WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

The Empire State guide opens not with a writer but with a governor. “This Guide,” Herbert H. Lehman declares in his foreword, “aims to present the colorful, historic past and the many-sided contemporary life of New York State” — and then, in a single sweeping passage, he traces that life from the Indian fur trade and the pioneer sawmill to a commonwealth that has risen to preeminence among the states in commerce and industry. On its battlefields, he reminds the reader, liberty was won and made secure; since its farms fed the armies of the Revolution it has kept a high rank in agriculture; in education, public welfare, and conservation it has shown the way.

What the New York State Writers’ Project set out to capture is the sheer simultaneity of all this. Lehman’s foreword promises a book in which things are “described side by side, as they occur on city streets or along State highways” — great industrial plants and broad farm lands, welfare institutions and bathing beaches, colleges and churches, battle sites and museums, canals and bridges, all the evidences of an active and enlightened life. For the visitor, he writes, the volume is an introduction to the Empire State; for the people of New York it is “in the nature of a self-portrait.”

The portrait was a community effort, as supervisor Bertrand M. Wainger makes plain in his preface: the book “could hardly have been compiled without the co-operation of the community which is its subject.” The New York State Historical Association and the Bureau of State Publicity lent their names and their archives; specialists supplied the chapters on public welfare, forestry, and agriculture; libraries and museums in Buffalo, Rochester, and Auburn opened office space to Project workers. Wainger reserves his warmest thanks for the several hundred men and women who had a hand in the book — many since gone on to private employment or to careers as free-lance writers — and notes that, but for a few small towns, the population figures throughout were drawn from the preliminary report of the 1940 Census.

The guide’s architecture reflects its ambition. Part I, “The General Background,” runs from the New York countryside — an essay by the historian Dixon Ryan Fox — through geology, the Indians, history, transportation, industry and labor, the ethnic groups, and the arts. Part II profiles the cities and special points of interest, from Albany and Buffalo to New York City, Niagara Falls, and West Point. Part III is a vast touring section — forty numbered automobile tours, with Hudson River and Long Island tours among them — threading the state from the Connecticut line to Lake Erie. A chronology, a bibliography, and an index close the book.