WPA: Telling Living History
A Utah interviewee discusses riding with Buffalo Bill. Former slaves living in Indiana discuss the Underground Railroad. Jazz musicians paint a picture of depression-era Chicago. Tens of thousands of pages documenting real lives—all courtesy of a program intended to get people back to work and sponsored by the federal government. It was part of the New Deal, specifically The Works Progress Administration (later the Work Projects Administration), more commonly known as the WPA. Federally-funded but state-administered, the WPA was formally established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to put millions of unemployed Americans to work during the darkest days of the Depression through a wide variety of projects.Ultimately, the WPA employed over 8 million Americans, a sizable portion of the labor force at the time. The majority of the WPA’s projects renewed and created the basic infrastructure of America: 116,000 buildings, 78,000 bridges, and over half a million miles of roads were constructed, as were many airports. For the genealogist, however, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project might be the administration’s greatest contribution.
The Federal Writers’ Project employed 6,600 workers specializing in producing works including children’s books, theatrical performances, and the American Guide Series. But workers also conducted interviews to document local histories, folklore, and oral histories. It’s these oral histories, many of which are now online in the “American Life Histories” section of the Library of Congress’s American Memory section, that provide family historians a link between textbook history and our own ancestors’ life experiences—whether or not our ancestors’ are directly mentioned.
Each oral history helps illuminate not only how various ethnic groups assimilated and related to each other, but also how individual Americans experienced some of the historic aspects of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century including slavery, the great westward migration, World War I, and the Depression.
From an entertainment perspective as well, WPA oral histories are first rate. Many of the interviewers went on to become famous writers and reading how they interacted with their subjects is fascinating. A partial list of interviewers includes Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Max Bodenheim, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, Studs Terkel, Mari Thomasi, Richard Wright, and Frank Yerby, among others. A number of researchers, including Hurston, Algren, and Thomasi, even based future novels on their Federal Writers’ Project experiences.
Locating Interviews
The easiest place to start your research for WPA oral histories is online at the Library of Congress. From here, you may enter in keyword searches or browse by state. Keep in mind that the vast majority of interviews have yet to be indexed, and you may not immediately find your topic of interest on the Library of Congress site.You may also want to look for oral histories in state-specific anthologies (see “Suggested Readings”). In addition, many institutions including a number of state and university libraries have large collections of WPA oral histories indexed that are not included in the Library of Congress website. See, for example, the University of Virginia’s “WPA Life Histories Collection” on its website.Try looking for members of your family or interviews conducted in geographic areas in which your family lived. Searches by job title or industry can also prove enlightening. Browse through all of the oral histories for a specific state to get a better understanding of what Depression-era life was like for your ancestors.
Interviewers were keenly interested in documenting the plurality of American democracy; they made a great deal of effort to discuss American ethnic experiences explicitly and honestly. Searching for keywords like “Irish,” “German,” or “Italian,” can help you find such oral histories—ones that will offer you a better understanding of the lives of specific American ethnic groups.
Focusing on People
A complement to the oral histories project was the WPA’s folklore project. As the project’s name suggests, these interviews centered on the American experience of recent immigrants, and how these immigrants integrated their own customs including cooking, family rituals, holidays, medical remedies, and folklore into their American lives.Possibly the most valuable contribution of the WPA oral histories are the more than 2,300 interviews that were conducted with former slaves. Initially, the project was started by Hurston and colleagues working within the Florida Writers’ Project creating the Florida State Guide. The group forwarded several of their interviews to WPA authorities who in turn decided that a separate project investigating African American folklore could prove illuminating. Eventually slave interviews were conducted in nearly all southern states as well as most New England states. Indiana in particular produced an especially rich collection of these narratives that also stands out because of the work of interviewer Anna Pritchett—one of the very few black interviewers in the WPA project. A collection of WPA slave narratives can be accessed through the University of Virginia.Native Americans, unfortunately, were not interviewed extensively. While references to “Indians” in the Library of Congress collection are voluminous, most of them are from the perspective of European American settlers. The libraries at the University of South Dakota, as well as other libraries, may be good places to find collections of Indian folklore.
Finally, keep in mind that the Federal Writers’ Project does not cover all states. California, for example, chose not to devote its WPA resources to conducting oral histories, although universities, libraries, and other community-based organizations collected similar interviews from th is period. An index to some of these appear here. Other collections include the Oral History Archive at California State University at Long Beach, which holds a unique collection of interviews documenting the stories of famous twentieth-century Jewish immigrants in southern California.
While the complete WPA oral histories collection is not yet fully digitized and indexed, genealogists hoping to grasp a deeper understanding of their Depression-era ancestors can look forward to more interviews being made available online over the next few years. In the meantime, searching the current offerings on the Library of Congress website
or browsing collections at local and institutional libraries can give you a head start on gaining a greater appreciation of your ancestors’ daily lives.
Roseann Reinemuth Hogan, Ph.D., has been researching her family history since 1978. Her special interests include oral history and social history.Derek Agard holds a masters degree in political science and works as a software trainer.
Limitations
WPA oral histories can be an inspiring resource for learning more about American people, cultures, and lifestyles, but watch out for the following limitations:Not all states devoted WPA resources to conducting oral h istory interviews. Many projects were continuations of non-WPA projects already underway by regional universities so additional histories may exist outside of those found in the Library of Congress. The Alexander Street Press offers an extensive list of oral history collection links. Be patient—the incredible volume of information on the page makes it slow to load.Oral histories vary in terms of length and quality. Some of the histories read like excerpts of well-crafted novels. Others are more form-like.
Researchers generally transcribed their interviews in the dialect of the interviewees without the benefit of tape recorders. While the original dialect and vocabulary can add to the fascination of the interviews, it can also prove frustrating at times. Especially disconcerting is the matter-of-fact manner in which many interviewers address ethnic and racial stereotypes.
Interviewers often spent considerable preliminary time in casual conversation with their interviewees. While the goal was to establish trust, this also left the oral histories open to exaggerations and selective or faulty memories.
Suggested Reading
Baker, Ronald L. 2000. Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless: The WPA Interviews with Former Slaves Living in Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bordelon, Pamela, ed. 1999. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: the Writings of Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project. New York: Norton.
Brent, Linda. 1983 (orig. 1861). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: HBJ.
Rawick, George, ed. 1977. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing.
Szucs, Loretto Dennis. The WPA: 60-Year-Old Investment Still Yield High Dividends. Ancestry Magazine. May/June 1995.
Witcher, Curt B. Records of the Works Projects Administration. Ancestry Magazine. May/June 2001.
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