Revisiting the New Deal in the Shadow of a Double Pandemic

Revisiting the New Deal in the Shadow of a Double Pandemic Sharon Ann Musher (bio) Scott Borchert, Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America. NY: Macmillan Publishers, 2021. 385 pp. Notes and index. $30. Mary Ann Calo, African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023. 216 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95. Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 232 pp. Notes and index. $16. Sara Rutkowski, ed., Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers' Project. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022. 264 pp. $30.95. Index. Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt. NY: Grove Press, 2020. 560 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $20. Today's politicians, activists, academics, writers, and artists regularly look to New Deal programs, rhetoric, and ideology to address contemporary challenges. In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called for a Green New Deal through a bill introduced to the House.1 Although that bill was not enacted, the youth-led Sunrise Movement has grown around the concept of electing leaders to prioritize climate change, end reliance on fossil fuels, and guarantee universally accessible living wages. Shortly after President Biden's election in 2021, efforts to establish a new New Deal increased. Biden issued an Executive Order to create a Civilian Climate Corps that would put young people to work to tackle environmental degradation reminiscent of an earlier New Deal agenda. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of President Roosevelt's programs, employing young men on national conservation projects to plant trees and build trails.2 In May, Congressman Ted W. Lieu (D-CA) took up the New Deal mantle when he proposed a Twenty-First Century Federal Writers' Project Act, inspired by the original Writers' Project, [End Page 160] which hired unemployed white-collar workers across the nation to portray the country through State Guides, ethnic studies, and first-person interviews. Lieu's plan was similar but less direct. Rather than the federal government openly hiring writers, it would provide funds to non-profits, libraries, and news sources to engage struggling writers to document COVID's impact and honor lives lost.3 That August, Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) presented the Creative Economy Revitalization Act (CERA) to the House. CERA resonated with the New Deal's Work Progress Administration (WPA), a work-relief program that included the Writers' Project.4 Like the proposed Twenty-First Century FWP, Fernandez's act called for less immediate aid to the unemployed. Instead, the Department of Labor would work with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to administer grants to organizations to hire artists to create accessible art. That September, Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) introduced the same bill to the Senate.5 Such modern-day New-Deal programs have not come to fruition.6 Instead, the government's response to COVID-19 has been more circumscribed, shorter in duration and less geared toward transforming the status quo than restoring it. The bulk of support to individuals and organizations grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has come through temporary funds in the form of relief bills, such as the CARES ACT (2020) and the American Rescue Plan (2021).7 New Deal-style efforts at the local, regional, and state levels have been a bit more successful. In 2012, New York City's Human Resources Administration revived the WPA with New York's Work Progress Program, which provides subsidized wages and job training for young, low-income, unemployed people who are not in school. While attempts to expand this program across New York State have failed, California managed, in 2020, to enact an—albeit underfunded—state-wide job training project for artists and writers.8 Nevertheless, such attenuated programs sustain more than reimagine the system. Some of the most creative programs emulating the New Deal's approach have developed in universities and the private and not-for-profit sector. Creatives Rebuild NY, for example, is a two-year artist employment program similar to the Federal Art Program. Creatives...