WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

“It has become a trite saying that ‘Pennsylvania Has Everything,’” wrote S. K. Stevens, the State Historian, in his foreword, “but the difficulty has been that few people know where to find it.” This volume, he argued, was the most valuable aid to seeing and knowing Pennsylvania yet made available to the general public: the historic and scenic treasures of the Keystone State, located and charted definitely and accurately as never before. It could not tell everything — that would take several volumes — but here were the highlights, and from its pages emerged new bits of information about the Commonwealth’s role in making modern America.

Roy F. Nichols, writing the book’s introduction from the University of Pennsylvania, set that claim in a longer perspective. The Commonwealth, he observed, has a rich offering for those who seek to know America: its natural resources, its scenery, its people and their manifest interests illustrate a vivid section of the contemporary life of the Nation. Yet there is more to discover than the life of today, for in few regions on the continent is so much of the significant past preserved in such proximity to the vibrant present. To review that past — to make an inventory of the Commonwealth’s successes and failures, its triumphs and disappointments across the three centuries since white men first crossed its threshold — he called an interesting adventure. So rich a treasure house, he added, cannot be best explored in ignorance or under the inspiration of whim; the book had been written by citizens of the Commonwealth for their neighbors, within and without Pennsylvania.

The guide was a large cooperative labor. Compiled by the workers of the Pennsylvania Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration, with the Pennsylvania State Department of Public Instruction as statewide sponsor, it was co-sponsored by the Pennsylvania Historical Commission and the University of Pennsylvania and published by the Oxford University Press in December 1940. Stevens hoped it would contribute to better citizenship by making Pennsylvanians conscious of their traditions and backgrounds — in those troubled times, he wrote, such a work might aid in preserving the fundamental values essential to democracy.

The book unfolds in four parts. Sixteen background essays open it, surveying the physical state, the Indians, history, the ethnic groups and their folkways, mine and mill and factory, the farms, religion, education, literature, the press, theater, music, arts and crafts, and architecture. Eighteen cities and towns follow, from Allentown and Bethlehem through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to York. Then come twenty numbered motor tours, with their many lettered branches and lettered sections, threading the Commonwealth from the Delaware to the Ohio line and from the New York border to Mason and Dixon’s line. A chronology, a reading list, the 1940 census figures, and an index close the volume — a thorough and affectionate portrait of the Keystone State.