Hermann: You can argue all you want that welfare is illegal, just like opponents of the War On Americans Who Use Drugs can argue that the government has no right to outlaw possession… but the law is what the courts say it is. And it seems they’ve disagreed with both arguments.
I don’t think anything like the WPA is possible anymore, unfortunately. I think that starting with Reagan, the notion of government taking action to do good on a large scale was killed off, although it may be reborn in the future.
Culturally speaking, the WPA was an amazing, astounding success – among other things, it literally made possible Abstract Expressionism, which in turn shifted the center of high art in the western world from Paris to New York, giving America a cultural prestige and credibility that it had lacked.
Serge Guilbaut’s “How New York Stoke the Idea of Modern Art” contains a very interesting account of this.
Perhaps you were misinformed.
I see you’re from Mississippi, kniz. Here just as one example, is a description of public libraries created in Mississippi through the WPA.
Try a google search for “WPA” and “Mississippi,” and you may change your mind about how much the WPA accomplished.
There is a park near where I grew up that was built in large part by WPA labor. They enlarged the pond into a small lake, built hiking trails, constructed open buildings for picnics and such, and built outhouses.
All in all, if the gov is going to hand out money, they may as well require the recipients to work for it. I really think most people would want to work for the money, instead of just getting a handout.
The problem is that it’s hard to go to “real” job interviews when you work 8 hours a day turning ponds into lakes. 
It’s probably best as a last ditch effort when you know that no jobs will be opening up in the near future. Maybe a combination where they can work part time and get schooling or actively job hunt. You can get some ugly situations when these things are mandatory, imho.
One more argument against the WPA, IMO.
There was over 20% unemployment at the height of the Great Depression. There were hardly any jobs to be hired onto, let alone interviewed for.
Not that I’m exactly in favor of it. But I did write that if the FedGov is going to be giving away money, they might as well require the recipiants to work for it.
Hermann Cheruscan:"
quote:
The problem is that it’s hard to go to “real” job interviews when you work 8 hours a day turning ponds into lakes.
There was over 20% unemployment at the height of the Great Depression. There were hardly any jobs to be hired onto, let alone interviewed for."
My next line was “It’s probably best as a last ditch effort when you know that no jobs will be opening up in the near future”.
You say “they might as well” work for it as if there couldn’t be any down side to the plan. I’m pretty sure a massive glut of cheap labour would have far reaching affects. Also, how do we keep people from being stuck in a dead end WPA-like job? (not that people aren’t getting stuck in the present system)
I’m not saying the problems are insurmountable but “might as well” doesn’t cut it. I personally would like to have it linked with some kind of ongoing learning strategy and some real plan to get people back into the real workforce.
—Actually, it is my understanding the Great Depression ended because of WWII, but larger poor economic conditions did not subside until after WWII.—
I’ve never heard it cited or discussed, but I wonder if sending off so many young men to war helped by making the labor maket better for the job seekers left behind.
There is really no great virtue in ignorance, believe it or not.
Assuming you have the slightest notion of abstract expressionism, the question is not whether you like that sort of art, but rather whether you recognize and acknowledge the cultural importance of this movement and what it did for American prestige not only in the art world, but also, for example, in the Cold War.
The fact is – whether you like it or not – the WPA created Abstract Expressionism, which shifted the cultural capital of the world from Paris to New York City, and that is a very large accomplishment, an accomplishment the likes of which will not soon be repeated now that small minded republicans have succeeded in blighting the cultural landscape, preferring the world as battlefield, for the foreseeable future, to the detriment of civilized humans worldwide.
Impossible.
The highest unemployment has ever gotten since World War II is 9%, which would be about one-and-a-half times what it is today.
Perhaps you were thinking of the inflation rate (which did exceed 10% during the late 1970s).
Reeder, you’re not the first person to suggest this. Pulitzer Prize winning historian Mike Wallace (not the 60 Minutes guy) has written a book pushing the idea (for NYC in particular) titled “A New Deal for New York.” BTW, the book’s list of Depression-era New Deal projects that built NYC public works, improved health an literacy, and enriched the cultural environment is utterly staggering.
Here’s more:
Perhaps, but at the time I was in Greene County, Ohio.
Please. Get off your little elitist bandwagon.
I have quite a bit of a notion of abstract expressionism. I understand that it had a very profound effect on the art world. And I don’t like the New York School, and I don’t like the direction that it sent visual art down. Frankly, I’d rather that American cultural prestige didn’t rest on this kind of tripe. Of course, that is merely my opinion, and I have no problem with other people feeling otherwise. American cultural prestige is much better served by its significant contributions to music in the 20th century, not by visual artists vainly trying to copy the ability of music to express emotion.
The WPA did not create Abstract Expressionism. First of all, the term was first used back in 1919 for what Kandinsky was trying, and failing in my opinion, to do…that is, make visual art as emotionally expressive as music. Perhaps you are referring to the popularizing of the term by post-war artists of the New York school.
Second, artists fleeing the rise of fascism in Europe had far more to do with the shifting of the “cultural capital” to New York than the WPA. Had that not happened, it’s far more likely that artists like Pollock, de Kooning and Avery would have moved to Europe and never had a chance to work under the Artists Project. Similarly, artists like Ernst or Mondrian would never have moved to New York and influenced what was going on at the time in the New York art scene. Furthermore, the most the project did was to help keep the artists creating during the Depression and the war, rather than having to go to other jobs. It is quite likely that even without the Artists Project, abstract expressionism would still have come into being as developments and psychology and the general zeitgeist of the art movement of the time was heading in that direction.
So spare me your sloppy history and anguished political tirades.
Hmmm…can a mod fix that?
Your preferences regarding the history of American cultural prestige are irrelevant to the facts. I assume you know that. I also love American 20th century music (i.e., jazz and rock) but America was able to compete with Europe culturally not in the music scene but in the visual arts. That’s just historical fact. Furthermore, the painters and sculptors in question were far too wise to “copy the ability of music to express emotion.” They were interested in the question of how to make good paintings and sculptures, i.e., works that compel the same sort of aesthetic conviction as is elicited by the Old Masters. It’s true that Pollack and David Smith loved jazz, but they were interested in making paintings and sculptures that look good. This has little to do with music.
Thank you for pointing out my poor choice of words. The WPA did not “create” AE (rather the artists did), but it is undeniable that it was only thanks to the WPA that artists like Gorky, Pollack and de Kooning and Smith were able to concentrate on their art so as to become great artists. Without the WPA, it is highly unlikely that any of these people would have succeeded in art.
To say that Kandinsky (or anyone else)'s achievement was to have made visual art as expressive as music is sheer nonsense for several reasons, especially this one:
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You fail to articulate just how “emotionally expressive” music is, and you can’t, because this sort of measure is just absurd; certain music may be more expressive than other music, just as certain painting is more expressive than other painting, and this sort of criticism may in fact be expressed in words, by those who care about such things. But to say that a piece of music is “more or less expressive” than a painting is ridiculous because in art, the expression of emotion is possible only through a specific artistic medium; the medium itself provides the criteria for quality, hence comparison between works within the medium. Your statement is sort of like saying that the German language is more emotionally expressive than the English or French languages. (This actually raises some very interesting questions about the notion of an artistic medium, and also about what constitutes good art.)
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(forgot what I was gonna say) However, I will point out that we owe this terminology to the great critic Clement Greenberg, who invented the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe Pollack’s work in the '40s. He also invented the term “New York School” to describe the derivative work of the later Abstract Expressionists, for example Franz Kline and de Kooning. The word “school” in Greenberg’s vocabulary connoted a sort of decline or degradation. Kandinsky is in my view a very minor artist and had very little lasting influence on the Americans.
It is true that the European exiles had a great influence, but my point about the WPA and Ab Ex was that it was far more than a shift in geography. In other words, Ernst, Duchamp and the surrealists in New York remained essentially European, so that in itself does not explain the significance of Ab Ex. That significance is tied to the fact that the artists who constituted the music were extremely American (Pollack the cowboy is the epitome of this). This was the first time in history when genuinely American artists were perceived as real competitors on the same level of quality as the Europeans, and the WPA made this possible.
Whether Ab Ex would have happened without WPA is purely speculative. What is undeniable is that the WPA allowed these people to dedicate their lives to art, and the result is an historical fact.
The original point of the thread was to ask whether another WPA type project is possible, i.e., whether the federal government would or could sponsor a large scale project dedicated to (among other things) culture.
Now we have the laughable NEA, which really does nothing, but makes a great whipping boy for conservative “moralists” (read: hypocritical ignorant imbeciles) like Bill Bennett, and we barely have that.
Despite the anti-intellectual moralistic whining of the GOP’s fraudulent culture-police, the fact remains that so far as American culture is concerned, the WPA was a gigantic success which will remain under appreciated by the self-proclaimed spokespeople for “Western Civilization.”
We need some historical perspective here. 5-6% unemployment is not much higher than the traditional level considered to be ‘Full Employment’.
Full employment is defined as the point where there is a job available for everyone who wants one. That doesn’t mean everyone is working, because people go between jobs, take leaves of absence, change careers, etc. Typically, about 4% of the population is considered to be in this position.
6% unemployment, which is about what we have today, is about what the U.S. employment level was at way back in 1994, turning the ‘boom’ of the 1990’s. So it’s not that employment is outrageously high today, but that the last few years of extremely low unemployment was an historical aberration.
So the bottom line is that if you came up with a grand public works program, you probably couldn’t get anyone to do it unless you paid them a lot more than minimum wage, and/or threatened to tie the work to receiving benefits they already get. And if you did that, it wouldn’t be the right who would be upset - it would be the left.
I’m guessing that a lot of people who think the economy is in terrible shape are younger workers who entered the workforce after 1990 and don’t know what a REAL downturn looks like. This mild little recession is nothing. Neither is 6% unemployment. Wait till you see a 15% contraction in GDP and unemployment in double digits. Then you can start to worry.