Otherwise these happy states will become a vast poorhouse in which we shall all try to live by taking in each others’ washing—until there is no wash left, and then we shall simply run around in a state of nature.
He added, “With this result in view I have been trying to diet and conserve my beautiful figure.” The remark was typical of the dark humor Alsberg brought to occasions of stress. And lately, his life had felt like one prolonged stressful occasion. He was deep into middle age with no fixed address, no consistent career path, no great literary achievement to his name. And, despite his friends and many acquaintances, he was painfully lonely. He was, to himself, a wretched figure.
I don’t see why you bother with me at all. I have been most neglectful and am certainly, in a practical way, no use to anyone any more, least of all to myself. I have fallen from even the modest imminences I may once have occupied. I am less than nothing, less than the ground you shall tread upon your triumphant return. Nobody pays any attention to me any more, and I don’t pay attention to anybody. I am in complete retirement, mentally, physically (not altogether, however), and morally. A completely debacled intellectual liberal. Expect to find me in my intellectual rags and tatters, barefooted, brazen and unashamed. I am, as it were, a beachcomber, on this garbage-strewn strand that calls itself a metropolis.
He sent the letter and that grim year of 1933 came to a close. But soon Alsberg would face another disappointment. Emma Goldman did not arrive in New York as expected. (Her trip was delayed by visa issues.) After the New Year, he wrote to her again, soliciting advice. Should he give it all up and move to a friend’s cooperative farm in Michigan? He could attend to his writing and do cultural work among the farmers—perhaps teaching classes—and handle some of the physical labor. “I am not such a terrible carpenter myself,” he wrote, “and, as to farming, I can tell a cucumber from a strawberry, and lettuce from cabbage.” He was willing, it seemed, to entertain any path that would give him purpose—“something productive and real and profitless.”
He signed off, “Take care of your health, and don’t forget your quite useless correspondent.”
He had no inkling that, while he stewed in feelings of uselessness, the New Dealers transforming the country would soon find a use for him. Within months, he’d be in Washington, working alongside them, helping to address the “fearful mess” that had befallen the nation. And in a year and a half, he would be swept into the directorship of the most ambitious national literary project ever attempted anywhere.
“HAS THE BRAINS TRUST SWALLOWED YOU UP?”
Harry Hopkins made no secret of his love for horse racing. A top US diplomat once said he was a man possessed of “the purity of St. Francis of Assisi combined with the sharp shrewdness of a race track tout.” It was barely a metaphor—Hopkins spent a lot of time at the track. He inherited the taste from his father, a small-time gambler with a fondness for bowling. (The St. Francis connection was more of a stretch, although his pious mother did instill in him a sense of Christian charity.) As Roosevelt’s relief czar, charged with overseeing federal support for the swelling ranks of the poor, Hopkins occasionally gathered his aides in the racetrack stands—shouting over loudspeakers and the beating of hooves as they puzzled out the problems faced by the young administration.
Hopkins was a divisive figure: a hero of the New Deal or its most sinister plotter, depending on the beholder. He was unpretentious and forthright, irreverent in style but serious, even zealous, about his work. He liked playing devil’s advocate to test the convictions of those around him. He was a lanky man with a high, wide forehead and an expressive face and a rapid way of speaking. He cursed. He felt an intense affiliation with the poor. He often said he was the son of a harness maker, which was not exactly true. (His father, after cycling through jobs around the Midwest, which may have included harness making, did eventually own a harness and sundries shop in Grinnell, Iowa.) His mother was a fervent supporter of the Methodist Missionary Society. When Hopkins left the Midwest after an unremarkable stint at Grinnell College, he threw himself into the world of East Coast social reformers and began rising through the ranks of private charities in New York.
He was ambitious and a little relentless. It was as though his concern for the poor was fused with a hard-nosed fixation on problem solving—and a sense of irritation when the solving didn’t come easily. Poverty, for Hopkins, was a moral challenge but also a practical one, an obstacle that could be overcome by effort and reason and, crucially, by spending cash. He was a professional in a field that was newly professionalized—its traditional charities replaced by staff agencies, its assumptions reset on a sociological basis, its amateur enthusiasts pushed aside by trained caseworkers and experts. Hopkins was formed in that shift, even if he never achieved a polished, professional deportment. One colleague described him as “an ulcerous type” who would wear the same shirt days in a row and was often caught shaving in the office. He had a nervous demeanor fueled by black coffee and cigarettes. Every weekday, he’d descend on Manhattan from the suburbs to the north, where he lived with his wife and children, commuting by train into the city, reading Keats and Shelley and Amy Lowell amid the rustling newspapers of his fellow passengers, his thoughts slipping past the gray concerns of organizational administration. He was another rumpled commuter, perhaps more rumpled than most, soon to preside over a historic overhaul of the nation’s paltry, antiquated relief system—as architect and overseer of its transformation.
“Relief,” for most of the country’s history, was a multisided thing. It could be a cash payment, a basket of food or a parcel of clothing or a bucket of coal, a voucher with a local merchant, a place in a poorhouse or in a veterans’ home. Sometimes it was a job: “work relief.” Politicians, social reformers, and many citizens preferred it when relief was distributed by private charities, secular or religious. But the alternative, public relief, was as old as the Republic, and older, administered by a patchwork of organizations at the state and local levels, typically at the smallest possible unit: the town or parish and, later, the county. Much of this relief was directed toward mothers with dependent children, the blind and others who could not care for themselves, and war veterans. Remarkably, aside from military pensions and bonuses, the federal government—from the ratification of the Constitution to the eve of the Depression—played almost no role in relief efforts. In 1854, Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill championed by the reformer Dorothea Dix that would have distributed land for the benefit of the indigent mentally ill. Pierce argued that the federal government had no duty to provide for the poor—a precedent that remained mostly intact until it was shattered by the Depression. It was true that for a time, the increasingly generous system of federal benefits for Civil War veterans and their dependents began to resemble a proto–welfare state—for those who wore the blue, anyway. But this system wasn’t designed to deliver relief per se, and it waned as the old soldiers died off. (Many reformers also saw it as a Republican Party patronage apparatus, intended to siphon off the budget surpluses yielded by high tariffs.) Machinery for assisting the poor and unemployed, in a truly comprehensive and effective way, seemed unlikely ever to be assembled at the national level. By one account, between 1803 and 1931, the federal government spent only a little over $11 million on direct relief in the form of congressional appropriations, mostly for victims of disasters—floods, overwhelmingly, but also “grasshopper ravages” in 1875 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
Then came the Depression. The localized and uneven relief system was quickly overwhelmed. Herbert Hoover confronted the crisis with monetary tinkering, protectionism, limited public works, bank bailouts, and heaps of optimistic exhortation. But when it came to direct relief for the jobless, he upheld the federal government’s tradition of neglect. Private charities were exhausted. Public funds soon covered an unprecedented 90 percent of the relief being distributed. Around three quarters of the unemployed received no relief at all. Finally, in July 1932, during the last desperate months of his administration, Hoover signed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, which offered states a meager $300 million in funds, hardly enough to meet the severity of the moment. In some counties, 80 or 90 percent of people were on relief. The effort failed, and Franklin Roosevelt was swept into office.
The new president brought Harry Hopkins with him. As governor of New York, Roosevelt had launched the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, the first state agency to bolster and organize relief in the face of the Depression. Hopkins ran it. After Roosevelt’s inauguration, Hopkins and another social worker pitched their plan for a massive federal relief program—New York state’s TERA on a national scale. They tracked down Frances Perkins, the new labor secretary, at the Women’s University Club in Washington, found a place to speak underneath a staircase, and hurriedly outlined a federal relief bill. She brought it to Roosevelt, he embraced it, Congress acted, and so appeared the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Roosevelt put Hopkins in charge, with a $500 million appropriation to disburse to the states—half outright and half in matching funds.
On his second day in Washington, Hopkins met Roosevelt at the White House. The president promised his support and insisted that relief must be distributed fairly, without regard to political affiliation, a policy that was strictly adopted under all subsequent relief programs. From there, Hopkins arrived at FERA headquarters in the Walker-Johnson building on New York Avenue; finding that his office furniture hadn’t yet been moved into his office, he sat down in the hallway and began to work. By the end of the day he’d funneled more than $5 million to eight states. When a jittery Washington Post article suggested that Hopkins was burning recklessly through his funds, he announced, “I’m not going to last six months here, so I’ll do as I please.”
The FERA didn’t much change the existing relief structure—it just flooded the states with cash. Hopkins preferred a decentralized operation and he mostly left local administrators alone, although he did push for them to provide direct payments without stipulations, instead of relief “in kind,” as much as possible. It was cleaner that way, and it helped preserve the dignity of people in need.
During this early phase of the FERA, there was little in the way of work relief—handing out jobs instead of checks or cash. But Hopkins believed that jobs were better than the dole. He’d watched during the spring of 1933 as the Civilian Conservation Corps plucked young men from cities, small towns, and farms and put them to work on federal lands: cutting trails and building shelters, planting trees and stocking fish, staving off floods and combating soil erosion. And yet the CCC, however popular, was limited. It was open only to men between eighteen and twenty-five who were unmarried and came from families on relief, and its crews performed only manual labor in designated areas. (It was limited in another sense: Black CCC workers were underrepresented and CCC camps, though initially integrated outside the South, were segregated in 1935.) The other major federal driver of employment, the Public Works Administration—headed by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, a prickly but principled Republican—was slow to initiate its larger, capital-intensive projects. They would need to invent an entirely new agency, Hopkins realized, in order to establish work relief on a wide scale.
Roosevelt approved Hopkins’s next plan. They created the Civil Works Administration, a temporary agency that hired the jobless directly and put them to work during the winter of 1933–34. The CWA trigged a frenzy of activity. Around a million workers signed up after two weeks. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving had to run three shifts just to print all the paychecks. By January 1934, the CWA employed more than 4 million workers—nearly as many as were mobilized during the First World War—and at its peak ran about 400,000 projects. CWA workers built or improved a half million miles of roads, forty thousand schools, and a thousand airports, along with parks, pools, sewers, and other public infrastructure.
The FERA and the CWA produced something else, too: a newfound appreciation for robust federal activity. Hopkins knew this thanks to the sixteen field investigators he’d sent into the country beginning in the summer of 1933. One of them was Martha Gellhorn, then a young reporter; another was Lorena Hickok, a more seasoned journalist for the Associated Press (and an increasingly close companion of Eleanor Roosevelt). Hickok’s letters to Hopkins described grasshoppers chewing crops down to the ground and eating clothes off the line. Unemployed coal miners were too starved and exhausted to riot. Whole families were sharing single beds to keep warm. A local work relief project in West Virginia, where rates of illness had spiked among the poor, was paying the unemployed to build coffins. But as she witnessed one grim scene after another, Hickok also noticed a distinct upsurge in support for Roosevelt, thanks to these relief efforts. Some people posted his photograph in their homes like an icon; others spoke casually and intimately of him, as if they knew him personally. From Fergus Falls, Minnesota, she wrote to Hopkins about the general feeling in the upper Midwest: “I have witnessed close up—so close up, in fact, that I was hardly conscious of it at first—one of the swiftest and most complete changes in the public opinion that this part of the country has ever seen.”
The CWA folded up at the end of March, leaving behind an array of improvements and infrastructure built from scratch. Hopkins refocused his efforts on the FERA and continued some work relief projects there. But the experience proved that the nation required a sustained, perhaps permanent, work relief program, and he and his aides began plotting.
In the wake of the CWA, Henry Alsberg arrived in Washington. He never did join that cooperative farm in Michigan, the one he described to Emma Goldman. He’d certainly been feeling desperate enough. But then—thanks, perhaps, to the “mysterious providence which takes care of drunken sailors and Americans” (as he put it in his letter to Goldman)—something unexpected happened. A government job fell into his lap. Jacob Baker, an old acquaintance, had become one of Harry Hopkins’s closest aides. Baker knew Alsberg from the left edge of the Greenwich Village literary scene, and he offered Alsberg a place on the FERA staff. Alsberg’s meandering career took yet another turn: he became a federal bureaucrat.
During the previous year Washington had been transformed by an influx of newcomers like Harry Hopkins and Jacob Baker—the New Dealers. These were men and women (although mostly men), economists and social workers and lawyers (mostly lawyers) who’d been stirred to action by Roosevelt and were taking up positions in his administration, or else angling for one. Ideologically, they represented all strains of early twentieth-century reformist attitudes: trustbusters and Bryanite agrarians and classical laissez-faire Democrats and progressive Republicans and assorted socialists, mingling with the usual careerists and patronage seekers. Their habits and manners—intellectual and informal, committed to hard work but comfortable with abstract ideas—made the southern city into the cosmopolitan center it had never been.
Such it was in the spring of 1934, when Alsberg arrived in DC and joined the Roosevelt administration. Edmund Wilson came to town at the same time and found it newly animated, as if it had shaken off the last administration “like a darkness, like an oppressive bad dream, in which one could neither speak nor act.” Washington had awoken in a mood for action, its new energy personified by sharp young people graduated from eastern universities and familiar faces from intellectual circles in New York. “Everywhere in the streets and offices you run into old acquaintances,” Wilson wrote, “the editors and writers of the liberal press, the ‘progressive’ young instructors from the colleges, the intelligent foundation workers, the practical idealists of settlement houses, the radicals who are not too radical not to conceive that there may be just a chance of turning the old order inside out and the Marxists who enjoy looking on and seeing how the half-baked liberals are falling victims to their inherent bourgeois contradictions.” Alsberg—veteran of the liberal press, former foundation worker, not-too-radical radical—fit the profile. As he settled into his new environment, he did not find his milieu merely reflected in Washington, but effectively packed up, transported, and reconstituted on the banks of the Potomac.
Jacob Baker was one of the familiar figures Alsberg found there. In many ways, the two of them were quite different. Baker was bald and stout, a former agricultural and industrial engineer from Colorado who’d taught in college classrooms and rural high schools (despite never graduating from college himself), overseen miners and ranchers, sweated as a day laborer, and been a partner in a Chicago engineering firm. But, like Alsberg, he was a radical of sorts—although a registered Republican—with literary interests. During the twenties, Baker operated the left-leaning Garland Fund in New York and, on behalf of its board members, helped set up and manage the Vanguard Press. He was an admirer of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin and belonged to a group that promoted mutual aid societies among the poor and unemployed. (While reporting from Russia, Alsberg had actually visited the elderly Kropotkin at his home and smuggled documents out of the country for him; the next year, after Kropotkin died, Alsberg returned to march in the funeral procession with his new friends Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman.) Baker the federal official was still keen on the cooperative movement and believed that society ought to be transformed along cooperative lines. Even if the New Deal was a step in the right direction, it wasn’t nearly enough. Once he wore a black shirt to an event at the White House to signal this dissatisfaction (which may have contributed to his strained relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt). So when Baker described Alsberg as “an anarchistic sort of a fellow incapable of administration but one with a great deal of creative talent,” it wasn’t a total putdown. He and Alsberg were on the same anarchistic wavelength.
Alsberg took a desk in a FERA back office and threw himself into the job, so much so that Emma Goldman complained about his silence when she wrote for inside info about the New Deal. “Has the brains trust swallowed you up to the extent that you haven’t time to sit ye down and answer my letter?” she asked. “Or have you grown lazzyer than you had always been?” His first assignment was to compile and edit America Fights the Depression, a kind of coffee-table book designed to promote the CWA’s multitudinous efforts over the winter. It showed CWA workers laying brick sidewalks and cobblestones, draining mosquito swamps, surveying highways by plane and dogsled and motorcycle, hauling gravel, planting trees, blowing glass for sodium lights, chopping wood, repairing shoes and tools, sowing oyster seeds, making malaria kits, tearing up old trolley tracks, conducting aeronautical research—and building or refurbishing bridges, dams, schools, pools, incinerators, stadiums, aqueducts, zoos, levees, and airports. The point was not only to capture the CWA’s activity but to emphasize the sheer variety of projects, all of them responsive to local needs, called into being at the grassroots level but executed by the federal government. Baker was extremely pleased with the result. (So was a reviewer for The New York Times, struck by the book’s handsome quality and convinced that the CWA was “a program wholly new in all the history of civilization.”) Baker asked Alsberg to stick around as the supervisor for reports and records, which involved promoting the FERA in an editorial capacity and editing two FERA magazines.
So Alsberg spent the spring and summer. By autumn, the New Deal relief apparatus was given a tremendous boost. The Democrats swept the 1934 midterm elections, gaining seats in the House and Senate that surpassed even their most optimistic forecasts. It was the kind of electoral triumph rarely seen in American politics. The editorialist William Allen White announced of Roosevelt: “He has been all but crowned by the people.” Harry Hopkins—who deserved some of the credit for that victory—celebrated, naturally, with a trip to the racetrack. By now, he was in the front rank of New Dealers, a combative, press-savvy fighter who seemed to thrive on attention from his enemies—and could often skillfully anticipate and undercut their attacks. Hopkins loaded up a car with his closest aides and, as they barreled down some Maryland highway, he exhorted them to take advantage of the moment. For months, they’d been sketching out proposals for a new, robust work relief project to replace the short-lived CWA. Now was the time to make it happen. “Boys—this is our hour,” he exclaimed. “Get your minds to work on developing a complete ticket to provide security for all the folks of this country up and down and across the board.”
Hopkins understood that any new program would need to include a substantial white-collar component. By the spring of 1934, when Alsberg arrived in Washington, the administration had managed to avoid a total breakdown of the economic system. But the recovery was stalling. This meant that the makeup of the relief rolls was changing. The first to go on relief, the poorest, were eventually joined by the broader working class, who over time were joined by white-collar workers who’d exhausted their savings. Hopkins described the situation in an address to the National Conference of Social Work in Detroit. “We are now dealing with people of all classes,” he said. “It is no longer a matter of unemployables and chronic dependents, but of your friends and mine who are involved in this.” The lesson was clear: any new work relief program would need to include not just manual laborers but white-collar workers—including, perhaps, writers.
The FERA and the CWA established some work relief projects with a cultural bent, but these were scattered and limited. They tended toward the recreational and educational: roving theater groups, community symphonies, a smattering of public art projects, lessons for adults and children. “Both the quality of the work and the kind of work carried on were, with few exceptions, of exceedingly low grade,” as Alsberg would put it later. He highlighted a few in his book America Fights the Depression. There were orchestras and sculpture classes and research projects. There was a Grant Wood mural celebrating veterinary medicine and a CWA-painted backdrop for the snake enclosure at a zoo. A researcher in Chicago’s Field Museum repaired the wrappings of a mummy from Peru. There was even a photo of a CWA worker, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, sitting with a family on their porch in rural Georgia, conducting an interview—a precursor to the federal writers who’d do the same. (Small-scale efforts to interview formerly enslaved people and collect folklore began around this time; both would become essential to the FWP’s work.) Otherwise, the new dispensation didn’t offer much for writers as such, other than jobs as researchers and clerks (or editors, like Alsberg) in the expanding New Deal bureaucracy. But one project in Connecticut did show potential: a modest undertaking, initiated under the CWA and finished with FERA funds, to research, write, and publish a guide to the state. It employed only eleven relief workers and around a thousand volunteers, and it was a thin forerunner of the FWP’s American Guides. But the experience showed that such a thing could be done, and the guide sold well, earning back all its costs in two months.
The most promising development along these lines, although outside of Hopkins’s portfolio, was the Public Works of Art Project, launched in 1933. The PWAP crossed an important threshold: it was the very first stand-alone federal relief program dedicated to the arts. It hired 3,749 artists to create murals, sculptures, and visual art of all kinds to embellish and beautify public buildings in every state. This wasn’t technically work relief: artists competed for the jobs and were hired according to their skill, not their need. The PWAP followed the traditional public works model, in the sense that its justification and ultimate purpose was to create something (in this case, artworks), not to shift the needy from relief rolls to public employment, to give out jobs instead of doles. But the precedent was established.
Hopkins was protective of cultural workers on relief, few as they were. “Hell!” he snapped at critics. “They’ve got to eat just like other people!” At a press conference in early 1935, as the FERA’s successor was taking shape, Hopkins lost his composure. “They are damn good projects—excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there—God damn it!” He launched into a full defense of the projects that fell outside the realms of construction and engineering: “As soon as you begin doing anything for white collar people, there is a certain group of people who begin to throw bricks. I have no apologies to make. As a matter of fact, we have not done enough.” For years, Hopkins would be haunted by a misquotation of these words, which had him say: “People are too damned dumb.” But he was undaunted.
Pressure came from outside the administration, too. The Newspaper Guild and the Authors Guild demanded jobs for writers, although they had in mind veteran reporters and published authors. The Unemployed Writers Association, a new group agitating from the left, sought to represent the rest, the struggling and the aspiring. It had the backing of established names such as Theodore Dreiser, Ida Tarbell, and Sherwood Anderson, and, in 1934, it morphed into the more aggressive Writers Union. That same year, a groundbreaking strike at the Macauley Company, a Manhattan book publisher, drew wide support from writers, while workers from other publishing houses joined in solidarity—a sign of the simmering discontent and growing class-consciousness spreading throughout the industry. Together and separately, organized writers were demonstrating, lobbying federal officials, and calling for work relief. In late February 1935, the Writers Union launched picket lines across New York. The Daily Mirror reported that, in the absence of government intervention, the only work available was writing more protest signs.
This outside pressure likely ratified what was in the works already. Even before the midterm sweep, Roosevelt wanted to pivot from direct relief to a CWA-style work program. But the question remained: Who would run it? Roosevelt was acutely aware of the rivalry between Hopkins and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and understood that, despite their overlapping responsibilities, they occupied very different places in the administration’s volatile mix of personalities. Ickes was a progressive Republican, an old Bull Mooser—pugnacious and deeply sensitive, a political brawler who nursed private grievances and often threatened to resign. Roosevelt sometimes called him “Donald Duck” and lumped him among the administration “prima donnas.” Ickes wasn’t as even-keeled as the brain truster Rex Tugwell—or the ever-reliable Harry Hopkins.
But personalities alone weren’t the issue. Ickes’s Public Works Administration was cumbersome by nature. It initiated capital-intensive public works projects, such as dams and bridges and airports, and it typically didn’t draw workers from the relief rolls but rather awarded contracts to existing firms. Ickes himself tended to slow the process down as he reviewed those contracts and blueprints as well, wallowing in the fine print, meticulously honoring his stewardship of billions of tax dollars. His cautious approach would make the PWA a resounding success: by 1939 it had helped construct 70 percent of new educational buildings; 65 percent of the courthouses and city halls and sewage plants; 35 percent of the hospitals and healthcare facilities; and 10 percent of the roads, bridges, and subways; along with naval warships and the Grand Coulee Dam and the Triborough Bridge, and all without a hint of scandal or corruption. But it wasn’t very flexible, and it didn’t move as swiftly as the FERA and the CWA did under Hopkins.
Even as the new relief law began to take shape in Congress and details crept into the press, Roosevelt made no decision. Even when, on April 8, 1935, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act and designated $4.8 billion for work relief, Roosevelt made no decision. This was the largest single appropriation in American history—or in any nation—to date. Ickes and Hopkins were left anxiously wondering which of them would oversee it.
Finally, Roosevelt chose. “Ickes is a good administrator, but often too slow,” he told a top advisor. “Harry gets things done. I am going to give this job to Harry.”
After two years of argument, plotting, and experimentation, Hopkins finally had his work relief program on a grand scale: the Works Progress Administration. It arrived at a crucial moment. Widespread early support for the New Deal was beginning to falter as the Depression dragged on. Its critics grew bolder and more numerous; disaffected old-guard Democrats and conservative Republicans joined in a chorus of recrimination. The radical left was torn between cautious support for Roosevelt and outright hostility. A trio of figures—the pension-scheme promoter Francis E. Townsend, the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and Louisiana’s governor-turned-senator Huey Long—collected masses of followers while short-circuiting conventional American politics. (Were they progressive firebrands or incipient fascists?) Meanwhile a deeper, less focused disgruntlement simmered among American workers and farmers, 20 percent of whom were still unemployed and many more of whom were being radicalized through months, and in some cases years, of deprivation.
And yet, for all the talk of boondoggling, and despite the exertions of the most hidebound Republicans, the idea of work relief had widespread support. In July 1935, as the WPA was coming into being, Fortune magazine conducted a survey with a simple question: “Do you believe that the government should see to it that every man who wants to work has a job?” A solid majority of upper-class respondents opposed this view. But, to the chagrin of Fortune’s editors, 81 percent of the lower-middle class, 89 percent of the poor, and 91 percent of African Americans agreed.
The WPA made this idea policy. And a portion of the WPA would be set aside for white-collar workers, with a slice of that earmarked for people in the arts, and a sliver of that reserved, specifically, for writers. But the question remained: Who would run it?
Henry Alsberg was wondering the same thing. By the spring of 1935, about a year after he left New York for Washington, Alsberg was growing bored with his FERA assignment. He needed the job too much to quit, but he worried that he’d be laid off, a casualty of the precarious relief structure. He wrote to Emma Goldman about his desire to return to Europe—to where, even still, his attention and affection pointed, more than to the United States.
The WPA was formally launched by executive order on May 6. A few months of bureaucratic jostling followed as the arts projects came together. Jacob Baker, who got Alsberg the FERA job, remained Harry Hopkins’s assistant in the new setup and now supervised the white-collar division, including projects for visual art, theater, music, and writing—collectively named Federal Project Number One. Alsberg soon found himself in Baker’s office, listening while Baker discussed Federal #1 with his own assistant, Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt. They were talking about directors. Who could they find to direct the writers’ project? Finally, Tex spoke: “Give it to Alsberg or he’ll be disappointed.” Baker looked at Alsberg and saw a particularly glum figure. The decision was made.
He was an unlikely choice. Outside of his FERA officemates, who in official Washington had ever heard of him? He was known to certain literary and dramatic circles in New York; middle-aged radicals may have recalled a younger, feistier Alsberg from the twenties. Worse, during his short career as a New Dealer, he’d developed a reputation as a poor administrator: he avoided making carbon copies and saved only the documents he thought were interesting—everything else went into the trash. Now Hopkins was placing him in charge of the FWP. From the WPA’s roughly $5 billion appropriation, the directors of Federal #1 had slightly more than $27 million to spend on the arts projects; $6,288,000 of that was set aside for the FWP. Though a fraction of the massive WPA budget, it was still a lot of money. Critics and supporters alike would have been forgiven for wondering, Who is Henry Alsberg?
He’d seemed destined for a life that was stable, predictable, respectable. His family were secular German Jews, highly educated professionals. (His father, a chemist, helped found the American Chemical Society; his eldest brother would become chief of the United States Bureau of Chemistry, forerunner to the Food and Drug Administration.) Henry Garfield, the youngest of four, was born in 1881, two days after his namesake, President James A. Garfield, succumbed to an assassin’s wounds. He grew up on the Upper East Side as the nineteenth century waned and New York developed into a modern metropolis. He attended Columbia, nurtured literary ambitions, and graduated with the class of 1900—the “Naughty Naughtians.” Next was Columbia Law School, and years of intermittent legal work while he fiddled with poems and short stories and essays and plays and was increasingly drawn to the bohemian world emerging downtown.
He was restless. He tried graduate studies at Harvard (with William James, one semester away from retirement) but returned to Manhattan a year later. He shuffled from his late twenties into his thirties, living with his mother (now on the Upper West Side, after his father’s death), and finally gave up law for journalism. He got a job at the New York Evening Post and started writing for The Nation, both owned by the liberal Oswald Garrison Villard. He published in The Masses, the day’s premier radical magazine. (His piece was a hammy satire, purported Roman newspaper clippings about Jesus of Nazareth and the hobo army he led on Jerusalem.) Alsberg was veering away from the genteel attitudes of his upbringing. He’d watched Greenwich Village become an enclave for artistic experimentation melded with all manner of radical thought. A spirit of nonconformity inspired by H. L. Mencken as much as Karl Marx animated discussions of labor strikes, free love, industrial sabotage, and birth control. Socialists squabbled with anarchists; Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the militant Industrial Workers of the World hunkered down in salons alongside modernist poets. Emma Goldman was there, lecturing on anarchism and women’s rights. In 1913, a year before Alsberg’s Masses debut, this radical bohemian milieu announced itself through two highly publicized events: an epoch-making exhibition of modernist art at the Lexington Avenue Armory and a sold-out pageant at Madison Square Garden to support the striking silk mill workers of Paterson, New Jersey. Alsberg found this world attractive, although he didn’t throw himself into it with the violence and passion that others did. If a cultural scene has its major and minor figures, it also has its larger assembly of peripheral admirers and dabblers. Alsberg was one of those.
In 1916, there came another swerve, now into government service as the secretary and press attaché to the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, a family friend. In Constantinople and throughout the region, Alsberg made his debut as a relief worker, supervising the embassy’s efforts to assist Armenians and Jews. After the United States entered the war, he was evacuated and returned to Washington, where he advised officials on the Ottoman situation. When he resumed his journalistic career, it was with an international bent. He sailed to Europe as a correspondent for The Nation and as a newspaper stringer, reporting from England and Ireland, then drifting gradually eastward: Paris, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Odessa. The political landscape of postwar Europe was shifting daily, and Alsberg took down lucid chronicles of battling factions, parties, and nationalities. But he was disturbed by the violence remaking the continent: “I have now been three months and more in this seething caldron of hates and prejudices called Europe,” he wrote from Budapest. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to stay a mere observer. Unbeknownst to his readers, he began working for the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization he’d first encountered in Constantinople. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe he gathered information and distributed money on the JDC’s behalf. He visited war refugees and children orphaned by pogroms; he conferred with officials and advocated for the displaced. For months he moved among some of Europe’s most wretched and hopeless people—a world away from Manhattan and the affluent German Jewish immigrant milieu of his youth, where attitudes regarding their poorer coreligionists from Eastern Europe tended toward snobbish indifference, or worse.
Alsberg’s travels entered a consequential phase in May 1920, when he crossed into the Soviet Union. He was thirty-eight, a dedicated leftist who admired the workers’ revolutions erupting throughout Europe (in Hungary, he met the Communist leader Béla Kun and discovered they had mutual friends in the United States). But he was basically a pacifist, repelled by violence and hating the human suffering that flowed from even righteous struggles. And yet he despised the hypocrisy of the West for its hostile treatment of the Communist governments taking power. “When the history of this period comes to be written, Lenine, I am inclined to think, will be its greatest figure, with nobody a bad second,” he’d written from Hungary. Now he was in the heart of the world revolution, staying in a Moscow hotel alongside delegates to the second congress of the Comintern. He was still a foreign correspondent but he continued his JDC work as well, gathering information in villages ravished by pogroms. It was dangerous—two of his JDC colleagues had been killed by Bolshevik soldiers who thought they were Polish officers.
After he met Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman, he joined them that summer on an expedition to collect artifacts and documents for the Museum of the Revolution in Petrograd. For six weeks they traveled south from Moscow and into the Ukraine in a specially outfitted Pullman car. Alsberg was unsettled by scenes of poverty and suffering. Goldman compared it to something out of Dante. But he also saw evidence of improvements and was especially struck by the new cultural programs being organized by the revolutionary state. “The proletariat has the orchestra stalls now,” he announced in The Nation, and he applauded the government’s efforts to include common people “in workmen’s and peasants’ theaters, in choruses and orchestras and brass bands, in the painting of pictures and the making of literature.”
The participants in the drama not only act but also conduct the theater and do the stage carpentering and scene-painting and shifting themselves. How many manuscripts have already been submitted from every part of Russia in the competition for the new revolutionary international song—manuscripts by quite humble individuals, peasants and shepherds and carpenters!
Alsberg wouldn’t forget such glimpses of a robust, state-supported public culture. But neither could he ignore the repressive aspects of daily life in Russia, which was still locked in a brutal civil war. He soon got a taste of that repression firsthand when he was detained by the Cheka and—despite Goldman and Berkman’s personal entreaty to Lenin—ordered back to Moscow. He’d tell the story of what followed for years: He and his guard embarked on a days-long train ride. He enticed the guard to share some vodka, and eventually the guard became so drunk—and then sick with pneumonia—that, when they arrived in Moscow, Alsberg had to carry him into the Cheka station. “Here is the man you sent out to find me,” he said. It was a sour end to his first Soviet trip. The following year, he made a second trip, this one coinciding with the Kronstadt Rebellion, when revolutionary sailors on a naval base outside Petrograd launched an anti-Bolshevik uprising. They were crushed by government forces. A few months later, Alsberg, increasingly disillusioned, wrote “Russia: Smoked-Glass vs. Rose-Tint” for The Nation, summing up his Soviet experience and diagnosing two “journalistic conspiracies.” The “smoked-glass” approach “insisted on seeing everything bolshevik in a darkened and distorted form” and often peddled fabrications. “It committed suicide some time ago by over-indulgence in lies,” he wrote. But “rose-tint” accounts were guilty of the opposite fault. “There has grown up an uneasy feeling among liberal-minded onlookers, and even among western Communists, that Russia has been swallowed a little too whole, without any mastication whatsoever.” Alsberg insisted simply that journalists and commentators do more chewing.
Back in the United States, he turned forty. For the rest of the twenties, instead of jumping between careers, he tried balancing several at once. He continued to lecture and write for the JDC. With Emma Goldman, Sasha Berkman, and Roger Baldwin of the ACLU, he helped form the International Committee for Political Prisoners and edited its first publication, Letters from Russian Prisoners. (He and Berkman had gathered the bulk of the contents themselves.) Meanwhile, he got involved in the downtown theater scene, mostly as a producer or director or publicist. In all three areas, he found success mixed with failure and missed chances. He contracted with the JDC to write a history of the organization. His nine-month deadline came and went, and four years later, he presented the JDC with a massive manuscript—his greatest literary accomplishment to date. The JDC couldn’t use it. (It was revised and scaled down but never published.) His work on behalf of political prisoners won some acclaim but just as much recrimination from those still sympathetic to the Soviet experiment. Alsberg lost friends and writing opportunities. The theater delivered his highest moment of glory when the Neighborhood Playhouse produced his adaptation and translation of a Yiddish play, The Dybbuk by S. Ansky. The play was a success and it bestowed on Alsberg a little fame. But even this was spoiled: George Gershwin wanted to adapt it as his first opera (beating Arthur Hammerstein to it), with Alsberg as librettist, before they realized Alsberg did not possess the musical rights to the play—only the translation rights. The project imploded and Alsberg was left behind while Gershwin moved on to his second choice: Porgy and Bess.
Alsberg muddled through the final years of the twenties. He helped Emma Goldman edit her memoirs and half-heartedly worked on his own projects: a book about political prisoners around the world, a new play, an autobiographical novel. Goldman by now had a keen sense of his character. “Henry dear you are not very grown up at times,” she wrote to him, “though at others you are as wise as Solomon.” In 1931, the year of his fiftieth birthday, he moved in many circles and fit comfortably in none of them. He wrote to Goldman that summer in a sour mood and ended by paraphrasing a line from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”: “Love is a dead cigarette butt floating in a urinal.” (He was close; it was a “burnt match.”) Goldman dismissed the cynicism of Crane and his generational cohorts. She reminded Alsberg that he was fundamentally of a different temperament. “Don’t deceive yourself, old dear,” she wrote. “You are not of them. You do have depth and intensity even if you pretend to be amused by the devil don’t care attitude to life on the part of the Cranes. You are a Yid my dear, you’ll never free yourself from the woe of the world.”
This was the Henry Alsberg who eventually stepped off a train in Washington, DC, bound for a FERA desk job—forlorn, aimless, trailing a hodgepodge of a career. But when the new Federal Writers’ Project needed a director, he made a better candidate than many might have guessed. He possessed an elite education and a law degree and experience in government service. He’d been a capable relief worker under treacherous conditions in multiple nations. He knew the writers’ trade as a journalist, critic, editorialist, dramatist, translator, and editor, and he knew what it meant to struggle in all these roles, and, sometimes, to fail. His politics—anarchist-ish, tempered by age and doubt—put him in general sympathy with the New Deal, and the WPA in particular, while his public criticism of the Soviet Union inoculated him against red-baiting. (Or so it seemed.)
He wasn’t the most adept administrator, although his conciliatory nature surely helped. But he proved to be the FWP’s crucial visionary. The FWP put a tremendous amount of literary labor power at his command—and he knew it. What if he marshaled those resources toward creating high-quality books for the American people, composed by their fellow citizens, about their fellow citizens? It would be the work of a lifetime. And it would save him from the obscurity he dreaded, the fate of living and dying as the “completely debacled intellectual liberal” he described in his letter to Emma Goldman. The FWP offered him a different path. Alsberg, in retrospect, offered the FWP a creative spark that very well saved it from producing a series of forgettable, quickly outdated discursive road maps. That they found each other was historically fortunate.
Alsberg took his place among the other newly installed directors of the WPA’s Federal #1. Hallie Flanagan would run the Federal Theater Project; Holger Cahill, the art project; Nikolai Sokoloff, music. As summer 1935 drifted into autumn, they worked to get their projects off the ground. They had the entire short history of Hopkins’s relief apparatus on which to build, but Federal #1 represented a cultural undertaking of unprecedented scale and scope. There were the usual bureaucratic kinks and obstacles. The directors shared a sense of being somewhat out of joint with the WPA—transplants from artistic realms who never fit snugly into the New Deal machinery. But they also shared a fierce commitment to their projects. “We worked like mad, we cursed the delays, the postponements, the involved procedure,” wrote Hallie Flanagan in her memoir of the theater project. “We criticized each other, our superiors, and ourselves; we laughed at each other, ourselves, and the W.P.A.; we went through fire for each other and the W.P.A. We were a violent lot, a thorn in the body bureaucratic.”
As the pieces fell together, the directors as a group wanted to meet with Harry Hopkins. He obliged and listened to their complaints. Once the meeting had gone on for a bit, he noticed that Alsberg hadn’t spoken.
“What about you, Henry?” Hopkins asked. “What is your gripe?”
Alsberg smiled. “I don’t have any gripe, Harry,” he said. “I haven’t had as much fun since I had the measles.”
“ONLY GOD CAN END THE GUIDE”
The FWP’s first challenge was figuring out what, exactly, it was supposed to do. The project needed a grand, overarching task that would absorb a maximum number of jobless workers from the relief rolls—one that wouldn’t attract controversy or invite charges of boondoggling, one that was inarguably useful. In late June, even before Alsberg was officially appointed, an internal WPA proposal laid out a mission. Its ancillary goals were predictably bland: a government encyclopedia, WPA progress reports, to-be-determined special studies. But the FWP’s key task nicely fit the introspective mood of the moment. It would create a guidebook to the United States, issued in five volumes, with a sturdy and authoritative title: “The American Guide.” Who would object to such a benign and practical idea? Who wouldn’t feel soothed by a unifying survey of the American scene when, half a decade deep into the Depression, the country seemed always on the verge of unraveling? How exactly to compile such a guide was left up to the director and his national staff. Nothing quite like it—a vast national self-portrait assembled by thousands of destitute citizens, under the aegis of a wholly public institution, in response to an economic and social crisis of exceptional severity—had ever been attempted. There was no course to follow other than one of pure improvisation and experimentation. Henry Alsberg, the product of a fairly improvisational life, had just the right temperament to meet the task.
He would have felt at home in the FWP’s first office: an old theater. It sat a few blocks west of the White House, a boxy, concrete structure nestled among drab government buildings. Anchored to the top of the façade were enormous letters that spelled out AUDITORIUM. In the twenties, when the building was new, those letters would have been illuminated, glaring down on the crowds that funneled through the doors for operas, lectures, movies, an Easter church service hosted by Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural ball. But by 1935—with the galas displaced by boxing matches and dog shows, and the building eventually leased by the FERA for staff offices—the tiny bulbs inside the letters were dark and the concrete façade was mottled from neglect.
The theater itself was dilapidated and dreary. Its enormous pipe organ, specially commissioned when the building was constructed, loomed inside the space like the remains of some extinct beast. Six thousand organ pipes clung to the walls. The climate was stifling. (So it was, too, in the main WPA building just down the block, where workers were beginning to call their agency the “Wet Pants Administration.”) The rows of seats were cleared out for partitions and desks; the opera boxes were loaded with filing cabinets. When the journalist Ernie Pyle visited and looked for his regular seat—where he’d once sat and listened to Paul Robeson sing, Clarence Darrow debate, and Amelia Earhart describe her trans-Atlantic flight—he found instead a WPA official sitting at a desk and speaking into a Dictaphone. Behind the stage, on the third floor, was a dressing room that had been converted into Alsberg’s office. From here he could peer down at the jumble of desks and cabinets and wonder what he’d gotten himself into.
Peering up at him were the project’s first workers, wondering what to make of their director. He was a large man with a low, resonant voice; he spoke slowly, carefully, often meanderingly. He wore the dark mustache he’d grown three and a half decades before, as an undergraduate at Columbia. Now it was mildly yellowed by nicotine. One FWP worker said Alsberg resembled “some shaggy bear dressed in rumpled clothes,” another saw “a lovable St. Bernard.” He seemed fit for a directorship, with his stature and his voice, even if his sensibility was more bemused and scattershot than authoritative.
Alsberg settled into the theater and began assembling his key staff. He hired a new secretary, Dora Thea Hettwer—his twelfth, amazingly, since he began working for the Roosevelt administration. Hettwer was wary of a man who’d burned through secretaries at the rate of roughly one per month. But she came to appreciate Alsberg’s amiable nature, his way with words, and his knowledge of German, which she also spoke. She grew devoted to him—perhaps in part because he so clearly needed her help.
He brought Reed Harris, his assistant from the FERA. Harris was a full generation younger than Alsberg and vastly more skilled in the administrative arts. When Alsberg had arrived in Washington, Jacob Baker knew him well enough to assign him a diligent and organized helper. Reed Harris was that person. He’d attended Columbia, as Alsberg did, although he’d been expelled for printing an exposé of the dining halls in the college newspaper (protests by faculty and the ACLU got him readmitted, but then Harris quit out of principle). Like Alsberg, he moved through a number of jobs: journalist, editor, ghostwriter, advertising production manager. In 1932, as Alsberg fretted over his stalled career, Harris published King Football, an attack on the seamier side of the high-stakes collegiate game. In the FERA office, Harris was first to discern the basic principles of the Henry Alsberg filing system when his boss, pressed to produce some document, shouted, “Hell, I don’t keep carbons!” It was said that, as Alsberg’s assistant, Harris did 90 percent of the work—while Alsberg did 90 percent of the talking.
Alsberg and Harris constituted two parts of a shaky triumvirate, with George Cronyn, the associate director, as the third. Cronyn, another old friend of Jacob Baker’s, was closer in age to Alsberg and had a résumé perhaps more diverse than Alsberg’s own. Cronyn was a bestselling novelist who had also edited encyclopedias and magazines and an anthology of Native American songs and chants, The Path of the Rainbow; before that, he’d been a cowboy, a rancher in the Southwest, a movie scenarist, an apple grower in the Northeast, a stonemason, an English professor, and a plumber. He’d seen the country and was comfortable handling a wide range of obscure information and commenting on it with authority. Like Alsberg and Harris, he’d studied at Columbia; unlike them, he also studied and taught out west, at the University of Montana. Like Harris, he possessed the methodical touch that Alsberg lacked, and he became something of a managing editor for the office. But his prickly temperament left Harris to handle many personnel issues, especially relations with the mushrooming state offices.
The FWP didn’t remain in the theater for long. All of Federal #1 was soon ushered into a new space just northeast of the White House. It was another emblem of twenties opulence repurposed after the crash: the McLean mansion, a faux-Renaissance pile occupying one third of a block on I Street. It belonged to Evalyn Walsh McLean, a Washington socialite whose other possessions included the Hope diamond. (Her husband’s family owned The Washington Post.) When times were better, she would string the diamond around the neck of a Great Dane named Mike during the lavish parties she threw for the capital’s elite. But, laid low by the Depression and in debt to many party caterers, she was forced to lease the mansion to the federal government in 1935.
Soon her mansion was occupied by the workers of Federal #1. They drifted through the mammoth rooms, gazing up at the chandeliers, admiring the woodwork, wandering among the gaudy statuary. They found a case of champagne in the basement and drained it. Some used the statues as coatracks. Rumor abounded: there was a ghost in the mansion’s ballroom (now taken over by the FWP), the specter of a woman who plunged off the musicians’ gallery during a long-ago ball; beneath the floor was a subterranean tunnel, once traveled by Warren Harding and his mistress, that led to the White House. As in the FWP’s previous home, desks were clustered out in the open and filing cabinets stuffed into any available spot—including inside the fireplace. Again, the air was stifling, full of smoke from cigarettes and cigars. The McLeans’ doorman remained with the building, and he looked upon the new tenants—harried men and women used to working for a living—with dismay. (Alsberg, coincidentally, was renting a room in a house attended to by another former servant of the McLeans, who likewise reminisced about her superior ex-employers.) The very idea of lowly New Deal bureaucrats occupying the mansion and despoiling it of grandeur drove Roosevelt’s upper-class enemies into a rage. Alsberg was likely tickled by it.
As the national office filled in around Alsberg, Reed, and Cronyn, the DC staff determined how best to fill the FWP’s ranks around the country. This meant confronting a question that seemed simple but wasn’t, not really: Who, precisely, deserved jobs set aside for writers? Jacob Baker grappled with this question even in the FERA days, when he noticed growing numbers of white-collar workers in surveys of the unemployed. Teachers, college professors, librarians, and ecclesiastics were losing jobs alongside novelists and journalists—could they all be grouped into a single project for writers? A more selective approach would mean judging applicants on the quality of their writing, as the PWAP did for artists. But such aesthetic vetting contradicted the very mission of the WPA. Its aim was to reduce the relief rolls, put cash into hands and pockets, and alleviate the suffering wrought by the Depression. Harry Hopkins had made this clear. At a staff conference in June 1935, Hopkins—conveying Roosevelt’s wishes—said that the WPA’s first objective was to take 3.5 million people off relief and put them to work. Human beings came first; the quality of the books and plays and paintings of Federal #1 came second. “Don’t ever forget that first objective,” he said, “and don’t let me hear any of you apologizing for it because it is nothing to be ashamed of.”
So the FWP threw open its doors to all writers, broadly defined, including—as Alsberg put it—“near writers” and “occasional writers.” This meant that young aspirants would be working alongside professionals laid off in mid-career and older scribes whose livelihoods had crumbled long before the Depression, as well as clerks and recent college graduates and teachers—people who’d never published a thing and never planned to. Such an approach exposed the FWP to criticism and ridicule from hostile observers who saw the arts projects as epic boondoggles, havens for loafers and hacks. But the FWP’s inclusivity carried an important, if subtle, philosophical argument. Instead of thinking about writers as uniquely inspired individual artists of exceptional talent, the FWP treated writing as a craft like any other—or, better yet, as a form of labor. And, as with any form of labor, some people excelled, some didn’t, and a great many simply got the job done. The FWP would serve writers all along that spectrum of ability. Just as WPA construction projects weren’t reserved for the most gifted pickax swingers but for anyone who could do the work and needed a job, so the FWP wouldn’t cater only to solitary geniuses. What made someone a “writer,” in the FWP’s view, was their ability to carry out the tasks of the writers’ project—no more, no less.
This approach was underpinned by a strict hiring quota: 90 percent of FWP workers had to come from the relief rolls. The remaining 10 percent were skilled writers and editors who were not on relief but could provide the necessary technical expertise. Such an arrangement had drawbacks. Becoming certified for relief meant submitting to a “means test,” an invasive interview that confirmed the applicant’s destitution. It was also called “swearing the pauper’s oath.” Many found it humiliating, and some worried that it would hurt their chances of future employment. One federal writer who’d lost his job in publishing described the ordeal: “I finally went on relief. It’s an experience I don’t want anybody to go through. It comes as close to crucifixion as…” (He didn’t finish the thought.) “You sit in an auditorium and are given a number. The interview was utterly ridiculous and mortifying. In the middle of mine, a more dramatic guy than I dived from the second floor stairway, head first, to demonstrate he was gonna get on relief even if he had to go to the hospital to do it.” O. Louis Guglielmi, an artist working for the Federal Art Project, captured the feeling in his painting Relief Blues: a family is being interviewed by a social worker in their shabby apartment, and all of them are struggling to contain feelings of great intensity beneath their uncomfortable, and discomfiting, demeanors—a portrait not of relief but of festering anxiety and plain old sadness.
But the quota system had a purpose. It ensured that the ranks were filled by those who most desperately needed work, and, as Roosevelt and Hopkins intended, it moved people off the relief rolls. Inevitably, though, the FWP attracted some dubious applicants. In New York, a mail carrier applied because he was “a man of letters.” In Chicago, an elderly Egyptian man—who claimed to be 120 years old and was apparently illiterate—did nothing but produce ornate calling cards every three months. (They kept him on staff for amusement and perhaps out of mercy.) A story circulated about an overflowing toilet in a state office and the four editors—all plumbers by trade—who sprang up to fix it. In the Washington office, Reed Harris collected more examples: One was “a very chunky little man, somehow impressing one as would a little bantam rooster,” who “came in one morning in a rush and announced breathlessly that he was a ‘twenty-pound poet.’” The man meant, apparently, that he had a twenty-pound suitcase full of poetry and wanted the government to publish it. Some undermined their own claims of competence, such as the “author of a lot of output” who lamented that writing “cannot be very remunerative under present circumstances because of the deluge of output pouring in on the editors in general.” Others weren’t bashful about their qualifications: one gave his own as “fencing, swordsmanship, weapon repair, boating, boxing, stamp collecting, and fancy diving.” The project also attracted its share of alcoholics—hard-drinking reporters, soused poets, even a family friend of the Roosevelts’ with a habit of disappearing on benders. When Eleanor Roosevelt asked Alsberg to find this friend a job, one without too much responsibility, Alsberg reassured her. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said, “if we made it a rule not to hire writers given to drink, we would probably not have a Writers’ Project.”
Soon enough, they had a workforce: flawed, diverse, desperate, promising. And they had an assignment, too: the American Guide, although the details were still vague. The idea for a guidebook, or a series of guides, wasn’t entirely new. It had been percolating in various New Deal agencies and was even suggested to the CWA by the poet Marianne Moore, who saw it as a useful endeavor for out-of-work writers. Jacob Baker and his aides had fielded similar proposals. One journalist suggested that writers create “iconographies,” assemblages of original source material—combinations of images and text, such as broadsides and handbills—that would essentially be sociohistorical scrapbooks. And then there was the slim Connecticut guide, published under CWA and FERA auspices, which provided that most valuable commodity in the bureaucratic world: a precedent.
So the timing was right when a staffer in the Resettlement Administration named Katharine Kellock cornered Tex Goldschmidt, Jacob Baker’s assistant, at a cocktail party. The RA was a short-lived agency headed by Rex Tugwell that relocated distressed farmers and laid-off urban workers to cooperative farming communities and planned garden suburbs. Kellock’s job was to visit these communities and report back to Washington. But she had an abiding interest in the nascent FWP, and when she encountered Goldschmidt, she pressed her idea: the FWP ought to create a series of guidebooks, American Baedekers, updating the popular German brand that was the standard for travelers. (She’d been making the rounds of DC cocktail parties with this pitch, trying to find a sympathetic ear in the right agency; before that, she’d presented the idea to commercial publishers.) Kellock was a convincing evangelist. Guidebooks, she argued, would require the work of many people—and therefore absorb more from the relief rolls—while naturally gaining support from the communities they covered. And there was a demand for such books. Leisure travel, ever since the late nineteenth century, was on a decades-long upswing that the Depression couldn’t reverse; so was auto tourism and the prevalence of paid vacation time for workers. Auto sales were erratic in the thirties, but fuel sales and car registration rates actually went up. The situation was analogous to what was occurring in the world of books, where library membership rates soared while book sales plummeted. People were still eager to travel and to read, but they did so within their means.
Goldschmidt was convinced and brought the idea to Jacob Baker. “Iconography is for the birds,” he exclaimed. “I’ve got the answer.” Meanwhile, Kellock discussed the idea with another FERA official, who happened to be her husband’s old college pal and a fellow Naughty Naughtian: Henry Alsberg. Soon she was collaborating on a plan with two FERA staffers, which led to a formal proposal for the FWP, submitted on June 25, 1935—the one calling for a guidebook as the project’s main task.
Kellock left the Resettlement Administration and transferred to the FWP, even though it meant a pay cut. She was a decade younger than Alsberg, born in Pittsburgh to a middle-class family, but they had similar résumés. While Alsberg was reporting on postwar revolutions in Europe and working for the JDC, Kellock was on the continent, too, undertaking famine relief with the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization. In New York, she worked for the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side and began writing for newspapers and magazines and the Dictionary of American Biography. Like Alsberg, Reed, and Cronyn, she had studied at Columbia, where she was profoundly influenced by the Progressive historian Charles Beard, who’d recently taught there. She arrived at the FWP possessed of staunch Progressive attitudes: eager for reform yet optimistic about the course of American industrial civilization, preoccupied with understanding how technological and economic trends shaped social life, and sensitive to the conditions of workers who were subject to those trends. If Alsberg represented one type of New Deal sensibility—creative, loose, conversant with the arts world, tinged with political radicalism—then Kellock represented its more grounded and technocratic complement.
Kellock, in other words, was more “brain trust” than Greenwich Village. She was focused and precise, tenacious in a way that occasionally irked her male colleagues—especially once she became the project’s highest-ranking woman. One of them called her a “small tornado of a woman whose voice seemed to alternate between the sounds of scolding and laughter.” She was not afraid to clash with her subordinates and did not seem particularly bothered when she did. “But,” that colleague went on, “she was as honest as she was zealous and her devotion to her task emanated a pervasive aura of dedication that seeped into the bones of the rest of the staff.”
As Alsberg and his team sketched out a vision for the American Guide and its five regional volumes, they began to see flaws in this approach. George Cronyn argued that regional boundaries are notoriously slippery; Katharine Kellock pointed out that state guides would elicit more support from legislators, who were, after all, the patrons of the FWP. So they chose a different tack: they would produce not one big guidebook, regionally divided, but separate guides to all of the states. (Alsberg and the DC staff never quite abandoned the goal of a single, massive guide to the nation and planned to someday produce one by condensing the finished state guides.) What these new guides would look like on the page was still unclear. Their ostensible model, the American Baedeker, was published in 1893 and last revised in 1909. It was written by a Scot with European travelers in mind: the author warned of an “absence of deference or servility” from “social inferiors” and alerted readers to the American habit of spitting on floors. It wasn’t going to be a template for the FWP, and neither would the drearily functional Blue Books and Green Books. (Victor H. Green’s adaptation of these generic guides, The Negro Motorist Green Book, which he designed to help Black travelers avoid discrimination and danger on the road, appeared slightly later.) The American Guides, in form and content, would need to update and surpass their guidebook predecessors.
Through the fall of 1935, the project shuddered to life. Alsberg issued a burst of missives to college presidents, newspaper editors, chambers of commerce, head librarians, Kiwanians, and Rotarians around the country, explaining the mission of the FWP and the nature of the guides, and urging them to cooperate with the FWP field workers who would soon be visiting cities of ten thousand or more people and fanning outward from there. The replies were favorable.
Meanwhile, the DC editors compiled the FWP’s bible: “The American Guide Manual.” Federal writers in every state would study it—or were supposed to, anyway—and learn about the project’s structure and mission. The manual contained commandments: “No pains should be spared to make the data reliable and inclusive” and “The literary style as a whole should be a model of precise, succinct excellence” and “The semi-colon should be used cautiously.” It also explained how the guidebook-making process would unfold on the ground. Armed with questionnaires on various subjects—these made up the bulk of the manual—field workers would go into their communities and gather data. Through a combination of research (in libraries and museums and newspaper morgues and family records), interviews with locals, and firsthand observation, the field workers would fill in the questionnaires and then write up “Field Continuities,” that is, their notes in unabridged prose form. Then they’d condense and polish the Field Continuities and convert these to Field Editorial Copy, which would then be converted to State Editorial Copy in the local offices, and absorbed into guidebook manuscripts. Then the states would ship the manuscripts off to DC for additional editing—manuscripts that were, by now, the collective products of many hands.
When the field workers fanned out across the country—often in their own hometowns and the surrounding countryside, or their own city neighborhoods and adjacent streets—their task was to catalog the American scene in all its aspects. Everything was relevant: the manual mentioned fish hatcheries, topography, lookout towers, polo grounds, church choirs, gold rushes, band shells, aquariums, famous ballads, soil conditions, homes for the aged, slum-clearance programs, plantation manors, navy yards, epidemics, folk customs, battlefields, floods, welfare associations, raids and wars and notable authors and on and on. Mostly, the manual asked for field workers to compile descriptive lists—all the railroads in a given area, or universities, or waterfalls of special beauty. But it also provided questions. “Are there interesting animal colonies such as colonies of beavers or prairie dog cities in your district?” “Are there any unusual instruments which were invented in your district?” “What deposits are there of marble, granite, clay, potash, etc.?” “Have ‘Americanization’ and intermarriage obliterated racial differences or are there sharply defined racial groups?”
Their approach, a hearty embrace of the American land and all that it contained, resembled something dreamed up by Walt Whitman—if he were handed a federal bureaucracy and a hefty budget. Its multitudinous potential may have seemed overwhelming. But the basic methodology laid out in the manual was all straightforward enough.
Then came the supplements. On the heels of the manual the DC office began issuing supplementary instructions. They sent at least eighteen of them, well into the fall of 1937, after several guides had already been published. Early supplements clarified the staff hierarchy; others explained the procedures for consulting outside specialists and volunteers. One provided subject codes for field workers to affix to their notes (S-202 meant a state’s “entrance into the Union,” S-503 meant “Notable roadhouses, dude ranches, resorts, etc.”). Exasperated state editors complained that keeping track of the supplements was a job in itself. (Imagine finding this in your mail: “Supplementary Instructions 11B, Appendix 1 (Revised) to the American Guide Manual.”) The barrage of supplements were proof that, week by week, manuscript by manuscript, Alsberg and his team were shaping and adjusting the FWP’s methods even while those methods were being carried out. It was a dynamic and deeply improvisatory process—and it was often messy.
The manual and its supplements were intended to steer FWP activities on the ground. It was left to the DC editors, meanwhile, to decide what the American Guides would actually look like. Katharine Kellock, who helped think up the very idea of the guidebooks, was also pivotal in shaping them—but not before she was ensnared in a scandal that nearly ended her career and might have sunk the entire project. When she first transferred from the Resettlement Administration to the FWP, Alsberg made her a field representative. This meant that she was a liaison between DC and the state offices, charged with explaining directives and keeping the work on track. Kellock had this job until February 1936, when she was hit with a sudden and furious wave of red-baiting. The William Randolph Hearst papers—rabidly anti-communist—ran an editorial naming Kellock as the sinister figure behind a taxpayer-funded “Red ‘Baedeker.’” She was using thousands of relief workers, it alleged, to compile information on American industrial and agricultural resources, along with highway and railway maps, with the purpose of funneling this information to the Soviet Union. The charge would have seemed ridiculous to anyone who knew Kellock—except that her husband, Alsberg’s college friend, did in fact work for the Soviet embassy, which had been newly recognized by the Roosevelt administration. Harold Kellock was a journalist and publicist who’d worked for Robert M. La Follette’s Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1924, and then for a private group that provided information about Russia to American businesses; after Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union, Harold was offered a job handling press materials for the embassy—that is, incoming clippings and reports from the US media—and he took it. As Reed Harris wrote at the time, “He is known to be somewhat anti-communistic in his views and keeps his job chiefly because he is a good publicity man willing to present the actual facts in an attractive way.”
But to the Hearst press, he was a spy and a traitor. When they attacked his wife—and by extension, the FWP—they set off a wave of criticism. For months, petitions organized by a Republican group arrived in stacks, protesting the appointment of “a woman whose husband, because of his office, must necessarily be pro-communistic, when there are plenty of American women, imbued with American principles and ideals, who need the work.” They called for Kellock to be fired. Anxious senators and representatives contacted WPA officials and forwarded outraged letters from their constituents. One private citizen wrote from Atlanta: “In the name of common hard horse sense, have the officials in Washington gone mad? Are there not sufficient real patriots (descendants of such) left to fill positions of responsibility in the government without calling in this horde of foreigners?” Jacob Baker quickly worked up a form letter refuting the charges, explaining Kellock’s qualifications, and emphasizing that she belonged to no foreign horde: she was a US citizen and came from a well-established family. (Her maternal grandfather was a cousin of Rutherford B. Hayes.) WPA officials regretted the controversy—not in sympathy with Kellock, but wishing someone less controversial had been hired in her place. And yet they were determined not to fire her. Instead, Kellock was transferred to a new role in the DC office as the editor in charge of tour copy—a less visible job than field supervisor, but one vastly more important in allowing her to shape the American Guides. She’d join a select group of national editors who were responsible for specific subject areas: the renowned but controversial song collector John Lomax, for instance, was brought on to handle folklore.
In her new position as tours editor, Kellock didn’t hold back while her colleagues wrestled with the design of the American Guides. The DC staff knew that, like the Baedekers, the guides would combine essays with descriptions of routes and cities. But would these books be functional items for travelers? Or would they be more reflective and digressive, literary compendiums that delved into the history and culture of each and every state? Alsberg tended toward the latter idea. Kellock, however, was firmly in the first camp. In a blunt memo, “Differences in Form and Content of Different Types of Books”—so precise it was somewhat condescending—Kellock defined various types of publications, including an atlas, a dictionary, a gazetteer, and a geography book. These, she explained, are all reference works, and their information is arranged topically or alphabetically, and they are intended for libraries or for the home. A guidebook, however, presents its information in the order that travelers will need it as they follow along a route, and is intended for the field. “It is a major error to try to combine a reference volume and a guidebook,” she insisted. And yet Alsberg was intent on making just that “error.” The result was a kind of hybrid, a book that could rest in your car’s glove compartment or on your nightstand, something that would meet Kellock’s expectations for functionality while fulfilling Alsberg’s desire for literary quality. This formal compromise would draw jeers from some critics: “It isn’t a guidebook if you have to leave it in the car,” according to Bernard DeVoto. But others appreciated that these books had room to stretch, to ramble a bit, and perhaps to suggest something more about the land they charted than simply what was around the next bend.
Kellock accepted this decision and turned to her work with gusto. The tours—dense collages of the mundane and the remarkable, of reported fact and alluring hearsay, whose juxtapositions were sometimes odd and frequently surprising—would become the signature aesthetic achievement of the American Guides. “The tour form is a difficult form,” Alsberg once said. “It is like a sonnet; but, if you can learn it, you can be more interesting in the description of a tour than in any novel.” Kellock, as national editor of the tours, their engineer and philosopher, sought to bear this out. From her desk in DC she envisioned a network of routes crisscrossing the United States, an invisible webbing that held all the guides together. She thought about how to join one to another and how to account for the flow of traffic. She thought about their placement on the page, the typography and the headings. She thought about the real-life experiences of the human beings who would be navigating these tours by car, hour after hour—and she thought about the places they’d pass through, the sites they would see. “THE PURPOSE OF A GUIDE IS TO LEAD SOMEWHERE,” she reminded Alsberg in a memo. So why not saturate the tours with destinations? This meant expanding them to include everything that wouldn’t fit neatly into the city profiles. It also meant, naturally, more work for her: as the tours editor, she was responsible for massive amounts of copy, with the help of only one and a half assistants and two secretaries. (The half assistant didn’t work on tours exclusively.) But she had a vision and she wanted to see it fulfilled.
She was meticulous and sophisticated, but sometimes her zealousness got the better of her. At one point, Reed Harris sent an unusually fierce memo on Alsberg’s behalf to Kellock and the tour section, criticizing them for writing brusque letters to the state offices that made the DC staff seem “as if we were posing as little tin gods.”
There has been a definite school-teacherish method of expression used … It immediately antagonizes the reader. It makes every line of your letter, or editorial comment, sound like a slap. There are very few times when it is necessary to use this type of language in dealing with state directors. It must be assumed that they are intelligent human beings, and in many cases they have long experience in the writing and editorial fields, and that they will not stand for being treated like school children.
Kellock had a habit of writing terse and pointed memos when she was addressing an important issue. She certainly may have neglected to embroider her letters to the states with anything but the directions she meant to convey. But she was, after all, a national editor of the highest rank. And it’s hard to imagine any other such national editor, all of whom were men, being compared to a schoolteacher mistreating her pupils.
Even so, Kellock’s authority inside the project was fairly secure. Outside the project, the red-baiting frenzy had dissipated, at least for the moment. Kellock and the entire staff had reason to be optimistic. They’d improvised their way toward a foundation for the largest literary project ever attempted, and, so far, it seemed to be working. George Cronyn wrote to Jacob Baker and another WPA official: “There is no escaping the conclusion that this will be a permanent government function, similar in certain respects to the census. It will be one of the most important perpetual sources of information the government can offer.” Reed Harris believed they needed to foster “snob appeal”—the kind of hype that would make readers believe they needed to read these books. That the books, once published, would be able to garner a few select strong reviews, or that they would even appear in the first place, were foregone conclusions.
At the center of it all was Alsberg, chain-smoking, dictating a letter or discoursing into a phone or hunched over documents. He still struggled with administrative tasks, sometimes jumbling up who was on what phone and which state office he was instructing to do what task. When he hired the state director for Louisiana, Alsberg promised him one salary and then sent a letter offering a larger one. George Cronyn caught the mistake, but Alsberg replied, “Oh, I forgot. Unfortunately, must pay 2600—don’t see what you could do about it.” He could be absentminded and aloof when it came to such details. But his dedication to the work never flagged. He rarely took breaks, although he did occasionally steal into a movie theater for a nap. He usually brought work back to his home and toiled into the night. Despite his missteps and fallow periods, he had never quite lost the drive that once propelled him across war-torn Europe, into shtetls and through the Soviet gates. Some project workers knew his history but many didn’t, and they might have been surprised to learn the story of a man whom they occasionally saw shuffling from his office into the nearby women’s restroom (more conveniently located than the men’s room downstairs), leaving his secretary to guard the door.
After moving to Washington, Alsberg didn’t correspond much with Emma Goldman. But she did write in October 1935, as the FWP was getting off the ground. “Indeed I never would have believed that you would display such sticktoitiveness to organizational work. I take off my hat to you, old dear.” Goldman’s position was that if someone were to helm such an instrument of the state—to which she was opposed in principle—it might as well be Alsberg and not “some corrupt person.” She was clearly glad to see her friend’s life take this unexpected and promising turn.
And so the copy flowed into Washington, revisions and telegrams and supplementary instructions flowed out. Every single sentence in every manuscript, Harry Hopkins informed the president, would be read and edited in the DC office. In a way, the FWP had all the problems of a major publishing house, a newspaper with far-flung bureaus, a large relief agency, and a government bureaucracy that lived or died by the whims of distant legislators. It was attempting a project of unprecedented scope and scale for which there was no blueprint. It was employing thousands of people at a task for which most had no real training or experience. It was operating at a perilous moment, when the very assumptions of American life and the democratic experiment were in question. And its core base—writers—were a group not particularly known for comfortably inhabiting large institutions, working cooperatively, or obeying orders. George Cronyn, who received weekly progress reports from the DC staff, knew this well. One particularly insouciant report carried the subject line “What I have been doing thru the week” and concluded: “Friday—in bed all day, not working, but certainly thinking of God and the Writers’ Projects.”
And far from Washington, another editor, Miriam Allen deFord of the San Francisco office, expressed her feelings in verse (with apologies to Joyce Kilmer):
I think that I have never tried
A job as painful as the guide.
A guide which changes every day
Because our betters feel that way.
A guide whose deadlines come so fast
Yet no one lives to see the last.
A guide to which we give our best
To hear: “This stinks like all the rest!”
There’s no way out but suicide
For only God can end the Guide.
Copyright © 2021 by Scott Borchert