Worker-Writers on the WPA: The Case of New Bedford, Massachusetts

Abstract

When Joseph Freeman celebrated the standard 1930s' version of heroic worker-writers at the American Writers' Congress, he didn't seem to notice that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a conflicted category. His vision assumed that the WPA empowered writers by aligning them with laborers, folding them into the celebration of physical labor promoted by the New Deal, an assumption that reverberated widely both at that political moment and in more recent discussions (Figure 1). This essay argues that bringing together the categories of worker and writer under New Deal sponsorship was a much less seamless, less heroic, and less masculinist operation than is generally asserted. It reconstructs the experiences of WPA writers with a local specificity heretofore missing from the discussion: in this case, the assortment of employees – the white-collar destitute, widows, impoverished gentility – on the New Bedford District Office of the Massachusetts Writers' Project. From this perspective, the experience of WPA employment was more in tension than in solidarity with working-class practices. The dynamics of government bureaucracy most often left project employees stranded between the categories of worker and writer, attempting (with limited success) to negotiate a resolution in both their social and their narrative positions.