A time when public works was public policy
American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA - When FDR Put the Nation to Work
By Nick Taylor
Bantam, 640 pp., illustrated, $27
The scene onstage was based on a true story: Dorothy Sherwood walked into the Newburgh, N.Y., police station, cradling her unmoving 2-year-old son, James, in his dress suit. Displaying him to the duty cop, she said simply, "Here he is." She'd drowned the toddler, she explained, because "I couldn't take care of him any longer and I thought he would be better off dead."
This 1936 play, "Triple-A Plowed Under," showed the two faces of the Great Depression, want and the response thereto. Sherwood's madness had detonated from the spark of joblessness and hunger. The play itself was part of Franklin Roosevelt's response to that deprivation. Taxpayers paid for the production, courtesy of the Works Progress Administration, by which Uncle Sam became the employer of last resort for everyone from actors to construction workers.
A paean to the WPA, Nick Taylor's "American-Made" is balanced and engaging if overlong, mixing historical overview with profiles of individual workers and the WPA's prime movers: FDR and program chief Harry Hopkins. Shoehorned in a dingy basement office, the latter oversaw a vast jobs conveyor belt, greased by federal dollars and wending through state WPA offices, that supplied $11 billion to put more than 8 million people to work from 1935 until 1943, when a more effective employment program - the Second World War - shut the WPA down.
The idea of public works wasn't radical for its novelty; populists had pushed it four decades earlier, during the nation's previously worst depression. Rather, opponents barked at the WPA's price tag - supervising people in jobs cost more than handing them relief checks, though the New Deal did that as well - and alleged make-work jobs. Taylor does not camouflage the WPA's goofs. In North Carolina, a man-made lake was built without a water source, its 40-foot-thick dam containing a 6-inch-deep puddle. Meanwhile, Hopkins battled unions over wage rates and other issues.
Yet the catalog of worthy WPA projects astounds: "650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 civilian and military buildings, 800 airports built, improved, or enlarged, 700 miles of airport runways. It served almost 900 million hot lunches to schoolchildren and operated 1,500 nursery schools. It presented 225 concerts to audiences totaling 150 million, performed plays, vaudeville acts, puppet shows, and circuses before 30 million people, and produced almost 475,000 works of art and at least 276 full-length books and 701 pamphlets."
Even if the occasional job was worthless, the critics didn't explain why paying for bad work was worse than paying relief recipients for no work. Hopkins and FDR hardly coddled the lazy. When labor leaders called a strike to protest WPA workloads and other measures, the president averted the stoppage with a "work or starve" edict, denying strikers the right to collect relief money.
When it comes to advocating modern jobs programs, Taylor tosses in the towel, dismissing the idea in one paragraph as politically infeasible. Perhaps. But from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which gets a nod from Taylor, to the lethal collapse of a deficient Minnesota bridge last year, there's enough work awaiting that even a Republican like Mike Huckabee called for combating the current economic slump with infrastructure jobs. Taylor recounts the arguments FDR and Hopkins made for a jobs program over welfare, and they were fundamentally conservative: Work dignifies people and justifies its expense by giving the nation valuable services and enduring goods. You get what you pay for.
Huckabee didn't make it to the White House, for reasons other than his New Deal-like instincts. Nevertheless, in America, where the Protestant work ethic has made us incurable workaholics in the eyes of other nations, endorsing work should be an eminently doable job.
Contact Rich Barlow at barlow81@gmail.com. 