WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Indiana’s guide was first published in September 1941 by Oxford University Press, with a sponsor unlike almost any other in the series: not a governor or state agency but the Department of Public Relations of Indiana State Teachers College, which saw the book through a second printing in 1945 and a third in 1947. College president Ralph N. Tirey’s foreword situates the whole American Guide Series within a larger argument, that a young nation approaching maturity was only now turning to document its own cultural heritage, a backward look he insists is “no sign of weakness” but rather “a quickening of our national consciousness.”

The preface, signed by State Supervisor Gordon F. Briggs, thanks an extensive roster of consultants: Dr. Christopher B. Coleman, director of both the Indiana Historical Bureau and the Indiana State Library; faculty from Indiana State Teachers College, Indiana University, Purdue, and Notre Dame; college presidents Otho Winger of Manchester College and Sanford C. Yoder of Goshen College; Wilbur Peat of the John Herron Art Institute; and the DePauw University anthropologists Charles and Erminie Voegelin. Briggs singles out Ross F. Lockridge, director of the New Harmony Memorial Commission, who had himself once served as State Supervisor of the Indiana Writers’ Project, and thanks Harcourt, Brace and Company for permission to quote Carl Sandburg’s “Smoke and Steel.”

The book unfolds in four parts. The first lays out Indiana’s background across fourteen essays, from a contemporary survey through natural setting, archeology, Indian history, and the arts. The second profiles Indiana’s principal cities, opening with the four steel-belt communities of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, and Whiting grouped together as “Cities of the Calumet,” before moving through Corydon, the state’s first capital, Evansville, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Muncie, New Albany, the Owenite utopian community of New Harmony, South Bend, Terre Haute, and Vincennes. The third part lays out twenty numbered tours, several broken into lettered sections, threading the state from the Michigan line to the Ohio River. A closing set of appendices supplies a chronology, bibliography, and index.

Sponsored by an institution devoted to teaching rather than a statehouse, the Indiana guide reads as a particularly didactic entry in the series, one that frames its own existence as part of a larger civic education, a state teaching itself, and its visitors, what a close look at its roads and history could reveal. Its later printings, corrected in 1945 and reissued again in 1947, suggest a guide that found steady use well past the WPA era that produced it.