WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People appeared in 1937 as the American Guide Series volume for the Commonwealth, written and compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts, with Frederic W. Cook, Secretary of the Commonwealth, as cooperating sponsor. Its foreword, headed “One Moment, Please!”, describes how the project was organized in the State and how field workers fanned out to interview local historians, consult town records, and check their data against every available source.

Out of several million words of field copy, the foreword recounts, there slowly grew a book — not an encyclopedia, its editors are careful to say, but a volume meant to serve the traveler and to preserve significant facts. The work drew on a remarkable roster of consultants, among them scholars at Harvard and the State’s learned societies, and the editors note that the adventurous reader will discover, beyond the main routes, many less precisely marked excursions into Massachusetts history, letters, art, and architecture.

The guide is, more than most in the series, a book of places and people: its second and longest part, “Main Street and Village Green,” portrays more than fifty cities and towns, each under its own heading — Boston as “The Hub of the Universe,” Lowell with its company founders and city fathers, New Bedford with its whaling cry, Salem as “New England’s Treasure-House.” A first part gathers essays on the Commonwealth’s character, its natural setting, the first Americans, and enough of its history to explain its people, along with government, labor, architecture, literature, music, the theater, and art.

A third part lays out the numbered highway tours and their branches, from the coastal road and the Mohawk Trail to New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, closing with a chronology, a reading list of fifty books about Massachusetts, and an index. Frank in its treatment of labor and of episodes such as the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the volume drew public criticism on its release, but it endures as one of the fullest portraits any State received in the series.