The judgment of historians, perhaps even of history, has largely been on the side of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal in assigning credit for getting the United States out of the Great Depression. From time to time salvos are lobbed from conservative bunkers, such as Amity Shlaes’ anti-New Deal tome of last year, “The Forgotten Man,” but it, like the rest, failed to land a lethal blow, and meanwhile the ranks of New Deal defenders continue to be replenished.
The latest enlistee is Nick Taylor’s “American-Made,” an admiring, as well as admirable, history of FDR’s main job-creation program, the Works Progress Administration. Taylor, author of several other popular histories, has produced, for this 75th anniversary year of the New Deal, probably the most complete account yet of the much-written-about agency.
Two related criticisms of the New Deal have been that it did nothing to alleviate the Depression, and therefore Roosevelt should have gotten out of the way to let the marketplace return us to stability, as it would do in the long run.
But, as Taylor shows, the first is a negative that has never been proved. Second, as John Maynard Keynes said, “Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” Fifteen million men and women out of work, 34 million with no income whatsoever — 28 percent of the U.S. population — were desperate, some literally starving. Doing nothing was a failed policy.
Keynes, of course, was an advocate of deficit spending. Roosevelt was willing to have the country go into debt if it would get his countrymen back to work.
And that is precisely what the WPA did. Harry Hopkins, a former social worker, ran it tirelessly and fiercely honestly, guarding it, at FDR’s insistence, from partisan political meddling. It lasted eight years, from 1935 to 1943 (when burgeoning war work made it unnecessary), and during that period spent $10.5 billion and employed 8.5 million. Its success can be gauged by the praise even today from families who were helped.
WPA workers built roads, schools, bridges and dams. They sewed clothes, stuffed mattresses, repaired toys, rescued flood victims, painted murals in public buildings, performed plays, played music, wrote guides to the 48 states. They did almost everything but direct military work, and even there they modernized neglected Army and air bases. Projects in Denver included Bonnie Brae Park and Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
But it was, and still is, bitterly condemned, despite its success, because the New Deal represented a seismic shift in governmental philosophy: that the welfare of the people is a federal obligation. This is the core complaint of its opponents, believers in a rugged individualism that says people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even when they have no boots (or feet).
It was, Taylor notes, “the most excoriated program of the entire New Deal.” Its workers were labeled shovel-leaners, its projects boondoggles (a word that was born of the criticism), its entire operation a hotbed of communists.
For instance, the New York airport that the WPA helped build — the city had no airport of its own then — and that was named for the mayor at the time, Fiorello LaGuardia, was derided as a colossal boondoggle. Yet it proved to be an enormous business magnet from the day its doors and runways opened.
Among the WPA’s many project categories, the arts drew the most heat, especially theater and visual arts. Music employed the most people among the arts projects.
“American-Made” is well-written and helpfully structured with short chapters that keep the mass of facts from becoming overwhelming. Taylor intersperses individual stories to give body to stark statistics.
Taylor is unquestionably on the side of FDR and the New Deal; nevertheless, “American-Made” is, to borrow a phrase, fair and balanced. The author admits the WPA’s miscues and flops, its cronyism and corruption at the local level (but never at the top), the ups and downs it experienced in raising employment overall.
And the WPA operated remarkably efficiently. Especially telling are its startlingly low administrative costs — 4 percent of total spending.
“The Roosevelt administration placed an extraordinary bet on ordinary people,” Taylor writes, “and the nation realized a remarkable return.” Indeed, it put its faith in, as Roosevelt said in a 1932 campaign speech, “the forgotten man.”
Roger K. Miller is the author of the novel “Invisible Hero” and writes the blog .
Nonfiction
American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA When FDR Put the Nation Back to Work, by Nick Taylor, $27
