The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.
The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.
Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.
Fern L. Nesson
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de la Fayette, joined the French Royal Army in 1771. After having achieved the rank of general in 1776 at only 19 years of age, he became inspired by stories of the American colonists’ struggles against British oppression and sailed across the Atlantic to join the uprising. Lafayette was shot in the leg at the Battle of Brandywine and spent the winter of 1777-8 in Valley Forge with George Washington. The two became quite close and Washington began to refer to him as “my adopted son.” In May 1778, Lafayette successfully led American troops in defending Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey from attack.
By 1779, the Americans desperately needed more money and arms. Lafayette sailed back to France to persuade King Louis XVI to offer more help. When he returned with both money and arms in 1780, Washington gave him command of the Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army. In 1781, Lafayette laid siege to the British at Yorktown until Washington arrived with additional troops. Surrounded by the Americans, General Cornwallis was trapped and forced to surrender, thus ending the war.
After the war, Lafayette returned to his estate, Château de la Grange-Bléneau, in France where he lived until his death in 1834.
The Americans never forgot Lafayette. In 1824, President Monroe invited him to revisit the United States in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. Accompanied by his son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, Lafayette arrived at Castle Clinton on the Battery in Manhattan on August 15, 1824. He was greeted by a military escort which accompanied him to City Hall. Their route was lined by over 50,000 people (a third of the city’s population). In his journal, Lafayette’s personal secretary, Levasseur, described the parade:
“The general, attended by a numerous and brilliant staff, marched along the front; as he advanced, each corps presented arms and saluted him with its colours; all were decorated with a riband bearing his portrait. During this review, the cannon thundered from the shore, in the forts, and from all the vessels of war. At the extremity of the line of troops, elegant carriages were in waiting. General Lafayette was seated in a car drawn by four white horses, and in the midst of an immense crowd, we went to the City Hall. On our way, all the streets were decorated with flags and drapery, and from all the windows flowers and wreathes were showered upon the general.”
For the next eighteen months, Lafayette toured the United States, traveling to each of the 24 states. He attended the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, revisited the Brandywine battlefield in Pennsylvania, met with former officers and soldiers in his regiment and paid his respects at the graves of George and Martha Washington at Mount Vernon.
Wherever he went, Lafayette was greeted with an extraordinary outpouring of patriotic emotion. His visit could not have come at a better time. The presidential election of 1824 had just ended with Andrew Jackson winning the popular vote, but the House of Representatives giving the victory to John Quincy Adams. Party politics and sectionalism were dividing the country, endangering the spirit of unity evinced by the Revolution. Lafayette was the last living general of the Revolutionary era, a throwback to better times, a reminder of our revolutionary ideals, a figure whom all could celebrate.
Lafayette was welcomed across our country with parades, cheering crowds, bands, cannonades. At Bunker Hill in Boston, Daniel Webster declared that Lafayette was “the man who spread the electric spark of liberty to the world.”
Lafayette ended his tour in New York in July, 1825. In Brooklyn, he was asked to dedicate the Library (predecessor of the Brooklyn Museum). At the dedication, he was surrounded by young children and he lifted up one small boy so that he could watch the ceremony. That boy was the six-year-old Walt Whitman.
On the evening that Lafayette set sail for France, 40,000 people gathered at Castle Clinton to see him depart. After a fireworks display, Lafayette cut the anchor cables to The American Star, a hot-air balloon. Its pilot, Eugene Robinson, tossed American and French flags to the crowd below as Lafayette’s boat pulled away from the wharf. Levasseur reported that “profound dejection was imprinted on every face and, although the wharfs were covered with a huge crowd, a solemn silence alone reigned.”
At the launch, French President Hollande said, “The Hermione is a luminous episode of our history. She is a champion of universal values, freedom, courage and of the friendship between France and the United States.” President Obama wrote in a letter of congratulations: “France is our nation’s oldest ally. For more than two centuries, the United States, Lafayette and France have stood united in the freedom we owe to one another.”
In honor of Lafayette’s visit, streets, schools, cities, colleges were named after him and monuments were erected through the country. In new York City alone, he was honored with Lafayette Square in Morningside Heights, Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, and Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn. In 1876, on the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution, the French donated a statue of Lafayette on horseback to New York City. Fashioned by Bartholdi, the same sculptor who later made the Statue of Liberty, it was placed it at the entrance to Manhattan’s newest park, Union Square.
New Yorkers were not the only Americans to honor Lafayette. Cities were named after him in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Indiana, California, North Carolina and Colorado. Lafayette (or Fayette) counties can be found in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana. Lafayette Squares anchor the downtowns of Washington D.C. and New Orleans and countless streets bear his name throughout our country.
Equally prevalent are statues of Lafayette by renowned sculptors, both French and American. Jean-Antoine Houdon, Bartholdi and Daniel Chester French each contributed statues of Lafayette to Richmond, Virginia; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Easton, Pennsylvania and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Statues and monuments have often become the subject of controversy in our country but Lafayette’s likenesses have never raised any issues. He was and continues to be revered, no matter the political climate of the times. (In contradistinction to others of our American patriots, Lafayette publicly opposed slavery. Throughout his life, he was an ardent and outspoken abolitionist and a friend and supporter of Frederick Douglas.)
Even now, two hundred years after Lafayette’s triumphant return tour, Lafayette’s contributions have not been forgotten. Every year on July 4 in France, the flag on Lafayette’s grave is replaced with a fresh one in a joint French-American ceremony. And in 2002, Congress granted Lafayette honorary U.S. citizenship.
In 2024, celebrations will be held through the 24 states that Lafayette visited in 1824-5. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Lafayette’s tour, the American Friends of Lafayette will hold a bicentennial celebration in Lafayette’s honor. The celebration will begin on August 16, and will include “hundreds of events planned tracing the footsteps of Lafayette on his tour of America as the “Guest of the Nation” between 1824–1825, in the exact order he traveled.” Detailed information can be found on their website: lafayette200.org.
We Americans have never forgotten Lafayette. When General Pershing and the first U.S. troops arrived in Paris to fight in World War I, one of their first stops, on July 4, 1917, was a visit to Lafayette’s grave. Standing at the gravesite in Picpus Cemetery, Pershing’s aide, Colonel Stanton, declared “Lafayette, we are here.” and Pershing then placed a United States flag on his grave.
Even in the 1930’s, Lafayette remained fresh in peoples minds. References to Lafayette in the WPA Guides abound. Just a partial list includes:
New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, South Carolina Pennsylvania, and Louisiana.
With any of these guides in hand, you can find houses where Lafayette stayed, where he fought, courthouses where he was feted with speech and parades, inns where he ate (and even the menus that he was served), Lafayette oaks, Lafayette elms, Lafayette memorials, Lafayette avenues, Lafayette statues.
Here are just a few very brief samples of what the guides have to say:
From the Virginia Guide:
“Lafayette’s role in winning the American Revolution:
During May and June 1781, Lord Corwallis led campaigns north and west of Richmond, opposed by Lafayette […] Washington and Rochambeau then joined Lafayette at Williamsburg. Meanwhile Comte de Grasse, sailed his French fleet from the West Indies […]
By September 29, the American and French forces had surrounded Yorktown, making the British surrender inevitable. On October 19, the English marched out between the American and French forces, laying down their arms while the band played ‘The World Turned Upside Down.'”
From the New Jersey Guide:
“The Boudinot House, in Elizabeth NJ:
Lafayette was entertained here in 1824, leaving a touch of Old World romanticism to color the dreams of the young ladies attending Miss Spaulding’s school on the same spot 20 years later.”
From the Pennsylvania Guide:
“The Scene of Lafayette’s Toast in York, PA:
At a dinner in a house here in 1778, Lafayette proposed his memorable toast of fealty to Washington, thus thwarting the “Conway Cabal” led by General Gates and fellow conspirators who were plotting to unseat the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.”
From the South Carolina Guide:
“The Lafayette Cedar in Camden, SC
The Layette Cedar […] is the sole survivor of a group of cedars planted on the grounds of the new home of Congressman John Carter in 1824. There, Lafayette was entertained on March 8, 1825.
In Lafayette’s honor, all of Camden’s best [silver] and mahogany were sent to Carter’s [And] a set of china [was] specially made for the occasion. A few pieces [of the set] remain.”
Yet another extraordinary event took place more recently. In 1780, Lafayette sailed from France with reinforcements for the American troops on the French ship, L’Hermione. Lafayette rejoined the fight in Virginia; L’Hermione also joined the war, doing battle against the English in Chesapeake Bay.
In 1997, the French people raised $27 million dollars to build a replica of L’Hermione in Rochefort, France, the same shipyard in which the original was built. Finished in 2015, L’Hermione redux set sail for a 27-day trip across the Atlantic. She arrived in Yorktown, Virginia in May and, later that summer, she visited Annapolis, Boston, Philadelphia and New York City.
One can still participate in Lafayette events to this day. May 19 is Lafayette Day in Boston. Every year, the current members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts (which dates back to the Revolutionary War) march to the Boston Common to place a wreath on Lafayette’s memorial. After a speech by the French Consul, the group retires to the French Consul’s residence for a formal lunch.
Truly, Lafayette is a hero for the ages.
June, 2023