Book Review: History Repeating?
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Odds are better than even that neither Susan Quinn nor Nick Taylor thought, much less knew, that their respective books on the WPA and the Great Depression would end up being quite so topical. Inadvertently or not, though, neither Taylor’s American Made: When FDR Put The Nation to Work nor Quinn’s Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times could have been timelier.
In the latter part of last year, Wall Street posted losses the likes of which had not been seen in nearly 80 years. This has led to no small amount of talk and speculation about Depression 2.0, and whether the United States, and the world, are headed down the same long, dark road last travelled in the early 1930’s. Similarly, programs promising jobs and economic stimuli have nearly invaribly drawn comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s litany of “alphabet soup” agencies–the NRA, AAA, CCC, and especially the WPA–formed to fight the poverty, joblessness, and despair that the 1929 crash left in its wake. Reams have been written trying to study, debate, and make sense of what happened, and (more recently) whether it might happen again, so neither Taylor nor Quinn are exactly covering new ground; but given the overall shape of recent events, both books are uncanny in their timing. (more…)