Taking it when no one is giving

Studs Terkel, the late, great oral historian and radio host, used to sign off his radio broadcasts with the line, “Take it easy, but take it!” Woody Guthrie said it first, but the phrase remains ingrained in popular memory, titles blogs, provides fodder for sermons, and ends the Pete Seeger song, “Talking Union.”

Both Terkel and Guthrie came of age during the Great Depression of the twentieth century (they were born only a few months apart in 1912). Terkel’s radio work began with a grant from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project under Federal Project Number One, the government’s artists’ project.

Many of Guthrie’s songs evoke the Dust Bowl era and the plight of working people, and his creative juices are thoroughly steeped in Oklahoma’s arid landscape. These songs are some of America’s most lasting folk songs. He played from a rich tradition of migrants and radicals, and in 1941, he spent thirty days recording with the WPA, which produced a significant body of his recorded work.

There is no question that WPA artists created some of the most lasting American art, from their recordings of slave narratives to the frescoes that adorn buildings from San Francisco to New York City. The luminaries who received some of the 225,000 grants over its eight-year run include Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, and Georgette Seabrooke. Contrast that with the 119,000 grants the National Endowment for the Arts has provided over the last 38 years, and the project’s enormity becomes clearer.

Arts funding in the United States has been slashed by over $50 million since 1992 and represents approximately one percent of the federal budget. But even though jobs in manufacturing, technology, banking, and retail are depleting, creative disciplines like architecture, interior design, and web design continue to provide lucrative options for students and artists alike.

President Barack Obama has called himself a “champion of the arts,” and proposes creating an “artists’ corps” for low-income communities as well as increasing funding for the NEA and reinstating arts education in schools. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he has been faced with opposition by pundits who claim this is a “communist” move, and by Congress, who endlessly debates the need for the $50 million in the stimulus package for the arts.

William Ivey, head of his arts transition team, recently claimed that he is troubled by the misconception “that an arts worker is not a real worker, and that a carpenter who pounds nails framing a set for an opera company is a less-real carpenter than one who pounds nails framing a house.” This language evokes an earlier decade when Holger Cahill, head of the WPA, wrote, “[Federal Project Number One] has brought the artist closer to the interests of a public which needs him, and which is now learning to understand him... The artist is bringing every aspect of American life into the currency of art.”

The United States needs to relearn that art is indeed currency. As a soon-to-be graduate with plans to work in the “creative economy,” I can only hope that the government finally reinvigorates community arts—particularly in cities and towns that have lost their educational arts funding—not only for my sake, but for the sake of the entire country.

To contextualize Guthrie’s quote, it was found scribbled in the margin of his songbook, complete as, “This world is your world. Take it easy, but take it!” This world seems to be crumbling at my feet, and I am not quite singing Guthrie’s “Worried Man Blues,” but I’m coming pretty close.

Jennie Rose Halperin is a Barnard College junior majoring in American Studies. Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt runs alternate Wednesdays.