American Made: Stories of Work from the WPA

As part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project (a subset of the Works Progress Administration) during the Great Depression, the government hired writers to interview working people about their jobs. They met at kitchen tables, in break rooms, and in union halls, where the writers recorded what the workers told them about their jobs, their lives, and their perilous journeys to this country. 

Some stories are brutal, describing harrowing working conditions; some are humorous and warm. All are unfiltered and startingly intimate. From canning meat in Chicago to catching fish in Massachusetts, farming in Nebraska, and building the New York City subway, these first person narratives, typed up and deposited in an archive after funding for the project was slashed, have remained largely unpublished.

American Made brings you a curated slice of this larger collection, so you can hear the voices of the people, many of them immigrant, responsible for the nation’s twentieth century manufacturing and economic prowess. Their words put into relief how America has —and has not —changed since. 

Edited by Anne Trubek with a preface by Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor.