A new book, “Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America,” traces the work of more than 6,000 out-of-work writers to create travel and information guides for all 48 states during the Great Depression.

The Federal Writers Project produced more than 2,500 publications between 1937 and 1943 as part of the Works Progress Administration, headed by Iowa native Harry Hopkins. 

Although Iowa writers were among the first to embrace the FWP, and the fourth state to publish  a guide, Iowa receives little notice in the book by New Jersey author and journalist Scott Borchert.

Much of Borchert’s 304-page text focuses on states with controversial writers, including Richard Wright in New York, female African American anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and Chicago’s Nelson Algren, a well-known socialist sympathizer.

Not that there weren’t controversies in Iowa. 

A 1985 introduction by Grinnell College’s Joseph Fraizer Wall to “Iowa: A Guide to the Hawkeye State” – originally published in 1938 – noted the tension between writers and the book’s nominal sponsor, the Iowa State Historical Society, which was asked to sign off without editing the text. 

Wall wrote that Historical Society Director Benjamin F. Shambaugh objected to text that said: 

“Iowa ‘even had indications of culture,’ that farmers ‘distrust outsiders,’ that the Iowan is ‘commonly thought of as a great boaster,’ and that ‘his boasting is largely in self-defense, impelled by a sense of cultural inferiority,’ that ‘many of the people were not proud of being the center of the hog belt,’ that ‘the farmer, conscious of his own deficiencies is willing to pay high taxes for the maintenance of educational institutions.’”

Shambaugh failed to remove those and other comments from the book, although Wall reported fears of negative responses were overblown.

“Almost every major newspaper in the state gave it [the Iowa Guide] a rave review. … Even the small towns liked the book, and the Iowa people seemed to relish the somewhat derogatory comments,” Wall wrote. 

The nearly 600-page book includes a 10-page chronology of Iowa history from white-settler perspective, although it does include a nine-page essay on “First Americans,” providing passing notice to “Mound Builders” and “Indians” who predated discovery of the Mississippi River in 1541 by Spain’s Hernando de Soto.  

Although Wall wrote that many of the book’s essays were of “uneven quality,” he praised a section on agriculture for seeing in 1938 that Iowa was “on the eve of a tremendous agricultural revolution” that would replace horse power with tractors and see the development of hybrid seed corn and soybeans as a major crops.

The book’s “Press and Radio” essay reported that the Du Buque Visitor was Iowa’s first newspaper, although it lasted only 13 months in 1836-37. Iowa’s oldest newspaper, the Burlington Hawk Eye, was founded in 1837 as the “Territorial Gazette and Burlington Advertiser.” By the time Iowa became a state in 1846, 24 newspapers were circulating in the Iowa Territory.

Iowa’s early newspapers were colorful and personal, with a 19th-century editor in Iowa City writing that a competitor’s “long-winded speeches are as frothy as beer and as empty as his head.”

The 1938 Iowa Guide also profiled the state’s 17 largest cities.

Des Moines, it noted, had 47 hotels and 22 motion picture houses, but was “one of the Midwest’s smokiest cities.” Burlington was the site of a threatened “cow war” in 1931, when 1,800 state militia were called out to control farmers who objected to bovine tuberculosis testing. Cedar Rapids claimed the Cherry Sisters, an 1890s out-of-tune vaudeville act that was so bad “audiences became hysterical” with laughter.

Although it is now 83 years old, the guide contains a wealth of mostly forgotten information that  I may return to in the future. 

For example, how many Iowans today know that Orville and Wilbur Wright, inventors of the airplane, lived in Cedar Rapids for four years as children before their parents moved to Ohio?