By Us, for Us

Nick Taylor on being American-Made

By John Hood

Work. It does a body good. A country too, especially when it’s in the grip of a Great Depression. FDR knew that; that’s why when we were falling on our hardest times, he created the Works Progress Administration. Too bad Bush II doesn’t know it, too; then America might not be in such a financial fix.

Or we’d at least be building our way out of it, and I don’t mean with more condos, either. I mean infrastructure. And I mean the arts and the sciences that make great these United States.

Of course, such a situation would imply that little George would be able to empathize, and that, I’m afraid, is a trait he seems to have in very short supply.

Not so Nick Taylor, whose telling true tale American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA (Bantam, $27) might be one of the most empathetic stories ever told.

It also is among the greatest. To Taylor, it’s a “story about so-called ordinary people who did extraordinary things — and all of it was American made,” including, naturally, the make of its remedy, and, yes, the make of its myth.

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR promised upon election in 1932. Delivering what might have been the last presidential promise ever kept — and certainly the largest.

Take it away, Taylor:

“To put a measuring stick on its accomplishments, the WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 buildings, and seven hundred miles of airport runways. It served almost 900 million hot lunches to schoolchildren, and operated 1,500 nursery schools. It presented 225,000 concerts to audiences totaling 150 million, and produced almost 475,000 works of art.”

It “employed not only laborers, but artists, writers, actors, musicians, teachers, and in so doing it totally changed the relationship between the government and the people.”

And how. Of the 6,500 writers hired by the Federal Writer’s Project, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck were but some of the many standouts; among the artists were Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko. And while the Music Project Director Nikolai Sokoloff didn’t consider “the music of dance halls, black churches, cowboy campfires, jazz clubs and brass bands to be sufficiently enlightening,” the WPA captured the Americana anyway.

And, of course, there was the theater, perhaps the WPA’s most controversial endeavor. Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Martin Ritt and Elia Kazan all have roots in the Federal Theatre Project. And though buffs know Welles’ all-black Macbeth caused no shortage of stir, it was The Living Newspapers’ Triple A and Plowed Under that was certainly the most socially acute.

And it was just the kinda work that gave WPA opponents ammo enough to have it shut down.

These days, the New Deal is most often spoken of in derision, despite — or because of — the fact that it spawned FDIC, TVA, the SEC and, yes, the system known as Social Security. In fact, staunch free-marketeers continue to insist that had that $11 billion spent by the WPA instead been lent to the private sector, the Depression would not have cut so deeply, or for so long.

But the fact remains that “people prefer jobs over handouts,” and if people can earn a paycheck by building “roads and bridges and schools and libraries and museums,” as well as airports and armories, pools, parks and playgrounds, well, that’s all the better — for them and for us.

Remember, FDR had inherited an infrastructure that dated back to the previous century; so too will whoever next occupies the White House. Let’s hope that he or she will heed the good deeded by the Works Progress Administration and the dignified legacy it left behind.