Why is Bernie’s Colorado Journeys retracing
tours from a 1941 Guidebook?
First, some background on how the book “Colorado – A Guide To The Highest
State” came about.
What makes a good guidebook? Baedeker Guides are travel guidebooks that have been published since 1828
by the Karl
Baedeker firm
of Germany.
The Baedeker
guidebooks were designed to be carried around in a coat pocket and be available
for handy reference by the tourist while walking about the streets of a foreign
city, or hiking to see a mountain panorama. Therefore, the books had to be
small, robust and yet easy to carry. The formula the Baedeker house came up
with meet all these requirements and is a major reason why the books became so
popular.
Karl prized himself on
the accuracy of his books and was once discovered keeping count of how many
stairs there were to the roof of Milan cathedral by placing a coin on every
20th step. He wanted his readers to know exactly how far they would have to
climb.
After his death in
1859 his empire passed to his sons, and his charismatic authority gave way to a
bureaucracy of editors and agents. Under his sons’ administration, a full line
of English translations was added, starting in 1861 with A Handbook for
Travellers on the Rhine.
By the outbreak of
World War I, 992 editions of the
guides had been published, covering Europe, Russia, North America, India and
the Middle East.
The name was also made
famous by the Baedeker Raids of World War II when the Germans targeted bombing
campaigns over English cities such as Bath, Canterbury, and Norwich, singled
out for their architectural beauty by Baedeker’s Guide To Great Britain.
After World War II,
Baedekers books disappeared from British shelves and guides such as Dorling
Kindersley, the Lonely Planet and Time Out took their place.
In 2007, the series
was re-launched. The red covers remain, but they now come in wipe-clean,
plastic jackets. Practical, but with none of the romance of the original red leather hardbacks. The
current publisher is Marco Polo Travel Publishing.
When the Work
Progress Administration (WPA) was established during the Great Depression of the 1930s, its
director Harry L. Hopkins and his staff argued that artists, musicians, theatre
people and writers, were out of work as well as laborers and farmers. They got
Congress to agree to allocate seven percent of WPA funding to employ those
groups.
- The
Federal Arts Project hired unemployed
artists to decorate hundreds of post offices, schools and other public
buildings with murals, canvases and sculptures.
- The
Federal Music Project hired musicians to
perform with symphony orchestras and community singing concerts.
- The
Federal Theatre Project
experimented with new forms of theatre in New York City. Touring companies
traveled the back roads with a variety of old and new plays.
- and the Federal Writers Project (FWP)
The
Federal Writers' Project was created in 1935 as part of the WPA to provide employment for historians,
teachers, writers, librarians, and other white-collar workers.
The
purpose of the project was not clear in the beginning, it took a letter from a
constituent to his Senator suggesting that the Government produce a series of
sectional guidebooks focusing on the scenic, historical, cultural, and economic
resources of the United States and were given the name American Guide.
The Writers Project had perhaps the
greatest impact of the WPA Arts projects. Fortune Magazine said
that the project produced "a sort of cultural revolution in America"
by documenting America for Americans. The main result of this effort was a
series of guidebooks that were written for each state and several localities.
The
WPA was unceasingly plagued and slowed down by a “red”-baiting right wing
Congress and other hostile forces, but its accomplishments in its eight years
were transformative.
For a country starved for reassurance in the grips of the Depression the
FWP director Henry Alsberg said, "The purpose of the American Guide is to
assemble all the data that some 125,000,000 inhabitants possess about their
country, boil it down to convenient size ... and put it into the hands of
people who don't realize wonders exist at their own door."
The writing in these guides was intentionally
anonymous, but some work had been attributed. Federal One artists, writers,
theater and film directors, musicians, folklorists and other talents collected
and recorded the unique legacy of Americans throughout the country from former
slaves to Native Americans to Mayflower descendants.
When the idea of Guidebooks became the chosen
project the next decision was what format? When one looks at the Contents page
of the 1909 Baedeker
guidebook to the United States, at that time considered the world “Standard”,
and the 1941 WPA –FWP “Colorado – a Guide to the Highest State”, the similarities
are to close call coincidence!
With such a
pedigree, Bernie’s Colorado Journeys is going to start the 2016 travel season retracing
the tours listed in “Colorado – a Guide to the Highest State” published in
1941. But why go back 75-years; surely there are more current books to use? The
1941 tours stopped at every wide spot in the road and detailed its existence.
Today many of these towns have been bypassed the interstates but that does not
diminish the history/legacy that made Colorado the great state it is today.
So…lets hit the road!
The last Baedeker; United States Handbook for Travelers was the 4th revised edition 1909
Work Progress Administration / Federal Writers Project
“Colorado –
A Guide To The Highest State” published in 1941.
