It’s hard to believe by the light of a smartphone, but the United States government once paid writers to write, painters to paint, photographers to photograph, actors to act, musicians to record. Things are quite different in this century, at least in the market-minded US, where native good sense keeps our elites from spending much money on the arts and humanities. There’s plenty of free crud, though: AI slop all over Instagram and YouTube, an endless stream of dullards with podcasts, and no paywalls around The Daily Caller or the New York Post either. Reality—unreality—gets cruder every day, with the channels of art and culture increasingly controlled by high-finance super-predators, and the NEA and NEH facing constant austerity. Call it for-profit phenomenology: the lived creative world pierced and remade by the needs of capital.

It doesn’t have to be this way. For a while, it wasn’t.

During the Great Depression, when the bottom fell out of capitalism, economic terror was in the land even more than usual, for way more people than was historically typical. Suddenly, enormous swathes of American society that had never suffered much were on the chopping block. You could be an educated professional on a breadline; you could be a good bourgeois citizen and lose your house. Many people were, many people did. Interviewed in the late 1930s, Rose Wilder Lane, a farm-sales agent from Missouri, recalled the Great Panic of 1893, a collapse where “the country was ruined, the whole world was ruined,” before considering the present day and remarking that “once more I am living through a depression”—“the ultimate disaster, the depression to end all depressions.”

It really was that bad. The whole American project seemed like it could go under. That is, until the Roosevelt administration pulled the emergency brake and gave Americans a taste of social democracy via the New Deal’s Keynesian programs: among them the TVA to electrify Appalachia, Social Security for the elderly, the Federal Housing Administration to shelter the poor, the National Labor Relations Board to calm worker unrest, and, for the masses of unemployed people, the Works Progress Administration, the fabled (and despised by conservatives) WPA.

The WPA hired unemployed workers to build infrastructure: roads, bridges, dams, parks, schools, post offices, libraries, courthouses, and other civic spaces across the United States. The Griffith Observatory above Los Angeles, for example, is a WPA project. However, via the blandly named Federal Project Number One, the agency also worked on less tangible forms of infrastructure: culture and the arts, understood as key attributes of a democratic American identity, particularly with European fascism mushrooming and Jim Crow entrenched at home. “Federal One” included the Federal Writers’ Project, which would, as official rhetoric put it, “describe America to Americans.” During its short run, it employed multiple future National Book Award winners and funded plays, travel guides, city profiles, library expansions, local and regional histories, and oral archives, such as the Slave Narrative Collection, which contains interviews with thousands of formerly enslaved African Americans.

The FWP also hired out of work writers (including future stars like Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, May Swenson, Muriel Rukeyser, and Nelson Algren) to compile ethnographies of the working class. Benjamin Botkin, lead editor of the Writers’ Project, called these worker interviews “folklore” and thought they would invigorate American fiction, drama, and poetry by providing a “social and cultural consciousness too often lacking in ivory-tower writing.” Others also saw it as inoculation against both Nazism and homegrown racism. The rabbi Stephen Wise, who trained writers to be interviewers, wanted to “publish material sympathetic to ethnic diversity as a way of preventing European hatreds from infecting our own country.” And as he was aware, plenty of hatreds—against Black Americans, against women who could now vote, against immigrants, against Jews and Catholics—emanated from the domestic sphere. This was the time of Father Coughlin’s sermons and Charles Lindbergh’s fame, of segregation backed by vigilante and police terror.

To resist this tide, interviewers would meet workers where they were, in pool bars and union halls and dives and streetcorners and fields and mines and factories, centering the experience of ordinary people, many of them relative newcomers to the US, all invested in getting by and getting along. These are the people who built modernity.

Trubek takes an explicitly presentist stance, connecting the Writers Project and the red-baiting backlash against it to MAGA’s violent contempt for creativity, care, and diversity.

As part of their culture work, FWP agents conducted over ten thousand interviews—“the size of a town,” remarks Anne Trubek, editor of the astonishing American Made: Stories of Work from the WPA. The work didn’t last long, because immediately after its 1935 founding, the WPA attracted the attention of conservatives, red-baiters, anti-intellectuals, and other bigots who saw a communist plot behind the effort to record the lives of working people. In fact, the WPA was the first target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and Roosevelt’s people did little to defend it; by 1943, the WPA, and with it the Federal Writers’ Project, were dead, the remaining money diverted to the war effort.

These interviews were buried after HUAC finished its job. Only about thirty percent of the archive has since been digitized; the rest is aging, disorganized paper housed in the Library of Congress. It has never seemed like the state wants much to do with any of this, these proletarian voices recorded by lefty intellectuals during a brief social democratic window, a crisis so big it tore a hole in ordinary life, when elites were frightened enough to peel off something extra for writers and artists, for steelworkers and laundry maids.

In 1980 the scholar Ann Banks published a selection of the FWP ethnographies, First Person [sic] America, which sold well enough to be reprinted a decade later. Then four decades passed—the Soviet Union’s collapse, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Great Recession, Donald Trump, Covid, all of it—with no more interviews seeing print. Until now, with Trubek’s collection, which comprises voices “at once unique and representative,” with an immediate “felt truth” underlying “the same story with different flags” (her words).

Trubek takes an explicitly presentist stance, connecting the Writers Project and the red-baiting backlash against it to MAGA’s violent contempt for creativity, care, and diversity. “I chose the interviews … I felt would most resonate with readers today,” she writes, “particularly while the nation celebrates its 250th birthday.” The interviewees loom from the dark of history, the anxious days just before World War II, but their voices are relevant to the 2020s, and they are both appalling in their depictions of what labor does to bodies and fundamentally hopeful about the capacity of working people to critique, narrate, and change their own lives.

It’s like having beers with friendly strangers. “I am a long-distance talker if you give me a chance,” says one retired Western miner. They’re all this way. It’s great.

Contemporary readers need books like American Made, especially when the silicon promises of networks, clouds, and streams obscure the persistent reality that organized society depends on laboring, embodied minds, on workers sweating, often in dangerous conditions for bad pay. Who assembled the laptop I’m typing on? Who mined the metals in its guts? Who keeps the electricity flowing to my apartment? Who harvested the food I eat to have the energy to write? Such questions, when they were asked during the Depression, were answered by the people themselves.

The workers interviewed in American Made have a vast range of jobs, most of which still exist—miners, musicians, copywriters, meatpackers, sailors, sex workers, newsboys, ironworkers, department store clerks—and speak English in multiple dialects, all of it swirling into a multicultural, polyglot American sound. The pure weird vibrancy of idiomatic conversation, of demotic speech, of idiom, is the collection’s style, and it’s thrilling how “ordinary” speakers describe the world. “I practically grew up on a pool table,” recalls a newsboy. According to a fisherman, “I wouldn’t never be happy without I had a boat under me.” And “you ain’t an ironworker unless you get killed,” remarks a veteran of New York subway construction; “We ain’t got any stories around here,” he continues, ironically. “All we got is hard luck.”

But hard luck is the story, and people, being people, were ready to talk. A Polish fishmonger who recalls being “smuggled into America” from Cuba asks his interlocutor, “You want me I should tell you about it? All right, why not?”

What emerges is a longform rejoinder to the idea that the working class is any less sensitive or articulate than the educated, and a correction to the conceit that something called “unskilled labor” exists. The details in American Made are a potent form of literary and economic history, and they force one to think beyond popular abstractions like The Economy or GDP or “business” and consider that all the material goods and services enjoyed by anyone go back to flesh.

An anonymous New England rubber factory hand, who spent his life making shoes, is one of the book’s many sharp critics of how the division of labor speeds up production while hurting workers and fragmenting craft knowledge. Once, artisans worked to produce whole objects, emphasizing “quality not quantity,” but by the 1920s work was segmented and socialized according to a complicated industrial scheme. Employees on the line went faster for less money. “Working fast and steady can do queer things to a person,” the rubber worker observes, noting how the regimen disciplined workers: “You get your whole mind and body adjusted to doing the same thing over and over again without hesitating at all and at as fast a tempo as possible. When your muscles beg you to stop, you just pay no attention to them, and keep going.” It is, he emphasizes, now “just part of the regular program: aches, pains, bandages, speed and all.”

When employees balked at this Taylorist efficiency, consultants were dispatched to observe and report: “a bunch of young college boys wearing white shirts and neatly pressed pants, who never made a shoe in their lives, came into the plant. They timed every job, keeping their eyes on a stopwatch and writing figures down on a sheet of paper. That marked the end of the good old days.”

Taylorism promised clean efficiency, without human friction slowing down production. But there was nothing clean about it. There never has been, and there still isn’t.

American Made is a violent book, as interviewees describe the effects of physical labor on their bodies, which are generally ignored in mass culture. (Only the final commodities, or the affluent people consuming them, get to matter.) A woman who worked packing sausages describes how “women get ruptured. They pick the strongest women—big husky ones, you should see the muscles on them—but they can’t keep it up. It’s horses’ labor.” Another worker from a slaughterhouse describes “my hands looking like red lobsters and all blistered up all the time.” Still another got rashes from the acid used in handling “poisoned pork.” “The acids from cans,” she says, “it just gets you so that you can’t stand up. You don’t know what’s the matter with you but work you can’t to save your life.”

In other words, labor sickened and killed people all the time. But if you didn’t work, you also got sick and died, because this is America, where nobody can rest.

Then, as now, employers worked hard to prevent workers from taking their complaints into union organizing. Flattery was one path—“You know, they pat you on the back and make out you’re just one of the family, a great big happy family”—but so were surveillance (“I was blacklisted. Some spy found I was friendly to the union”) and other modes of union-busting, such as having priests tell their flocks that unions were godless communism or sewing division between ethnicities. In the meat yards of Chicago, for instance, Lithuanians and Poles were pitted against each other to prevent the kind of solidarity that might lead workers with everything economic in common to organize.

But amid all that, they did organize, and they often won. Workers were consistently able to diagnose exploitation and resist it. When one boss forbade laundry employees from singing on the job (“too much pleasure to have while working for his money”), “it gave us more time for thinking—thinking about our problems.” Which led toward the hope of unions, which worker after worker describes as a lifeline their bosses hated. Plus ça change. By the late 1930s, millions of people had gotten a taste of collective bargaining, and they were not just better protected, they were also more politically astute. As a meatpacking worker related in 1939, “It’s things like that [workplace injuries] the union is here to prevent from happening, and to see that when some worker does meet such an accident she won’t be thrown out on the dump heap, maimed and thrown a little compensation sop that wouldn’t last a year. The companies can’t get away with that anymore. People know more.”

In her introduction Trubek raises the problem of genre, commenting that these interviews could also be called “essays, memoirs, testimonials, literary works.” For me at least, this in turn raises questions of transcription and translation, of literary construction, of who exactly is speaking through the text.

On the one hand, it’s the workers themselves, obviously. Their recollections are thebook’sscarred body. The working class makes its own history; it turns out the subaltern can speak if given the chance.

But nonetheless someone had to create that chance. Workers did not organically or spontaneously divulge their memories. They were prompted by trained interlocutors paid by the US government, who in turn had to assemble polished, readable interviews from hasty notes and field jottings. Interestingly, Federal Writers’ Project nomenclature categorized the interviewers as “workers” and the workers interviewed as “informants.” Further, as Trubek notes, most of these federal writers “were just as poor as the workers they interviewed, and the work they did helped them feed their families, too.”

Nor were the ethnographers operating with the kind of audio equipment that would be mass-produced cheaply in the postwar era. Instead, they took notes on paper, then usually typed these up. Because the archive has only been (partially) digitized, but not assembled into a continuous scroll, “the pages are fascinating in and of themselves,” Trubek writes, “material documents that convey their history: fading typewriter ribbons, marginal notes, and other residue of twentieth-century writing tools are integral to the experience of reading the archive online.” The appendix includes a sample of these, so a reader can see that archival materiality.

The interviewers usually do some framing in their reports, bits of character detail and scene-setting, though occasionally a critique or evaluation leaks through, like something from a novel, as when an FWP writer observes that “Mrs. Haggerty [a retired housekeeper] is 72 years old, a sweet, refined little lady with a forced dignity, which she tries to maintain in the presence of her too-modern family.” But these frames are not distracting or ornamental, and they tend to be lean, and broadly realist, along the lines of: “Medium blonde, bright blue eyes, big and healthy, absolutely overflowing with life.” Worker testimonies (albeit unavoidably filtered by the interview format) retain center stage, and their conversational intelligence is gripping.

An anonymous Portuguese fisherman on Cape Cod, for instance, basically theorizes one of the major themes of Moby-Dick, with its depiction of capitalist extraction and production yoking together an international workforce: “On land the Portuguese and Americans don’t always get on so good. But we fish together all right. It’s different out in the boats. There’s the same rules for everyone. The rules for a captain and crew are the same everywhere, and we all want the same things—a good catch and a good market. We get on good on the sea.”

“We value people for what they do, not for what they look like.”

Trubek saves a banger for the finale. Running back through her memories, a retired ad writer and farm saleswoman recalls something a stranger once told her: “We value people for what they do, not for what they look like.” American Made ends there.

Given the collection’s focus on labor in a troubled society—on the living mixtures of dignity, skill, injury, and violence—this closing line can be read multiple ways, none of which necessarily cancels the others. In one interpretation, it’s a rejection of xenophobia in complex, diverse workplaces (the kind that capitalist commodity production relies on) and a claim for labor’s dignity. It frames collective workplaces as schools for democracy: Whatever the color of one’s skin, if you can do good work, you’re an equal. Work makes Americans.

Unions, however, are the key here. They level intra-class and ethnic divisions through solidarity: Whatever your demographic profile, you’ve probably got a boss who doesn’t treat you well, and you’re stronger standing with others than going it alone. As Jim Cole, a Black butcher from Chicago, recalls, the racist ownership class exploited group tensions and despised solidarity. Cole notes that “the bosses, or either the company stooges, try to keep the white boys from joining the [CIO] union.” “I tell you,” he goes on, “we Negroes was glad to see it come.” Cole experienced solidarity up close, and it made his life better: “There’s a many different people, talkin’ different speech, can’t understand English very well, we have to have us union interpreters for lots of our members, but that don’t make no mind; they all friends in the union, even if they can’t say nothin’ except “brother,” an’ shake hands.”

The problem (here’s the second reading) is that this ground-level organizing still takes place under capitalism, meaning everyone’s labor is exploited. Indeed, a liberal capitalist would point out that diverse workforces are good for the bottom line. Our work may express human skill, knowledge, and need, we might form unions, even fighting ones, but ultimately that labor is mostly being done to benefit corporations and wealthy people. And if you can’t work, if you can’t “do,” you’re useless.

But there is a third view, one that looks toward future potentialities: the capacity of labor, brought together as an industrial class by capitalism, to “do” something about a cruel status quo by organizing and even going beyond workplace unionism, toward a socialist vision of society. The Depression saw an explosion of radicalism and resistance, in waves of strikes, battles with police, bitterly contested union campaigns, and the mass growth of the Communist Party; in the Trump era, as dead-end capitalism increasingly fails to fulfill its promises, we’re seeing widespread labor unrest again: as American workers, from auto plants to coffeeshops to universities, fight stagnant pay and the towering cost of living, and left organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America grow.

With varying levels of political sophistication, workers are fielding a different future where labor isn’t disciplined to line the pockets of the rich, where work bolsters the common good, where maybe, as another writer once put it, our ethic becomes “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

This would be a new society. But it is possible if we dream it, work toward it, build it, do it. The workers in American Made, after all, had fewer established rights and protections than workers in the 2020s, but they changed the world.

If our forebears could fight, so can we. What choice do we have? 

This article was commissioned by Ben Platt.