WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Iowa’s volume in the American Guide Series, first published in August 1938 by Hastings House of New York, was commissioned for a specific occasion: The State Historical Society of Iowa sponsored the book to commemorate the centenary of the organization of Iowa Territory, the hundred years since 1838. The guide proved durable enough to reach a fifth printing by 1959. Its foreword, dated July 1, 1938, from Iowa City, was written by Benj. F. Shambaugh, the Society’s longtime Superintendent, who notes that the guide was produced under a specific mandate “placed upon the statute books of Iowa by the Forty-seventh General Assembly” in 1937, making Iowa one of the few states in the series whose guidebook was, quite literally, ordered into being by its own legislature.

Shambaugh is careful to deflect credit from his own institution, writing that “whatever merit there is in these pages belongs to the many Iowans who took part in their compilation,” and crediting the Federal Writers’ Project staff for the actual work of selecting, arranging, and editing the material. The Preface proper, signed by State Director Raymond Kresensky, describes an unexpected secondary effect of the project: although conceived primarily as a guide for sightseers from other states, the work of compiling it ended up acquainting Iowans with their own state, since the postmasters, librarians, ministers, teachers, historians, and old settlers who supplied material often discovered, in Kresensky’s words, that they had “yet to know their own State.”

The finished guide runs to four parts. The first, “Iowa: Past and Present,” lays out fifteen essays on natural setting, the state’s social pattern, its mound-building and Indian past, territorial and state history, agriculture, industry, and the arts. The second profiles seventeen cities and towns, Ames through Waterloo. The third lays out seventeen numbered tours, several broken into lettered sections, each route heading precisely tallying its own mileage, a fittingly exact convention for a state whose section-line roads follow the township grid with unusual regularity. A closing set of appendices supplies a chronology, bibliography, and index.

Read today, the Iowa guide stands as a genuinely commissioned act of civic memory, a book the state legislature itself called into existence so that, on the centennial of its own organization as a territory, Iowa might take stock of what a hundred years had made of it. Its repeated reprintings into the late 1950s suggest the volume kept earning its keep long after the centennial that occasioned it had passed.