The Food of a Younger Land Read Free

unreasoning optimism. He was so exuberant, so irritatingly frothy, that he was the perfect antidote to an age known as the Great Depression.
    Triumphantly, electoral mandate in hand, Roosevelt declared that the government should “quit this business of relief.” It was the new president’s contention that in this moment of crisis, when so large a portion of the population was unemployed, it was vital to “not only sustain these people but to preserve their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage, and determination.” His idea was to let the unemployed earn money by working for the federal government. Despite considerable controversy, by April 1935, fifteen months after Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Emergency Relief Act of 1935 was passed. This law gave the president the power to decree work relief programs. A few weeks later, on May 6, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration, the WPA.
    Roosevelt was proceeding with skill and caution. The WPA was a public works program that would put blue-collar laborers to work building government projects, a program that was only slightly controversial. There was the issue of whether a country with a rapidly shrinking GNP should be spending like this. But many argued that they should, in order to stimulate the economy. The WPA, both to simplify its tasks and to draw less controversy, tended toward many small, easily launched projects rather than a few massive ones. The executive order had called for “small useful projects.”
    But the Emergency Relief Act had also called for “assistance to educational and clerical persons; a nation-wide program for useful employment for artists, musicians, actors, entertainers, writers . . .” By the summer of 1935 Federal Project Number 1, popularly known as Federal One, was under way. It included the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Writers’ Project, all mandated by law in that one barely noticed phrase in the Emergency Relief Act.
    At its height the Federal Art Project employed 5,300 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jacob Lawrence, and Marsden Hartley, and staffed one hundred art centers in twenty-two states. The Federal Music Project, directed by former Cleveland Symphony conductor Nikolai Sokoloff, gave 5,000 performances. The Federal Theatre Project employed 12,700 people, including Orson Welles, John Houseman, Burt Lancaster, Joseph Cotten, Will Geer, Virgil Thomson, Nicholas Ray, E. G. Marshall, and Sidney Lumet, produced more than 1,200 plays in four years, mostly free of charge, and introduced one hundred new playwrights.
     
     
     
    W riters, too, were in desperate need of work. Newspapers and magazines were folding as declining advertising revenue was being increasingly diverted to radio. Book sales were decreasing every year, even for established writers. The Federal Writers’ Project directed pools of writers in each of the forty-eight states. New York City had its own project in addition to the New York State Writers’ Project, and California was divided into Northern and Southern. In all there were fifty local projects answering to the FWP.
    The poet W. H. Auden called the Federal Writers’ Project “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state.” The idea was received by the public with predictable cynicism. Subsidizing art has never been popular with Americans. Subsidizing anything in America comes under attack. The workers of the WPA were called “shovel leaners.” Now the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project were labeled “pencil leaners.” Editorials argued that poverty and adversity, not government subsidies, produced great writing.
    The writers were constantly under suspicion of boondoggling. When the New York City Writers’ Project produced a translation of the biblical Song of Songs from the original Hebrew into Yiddish, one perennial critic of the program looked at