Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 2
by Jerre Mangione Little, Brown and Co. 416 pp. $12.50 The situation in April, 1935, was ugly. Between eight and ten million unemployed out of a labor force of some forty million. Dust storms and foreclosures on the farms, locked factory gates in the cities. A sodden blanket of despair muffling the country’s initiative toward recovery. Groping for palliatives as well as cures, Congress, under Presidential stimulus, passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. Part of its effect was the creation of the Works Progress Administration, designed to give those on relief rolls work as well as handouts, in order to preserve their morale and their skills for a better day. In an unprecedented step WPA funding was supplied for four programs to employ those who worked in the fields of theatre, music, the fine arts, and writing. Unprecedented because the nation had no official cultural establishment, no tradition of government support for the arts, and a general distrust of those who did not earn a living in the “practical” world of farm, workshop, or office. But there were thousands of men and women whose work experience lay outside that world, and Congress seemed to agree with chief relief administrator Harry Hopkins’ dictum: “Hell, they have to eat just like other people.” So the government stepped in to enable them to eat as well as they could on salaries of around twentythree dollars a week. Their efforts, however, were not to be purely imaginative but were to have utilitarian objectives. The musicians and mummers of the Theatre and Music projects would entertain low-budget audiences. Members of the Art Project would decorate federal buildings [see “Memoirs of a WPA Painter,” A MERICAN H ERITAGE , October, 1970]. And the Writers’ Project would reveal to tourists the terrain of America. Their initial assignment was the production of several regional travel guides, eventually to be synthesized into a single American guide. Time and chance altered this plan, and the
“Out of this nettle, danger,” says Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV , Part I , “we pluck this flower, safety.” The metaphor is so attractive that the urge to steal it is irresistible. So one notes, to begin with, that The Dream and the Deal is the story of how out of the nettle of economic catastrophe the nation plucked the flower of historical achievement. Told by Jerre Mangione, a novelist, eloquent nonfiction writer, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, it is an account of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. A make-work enterprise for jobless authors, the project turned into an unusual venture in exploring the American heritage—and the choice of words here is deliberate. The rollercoaster ride of the enterprise from crisis to crisis is a fascinating story in itself and an enlightening excursion into the workings of American culture, then and now.