Class in violin instruction under the direction of the WPA Federal Music Project in New York City, 1936. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
WNYC moved last year, as many of you know. But for the first 84 years, WNYC broadcast from the top of the Municipal Building across the street from City Hall, in downtown Manhattan. This early skyscraper has always housed many city government agencies, which, until the first Giuliani administration in the early/mid 90s, included WNYC. This explains why, in the 1930s, a series of murals were painted on the hallway walls of WNYC as part of the the WPA - the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was a huge, ambitious, nation-wide project that FDR came up with as a way of jumpstarting a moribund economy; the WPA built bridges and roads, airports and aqueducts, and brought running water and electricity to much of rural America. But it also included sizable grants for music, theater, and the arts.
Much of this sounds familiar, doesn't it? Except for that last bit. Congress is deeply suspicious of putting any extra funding for the arts into the current economic stimulus plan, and while the NEA stands to get a $50 million boost, it's a drop in the bucket - and it's a drop that many politicians on both sides of the aisle are trying to hack away at. I don't understand it - the arts employ millions of people and pump over $100 billion into the American economy. If America were a house, the arts would not be the frilly extra bits of trim you stick around the windows - they'd be the load-bearing wall in the middle of the floorplan.
When I hear about the stimulus plan, I can't help thinking back to those WPA murals that decorated the walls of our old home on Centre Street. At least two of them were really good (in fact, one was moved some years back to the Brooklyn Museum), but even more impressive was what they meant - that an American administration and an American Congress once viewed the arts as an integral part of our country, and our economy. Why are we looking to FDR's model for our current crisis and lopping off what was actually the first thing he put into his New Deal package?
Tell us: should the arts be a major part of any stimulus plan?
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John Schaefer has hosted Soundcheck since the show’s inception in 2002. He has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (“The No. 1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.
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