WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

“In preparing South Carolina, A Guide to the Palmetto State, we hoped to present the subject as a well-rounded whole for two groups of people: South Carolinians who want to know more of their State and others who want to know the whys and wherefores about us.” So begins the preface to this volume, and the task, its authors confessed, had been tremendous, because so many interesting facts had been discovered, and condensation had not been the least of their labors. To get the scent of a good story and trail it for months in and out of libraries, old newspaper files, and private papers, and finally to catch it by the tail, had been an adventure multiplied hundreds of times.

‘South Carolina is the least written about and the least understood of all the States that have played an important part in our history,’ a Northern historian had asserted; and through this Guide, the compilers hoped to allay some of that criticism, conscious of how briefly one small volume could cover four hundred years of activity and development. They aimed at balance — not too much of solemn fact, not too much of obvious tradition, not too much description, not too many dates. The book opens by asking a deceptively simple question, ‘Who Is the South Carolinian?’, and answers it across a State that runs from the Low Country plantations to the Indian block houses of the Up Country, from Fort Sumter to King’s Mountain.

In his foreword, Governor Burnet R. Maybank wrote that the South Carolina Guide presented a comprehensive view of the state for the first time in its long and stirring history. Herein were delineated the livelihoods, natural resources, customs, art, and history of the people; much of the information, he predicted, would be read for the first time by South Carolinians, and it was for them, as well as for the State’s many visitors, that the Guide had been written. He believed the book would add to the interpretation of a singularly individual state.

The volume was compiled by the Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in South Carolina, with the South Carolina State Department of Education as state-wide sponsor, and published by the Oxford University Press in February 1941. Signed by State Supervisor Mabel Montgomery and Assistant State Supervisor Louise J. DuBose, it gathers a long run of background essays — from natural setting, Indians, and history through agriculture, industry, education, religion, folkways, the arts, gardens, and cookery — followed by descriptions of fourteen cities and towns and twenty-one numbered motor tours with their lettered branches and sections. A chronology, a bibliography, a list of consultants, the 1940 census figures, and an index complete a portrait of the Palmetto State.