The Welfare State and FDR’s Alphabet Programs

Ipledge myself to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms…not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its people. – FDR, the Democratic National Convention – July 2, 1932.

Today, the 1930s and the Great Depression seem like ancient history. But all around us are reminders of that era: bridges, buildings and roads, post office murals, Social Security and minimum wage. Much of what we are as a nation is a result of the struggles of those days. 256 banks shut their doors in one month in November 1930, people who lost their life’s savings jumped out of windows, and starving families like the Joads faced tragedy on a daily basis.

The Depression lingered and worsened. In 1931, 2,294 banks closed and 28, 285 businesses collapsed. Unemployment soared from 1.5 million in 1929 to more than 12 million by the beginning of 1932.  Still President Hoover refused to call the crisis a Depression. In the winter of 1931 he said: “No one is going hungry and no one need go hungry or cold.”

A radical crisis called for a radical cure, and after the stock market crash of ‘29, a tidal wave of change swept across America. Old ideas were attacked and thrown out; and new ideas were eagerly tested.

But what form would this change take, and how would it affect the future of America. Would the nation move toward socialism or maintain its capitalistic underpinning?

At the heart of these changes were ordinary Americans who challenged themselves and their government to not merely meet the crisis, but to set a new course for the country that would protect future generations from similar economic catastrophe. The crisis of capitalism, which is the essence of the Great Depression, also questioned the nature of democracy, its people and their government. The result was a complex experiment sometimes called the welfare state.

Modern definitions of welfare state are oftentimes confused with political ideology from the right or left; but in the 30s, the term welfare state meant the expansion of government into the economic life of the people. Before 1935, the federal government allowed the economic cycles to take their “natural” course during recessions or downturns, placing their faith in the idea that time would “fix” the problem of too much supply or not enough demand. But the world-wide crisis of the 1930s was too severe to be left to “natural cycles.” Aggravating the situation were daily reminders of want:  bread lines, tent towns, and an army of hoboes. Democracy, not capitalism, was at a crossroads. Some folks pointed to the Soviet Union as a model the United States could follow, where the government ensured all people employment because it owned all the factories and businesses. To most Americans this was not a real alternative; it denied one of our most prized liberties, property. Our government had to find a middle ground, a way to lift up the people, without sacrificing the ideals on which the country was built. This middle road was the welfare state.

The president who introduced the welfare state to America was, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He moved into the White House in 1933 and faced a nation on the verge of collapse—unemployment hovered around 25 percent, scores of workers faced declining wages and purchasing power, banks failed at an alarming rate, businesses closed, and the prospect of a positive future was dim. FDR approached the crisis by launching a slew of reform-minded pieces of legislation during his first 100 days. These laws, like the creation of the National Industrial Recovery Administration (NRA), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) were stopgap (temporary) measures designed to slow the crisis down and give his administration time to study long-term solutions. Two years later, FDR asked Congress to pass legislation designed to attack the root causes of the Depression, while at the same time provide the hope of a future for America’s citizens. The Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act sought to provide hope for the future of America’s workers, but the key to FDR’s new legislation was the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The WPA – Bringing Art to the People, from Plays, Concerts, and Art Exhibitions to Painting Lessons

Created in May, 1935, as part of the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, the WPA sought to create something its chief administrator Harry Hopkins (in above photos) called “work relief.” This idea involved getting people to work in jobs they were trained for, or by employing skilled people in occupations they held prior to the crash. Hopkins felt strongly that if the government provided short-term work opportunities for the unemployed in jobs that provided some level of self-esteem, the moral crisis of the Depression would be met. The economy would rebound, but in the meantime the WPA was designed to provide hope for the future. More than one community saw the WPA as their salvation. In terms of sheer volume, WPA workers constructed 60,000 miles of highways, 116,000 bridges and viaducts, more than 110,000 libraries, schools, or other public buildings, 600 airports; they provided 575,000,000 school lunches and helped 1.5 million adults become literate. There were many, many more WPA projects, too numerous to list here, that continue to benefit the country to this day.

In August, 1935, Hopkins announced the creation of the Federal Arts Projects or Federal Project One (FPO). This work relief would be designed for the nation’s artists, writers, musicians, and actors in the hope that the government might help in establishing, as Hopkins said, “a new base of American life.” The FPO was divided into four programs: the Federal Art Project for painters and sculptors; the Federal Theater Project for actors and directors; the Federal Writers’ Project for writers; the Federal Music Project for musicians and conductors. The short-lived Federal Dance Project was absorbed by the FTP. Each of these programs walked a delicate line between helping the unemployed artist and encouraging artistic creativity. Unfortunately, the more creative and daring the artists became, the more certain sectors of society accused the FPO of subversion. Since the programs were funded by taxpayers, another incentive included the promotion of American themes and ideas. Some members of Congress believed this meant that the projects should only highlight and support traditional American values, even though many of these values were being discredited or at least re-evaluated at the time. (Recall that in the 30s, old ideas, traditions and economic theories were blamed for causing the Great Depression.) These congressmen did not want the Art Projects to be testing grounds for new ideas like minimum wage, collective bargaining, and racial fairness.  When some of the artists of the Federal Writers and Theater Projects promoted these ideas, the projects were attacked and labeled communistic by conservative members of Congress and other opponents of the New Deal.

The Federal Writers’ Project and the American Guide Series, Teaching Americans About Themselves

Henry Alsberg was chosen to lead the Writers’ Project (FWP). He wanted the nation’s writers to reach out to ordinary people, not just intellectuals. This was a typical view of the role of artists in the 30s: they should serve not simply an elite few, as they often had in the past, but the whole population.  Alsberg strove to make the FWP the hub for a new type of literature based on the American people in its broadest sense. Central to the FWP goal was the American Guide series. These were state travel guides on the surface, but they also succeeded in introducing Americans to other region’s folk tales, history and people. Written as extended essays rather than travelogues, they allowed tremendous creativity by the writers, while promoting national unity among the readers. They are still popular today. [Take some out from the library.] The FWP also encouraged the writing of fiction and several of its employees, like Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, found their FWP experiences essential to their careers. In addition, the Project published for a limited time a small poetry magazine called American Stuff.

To help create a new, more inclusive America, in which the American Dream was accessible to everyone, the writers of the FWP made the lives and struggles of ordinary citizens take center stage. But some people viewed this as politically subversive.  The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) wanted the FWP to write stories about the great heroes of America’s past, like Lincoln and Washington, not about the struggles of workers trying to earn a living wage or of African Americans fighting racism. The FWP also sent writers into seventeen states to interview more than 2,300 surviving ex-slaves about their lives in slavery. These outstanding oral histories reveal what it was like to be a slave in antebellum America (two of the former slaves are shown above, Mary Rice and Simon Walker).

When the FWP ignored the demands of HUAC, HUAC found disgruntled, former FWP employees who were willing to testify that many members of the FWP were members of the American Communist Party. As a result, Congress found itself unable to continue its support without appearing to back communism with taxpayer dollars. Thus, the FWP was terminated in 1939, despite its many outstanding contributions to American culture.

The Federal Music Project: Concerts for the People and by the People

The Federal Music Project (FMP) was able to avoid attacks of radicalism because it focused on cultivated or classical music, which made it non-threatening. Nikolai Sokoloff (former conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra) was selected to lead the FMP, and he believed the job of the Project was not only to employ those musicians out of work, but to educate the American people on the benefits of classical music. THE FMP would provide a coast-to-coast classical music lesson, from large cities to tiny towns. While idealistic, Sokoloff ignored the fact that the majority of out-of-work musicians – in the early 30s this number ran as high as 60 percent – played popular music, Swing, Jazz and folk. Nonetheless, Sokoloff’s FMP attempted to lift America’s spirits through music, while educating the people about the benefits of “proper” music.

The FMP reached out to all Americans. While never employing more than 16,000 musicians, from 1935-1939, the FMP gave 224,698 performances before nearly 150 million people at very affordable prices – usually 10 cents to 25 cents a ticket. A large number of the pieces they performed were written by American composers who had previously been ignored. Nearly sixty percent of these American compositions were written by living American composers who heard their music performed for the first time. Until the advent of the FMP, almost no American orchestra would perform the work of American composers. They focused on dead European masters: Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, etc.

But the FMP also effected social change. It assisted many communities, like Akron, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Jackson, Mississippi, and other cities in establishing orchestras that still perform today. Female musicians, who until then experienced tremendous difficulty overcoming sexual stereotypes, found the FMP welcoming, an organization where they sat in equal station with their male counterparts. Sexually mixed orchestras, an uncommon sight for private symphonies, were a regular and common feature in the FMP, as were female conductors.

Women, like Marian Bauer, Ruth Crawford, Mary Carr Moore, and Radie Britain, saw their compositions performed by FMP symphonies. African Americans also played a vital role in the FMP, making up twelve percent of those employed by the Project. The American Folk Singers in Boston, the Juanita Hall Melody Singers in New York City, and many ensembles in towns and cities across the country performed for large crowds made up of black and white Americans. While the bands themselves were all black, they performed before mixed audiences and were often the most profitable of the project’s musical groups. For example, an August 1938 performance, conducted by William Grant Still, drew the highest attendance and gate receipts for the Los Angeles district that year. The FMP exposed African-American composers like Still and Clarence Cameron White to American audiences. For other groups, such as Hispanics, Gypsies, and other ethnic minorities, the FMP created specialty orchestras designed to display the diversity of American society.

For all of its positive attributes, the FMP had its drawbacks. Chief among them were the administrative staff’s attitude toward popular or vernacular music. When asked what his opinion of swing was, Sokoloff said dryly:  “I like to dance when I am dancing, but to compare it with music, why, it is like comparing the funny papers with the work of a painter.”

The federal staff created music tests, designed to decide which unemployed musicians got relief. These tests favored those who had studied and could read music. As a result, many unschooled but talented musicians went without FMP aid, much to the dissatisfaction of their union, the American Federation of Musicians. Sokoloff and his staff saw popular music as detrimental not only to musical study, but to American life in general and tried to discourage Americans from favoring this type of music. When the FMP employed musicians who did not meet the high standards imposed, they were paid less and often segregated from the more sophisticated symphony units. The results of this cultural bias meant that when the FMP lost federal funding, many simply forgot its contributions to composers, women, African Americans and so many others. Although some HUAC members challenged the music project simply because it employed so many musicians with foreign-sounding names, including its Russian-born director, Sokoloff, the FMP’s conservatism and emphasis on traditional music protected it from serious charges of radicalism. While the other projects allowed room for experimentation and risk-taking, this was not the case with FMP. Because it failed to break new ground artistically, its other successes are frequently ignored.

     HUAC VERSUS THE FEDERAL ARTS PROJECTS  –      An Arts Lesson for Today

The Federal Arts Projects lost their federal funding in the early summer of 1939 for a variety of reasons. The charges of radicalism made by HUAC eroded support for the projects, but with the growing confrontation abroad (in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and Japan), many in Congress felt it was time to tighten the national belt and prepare for what they surely believed would be a catastrophic world war. The FWP was abandoned while some FMP units were absorbed into state relief agencies. Some continued to operate as late as 1942, playing patriotic music for a nation now engaged in World War II. When the war ended and America returned to normalcy, the Federal Arts Projects were viewed as obsolete, although the belief that the government should sponsor artistic creation has remained constant to the present day. The National Endowment of the Arts is just one of ways the federal government continues to support the nation’s artists, writers and musicians and helps to better redefine us as Americans. But in spite of its many contributions, the NEA has been repeatedly attacked in ways that echo HUAC’s assaults on the Federal Arts Projects of the 1930s.

The 1930s was an era when Americans chose to work together to conquer the economic and adverse social effects of the Great Depression. This unity was manifest in the rise of unions such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which sought to unify those unskilled workers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds into one union; or, in the formation of Swing bands like those of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Artie Shaw, made up of different ethnicity’s, races and genders; or, in Hollywood films like The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, that depict the struggles of ordinary Americans fighting for fair wages and justice. The cultural and social redefinition that occurred during the Depression extends well beyond these few examples, for in the midst of the worst economic and political crisis this country has seen, Americans of all stripes pulled together to recreate an America that would become more diverse and democratic than at anytime in the past. The Federal Arts Projects played a large role in this transformation by highlighting aspects of our society that had been ignored, by taking art directly to the people, and by promoting many of the ideals that helped reshape America.

AMERICA TRANSFORMED—the WPA & the ARTS, by Kenneth J. Bindas, Assistant Professor of American History at Kent State University, Trumbell Campus.  His book, All of this Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society (1996), is the first comprehensive history of the FMP. He has also written numerous articles on the development of Swing, Country, Blues and Rock music.

ACTIVITIES:

1) Identify the WPA projects in your area. How many people worked on them? What were their specific tasks? Try to track down and interview people who actually participated in the projects. How did your area benefit in the short term and long-term from the WPA projects?

2) Research the NEA controversies of our time and the efforts to abolish government support of the arts. Write a research paper on your findings. Be sure your research includes information from NEA supporters and opponents; in other words, examine both sides fairly and as objectively as you can.

NEXUS – PALLAS COMMUNICATIONS, INC.

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