How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America

There’s a proposal in Congress to put unemployed writers and journalists back to work collecting stories about life in America during and after the pandemic. The US government did something like this before—back during the Great Depression. President Roosevelt’s New Deal created the Federal Writers Project to publish travel guidebooks for every single state. In the spirit of the project’s resurrection, author Scott Borchert has written a new history of the project called, “Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America.” (Photos: US Library of Congress)