WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

“Nearly four centuries ago, in 1541, the area now known as Tennessee was described by the Gentleman of Elvas, chronicler of De Soto’s expedition.” So the preface to this guide opens, and it presents the present account — vastly more complex and comprehensive than that early narrative — as an attempt by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration to define the State in all its important aspects: social, economic, historical, cultural; and to picture the life of its people against their natural background. The writers aimed not only to supply visitors from outside with information that might increase their interest, but also to give Tennesseans a ready source through which their understanding of their native territory might be deepened and enriched.

The task, the compilers admitted, had not been easy. Many phases of Tennessee life and history had not previously been studied, and for the purposes of this volume much original research was necessary; accuracy demanded that, wherever practicable, existing documents be checked against their sources. The book opens with a ‘Cross Section of a Threefold State,’ a fitting figure for a commonwealth that runs in three grand divisions from the mountains of the east through the central basin to the Mississippi bottoms of the west. Compilation of such a work, the preface notes, would have been next to impossible without the generous help of public and private agencies and of many individuals, among them Jennings Perry, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, who read and criticized the entire manuscript, and Dr. Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University, who helped prepare the article on Negroes in Tennessee.

The volume was sponsored by the State Department of Conservation, Division of Information, and published by The Viking Press in December 1939. It was begun under the directorship of Colonel A. P. Foster and continued almost to completion under Charles J. Elder, former State Director; the preface is signed by State Director William R. McDaniel and editors James R. Aswell and William H. Bunce. As one of the American Guide Series, it carried the imprint of the national project directed by Henry G. Alsberg, within the Work Projects Administration under Commissioner F. C. Harrington and Assistant Commissioner Florence Kerr.

The guide unfolds in four parts. Eighteen background essays open it, surveying the natural setting and conservation, the first Americans, history and government, industry and commerce, agriculture, labor, transportation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, religion, education, sports, folklore, the State’s writers, architecture, and the arts. Seven cities follow — Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Jackson, Columbia, and Kingsport — and then sixteen numbered motor tours with their many lettered branches and sections, threading the State from the Virginia line to the Mississippi. A chapter on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index close a thorough portrait of the Volunteer State.