Works Progress Administration - Art

Show Notes

Aughie and Nia discuss the Works Progress Administrations programs  to provide work opportunities for artists, actors, musicians, and writers during the Great Depression. They also discuss some of the criticisms of the WPA programs,

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Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.

N. Rodgers: Hi Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: Morning, Nia. How are you?

N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine especially so, because we get to today during the podcast finish our discussion of the Works Progress Administration.

N. Rodgers: Yes, and last time we talked about nourishing the body, physical labor physical jobs for people to make sure that they could support their families, afford themselves. Now, we're going to talk about nourishing the mind and the heart and the soul. The idea that there are people in the nation whose job is also their passion but who support us in terms of, I say us because maybe listeners, maybe some of you are great Broadway producers and fantastic musicians and all those other great for creators of art. I'm none of those things. Any art that I make it looks like it was made by a 12-year-old. I'm musically completely untalented except for listening and I couldn't act my way out of a wet paper bag if I was absolutely required to do so. When they talk about starving artist, if I had to be an artist, I would be starving because I would not be hired by anybody. But this is a different starving artist, in it's pressing.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because what we're talking about listeners is, again, remember, the WPA was created in response to the Great Depression. This was one of the Roosevelt Administration's New Deal programs. In the previous podcast episode, we talked about how the basic idea of at least one component of the WPA was to do hard labor infrastructure projects, digging ditches, building sidewalks, constructing buildings from gymnasiums to museums, to libraries [inaudible]

N. Rodgers: Then we transitioned to libraries, which is both a physical thing, a physical [inaudible]

J. Aughenbaugh: But for the mind, right?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: The other part of the WPA that I think many Americans today don't recognize or don't remember is what was labeled Federal Project Number One. This was basically for the arts and there were five units within Federal Project Number One.

N. Rodgers: Can I tell you that I went to the National Gallery and I saw these little plaques under a bunch of the paintings that said WPA as the sponsor or patron or whatever. I was like, "What? What is all that about?" That's part of what brought up this question that I had for Aughie which was, what was the scope of this thing? He's like, "Oh, it's just bigger than art. There were other things."

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, of course.

N. Rodgers: What else is there?

J. Aughenbaugh: You have the art project. Basically, you have five units, art and what we're talking about here is basically paintings, murals, sculptures, etc, then you have the Music Project, then you have the Theater Project, then you have the Writers' Project. I'm just going to slightly digress on that fourth unit, the Writers' Project. When I was a high school student, I had a teacher who actually had us read some of the works that were produced in the Writers' Project. Then the last one was the historical records survey. There were five units. Nia what you were talking about, it was basically the federal government was the patron for a whole bunch of painters, artists.

N. Rodgers: Just briefly, if you don't know how the patronage system worked, artists, back in the olden days, they would be hired by dukes, princes, kings, people with money, people with extra money to spare. Somebody would say, "Paint this wall with portraits of my family", or "Paint a portrait of my family," or something. You would be hired to do the work and then they would own it. You would not own it, they would own it but they were your patron and what they paid for was not just your art, but they usually paid for where you lived. You got a certain amount of money for food and that thing and then you got money for supplies. It's not an entirely new concept. We've had patronage for-

J. Aughenbaugh: What was -

N. Rodgers: As long as there have been rich people and starving artists, we have had patronage.

J. Aughenbaugh: What was different in albeit somewhat controversial was the idea that the government would step in, because you were talking about well over 40,000 artists, from painters to musicians, to actors, to producers, writers, directors who were out of work. Because if Americans didn't have jobs to pay rent, mortgage, food, etc, it certainly-

N. Rodgers: You're not go into the theater.

J. Aughenbaugh: -you're not going to the theater, you're not going to the concert hall. You certainly weren't buying art because you couldn't afford to put food on the table.

N. Rodgers: You couldn't buy bread. You weren't going to buy a sculpture like that just not [inaudible] -

J. Aughenbaugh: You had entire-

N. Rodgers: -unless it was made of bread.

J. Aughenbaugh: -you had entire industries, art industries that we're also suffering from the depression. So on one hand, these were unemployed Americans, just like coal miners, just like automobile, assembly line workers, steel workers. They were unemployed, just like everybody else. But the logic here was, how do we also go ahead and make sure that all of these other Americans who are suffering from the depression, whose morale emotions are in the tank, have something to take their mind off of their suffering. That was the part of the logic of project number one.

N. Rodgers: Each according to his talent. If I take a bunch of writers and I have them try to construct a road-

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh my goodness.

N. Rodgers: -what road am I going to get? Probably, in some cases I'll get a good road and in many cases I won't. Each according to your talent, whatever your talent is. If you had a talent for physical later or for intellectual labor, they tried to find something that we'd use your talent and benefit other people. We did both things. We gave you the dignity of doing the thing you're good at or a thing you could be good at in case of like coal miners who ended up building bridges. They're still using their physical labor for the betterment of their local-

J. Aughenbaugh: I understand that there are some-

N. Rodgers: -area.

J. Aughenbaugh: -listeners to this podcast, Nia, who don't appreciate art, and that's fine.

N. Rodgers: I don't appreciate some art. Those things where you have the colored box on top of another colored box, my set art, I could make that. That's not art, but-

J. Aughenbaugh: But historically-

N. Rodgers: -it is for somebody.

J. Aughenbaugh: -through the history of mankind, art has served a purpose. The federal government stepped in with this part of the WPA. By the way, folks, Federal Project Number One also gave out grants for artists to teach. When we talk about the art project unit, it has been estimated that artists actually taught classes to over 50,000 children and adults.

N. Rodgers: Can you-

J. Aughenbaugh: They set up art centers across the country. To me that's fascinating. I mean, the Music Project did the same thing.

N. Rodgers: Well, I mean art centers served like several million people, because it wasn't just that you are necessarily going to learn art, but you are also going to do art. People would gather and do things that these art centers, you want to learn quilting? That's not them teaching quilting, that's people sitting around quilting together and learning from each other. That thing. But I want you to say the name of the guy who was in charge of it.

J. Aughenbaugh: The art project? Which one?

N. Rodgers: The Federal Art Project.

J. Aughenbaugh: Holger Cahill.

N. Rodgers: Holger Cahill. What a great name.

J. Aughenbaugh: I love that name. In fact, my next dog.

N. Rodgers: I'm going to name, it Holger Cahill.

J. Aughenbaugh: I love that name.

N. Rodgers: It's a great name.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, if any of my students are listening to this podcast, they know how I love names.

N. Rodgers: You have a lifetime nickname. Of course, you love playing with names.

J. Aughenbaugh: Somebody like me who's been actually known most of his life by a nickname that people usually remember. But Holger Cahill, what a great name. Or the individual who ran the Federal Music Project, Nikolai Sokoloff.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's a good Russian name.

N. Rodgers: It's a good Russian name. But he was the former principal conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: You would have thought with that name, he would have been from the Russian orchestra or whatever, and he's like, nah, I came here from Cleveland. Like, whoa, okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That's such an American.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: You hear that name and you think, he's got to be from Moscow, and he's like, yeah, I'm from Cleveland.

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm from Cleveland.

N. Rodgers: That's what I love about the United States. When you have this awesomely cool, clearly from a place name and somebody is like, nope, I'm from Ohio. How is that even a thing? But I also think what's cool about the art project that you put in the notes that I wanted to make sure that I mentioned to people, is one of their jobs was to make illustrations and posters of the other art projects.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: They would make posters for the Broadway shows.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: You get this whole intermingling of the arts. Because if anybody who's ever paid to have someone make art like a play bill or an illustration for a thing they're doing, it can be enormously expensive to have somebody do that. The idea that you would use other out of work people to create your play bill. Then the writers, I'm assuming, wrote some of the playbills so that in this theater production could go forward with all these different parts.

J. Aughenbaugh: Musicians from the Federal Music Project were sometimes loaned out for theater projects.

N. Rodgers: Yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because again, even if you don't attend a musical, if you're talking about a drama work or a comedic work, there is sometimes, if you will, background music, a score.

N. Rodgers: Remember in the 1930's too. Unlike films, if anytime you watch a film today, the score, the music in the film, tells you what's happening, right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. You're talking about Jaws?

N. Rodgers: Right. We all know what's coming if somebody is about to get eaten. This is about to be a shark attack.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's the beginning music for one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, North by Northwest, which is this frantic juxtaposition of noises, which primes you for all the anxiousness and frantic chase scenes throughout the rest of that movie. Yeah, very good point.

N. Rodgers: Well, John Williams, there's a reason that John Williams has got 18,000 Oscars, and it's because every modern piece of music that you can think of from Indiana Jones.

J. Aughenbaugh: Star Wars.

N. Rodgers: Star Wars, sorry. Thank you.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: The Indiana Jones music and Jaws.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That's all John Williams. Because music adds an element that you need. Back in the day when you had live theater, you didn't have any way to have. Even in movie theaters, you had music, you had a guy on an organ. The Wurlitzer John Aughenbaugh plays Citizen Kane or whatever, and you would have to play the music.

J. Aughenbaugh: For listeners of the podcast living in Richmond, you can still see that at the Byrd Theater, right?

N. Rodgers: Exactly. In Atlanta, at the Fox Theater.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: Some of the old theaters still have all those giant organs., so I'm assuming some of these people played some of that as well.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: They played that kind of music. In addition to one of the things you have listed here is military bands, which I just think is awesome. If the military bands are off with the military.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then who's going to play the military inspired or related events in the United States?

N. Rodgers: Right. July 4th or anytime the president shows up.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: I used Pomp and Circumstance when the president shows up, but that's not what they play. That's the graduation theme. But they play the presidential theme. I can't remember what it's called now, isn't that terrible? The military band plays that when the president arrives and that's let everybody in the crowd know. Because by the way, if you ever go to see the president arrive somewhere, you will be standing there for two or three hours before the president shows up. Presidents are never on time.

J. Aughenbaugh: Hail to the Chief.

N. Rodgers: Hail to the Chief. Thank you.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Somebody's got to play that. It's one of these guys. It was three or four of these guys because it's a little group of people who play it. Yeah. How many performances do they give, the music people?

J. Aughenbaugh: A hundred and thirty one thousand performances and programs to 92 million people each week. They were just running it. The federal government was basically just funding a whole bunch of music that was being played across the country. This is absolutely phenomenal.

N. Rodgers: It would've been, I suppose, played on the radio as well.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That would have been radio music too. Didn't they also do things like they learned music, folk tunes and stuff to keep those things alive or to write them down, that kind of stuff?

J. Aughenbaugh: The Smithsonian has an entire section devoted to the evolution of music in the United States, and so much of the preservation of the music in the 1930's was because of the Federal Music Project.

N. Rodgers: I'm going to need you to go out and find all the tunes for Oh Susanna and gather them up together, all the variations, all of this, all of that, so that we know what was regional. Because anybody who thinks that music is not a language is silly. Music is a language. You learn, it's got different dialects. Thank you.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: It's got different dialects from all around the nation. That's really cool, the idea of gathering all that up so that we don't lose it because we're losing languages as people who speak them die.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: I know that there's a lot of small islands and tribes and stuff where they're three or four people who speak the language now. Now, language people are going around and recording them as much as they can to try to hold onto at least some of those languages. But how much have we lost?

J. Aughenbaugh: Some of my earliest folk albums that I ever purchased, some of them actually have the interviewer at the beginning of the album say what's the song about. You can hear them prompting the musicians. Musicians are like, well, just listen to the song. Which is absolutely hilarious. I actually have that on three or four albums where I'm like, who's this other person? Because I purchased the album because I wanted to listen to the folk or blues, right?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, guys, you've heard Nia and I talk about this. You ever get a chance, go to the Smithsonian.

N. Rodgers: Go to all of them.

J. Aughenbaugh: Go to all of them.

N. Rodgers: Take a month.

J. Aughenbaugh: Every time you decide you're going to go to Washington DC, just pick one.

N. Rodgers: Pick one and go.

J. Aughenbaugh: Go.

N. Rodgers: It's amazing, the Americana.

J. Aughenbaugh: That they have accumulated. It is a chronicle of the country. But you and I both are just utterly fascinated by the Theater Project.

N. Rodgers: I'm completely fascinated by the Theater Project. First of all, I had no idea that there was a racial divide in the Theater Project.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That there was a white theater project and what they called, and forgive me if this is this language offends anyone, but it's when it was called, The Negro Theater Unit.

J. Aughenbaugh: The Federal Theater Project right before the Great Depression, Nia, Broadway in New York employed 25,000 workers. By 1933, only 4,000 still had jobs.

N. Rodgers: One out of six. That's terrifying.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Okay. The theater project ended up employing about 12,700 people. They did performances across the country. They produced over 1,200 plays. They hired 100 new playwrights. Some of the performers, actors, directors became very successful in Hollywood. Listeners, you may actually be familiar with some of them. Orson Welles.

N. Rodgers: Citizen Kane.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, John Houseman.

N. Rodgers: For me Paper Chase because I'm of a certain age. There was a television show called Paper Chase, but he had a long and storied career before that.

J. Aughenbaugh: He was a producer and writer. Then later on in his life, he gains fame as an actor. He's the Paper Chase. See Three Days of the Condor. Burt Lancaster.

N. Rodgers: From Here to Eternity.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, he was. From Here to Eternity. Elmer Gantry, which he actually won an Oscar for. Joseph Cotten, Canada Lee, Will Geer.

N. Rodgers: Wait Will Geer was the grandfather on The Waltons.

J. Aughenbaugh: The Waltons. Yes. Nicholas Ray, well-known director in the 1950s and '60s. E. G. Marshall. If you ever watched a movie in the '50s, E. G. Marshall is like in nearly all of them. He was one of those supporting actors that was like in all these movies.

N. Rodgers: I was going to say, is he a great character actor?

J. Aughenbaugh: Actor? Yes. Then one of my all-time favorite movie directors, Sidney Lumet, 12 Angry Men.

N. Rodgers: I was wondering why this name is super familiar, 12 Angry Men. That's why.

J. Aughenbaugh: Twelve Angry Men in the 1970s. He did Dog Day Afternoon. The Verdict. Yes. Interestingly enough, Nia, The Theater Project was the first of the Project 1 units to actually be terminated. Congress zeroed out the funding in June of 1939.

N. Rodgers: Let's get rid of these actors. These actors and directors, these Hollywood people. [inaudible]

J. Aughenbaugh: This is when you first start seeing criticisms of the WPA for employing and communists and socialists.

N. Rodgers: So, The Writers' Project, I think it's funny to hire people. I know that the government still hires people to write because you have technical writers for the government. If you only write technical reports so what happens if somebody shows up with all their data and they dump it on a person and they say, "Make this readable?" The other person says, "Okay," and that's their job. Their job is to put it into reasonable, accessible language. I didn't realize that they did that during this process.

J. Aughenbaugh: The Writers' Project was led by a man, Henry Alsberg. At one point they had over 6,600 writers in 1936.

N. Rodgers: That's a lot of writers.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's a lot of writers. Within three years, they produced 275 major books and booklets, including, and this is the series that I actually read, The American Guide Series. They produced guidebooks for every state with descriptions of towns, waterways, historic sites, oral histories, photographs, and artwork. I read these not only in my high-school literature class, but my high school history class, which pretty much indicates, listeners, the quality of my high school library. They had books produced in the late 1930s. I'm not going to mention when I was in high school, but nevertheless.

N. Rodgers: It was after the 1930s.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was after the 1930s.

N. Rodgers: He wasn't doing it real-time just in case here you're curious.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The other thing that they did, and this was really important and I thought was really cool, they recorded oral histories to create archives like the slave narratives and Nia as you mentioned a few moments ago the collections of folklore. Again, for listeners, particularly our younger listeners. The idea of folklore where one generation would basically pass on knowledge to the next generation or the next generation through the telling of stories was a very important way of, if you will, developing culture and maintaining culture in communities. This idea that at the end of a hard work week, people would sit around on a front porch or a kitchen or backyard and just tell stories to entertain one another. But the stories usually had messages.

N. Rodgers: Right. They were moral tales.

J. Aughenbaugh: A mean of hope, of resilience.

N. Rodgers: Or if you do bad things, bad things happen. Sometimes they were actually fable-type stories.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Can I mention?

J. Aughenbaugh: Right. Go ahead.

N. Rodgers: In that vein, when I was very little, 2nd grade, maybe 3rd grade, there's this book called The Jack Tales. It's Appalachian folk stories about a character named Jack and all the trouble he gets into. The author of that book, a very old man with a very long white beard, came to our school and read one of the Jack Tales to us.

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh my goodness.

N. Rodgers: Because somebody at our school knew somebody he was related to.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: It was one of those things. I'm going to tell you everybody in the South is related, so you just have to, at some point, somebody is an 18th removed cousin from you. It doesn't matter how that works. But anyway, it's that kind of story whereas Southerners would say your granny and your papa would sit around and tell these tales that go back for if you ever tried to pin down now who were these people and what actually happened? That's not how that worked. Somebody knew somebody, who was a cousin of somebody, and this is what happened to them and then they would tell the story, and it was just marvelous. When I was also a little kid, my family sat around and did that. Several people in my family were farmers and so in the evening when there's no work to do and you're tired. You're sitting around them and suddenly somebody starts telling stories and the next thing you know, it's 10 o'clock and time to go to bed. But they also created archives like the slave narratives, which is really good because, at that point, we're starting to get the generation born after the generation of slaves. We would have lost those stories and those narratives because as you get more and more generations removed, the details get more and more vague. More and more vague as you go. I'm glad that they did things like that in the oral histories. We're now learning how important oral histories are to keeping experience alive.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because there are a lot of cultures and a lot of communities where they didn't write things down. Or they didn't know how to write, so the spoken word is the chronicle.

N. Rodgers: Right. Especially when you get to slave narratives, most slaves were not educated.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I mean, because their owners didn't want them to become educated.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. Easier to keep somebody in chains if they're uneducated.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. It is the spoken word narrative where a lot of this information is maintained. Then the last one, Nia, you and I've already talked about this with a number of the podcast episodes we've done. The historical record survey. It was the smallest unit of Federal Project 1. But they identified, collected, and conserved US historical records. At one point, they had over 4,400 workers whose job was just to go ahead and maintain, in large part, historical government records. I mean, that's what they did.

N. Rodgers: Right. At the state level, at the county level, at the local level, they were trying to, well, even if they didn't, here's what's interesting to me about that. I'm going to go all library geek on you for a minute.

J. Aughenbaugh: No, that's fine. Yeah.

N. Rodgers: I'm going to try to hold myself back a little bit. Some of what they did was simply index. They wrote down that there was a document.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: They didn't necessarily preserve the document itself, and so if the state didn't preserve the document, now we know there was a document but the document is lost, which is super frustrating. But basically what they were trying to do was organize us as a country so that we didn't lose important things like the Colorado River treaty. That comes later. But this idea that there are significant documents that are outside of the Serial Set, which we've already talked about on this previous episode on. There are significant documents outside of that that still need to be preserved because they affect millions of people.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, you have to put this in context. It's hard to go ahead and focus on maintaining records when you don't have a job and you don't have food, and you don't know how you're going to go ahead and put a roof over your family's head.

N. Rodgers: Right. Some stuff doesn't matter at that point.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. You're just trying to survive. But we had an entire unit whose job was to go ahead and say, yeah, but when we get through this, what is the historical record of this very small part of civilization.

N. Rodgers: One of the most marvelous things that they did, was a survey of all the portraits and public buildings. Somebody thought that they should make a list.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Of every portrait.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: In every public building. That is phenomenal. If you are looking for a portrait of some obscure figure in Missouri and you're trying to figure out if their portrait was ever put up in a public building, then there's a list of it. Now, does that mean you can find the portrait? Who knows? Because the portrait itself may have been put in an attic somewhere and may have been lost to a fire, who knows? But you would know that there was one.

J. Aughenbaugh: If you just think about the process, the thought process of the individual who came up with that. How their mind must work.

N. Rodgers: Right. Excuse me.

J. Aughenbaugh: Shouldn't we go ahead and, and catalog where all the portraits are. Who thinks that way? But again, that's just phenomenal.

N. Rodgers: They also had one called America Eats.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Where they chronicled the food in the Northeast, the South, the Middle West, the far west, and the Southwest. Notice where the focus was. It was in the West, which I think is interesting. As a Southerner, I'm like, hey, but not only did they say, well in the South, they eat, I don't know, sausage, gravy, and biscuits. But they talk about what the local customs are around eating.

J. Aughenbaugh: Each. That's right.

N. Rodgers: I'm just going to throw out pizza. If you eat pizza with a knife and fork, some people in the country think that you're a criminal of some kind.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: They are like, that is not how you eat pizza. You pick up a piece of pizza, you fold it in half. Then you eat from the pointy end backwards. Like there's a very specific way to do it, and other people are like, no, you don't touch your food. You cut it with a knife and your fork and you eat each piece with a knife and fork. I find things like that fascinating and clearly so did someone else, someone else is like, we ought to do, we ought to chronicle not only pizza but how people eat it.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: In case someone in the future is going to want to know that or it's not about us as a culture or what happened.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I mean in the years. Nia, you've heard me tell so many stories about the cultural differences that I recognized when I moved from the north to the south, when I moved from Pennsylvania down to Blacksburg Virginia to get my master's and my PhD, and one of the first things I saw that just horrified me was, I saw people eating pizza with a knife and fork. I was just like that's not how you eat pizza.

N. Rodgers: Well, but in fairness, in the north, at least in the New York-Pennsylvania area, pizza is thin.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: You can't fold a piece of Chicago Pizza unless you're Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don't think you can physically fold it.

J. Aughenbaugh: I was just going to mention that. The first time I ever went to Chicago, I went there for an academic conference. We went out with a bunch of natives. They're like, "You got to have a slice of Chicago deep dish pizza." And I'm like, "Only a slice." They're just like, "Trust us, a slice of deep dish Chicago style pizza is a meal."

N. Rodgers: Isn't that the one where the cheese is on the top and the saucer is underneath?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and it is thick and it is huge. The waiter gave us knives and forks.

N. Rodgers: You actually needed them?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because there was no way I was going to able to eat.

N. Rodgers: If you'd picked that up, you would have been covered in it. Why is Aughie wearing his dinner? Don't mind, it's fine. But that's funny.

J. Aughenbaugh: What we eat and how we eat it demonstrates so much of our culture.

N. Rodgers: But that's what is so cool about the historical record surveys, that it goes from something like what are all the portraits and all the public buildings to how do people eat pizza. That to me is a cool.

J. Aughenbaugh: It so much reflects enlightenment area of thinking. We should observe what we do. We should measure it.

N. Rodgers: We should note it for future in case it changes.

J. Aughenbaugh: Why did it change?

N. Rodgers: We should snapshot it in time and try to figure that out.

J. Aughenbaugh: What does it say about us because we now are making pizzas differently and we're eating it [inaudible] .

N. Rodgers: What is now the definition of pizza? Has the definition of pizza changed over the years? It probably has.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's like the debate you have with your friends about whether or not a pineapple should ever be on pizza?

N. Rodgers: No. That's not a debate. That's disgusting.

J. Aughenbaugh: I tend to agree with you.

N. Rodgers: Yet there are people who order "Hawaiian pizza" which has got ham and pineapple on it. I'm like, that is so wrong. But then I'm sure that people think the way that I have sausage and green peppers on mine is wrong. They're like, "Why don't you just get that in a dog and be done with it?" What's great about this country is you can have your pizza however you want it.

J. Aughenbaugh: You want, right?

N. Rodgers: Sorry.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, before we go. Before we conclude.

N. Rodgers: No, I just wanted to get briefly to the criticisms because you and I are clearly for all of this. We're like, "Yeah, this is all great." I feel certain that because you always carry a dark cloud around with you in your pocket to pull out. In case somebody is too happy about something, you can be like, "There's a criticism of that.".

J. Aughenbaugh: Wow, dear.

N. Rodgers: No, it's just your nature to be like not.

J. Aughenbaugh: Wow, what a shot across the bell of good ship [inaudible].

N. Rodgers: I'm sorry, I didn't mean that to be mean, because it's not mean. There is no good without some questionable something. What I like about you every time these things come up is you're like, "There is no pure unadulterated good."

J. Aughenbaugh: There are tradeoffs.

N. Rodgers: Everything hurts someone or something, part of it would be that this money was taken away probably from other projects.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, there was a significant amount of money that was allocated for the WPA. If you did subscribe to Keynesian economics, this idea that the government should spend money during an economic downturn to affect the markets. Well, the WPA was probably one of the most obvious examples of wasteful government spending. But there were other criticisms. Some people thought that the WPA was part of a Roosevelt plan to create a political machine for the Democratic Party.

N. Rodgers: I'm sure. Don't you think?

J. Aughenbaugh: To give you an example, and I've mentioned my dear grandmother. My grandmother was a child of the Great Depression. But because her father, my great grandfather, had a job with the WPA for a number of years, she was, and remains today, a loyal voter for the Democratic Party.

N. Rodgers: It worked on her. Well, if your family was starving, and they gave you a job.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's the definition of a political machine. You use the spoils of government to, if you will, develop and maintain a base of loyal supporters. That was one of the criticisms. Another criticism, and we touched upon this with The Theater Project, there were members of Congress who thought that the WPA was a 'hotbed of communists'. Truth be told. Nia, maybe your experience is different. My experience with artists, musicians, etc, is that most of them tend to fall on the left side of the ideological spectrum. That's just who they are.

N. Rodgers: Free expression. They want free expression for everything and everyone for all things.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and my beloved jazz. I've come across very few jazz musicians who aren't or don't possess anarchist tendencies.

N. Rodgers: Just let me smoke my weed and play my music. Just leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's a gross stereotype.

N. Rodgers: It is. There's reason for the stereotype.

J. Aughenbaugh: There was that criticism.

N. Rodgers: Can I ask, at this time in the country though, weren't there a lot of communists? Communism hadn't taken on the '50s McCarthy.

J. Aughenbaugh: Cold War era, us versus them. Communists and socialists had made major inroads in various parts of the country. Remember, Eugene Debs ran as a Socialist Party candidate for president five or six times, and in one presidential election, he actually accumulated six percent of the popular vote. Six percent.

N. Rodgers: That's huge.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's a healthy minority percentage of the popular vote in a presidential election. There were many Americans who had soured on lazy, fair, unregulated capitalism.

N. Rodgers: But when they're talking about 'hotbed of communism' here, I'm assuming that that is a Republican criticism in an attempt to tie Democrats to Communists. These things are all mixed up together with this whole new deal is all communism.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was Republican-Southern Democrat criticism.

N. Rodgers: Okay, because back then it's the reverse.

J. Aughenbaugh: You got to remember many Southern Democrats were not fond of collectivist responses.

N. Rodgers: Well, they had just gotten done dealing with one of those.

J. Aughenbaugh: A couple of more criticisms. Distribution of projects. There was the criticism that how they were allocated was politically motivated.

N. Rodgers: Well, we saw that with the food. You get the south and the northwest, and then you get three locations in the west.

J. Aughenbaugh: The south in particular, southern states complaint that Roosevelt was punishing them for not being supportive of the new deal generally.

N. Rodgers: Maybe he was.

J. Aughenbaugh: Swing states seemingly took priority.

N. Rodgers: I'm assuming that one of the reasons that California would have received so much money is in part because it has a huge number of electors in the Electoral College.

J. Aughenbaugh: Back then, it was not like today, an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

N. Rodgers: I was going to say, wasn't it more hotly contested?

J. Aughenbaugh: It was more hotly contested, and if anything, it tended to lean Republican. If you want to go ahead and convert a state to your political party, what better way than to use the [inaudible] of the federal government to do it. All presidents do this and all political parties do this.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Is President Biden going to do some stuff right before the midterm elections that is going to benefit maybe a handful of Democratic members of Congress who were running in very competitive races?

N. Rodgers: Of course.

J. Aughenbaugh: Presidents do that.

N. Rodgers: Of course. Trump did that and Obama did that. [inaudible] It's just a thing you do that's part of the power of the presidency is. Here let me help my party try to get more people in Congress.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, because parties want to win elections.

N. Rodgers: Yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because if you win elections then you take control of the apparatus of government.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Probably the most trenchant criticism was that WPA employees were not diligent workers. The criticism here is those in the private sector, if they had jobs available struggled to go ahead and find good workers and in particular after people worked for the WPA they had really bad work habits because the WPA particularly for the hard labor positions were viewed as made-up jobs.

N. Rodgers: Does that sound even vaguely familiar to listeners now about unemployment and workers not wanting to go back to work?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Oh, it's easier for you to take money from the government. Look, 100 years later still making this argument.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Now, there are a whole bunch of economists and a whole bunch of sociologists who will go ahead and argue otherwise. That many people want a good job paying, what's the word I'm looking for? A fair wage because there is intrinsic value in doing a hard day's work for a good salary. In one of my rare moments of boasting about both you and I, we subscribe to that view. We like our jobs, we like to work hard.

N. Rodgers: Satisfaction in that. When you see that light bulb moment with the student, when they get in and they go, oh, and you're like, yes, that's why I got up this morning. That feeling right there that I feel like we've communicated and we've accomplished something and learning has happened on both sides.

J. Aughenbaugh: Like for you Nia when you know at the end of the day, when you look back and say, I had four consultations with students for papers. I helped out two faculty members with a couple of their classes, and I responded to a bunch of requests that happened during the day. I did some good work today, there is a sense of accomplishment. But the fear was WPA workers were not well supervised. They basically knew that if they merely showed up they would get a paycheck at the end of the week, etc.

N. Rodgers: You have some things listed here which I think is amazing. I would like for you to list them before we close out this episode.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. WPA, we poke along. WPA, we potter along. WPA, we piddle around.

N. Rodgers: I'd love this one.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, the last one, WPA, whistle, piss, and argue.

N. Rodgers: Stand around first and go to the bathroom.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that's right.

N. Rodgers: That's interesting that people are perceived as not wanting to work in the WPA, especially in the hard labor jobs. I would put to you that that's probably true for some people. They showed up, barely did what they needed to, because you know what? That's true today. In any field there are people who show up, barely do what they need to do, and go home. This is not what they care about. The other thing is, this is not what these people expected or wanted to be doing.

J. Aughenbaugh: No.

N. Rodgers: Sometimes it's hard to make yourself do a thing that you just don't want to do. This is not what your passion is, it's not what you know, it's not what you care about. They've picked you up and moved you halfway across the country so it's not even your community that's benefiting. There's some real complications with getting yourself to want to be enthusiastic about that so I can see showing up and being grumpy. Now, I can't see showing up and not doing the work.

J. Aughenbaugh: I remember asking my great grandfather, did he like his job or the jobs that he did for the WPA and he said he initially struggled because it was a recognition that his life's work as a coal miner came to not and that somebody else had to help him out. He said he initially struggled with that. But he said eventually the fact that he at the end of a work week got paid, could cover the rent and his kids could eat meant that he was going to do a good job but he initially struggled because for most of his adult life he had been a coal miner and that's how he viewed himself.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm one of the people who digs out the energy for the country.

N. Rodgers: In America we have a tendency to answer the question, who are you? Oh, I'm a college professor.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: As if your job is who you are.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right, yeah.

N. Rodgers: Right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: We do have a tendency to focus on our jobs as representations of who we are as people. If you're doing something that's not your jam, you have the mental space where you have to connect those two things somehow.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because you're going to be struggling with your identity. If most of your identity is wrapped up in what you do for work.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Anyways, I got a little philosophical at the end but nevertheless, Nia, I really enjoyed our last two podcast episodes. I'm glad you went ahead and had us talk about the WPA because that's part of my family's history. I think it was one of those good things that arose during the New Deal as a response to the Great Depression. Listeners, if you ever get a chance when you go to a museum and you see sponsored by, paid for by the WPA.

N. Rodgers: Take a moment and think that person didn't starve.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. This was an artist that could continue to do their wife's work during the Great Depression. We're thinking about some of the museum's abilities that were constructed by the WPA.

N. Rodgers: Every time you go across a creaky bridge think to yourself, maybe we need another WPA.

J. Aughenbaugh: All right Nia.

N. Rodgers: On that note, we'll talk again soon.

J. Aughenbaugh: Bye Nia.

N. Rodgers: Bye.

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