American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work [Hardcover]

Nick Taylor (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0553802356 | ISBN-13: 978-0553802351 | Publication Date: February 26, 2008 | Edition: First Printing

If you’ve traveled the nation’s highways, flown into New York’s LaGuardia Airport, strolled San Antonio’s River Walk, or seen the Pacific Ocean from the Beach Chalet in San Francisco, you have experienced some part of the legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—one of the enduring cornerstones of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a staggering 13 million American workers were jobless and many millions more of their family members were equally in need. Desperation ruled the land.

What people wanted were jobs, not handouts: the pride of earning a paycheck; and in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created. This was the Works Progress Administration, and it would forever change the physical landscape and the social policies of the United States.

The WPA lasted for eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 8½ million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Under its colorful head, Harry Hopkins, the agency’s remarkable accomplishment was to combine the urgency of putting people back to work with its vision of physically rebuilding America. Its workers laid roads, erected dams, bridges, tunnels, and airports. They stocked rivers, made toys, sewed clothes, served millions of hot school lunches. When disasters struck, they were there by the thousands to rescue the stranded. And all across the country the WPA’s arts programs performed concerts, staged plays, painted murals, delighted children with circuses, created invaluable guidebooks. Even today, more than sixty years after the WPA ceased to exist, there is almost no area in America that does not bear some visible mark of its presence.

Politically controversial, the WPA was staffed by passionate believers and hated by conservatives; its critics called its projects make-work and wags said it stood for We Piddle Around. The contrary was true. We have only to look about us today to discover its lasting presence.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Launched in 1935, at the bottom of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) served as a linchpin of FDR's New Deal. Through the WPA, Roosevelt put millions of unemployed Americans to work on public construction projects, from dams and courthouses to parks and roads. The WPA's Federal Writers Project employed a host of artists and writers (among them Jackson Pollock, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and Studs Terkel); theater and musical artists also received funding. Taylor (Ordinary Miracles: Life in a Small Church) vividly and painstakingly paints the full story of the WPA from its inception to its shutdown by Congress in 1943, at which point the war boom in manufacturing had made it unnecessary. In an eloquent and balanced appraisal, Taylor not only chronicles the WPA's numerous triumphs (including New York's LaGuardia Airport) but also its failures, most notably graft and other chicanery at the local level. Taylor details as well the dicey intramural politics in Congress over which states and districts would get the largest slice of the WPA pie. All told, Taylor's volume makes for a splendid appreciation of the WPA with which to celebrate the upcoming 75th anniversary of the New Deal's beginnings in 1933. (Mar. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March 1933, the rate of unemployment was approximately 25 percent. Staples of today’s government support system for the needy, such as unemployment compensation and food stamps, did not exist. Roosevelt had not campaigned as a big government “liberal,” but he and his brain trust felt compelled to do something and do it fast. One of the cornerstones of the New Deal was the WPA, or Works Progress Administration. It was a controversial program. Conservative economists and politicians viewed it as an unwarranted and wasteful intrusion of government into the economy But as Taylor illustrates in this comprehensive analysis of the program, the short-term results, over the eight-year life of the program, were enormous. Dams, roads, and bridges were built; on a smaller scale, WPA workers painted murals, served hot meals to the indigent, and even repaired toys. Perhaps more important, hope was provided for the hopeless. Taylor has written a passionate defense of a program that millions saw as a godsend. --Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; First Printing edition (February 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553802356
• ISBN-13: 978-0553802351
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent overview of how the New Deal put America on its feet, April 14, 2008

By 

R. C Sheehy "deadsox" (Foxboro,MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (Hardcover)

This is a very interesting and highly readable overview of how the average American, namely those hurt the worst by the Great Depression were able to get back on their feet and help boost the country along with them. American-Made doesn't intend to sanctify the WPA and does a great job at showing how in many cases there were glaring imperfections both in management and in how it was run. Still, the over reaching theme is how the WPA succeeded in its overall mission of giving people hope and of finding ways to boost the economy without treading on the concept of handing out charity to people too proud to receive it. There is also an excellent table setting which demonstrates the feeble attempts of the Hoover administration to deal with the Depression. Needless to say they all failed miserably.

There are two weaknesses to the book that prevent me from giving it five stars. The first is that it falls to far into jargonism and we see too many alphabet soup agencies which were common at the time but make the story tough to follow as a reader sometimes you have to go back several pages to remember what this was or that was. Also, the stories of the individual workers are fascinating and while Harry Hopkins and FDR are well known these people are not and their own experiences with the WPA and more of their reminisces would have been welcome. But still overall this is a great book worth reading!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A highwayscribery "Book Report", April 14, 2009

By 

Stephen Siciliano "the highway scribe" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (Paperback)

Writerly passion and interest can even inform a dry subject like the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

In "American Made: When FDR Put the Nation to Work," Nick Taylor takes what might be food for only the wonkiest among us and gives a fighting chance with those who merely like an interesting story.

Lists and data are inevitable in a book about a public works project and so we are often exposed to paragraphs detailing the 5,000 bridges built, 70,000 zillion miles of road paved, one million people vaccinated etc. etc.

Not that this is without merit. Conveying a story, Taylor must-needs wrestle with the second job of assembling an accurate historical document to support his conclusion that the ordinary folks of the WPA "proved to be extraordinary beyond all expectation."

The literary calculus here entails providing a political context for the WPA narrative, a focus on some of the agency's more colorful exploits, and the depiction of a nation brought to its knees by government neglect, rather than cataloguing every single deed done.

By way of background, the WPA was the newly inaugurated Franklin Delano Roosevelt's effort to provide some of the Great Depression's many unemployed millions a job.

"American Made," enjoyed a special relevance over the past few months as the Obama administration dug deep into our pockets to finance projects that would both stimulate the economy and put idle hands to doing some long-overdue repairs all around the country.

New Deal comparisons were inevitable.

The book makes clear that, politically, little in the United States has changed over the past 80 years or so.

In an all-too-familiar role, the Republican Party of those times choked on its own insistence all economic issues be sorted out by the free market, while it supporters belittled WPA workers as bums looking for a handout.

Last week the highway scribe saw a bumper stick in Republican north county San Diego that read: "I voted for a hero, not a handout."

Same as it ever was.

"American Made" makes clear that, when Roosevelt could squeeze money for WPA projects out of Congress, unemployment went down and economic prosperity rose. In subsequent years, when budget balancing took precedent, the whole enchilada tanked once again.

Taylor does a nice job of fleshing out the major personality behind the WPA, administrator Harry Hopkins, whose book, "Spending to Save," serves as a perfect textual response to present day budget hawks and Bible for deficit defenders such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

But it is the stories of the little people writ large by their efforts on WPA projects that gives the book its life.

These include the story of a famed international chef reduced to assuming the cooking duties in the work camp at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon.

Another tells of an Appalachian women driven to the WPA rolls and charged with delivering used books on horseback to back country folk suffering as much from mental malnutrition as physical.

The recounting of John Houseman and Orson Welles launching a voodoo-infused version of MacBeth in Harlem brings to life New York culture of the time, details left-wing infiltration in Gotham's WPA branch, and shows how Republicans and Democrats alike used it as a springboard for a rollback of New Dealism, and worse, McCarthyism.

Chapters recounting terrible natural disaster impacting a beleaguered nation are pregnant with commentary on the importance of never wasting human desire to thrive, be useful, and live with some dignity.

These chapters attest to the potential dividends yielded by investing in human capital and to the virtue of the democratic project when it is working best.

The author smoothly lays out transitions in the political environment while successfully linking them to changes within the WPA itself.

The New Deal and the times in which it unfolded were not static, but ever ebbing and flowing. Nick Taylor's book does a fine job of capturing the personalities, the issues that moved them, the tenor and pitch of the debate surrounding.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A herculian task done well..., September 1, 2008

By 

Quixote010 (columbus, ohio) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (Hardcover)

History is what it is. When written, it can be entertaining, or the most pathetic bore imaginable. Nick Taylor has done an applaudable feat of telling the tale of the country's ascention from the depression in an entertaining and highly acceptable manner that reads far more like a novel than a historical review.

At better than 500 pages, American-Made begins after the prosperity of the 1920s and leads us to World War II by following the trails taken to put one-third of the American people to work.

For anyone having read Grapes of Wrath, American-Made recalls much of the same hardship and futility experienced by Steinbeck's Joad family, only on a much grander, but just as readable, scale. Why did Hoover think that the answer to the country's problems literally could be solved with a song, and where did the poor and hungry find apples to sell for a nickle are just two of the dozens of tales incorporated into this book.

I also particularly enjoyed his simple, untold tales of American ingenuity, and was surprised to discover how many WPA projects endure today. From building gravel roads, to constructing a podium for FDR, the author has done a superb job of capturing the era while keeping the reader's attention and interest.

Paraphrasing Howard O. Hunter, Commissioner of the WPA, .."the full accomplishments of the WPA will never by known. It has simply been too large in figures and volume of things done to get it all in one brief statement." Taylor tries, and does a commendable job of it.