Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy. Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com
Nick Taylor’s new book, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA (When FDR Put the Nation to Work), has a bit of a run-on title, a threatening thickness (520 pages), and an intimidating agenda as the first-ever solo history of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). (You know, the Depression era federal job creation agency which kept millions of American workers from becoming so many Tom Joads by putting them to work writing, painting, performing, and building hundreds, maybe thousands of schools, libraries, swimming pools, golf courses and, of course, the Staten Island Zoo.) But it turns out the WPA is just the glue that holds together a tale of political and economic conflict that reads more like an apocalyptic-cum-redemptive novel than a history book. And the parallels between Herbert Hoover with his cohort of conservative crackpots and the Bush Leaguers of today are verrrry scary. Read on for my review; visit Nick himself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phlsuT7AUfA.
As I recall, Nick Taylor (seven non-fiction books), Terry Kay (11 novels), Paul Hemphill (15 books, four of them novels) and Bill Deihl (Sharkey=s Machine and eight other novels) are the only four graduates of the late1960s/early 1970s class of Atlanta Journal/Atlanta Constitution reporters who actually made a lifelong go of writing sure enough serious books, and books only, for a living. Others from the same period at the AJC had onesy-twosy book careers, only to lapse back into the comfortable lap of journalism or the cozy company of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. Lew Grizzard had a fabled career with a series of decidedly un-serious books like They Tore out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat. And Anne Rivers Siddons rose to international fame (and a huge fortune I’m sure) with 18 best-sellers like Heartbreak Hotel and Peachtree Road, but she blossomed out of the literary hothouse at Atlanta Magazine, and not from the bowels of the town=s daily newspapers.
Of the four AJC serious-book alums, Nick=s career has been less glamorous than the others because he chose non-fiction. But I suspect he=s had a steadier income than all but Deihl, who made and spent a helluva lot of money before he died in 2006. Now with American-Made, my guess is that Nick and his wife, Barbara, soon will be moving on up to the East Side of Manhattan.
American-Made begins with a dismal prologue describing an economic collapse Aimpossible for us to fathom@ C 25 percent of the nation=s workers without jobs, which meant that half the population of 130 million Awere literally without support: no money for rent, no food to feed their children, no coats against the wintry cold.@ Using crisp, adjective-free simple sentences, Nick lays the groundwork for a horrifying, then uplifting story that Astarts in a country that was on its knees.@I=m not going to describe this doozy of a read chapter by chapter because that would spoil it for you. But in Part 1 of American-Made, Nick raises the hackles on the back of your neck and all the way down to your beltline with his recounting of how feckless fools of conservatism like President Herbert Hoover took us down a road to near-destruction. AThis did not have to happen,@ he writes. AThat it did was dictated by a revered American political philosophy that denied the central government a central role in addressing social problems.@ Sound eerily descriptive of our current economic circumstance? And savor this quote from President Hoover that could have rolled right off the unconnected tongue of our current president: AThe cure for unemployment is to find jobs.@
Later in the first chapter, Nick catches Hoover in 1931, still ranting two years after the Crash: AThe sole function of government is to bring about a a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise.@ This is the same president who said in his Republican nomination acceptance speech in 1928: AUnemployment in the sense of distress is widely disappearing … We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing among us.@
And so on and so on and so on. Don=t take my word for it C pick up American-Made at your favorite bookstore or buy it online from Amazon.com.
Nick on how Americans stuggled agains the loss of hope: AOld farm trucks driven by grim men plied the roads, overloaded with matresses and furniture, pots and pans, suitcases and chests, wives and children and sometimes parents crowded together in the cab or huddle under canvas in the back.@
Hoover several years later in his memoirs: AMany persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.@
From Nick on how Arugged individualism@ and Alaissez-fair@ brought on a crisis much like our own today: AThe economic crisis had exposed grotesque disparities between the rich and poor. There were two America=s and they were vastly different. The assets of the rich had swelled to unbelievable levels during the boom of the late 1920s. One percent of the people owned 59 percent of America=s wealth by 1929, yet simultaneously more than half the country=s population of 123 million struggled in poverty, trapped below a minimum level of existence.@
Read on and you=ll learn how bonus marchers, guns drawn in Dearborn and Arumbles from the left@ created the atmosphere for the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the flood of can-do reformers he brought into government and the audacity of the New Deal (yep,FDR had audacity first). The centerpiece soon follows C the creation of the WPA and the historic power struggle between its administrator, Harry Hopkins (AHe drank coffee, chain-smoked Lucy Strikes, and moved through his duties like a sherrif in a Tom Mix western.@) and interior secretary Harold Ickes, a progressive Republican from Chicago who headed the Public Works Administration (Ickes lost out on all fronts).
Nick chronicles the successes of the WPA as a quiet cheerleader, sharing a sense of revival and hope, tempered by a foreboding over continued opposition to a program that was steadily helping workers and their families crawl out of the muck of inequality. My favorite narrative comes in Part V of American-Made when Hopkins, with FDR=s full backing, extends the WPA into the ranks of starving writers, painters, musicians and actors, encountering on the one hand turmoil created by rival radical arts groups and on the other hand opposition from mainstream media (ASome critics, among them the New York Times, objected on principle to the idea of paying artists to create art rather than build roads. >Their usefulness has been widely doubted,= the newspaper wrote in a September 1, 1936 , editorial decrying the 25 percent of the WPA budget spent on the arts and other white collar projects in New York.@)
The WPA=s art, theatre, music and writers= projects stirred up swarms of hornets, but managed to provide employment for hundreds of thousands of white collar as well as blue collar workers and create a body of works that still stand remarkable. When the Federal Theatre Project decided to launch stage adaptations of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can=t Happen Here simultaneously in 18 cities across the country, the play=s content created a vicious storm of protest: AThe book, published in 1935 and mirroring ongoing events in Germany and and Italy, told the story of Senator Buzz Windrip, who establishes a facist dictatorship after he is elected president, and uses a brutal private army called the Minute Men to erase liberties and crush dissent.@
On opening night, the play was cancelled in New Orleans because of political opposition, and in St. Louis due to script difficulties. ABut on the night of October 27,@ Nick writes, Athe show went on as planned in Birmingham, Alabama; Boston; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Chicago; Cleveland; Detroit; Indianapolis; Los Angeles; Miami; Newark; New York City; Omaha; San Francisco; Tacoma, Washingtom; Tampa and Yonkers.@
The play went on to new cities and reach an audience of half a million over a five year period. Who would have thought people would flock to a play about something as preposterous as a facist president and his Aminute men@ taking control of America?