Will Act for Food

Though Obama hasn't made any arts or humanities appointments yet, he has signaled that he regards culture seriously. During the campaign, he took the unprecedented step of forming an Arts Policy Committee, which produced a thorough list of policy objectives. (Rare are the campaigns that can boast a statement of principles drafted by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist—in this case, Michael Chabon.)

Yet in the months since then, the cultural ground has shifted. Calamitously. Thanks to the recession, the customary sources of nonprofit arts revenue (single-ticket sales, individual philanthropy, corporate and foundation support, state and local governments) have begun to decline, even as the stock-market collapse has caused many endowments to shrivel. A round of interviews with artists and leaders of arts advocacy groups didn't turn up many calls for a Detroit-style bailout of cultural organizations—not yet, anyway. But with the arts section of the newspaper beginning to feature almost as many bankruptcies as the business page, you get the sense that if Obama wants to sustain our cultural traditions, he'll need to think in very broad terms about the role government can play. In other words, he may need to brush up on his FDR.

When President Roosevelt signed the Works Progress Administration into law in 1935, it included provisions for four arts programs: theater, writing, music and art. The $418 million (in 2008 dollars) allocated in the first year was a tiny slice of the agency's total, but, as Nick Taylor relates in "American-Made," a new history of the WPA, it was extremely effective. Arts organizations such as theaters and symphonies tend to be highly labor-intensive, making them a quick and efficient way to help put many people back to work. (Take note, you writers and artists threatened by new media and the Death of Print: part of the rationale for the program was to find jobs for talented people left unemployed by industrial shifts that predated the Depression, such as vaudevillians being put out of work by the movies.)

From the vantage point of our current crisis, new employment may be the least interesting result of the arts programs. Without trying to be a latter-day Medici, FDR sponsored some impressive creations, including Orson Welles's trailblazing, voodoo-inflected, all-black staging of "Macbeth," as well as countless dazzling murals and posters. These achievements weren't merely esthetic. The WPA's investment in the arts also helped bring about a change in values—one that's especially evident in the work of the Federal Writers' Project. The agency published state guidebooks that were far more ambitious than itineraries for tourists on car trips. Contributors—including the young Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright—collected stories about the history, people and day-to-day life of cities and towns, making the books part essay collection, part encyclopedia and part vehicle for exploring a certain ideal of Americanness.

As Jerrold Hirsch writes in "Portrait of America," his history of the Federal Writers' Project, many writers in the field, particularly in the South, automatically belittled or stigmatized black and immigrant communities. But the editors in Washington, inspired by the writing of Whitman and Bourne, imposed a modern, pluralist sensibility on the books. "The common element in all the guides," writes Hirsch, "is that ethnic groups are viewed as a dynamic factor in American culture, not as a social problem."

These cosmopolitan tendencies didn't escape the notice of the New Deal's nativist enemies. Martin Dies, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, saw the egalitarian FWP as a hotbed of radical subversion, which is not surprising or even particularly irrational from a man who thought that immigration was a "great alien invasion." By 1939, Dies was wreaking havoc on the WPA, but not before it showed that a substantial investment in artists, under enlightened leadership, can all at once yield benefits to them, the art forms in which they work and their society.

Even if some wild recovery spares Obama the need to stage an FDR-style rescue of the country's nonprofit arts sector, he'll still need to find ways to achieve some of what the WPA achieved, only within the limited means of the National Endowment for the Arts. When Dana Gioia steps down as chairman this month, he will leave a firm foundation for his successor, and can look back with some justifiable pride on what he's done for the agency over the past six years. Specifically, he has persuaded America's leaders to stop kicking it.