WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

When the Washington Writers’ Project at last sent its guide to press, the book carried the marks of an unusually crowded passage. As the preface tells it, the volume was the result of the collaboration of many minds: working as a group, the staff gathered, checked, and re-checked a multitude of facts gleaned from many and varied sources. Hundreds of consultants — historians, pioneers, newspaper men, scientists, teachers, and business men — gave generously of their time, and friendly strangers helped the field workers and tour checkers as they traveled the thousands of miles of highway and byway the book describes. Without exaggeration, the State Supervisor wrote, the work might be called a community endeavor and a community interest.

It also passed through a succession of sponsors. The Washington State Planning Council, next to the last of these, withdrew for want of trained personnel to handle the manuscript, and only after much urging did the Washington State Historical Society accept the sponsorship. The Society, its acting president explained, had no part in planning, compiling, or writing; before it lay only the question of accuracy and inclusiveness. What other state societies — in Virginia, Nebraska, Iowa, and Nevada — had been given three or four years to do, the Washington Society undertook in four or five months, verifying a large body of excellent material and bringing some of it up to date, for more than a year, and a census year at that, had elapsed between the closing of the Project and the manuscript’s going to press. Having studied some thirty-six of the state guides, the editors made no claim to having caught every error; they did the work, they said, as a labor of love.

So large was the mass of interesting material that much had to be left out, and the staff came to regard the finished book as merely an introduction to other volumes still to be written about the State — its people, its history, its resources, its cities and towns, its industries, its culture, its recreational areas and scenic wonderlands. The final manuscript was edited in the Washington, D.C., office of the Writers’ Program; R. B. Inverarity designed the jacket and helped assemble the photographs, Professor Melville Jacobs read the Indian material, and Charlotte Shackleford prepared the index.

For the armchair traveler the editors promised fragments of history, short biographies, thumbnail pictures of people and places, and carefully drawn maps. The book moves, as its opening essay does, from sagebrush to seacoast — from the dry country east of the Cascades to the rain-washed shore of the Pacific — and its makers hoped that, against the panorama of the past, the reader might see the moving picture of the present, and feel anew the close bonds that tie the Evergreen State to the rest of the Union. Sponsored by the Washington State Historical Society, the volume was first published in 1941 by Binfords & Mort of Portland, Oregon.