WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Illinois’s volume in the American Guide Series was published in 1939 by A. C. McClurg & Co. of Chicago under the sponsorship of Governor Henry Horner. State Director John T. Frederick’s foreword describes a project that depended on literally thousands of contributors, business people, teachers, clergymen, newspaper editors, local historians, and farmers, representing “every phase of Illinois life,” who gave freely of their time in personal interviews and special investigation to make the guide as complete as space allowed.

What sets the Illinois volume apart within the series is Governor Horner’s own hand in its contents: beyond serving as official sponsor, he personally wrote the essay “Man of Illinois,” on Abraham Lincoln, that appears at page 46 of the general background section. Frederick calls this “a contribution of paramount importance,” and also thanks Lieutenant Governor John Stelle for his courtesies while serving as Acting Governor during part of the Project’s work, along with Paul M. Angle, Secretary of the Illinois State Historical Society, and A. L. Sloan of the Chicago Evening American, both of whom read the entire manuscript before publication.

The foreword also credits Charles E. Miner, WPA Administrator for Illinois, and Mary Gillette Moon, State Director of the Professional and Service Division, for their assistance, and names the six editors, James Phelan, Parker Van de Mark, Jacob Scher, James Baxter, Nathan Morris, and James Gilman, who gave the manuscript its final form after typists, mapmakers, and research workers across the state had done their share.

The finished book runs to three parts. The first lays out Illinois’s background in fourteen essays. The second profiles seventeen cities and towns, Alton through Springfield, with Chicago alone given more than a hundred pages of close description. The third lays out twenty-two numbered tours, including two built around special themes rather than simple routes: Tour 21, “The Lincoln National Memorial Highway,” linking sites associated with Lincoln’s Illinois years, and Tour 22, “The Illinois Waterway,” which traces the Chicago River, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, and the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers along the inland water route connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.

Closing with a list of “Fifty Books About Illinois,” a chronology, and an index, the guide stands as a state self-portrait with an unusual distinction: a sitting governor who put his own writing, not just his sponsorship, into the permanent record of his state, in a volume otherwise built, like its companions across the series, from the patient, unsigned labor of editors, mapmakers, and field researchers.