My fellow booksellers in these parts were recently advised to research and stock books created under the auspices of the FDR-era \u201cFederal Writers\u2019 Project,\u201d a tax-and-spend-and-elect outfit created in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s Works Progress Administration.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s good advice as far as it goes. Writers who later became well-known, from Nelson Algren to Richard Wright, from John Cheever to Studs Terkel to Ralph Ellison, were indeed at one time or another on the federal dole during the late 1930s, drawing pay from the aforementioned Writers\u2019 Project to work on state-by-state guidebooks, or any other make-work schemes the New Deal bureaucrats could dream up. (Artists unable to produce works anyone would purchase voluntarily were even hired to do mosaics in subway stations, beginning a great tradition of forcing bad, urine-stained works of art on those who had been stripped of the right to refuse to fund them.)<\/p>\n
Even though the contributions of these notables-to-be were generally anonymous, most of these guidebooks can be worth a few bucks; it\u2019s wise to keep an eye out for them.<\/p>\n
The Library of Congress started more than a decade ago digging piles of Writers\u2019 Project material out of tax-funded warehouses and deciding what to do with it. This apparently included deciding which of it to make available to the public — an interesting role for a government agency to assign itself, given that all<\/em> this stuff was funded by taxpayers.<\/p>\n What quickly became clear, according to Professor Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State University in little Kirksville, Missouri, is that the editors of the project believed they could build a national culture based on \u201cdiversity. They faced a great challenge coming out of the 1920s, where white supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K., and anti-immigration laws, held sway,\u201d Professor Hirsch told leftist Rice University History Professor Douglas Brinkley, back in 2003. \u201cIn the Federal Writers\u2019 Project,\u201d Professor Hirsch went on, \u201cethnic minorities were celebrated for being turpentine workers or grape pickers or folks artists.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo you see, FDR did do something good,\u201d was the conclusion of the fellow urging a study of the work done under the auspices of the Writers\u2019 Project.<\/p>\n Oh, horseshit.<\/p>\n Anyone whose summary of American culture in the 1920s runs first to the Ku Klux Klan and \u201canti-immigration laws\u201d has an axe to grind, to say the least. Black economists including Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have documented that blacks in the 1920s were making great strides in America in income growth, educational attainment, legitimate birth rates, even home ownership — progress lamentably since reversed under and thanks to America\u2019s post-1964 fatherless welfare state, which (in addition to our looming federal bankruptcy) is the great lingering legacy of FDR\u2019s partisan scheming.<\/p>\n All immigration laws are by definition \u201canti-immigration laws.\u201d Regulating immigration is one of the few things Congress does today which it\u2019s actually empowered to do by the Constitution. The main difference between the \u201canti-immigration laws\u201d of the 1920s and today\u2019s is that today we have a president who refuses to do his sworn duty to ENFORCE our duly enacted \u201canti-immigration\u201d laws.<\/p>\n (I\u2019m all in favor of the executive branch declining to enforce laws which are unconstitutional, starting with every single drug and gun law, not a one of which exercises a power delegated or allowed to the government under the constitution. Again, the immigration laws are among the few that ARE authorized. Allow unlimited immigration in a \u201cdemocracy\u201d and you\u2019ll soon be outvoted by those who favor seizing and dividing anything owned by the productive class.)<\/p>\n This is \u2018Diversity\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n The Ku Klux Klan did plenty of mischief under Democrats Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and Harry Truman (1944-1952.) Sen. Robert Byrd was the Grand Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of his local Klan klavern in West Virginia not in the 1920s, but in the 1940s, under Roosevelt and Truman. He voted against the Civil Rights Act (and the \u201cwhite niggers\u201d he said were pushing it) in 1964. Byrd, who wrote to his predecessor that he refused to go into the Army during World War Two because he might have to serve alongside \u201crace mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds,\u201d was a life-long Roosevelt Democrat. So why bring up the yokels of the KKK as though they were a dominant presence primarily of the Coolidge-Republican 1920s . . . unless your goal is to construct a straw man, seeking to turn on its head the obvious contrast between the dynamic, prosperous, capitalist 1920s and the somber, debilitating, impoverished decade-long Great Depression — stretched out interminably by the top-down, counterproductive policies first of the \u201cGreat Engineer\u201d Herbert Hoover and then of the tax-mad, gold-seizing Roosevelt \u201cProgressives\u201d?<\/p>\n In fact, Professor Hirsch here uses the word \u201cdiversity\u201d in precisely the same sense most of today\u2019s state-socialist double-talkers use it, to mean the Democrat Writers\u2019 Project tried to throw federal handouts to white socialists, black socialists, male socialists, female socialists, red socialists, brown socialists, Communists of any color, and call it \u201cdiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n If the \u201ceditors\u201d of the Writers\u2019 Project wanted to prove an intent to honor and promote \u201cdiversity,\u201d where are the critics<\/em> of Roosevelt and his thoroughly predictable and predicted economic debacle on the list of writers they helped or at least solicited to contribute to their publications -\u2013 the John T. Flynns and the H.L Menckens and the Garet Garretts?<\/p>\n To this day, how many of the works of those courageous writers who stood up for the free market against FDR\u2019s corrupting boondoggles are assigned and taught by the members of the Democratic teachers unions in America\u2019s government schools? Not a one. But I dare say a lot of the kids — the ones who can still read, at all — have heard of John Steinbeck.<\/p>\n During the late 1930s, the League of Nations collected statistics from the U.S. and many other nations on industrial recovery. Much of that data supports the idea that Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal created endless economic uncertainty \u201cand was in fact uniquely unsuccessful as a recovery program,\u201d writes Burton Folsom, Jr. in his 2008 book \u201cNew Deal or Raw Deal? \/ How FDR\u2019s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.\u201d<\/p>\n The WPA built thousands of hospitals and schools, Folsom agrees. But many of these projects \u201cmerely duplicated existing facilities and were so poorly constructed they had to be rebuilt almost immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n Who cared? Unlike the projects that likely would have been funded by private businessmen if their top tax rate hadn\u2019t gone from 24 percent to 74 percent between 1931 and 1936 (not to mention regressive new excise taxes that drained far more than income taxes from the private economy, \u201cexcess profits taxes\u201d -\u2013 heck, Roosevelt would eventually try to impose by executive order a 100 percent tax on incomes above $25,000!), no one cared if a government \u201cproject\u201d fell down the day after it was finished. The goal, after all, was simply to \u201cmake work.\u201d Yay! If you figure that\u2019s going to lead to prosperity, why not just put everybody to work in the home repair business by burning down every house in America?<\/p>\n (In fact, the Keynesians to this day embrace just that obvious fallacy, by claiming that economic prosperity was restored not by economic de-regulation under the sensible businessman Harry Truman but by World War Two — the creation of wealth by Blowing Things Up.)<\/p>\n Piano lessons, caterpillars<\/strong><\/p>\n Economist Henry Hazlitt, who wrote for Newsweek and the New York Times during the 1930s, points out that the WPA — since it had to be funded through taxation — destroyed as many jobs as it created. The WPA might build a $10 million bridge, Hazlitt noted, but \u201cfor every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. . . . But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $10 million taken from the taxpayers.\u201d<\/p>\n See Frederic Bastiat: \u201cWhat Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.\u201d<\/p>\n The WPA wasn\u2019t just a boondoggle; it was partisan graft incarnate. New Mexico Gov. Arthur Seligman established a common pattern \u201cright from the start when he recorded the political affiliation of all applicants for federal relief and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) work in New Mexico,\u201d writes Mr. Folsom.<\/p>\n New Jersey\u2019s WPA workers enjoyed the highest wages in the nation. (That great champion of \u201cdiversity,\u201d Franklin Roosevelt, who kept the U.S. armed forces segregated as long as he lived, saw to it that workers in the Deep South were paid 31 cents an hour by the WPA, while whites in New Jersey got $2.25.) But \u201cone minor drawback\u201d of those high wages \u201cwas that WPA workers in New Jersey had to \u2018tithe\u2019 3 percent of their salaries to the Democratic Party at election time,\u201d writes Mr. Folsom. \u201cOne WPA director in New Jersey \u2013 a corrupt but candid man \u2013 answered his office phone \u201cDemocratic headquarters!\u201d (Folsom\u2019s source: Couch and Shughart, \u201cThe Political Economy of the New Deal.\u201d)<\/p>\n Roosevelt hatchet man Harry Hopkins received reams of letters from Democrats who had landed jobs through the WPA, asking if it was right and legal for Democratic Party bosses to subsequently tell them they now had to vote Democratic and even donate $2 to the Party in exchange for that job — and from Republicans like Sadie M. Kearney, who wrote to Hopkins that a Democrat time keeper in the City Hall in Paterson, New Jersey, had told her that her father might as well give up trying to get a WPA job: \u201cHe won\u2019t get anything because he\u2019s a Republican.\u201d<\/p>\n Those reams of letters and telegrams are today stored in the National Archives in state-by-state files labeled \u201cWPA — Political Coercion.\u201d <\/p>\n Nor were the corrupting effects limited to the street level. Here began the evil tradition — continuing to this day — of running out of office principled champions of the free market and state sovereignty who refused to vote for the Roosevelt boondoggles, like blind Sen. Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, a Democrat, by accusing them of \u201cfailing to bring home the bacon.\u201d<\/p>\n No depression, Gore warned, \u201ccan be ended by gifts, gratuities, doles and alms handed out by the federal Treasury, and extorted from taxpayers that are bleeding at every pore.\u201d And the states would come to regret accepting all these federal handouts, Sen. Gore warned, in exchange for which they were trading away their ability to ever again tell Washington \u201cNo\u201d about anything.<\/p>\n The next year, Thomas Gore, who had served since Oklahoma became a state in 1907, couldn\u2019t even win re-nomination.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this country there are 18,000 on WPA,\u201d the more forward-thinking freshman congressman Frank Towey of New Jersey told a Democrat rally in Newark. \u201cWith an average of three in a family you have 54,000 potential Democratic votes. Can anyone beat that if it is properly mobilized?\u201d (Newark Evening News, Sept. 8, 1938.)<\/p>\n Mr. Folsom does make passing mention of the Writers\u2019 Project. Frank Kent of the Baltimore Sun warned at the time, he relates: \u201cBoondoggling on a gigantic scale is about to begin. Millions are to be spent giving piano lessons to the children of those on relief. Millions more will pay 7,000 men to write a guide book of America. A disgusted Congressman was here the other day telling of discovering seven men in an automobile going around counting caterpillars.\u201d<\/p>\n Helping out a few Commies<\/strong><\/p>\n The great books written by Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow and John Cheever and John Steinbeck and Studs Terkel and Richard Wright and the rest while they were on the WPA dole?<\/p>\n Communist Richard Wright did indeed publish \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Children\u201d in 1938; he almost certainly wrote some of those four short stories while working on the Harlem chapter of the Writers’ Project guidebook to New York City, \u201cNew York Panorama\u201d (1938.)<\/p>\n Today\u2019s leftists, mooning for the glory days of the WPA and whining it was killed by \u201cright-wing reactionary congressmen\u201d (ignoring the fact the handful of free-market conservatives remaining after the Great Roosevelt Landslide of 1936 could probably have convened in a phone booth), allow as how Wright may have been \u201cleft-leaning.\u201d Come on. He was Harlem editor of The Daily Worker and served on the editorial board of The New Masses. He was a government-subsidized Communist.<\/p>\n But the connection of a lot of these other oft-cited names with the New Deal project turn out to be fairly tangential. Eudora Welty worked for the Writers\u2019 Project as a photographer. John Cheever (the Republican exception who proves the rule) was a junior copy editor in Washington, D.C., complaining about the low quality of much of the work submitted. John Steinbeck, whose rabble-rousing, salt-of-the-earth novels of the 1930s certainly would have pleased the leftists at the WPA, is often listed as having been funded by the Writers\u2019 Project, but I can find no evidence that he was. Steinbeck was indeed employed for a time by the WPA, conducting a census of dogs on the Monterey Peninsula (yes, dogs), and is also often cited as having \u201cpored over the WPA state guides while researching The Grapes of Wrath.\u201d That\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n Studs Terkel? The Writers\u2019 Project paid the young man to write radio scripts and advertisements and to do news and sports announcing. His first book, about jazz musicians, wasn\u2019t published till 1956.<\/p>\n Staff photographer Welty was apparently recruited to work with Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren on a project about cuisine called \u201cAmerica Eats.\u201d They visited picnics, parties, and local festivals to gather material, but the book was never published, except in fragments.<\/p>\n There\u2019s little doubt Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s first books drew on the interviews and folk tales she was sent out to collect in the backwaters of Florida by the Writers\u2019 Project. Ralph Ellison, too, said the vernacular speech of the Harlem residents he interviewed for the Writers\u2019 Project in the late 1930s (after Richard Wright helped him find a job there) found its way into \u201cInvisible Man,\u201d which he started in 1945 and published in 1952.<\/p>\n Vardis Fisher\u2019s 1939 \u201cChildren of God\u201d may be another exception \u2013- but Fisher was already an established historian and college professor when he lost his job and became the head of the Writers\u2019 Project for the state of Idaho from 1935-39.<\/p>\n This outfit wasn\u2019t exactly providing \u201cgenius grants\u201d so people could write \u201cThe Grapes of Wrath.\u201d Bureaucrats in large organizations rarely act like private patrons, encouraging those they subsidize to write their best, most innovative, most controversial stuff. The idea here was to get these guys — and 6,950 others you\u2019ve never heard of — to pull on a coat and tie every morning, report to some office, pretend to have a \u201cjob,\u201d churn out some pabulum, and take home a tax-funded paycheck.<\/p>\n To the dilettante Frank Roosevelt — subsidized all his life by his mom\u2019s money, a charming dabbler who had no idea how anyone ever succeeded in business — the appearance that people were \u201cworking\u201d was all that mattered. Dig the ditches, fill them back in. These guys might as well have been operating Donald Duck’s Toy Railroad.<\/p>\n The \u201cProgressives\u201d with their massive tax hikes, their debilitating tariff and trade war, the legalized fraud of fractional reserve banking and a centralized \u201cFederal Reserve,\u201d created the Great Depression. Thousands of aspiring writers found no option from 1935 to 1939 but to go on the federal dole — a system purposely set up to destroy local- and state-based charity and thus any remaining sovereignty of the several states. To say this \u201cWriters\u2019 Project\u201d created any great writers is little different from saying all America\u2019s great leftist writers got that way by reading \u201cThe Scarlet Letter\u201d in high school, or by eating Cheerios or Post Toasties every morning.<\/p>\n While those who rejected Roosevelt\u2019s brand of national socialism either made it on their own (God bless \u2018em) . . . or were left to pound sand.<\/p>\n – 30 –<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My fellow booksellers in these parts were recently advised to research and stock books created under the auspices of the FDR-era \u201cFederal Writers\u2019 Project,\u201d a tax-and-spend-and-elect outfit created in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s Works Progress Administration. That\u2019s good advice as far as it goes. Writers who later became well-known, from Nelson Algren […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,53,33,18,14,55,25,26,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-books","category-collectibles","category-economics","category-education","category-fiction","category-history","category-literacy","category-readers-write"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-vC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1961,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions\/1961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}