Out-of-work writers, artists, and other professionals found employment in federal projects designed to document the past as a way of providing solace and inspiration in the present, looking to pre-industrial models of how to overcome hardships. Americans working at some of the highest levels of federal government determined that it was important to record and preserve the folkways of the past, as these practices reflected a sort of American romantic nationalism. Romantic nationalism had become a more commonly understood concept in Europe during the nineteenth century and took the form of celebrating national and folk identity as an inspiration for artistic expression. In the 1930s, many Americans understood quilts as quintessentially American objects that reflected both the values of the past and encouragement for the present, and as such they fit perfectly into the federal government’s vision of romantic nationalism. Although a wide variety of quilt styles coexisted in the 1930s, the imagined quilts of the colonial and pioneer past loomed large in the American imagination. Many New Deal workers—including the cultural critics, folklorists, writers, and artists who worked on these documentation projects—adopted Colonial Revival ideologies that promoted romanticized, and sometimes incorrect, ideas about the past in an effort to instill pride and courage in Americans struggling amid the Great Depression.

The Federal Writers’ Project tasked out-of-work writers and journalists with interviewing African Americans who had grown up during enslavement. It also collected interviews as part of the WPA Folklife Project, which documented the lives and traditional practices of Americans, including quiltmaking. The Index of American Design (IAD), part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project, employed artists to document traditional American arts with the aim of creating a record of American design that contemporary artists could draw upon. The resulting IAD collection includes almost 700 paintings of historical quilts.  Looking to quilts as old-fashioned inspiration for “making do,” one geographic district of the Museum Extension Project, part of Pennsylvania’s WPA, created screen-printed quilt patterns based on historic quilts.