WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

When the compilers of Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State sat down to explain their book, they reached past their own century for company. The preface opens with Dr. Samuel Johnson, who complained in his Idler papers that most travelers tell nothing because their manner of travelling supplies them with nothing to be told — the man who “enters a town at night, and surveys it in the morning,” then hastens away. The Wisconsin writers set out to make a book the good doctor might have forgiven. They travelled the State with note-books in hand, took mileages on the main highways, prowled about towns, scoured local libraries, and pressed good citizens with questions; then they checked and rechecked what they had gathered by letter, by interview, and through long hours in the State Historical Library at Madison.

Their ambition, the preface insists, ran past geography. A place is interesting chiefly for the people who inhabit it, the writers reasoned, and so the guide proposes to lead its reader to Wisconsin’s people — “down through the years as well as across the miles” — telling of the land the settlers found, how they cleared it and broke it, and the changing institutions they built upon it. The design follows from that intention. The book divides into three parts: a series of essays, most of them historical, that paint the State’s development in large strokes; a section describing the nine largest cities, their histories sketched and their landmarks set down for the traveler; and a sequence of selected tours along the main highways.

The tours carry a double purpose — to guide the motorist from one destination to the next, and to present the State once more in mosaic, “isolated bits” of description, history, and legend pieced into a single variegated picture. A work of this size could not be the labor of one office. The Writers’ Project leaned on the long line of Wisconsinians who had veined that “gold-mine of information,” the State Historical Library, and on a roster of consulting scholars who read the chapters in manuscript and in galley proof. The research and writing were done in large part under Marie G. Dieter, editor of the Tours section, and Harold E. Miner, assistant State supervisor.

The volume carries a foreword by the historian Joseph Schafer, who reminds the reader that the American regional guide is no modern invention — Timothy Dwight had toured New England and New York by horse-drawn gig more than a century before — and that this book is distinctly a guide, not a systematic history, though its essays may be read with confidence in their general accuracy. Compiled by the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in Wisconsin, sponsored by the Wisconsin Library Association, and signed at last by State Supervisor John J. Lyons, the guide was published in 1941 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Because it went to press before the 1940 returns were ready, its text reckons the State in 1930 figures, with the newer census gathered into the appendices — a book, in the end, representative rather than exhaustive, because Wisconsin is too big to be pressed whole into a volume of this size.