About Scott Borchert

Scott Borchert is a writer and editor based in New Jersey, and a former assistant editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America

The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states—along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns—while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities.

All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day’s most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing—forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself.

Scott Borchert’s Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the experiences of key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We observe notable writers at their day jobs, including Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel; Zora Neale Hurston, the most widely published Black woman in the country; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the FWP’s chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and other future literary stars found encouragement and security on the FWP payroll.

By way of these and other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation’s very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book’s lessons are urgent and strong.

Imagine “a country of odd contraptions and strange careers, where all the big houses have secret rooms.” Now imagine its inhabitants: “A fanciful, impulsive, childlike, absent-minded, capricious and ingenious people” who “composed irreverent jingles for their tombstones, made up jocular names for their villages and farms … and were continually deciding boundary lines, the locations of county seats and the ownership of plantations by flipping a coin.” Then picture a land where “the project failed, the boom collapsed, the railroad went the other way, the authorities got wind of the plot, the current shifted, the bay filled in.”

Such is the America portrayed by the publications of the Federal Writers’ Project, according to an assessment by the brilliant writer Robert Cantwell in 1939, just as the project was withering under anti-communist congressional scrutiny. As Scott Borchert relates in his impressive “Republic of Detours,” four years earlier the Works Progress Administration had initiated an unprecedented scheme to pay thousands of unemployed writers to document America, its people, its locales and its heritage. During the F.W.P.’s seven-year tenure, it produced at least 1,000 wildly heterogenous publications that together form “the biggest literary project in history” (Time magazine, 1943), “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state” (W. H. Auden, 1950, referring to the entire W.P.A. arts program) and perhaps the most complete portrait of the United States ever compiled. It was also, as Cantwell wrote, “a grand, melancholy, formless, democratic anthology of frustration and idiosyncrasy, a majestic roll call of national failure, a terrible and yet engaging corrective to the success stories that dominate our literature.”

The main idea was simple: to hire a vast workforce of impecunious and anonymous writers to create local and state guides that would avoid boosterism and mythmaking. The writers succeeded, instead of showcasing incongruities, minorities and arcana. (They also collected oral histories, including invaluable interviews with formerly enslaved people.) The stunning richness and poverty of the American landscape and people have never been as impertinently depicted. And the entire project was, as Borchert points out, as antifascist as possible.

Although more than 10,000 people helped produce the guides, two were the brains, soul, and beating heart of the project: Henry Alsberg, its founding director and one of its most colorful figures, and Katharine Kellock, who came up with the idea for the guides and served as their primary editor. (She was, as Borchert writes, their “engineer and philosopher.”) Women played a huge role in the F.W.P., making up 40 percent of its staff, which is more than you could say for practically any other government office of its time (excepting, of course, the federal Women’s Bureau).

A great deal has been written about the F.W.P., including Jerre Mangione’s definitive “The Dream and the Deal” (1972), which sets a high standard. Mangione worked for the project himself, interviewed dozens of other participants, included hundreds of telling anecdotes and provided fair assessments of all aspects of it, from the writing to the twisted politics that gave birth to, sustained, frustrated and eventually killed it off.

Borchert, in his first book, takes a different approach, focusing primarily on six people: Alsberg; Vardis Fisher, a novelist who wrote practically the entirety of the Idaho guide, the F.W.P.’s first to appear; the writers Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright; and Martin Dies Jr., the Texas congressman whose House Committee on Un-American Activities essentially destroyed the F.W.P. in 1939, labeling the guidebooks “a splendid vehicle for the dissemination of class hatreds.” (The project limped on for a few more years, but was fatally crippled.)

Borchert’s survey is absorbing from beginning to end and impeccably researched and written; it neglects neither telling details nor big-picture conclusions, and it lets each of its central figures come alive on the page. I have only three quibbles: I wish it had devoted more space to Kellock, the guides’ intrepid editor; included even a cursory list of the project’s publications (there’s a good one at the end of Mangione’s book); and quoted more material from the guides themselves.

Open an American Guide at random, and you’re bound to come across a delectable passage or remarkable tale. For example, the 1941 pamphlet “Homesteaders of McPherson County” (South Dakota) tells of one C. W. Hawes, who was enlisted to collect the county’s gophers in order to ship them to Australia, where they would be inoculated “with a disease fatal to rabbits but harmless to the gophers.” After paying locals for thousands of gophers and waiting in vain for a Chicago agent of the Australian Rabbit Extermination Company to collect them, Hawes had to let them loose, as they had started cannibalizing one another; they swarmed over the town of Leola and destroyed its gardens. Much later it was discovered that the entire scheme was a practical joke played on Hawes by the local schools’ principal, “a young Easterner.”

The National Endowment for the Arts was created in 1965. While it has little in common with the F.W.P., it has reinforced the idea that the U.S. government should play a (small) part in supporting writers’ endeavors. But back in the 1930s, such a notion was radical — perhaps too radical for its era. And perhaps it’s too radical for ours as well: As a percentage of the federal budget, the N.E.A.’s budget was bigger both 20 and 50 years ago. One could argue that the government should not get involved in paying writers since, after all, there are far too many of them these days, swarming and cannibalizing one another as they are wont to do. But paying unknown writers to be as irreverent as possible about our national heritage? That’s essentially what the F.W.P. did, and what we almost certainly cannot hope for even from a president as ambitious as Joe Biden.

Unless, of course, he reads Borchert’s book.