WPA Posts

I’ve been moderating part of the Elizabeth Warren campaign’s online community, Artists With Warren. I’ve been writing a series of posts for it on the WPA, and I thought I’d share them here. Here’s Post #1:

Modern America has had an odd relationship with the arts. Part of it is simply our all consuming faith in the market. If people don’t want to pay for it, it must not be worthwhile. And if people don’t want to pay YOU, you must not be any good at it. “You should have gotten a real job.” Don’t get me wrong, we all have to do what we need to do to survive, but I’m not sure unemployed accountants get the same lecture. Another part of it is (somewhat) benign neglect. The arts aren’t taught in most public schools, either appreciation or practice, and they’re really not covered in television anymore, other than the actual shows themselves that qualify as art. Some countries censor their artists through jail and worse; we do it by dooming them to irrelevancy. But once upon a time…

In 1935, through an Executive Order (mentally nudging Senator Warren), FDR created the WPA, putting a staggering amount of Americans to work on jobs for the greater good. A subsidiary of this was Federal Project Number One. This project’s main principals were “1) that in time of need the artist, no less than the manual worker, is entitled to employment as an artist at the public expense and 2) that the arts, no less than business, agriculture, and labor, are and should be the immediate concern of the ideal commonwealth” – or, as the Secretary of Commerce put it, speaking of artists; “Hell, they’ve got to eat, too.” It consisted of the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Historical Records Survey.

It’s almost impossible to grasp the scale of this initiative. At its peak, it employed 46,000 people. It included visual artists, musicians, actors, and directors, dancers, poets, novelists, and many more, as well as stagehands, music researchers, art teachers, music copyists, and many others. Some of the people who participated were William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Jackson Pollock, John Houseman, Paul Robeson, and Robert Blackburn. It funded abstract and cutting edge art, as well as more mainstream projects. Due largely to Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence, while some divisions were segregated, the funds were somewhat evenly distributed through various ethnic and regional communities throughout the United States. While the program was largely shutdown by 1939, its influence and legacy lasted for decades.

I’ve always had qualms about government funding for the arts, largely because of the possibility of censorship. However, I’m realizing it’s probably no worse, and quite possibly better than the system we have now, which is mostly market-based, along with the largesse of some wealthy benefactors. In other words, a system parallel to the one Anand Giridharadas has been so eloquently critical of in the world at large.

Much like AOC has said about the efficacy of her marginal tax rates, if we look to the not so distant past, we can see the success of government arts programs is not just theoretical. We once had nice things, and the worked. We could have them again. If we’re pushing for a Green New Deal, why not a 21st century WPA, as well? Let's discuss this for a while.