Confucius Visits D.C. for his Birthday

Maybe you don’t expect to see Confucius commemorated on his birthday in a U.S. public library, but on September 25 that’s what you will find in the main DC public library downtown. The Chinese philosopher and educator gets his 2,561st birthday blowout not with a cake but with a musical celebration of his influential ideas and his Analects.
    It’s not such a surprising fit, after all, with the institution of American public libraries and their democratic principle of self-education with a library card.
    And yes, the great man appears in the WPA guides too. The 1939 WPA Guide to California visits the Tin How Temple in San Francisco, on Waverly Place, the “oldest Chinese joss house in San Francisco,” and for that matter, the oldest Chinese temple in the United States. In 1939 you could go up to the fourth floor and ring for entry, and inside you'd find the centuries-old main altar, covered with gold leaf and carvings depicting scenes from the life of Confucius.

Jobs Stimulus Stutters and Echoes

The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial is one of many voices saying that President Obama's stimulus has been less than stimulating for new jobs, and that his proposed second round is a recognition of that. It's worth remembering that FDR's New Deal didn't come in one straightforward push either: there was a first phase with financial reform (heard about that) and the National Recovery Administration. When that wasn't enough to kickstart the economy, FDR created larger programs like the WPA, unprecedented in scale and impact.
    Some conservative bloggers have said that by 1939, when many of the New Deal programs ended, unemployment hovered around 19%. They imply that the programs were failures. They don't say that when the New Deal began, unemployment was nearly twice that level, and had dropped to 14.3% in 1937 before an uptick as the programs ended.
    Our recession today isn't on the same scale as the Great Depression. Don't let a false comparison suggest that the New Deal didn't get people back to work.

Documenting the Lone Star State

The Texas WPA writers came up against some of the most virulent anti-WPA sentiment anywhere, and it was stoked by a Texas congressman Martin Dies from Beaumont. That didn't stop them from producing a clear-eyed view of the state, including hot-button topics like labor history and poverty, such as this recap of the violence between unions and union busters:

Longshoremen on Houston's cotton docks

In the early 1930s the longshoremen at Houston and in the chief shipping centers of southeast Texas, although organized along craft lines, developed a strong militant unit… In 1934 striking longshoremen, strikebreaker guards, and non-union workers clashed frequently and violently for four months. On one occasion three men were killed. The oil workers are the largest group of the Texas membership of the CIO…

And this look at culture, poverty and housing problems in cities like San Antonio:

In west San Antonio are odd shops, women wrapped in black rebozos huddling over baskets of freshly made tortillas, and brilliant paper flowers… The poorer section covers about 25 blocks… The very poor live in housing conditions devoid of comfort… In 1936 a slum clearance program was begun by the city… more than 2,300 houses were razed or closed… The necessities of the very poor have been exploited by various interests… In 1934, the average piece work wage for a 54-hour week was $1.56.

These excerpts appear in honor of their work on the guidebook, published 70 years ago yesterday (Sept. 7, 1940). Don't mess with Texas.

Coming to America Stories - Free for a few days

There's nothing like hearing it from the horse's mouth. Listen to Lawrence Meinwald relive the emotional charge he felt seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1920, or hear Millvina Dean, last living survivor of the Titanic.
    For a few days -- until Monday, September 6, reports the Times -- you can listen for free to stories from oral histories recorded with people who immigrated to the U.S. through Ellis Island. Recorded by the National Park Service, the recordings have up to now been accessible only if you went to the Ellis Island park.

When Work Relief was Murder

Work relief on a scale as massive as the WPA struck Americans of the 1930s with numbed amazement – it was radically bigger than any such effort up to then. It immediately triggered appalled reactions in essays, radio, fiction and pop music. Tunesmiths already riffed on the plight of unemployment, but with the WPA came songs like “Pink-Slip Blues” (the original ‘pink slips’ were the bureaucratic notices that told workers their time on WPA relief was up) and “WPA Blues.”
    Louis Armstrong teamed up with the Mills Brothers to record “W.P.A.” with the classic lines, “Sleep while you work while you rest while you play/Lean on your shovel to pass the time away.../The WPA.”
    In fiction, what better way to sell a novel than by combining a timely topic with a whodunit? That at least was the idea of the 1937 novel by Alexander Williams titled Murder in the WPA. In that, a bewildered agent is told to find out who killed a WPA supervisor in New Jersey. As the plot unfolds, it reveals many suspects: disgruntled employees (some who got the pink slip), political rivals, and more.
    Political cartoons skewered the WPA at every turn. Studs Terkel recalls in Soul of a People how Chicago Tribune cartoons on the front page mocked WPA workers as boondogglers, a term for thumb-twiddling taken from old westerns. If the humiliation and stress of being out of work wasn’t enough for you, just pick up the newspaper.

Museum Presents Life when the Depression Hit the Pacific Northwest

Along the Oregon coast, the landscape and a new exhibit in Cannon Beach point to the ways people made it through a previous hard time. Read the story in the local paper or at the museum's website.
    Russell Lee's FSA photo shows fishing boats in Astoria, OR.

Adventures in Animating Real Stories

The New York Times recently reported that StoryCorps will release animated short films based on interviews that ordinary people have recorded in the nearly seven years of StoryCorps' existence. (Their approach was inspired by the WPA Writers' Project, creator Dave Isay told me for Smithsonian way back when.) This opens a door for taking the stories of real people into an imaginative new dimension. It requires relatively little money and an eye for a good, revealing story. They have a first sample online here.
    It helps if you have broadcast-quality voices from the original storyteller, as in the StoryCorps case, but the WPA Life Histories online hold gems that would work well as animated shorts too.
    Try this: Find 2 or 3 vivid episodes in a life history (maybe in your home state, or not) and imagine a two-minute video for one of them.