Man: The New Deal programs put people back to work.

Some of the more famous artists of our own time wouldn't have made it if it hadn't been for the Federal Art Project.

Woman: This is a kind of a moment where to come out of this pandemic, we are going to need something akin to the New Deal, and the arts must be part of it.

Man 2: The WPA was an investment in small businesses and independent workers and culture.

Art is an industry, not a cause.

[Music] Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Frieda Berlinski Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, on the web at arts.gov, and California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

[Music] David Kipen: Every time you drive across Los Angeles or fly in and out of it or even flush a toilet in it, you might want to thank Franklin Roosevelt.

If you or your family have ever attended public school here or your grandparents survived the Depression here, you owe FDR's Works Progress Administration, the WPA, big-time.

The same goes for practically every town in America.

In the 1930s, people referred to all these new public works projects by a single catch-all name, the New Deal.

But the New Deal has another legacy, equally underappreciated.

Out of the 8.5 million laborers who rebuilt the country, a few thousand hired on to work in art, music, theater, and writing.

Thanks to the Federal Arts Projects, a whole lot of Americans saw their first play, heard their first concert.

Project alumni went on to win everything from Oscars to the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From the 1930s onward, their generation utterly transformed American culture.

Today, our country may not be in a depression, but it sure is depressed.

For artists, especially after the last couple of years of global pandemic, the Great Depression is already back.

The government is investing in modest public works again, but artists, as usual, are an afterthought.

America could use a new Federal Arts Project, and that goes double for Los Angeles.

David: I'm David Kipen, and this is my bilingual nonprofit, Libros Schmibros Lending Library, in Boyle Heights, which another New Deal program called Unemployment Insurance helped me found back in 2010.

It's dedicated to the very New Deal proposition that the arts are for everybody who walks in the door.

We put good, free books into our neighbors' hands and do cultural programming, including a podcast, movie screenings, and high-school enrichment fellowships over the summer.

Of the thousands of books at Libros, maybe my favorite is this, "The WPA Guide to Los Angeles."

Like the equally great "WPA Guide to California" and all the other state and city guides around the country, it was created for the Federal Writers' Project by scores of previously unemployed writers, editors, and oral historians.

It's got delightfully written essays about every aspect of our county and road trips from Santa Monica to San Bernardino.

And, like all great literature, at least once in a while, it's funny.

Today the guide is looking its age.

So is Hollenbeck Park, near Libros, which appears in the 1941 WPA Guide.

So our summer programs teacher, Tom Laichas, and the Libros staff took a bunch of our summer fellows there and turned them loose to write a new page in L.A. history.

Tom Laichas: So what I want you to do is find at least two other people to go with, and notebooks out.

See what you see.

There's a difference between looking and seeing.

So tell me what you see.

See you in a bit.

Tom: So in 1941, the WPA created a guide to Los Angeles.

And in that guide were five paragraphs on Boyle Heights.

One paragraph--two or three sentences--was about this park.

So the question for students is, What's changed?

What's stayed the same.

And, really, what do they see?

They will be rewriting the WPA paragraphs.

So what do we want to have said about Boyle Heights?

What would it be to write a guide for the rest of the people in the city and the rest of the people in the country?

What's that going to look like?

David: I think we can ask Tom's question on an even larger scale: What would a rewrite of the entire New Deal in Los Angeles look like?

Because the "WPA Guide to L.A." is only a tiny fraction of the legacy left behind here by the New Deal.

For a literal overview of everything the WPA created nationwide and a hint of what a new New Deal could do for the country, retired UC, Berkeley geographer Gray Brechin is the guy to talk to.

We met at the L.A. County Natural History Museum, which houses an amazing WPA-built model of downtown Los Angeles, circa the 1930s.

So what was the New Deal?

Gray Brechin: The New Deal was a very complex but incredibly effective series of reforms and recovery procedures inaugurated with Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration in March 4, 1933, which was designed to bring the country out of the Great Depression.

Somebody said to Roosevelt, "If the New Deal doesn't work, you will be a one-term president."

He said, "If it doesn't work, I will be the last president."

The New Deal programs were a series of programs for recovery by putting people back to work, and not just any work, actually-- socially beneficial work and at the same point, giving the people self-respect.

And the New Dealers knew that that was critical to having a healthy society is, people must have self-respect.

David: FDR wasn't the only acronym we identify with the New Deal.

His administration created a whole Scrabble rack of programs.

The general abbreviation that most people use is the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, which oversaw most of the other programs, including the Federal Arts Projects, which focused on the visual arts, music, theater, and writing.

What's there to say about the careers that the Federal Arts Projects started?

Gray: Well, many artists said that they owed everything to it and it preserved their skills.

Some of the more famous artists of our own time, such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Dorothea Lange, they wouldn't have made it if it hadn't been for the Federal Art Project.

Artists are always the first to starve in an economic downturn.

Harry Hopkins, the administrator of the WPA, famously said, "People don't eat in the long term.

They eat right now, and they have to be put to work," and artists are the same.

David: We're here in the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, and we have an example of what the landscape looked like.

What's with this?

Gray: This is one of many WPA models that were made of cities for planning and educational purposes.

It was a way of putting hundreds of workers to work, and they would actually create a three-dimensional map showing the layout of the city, each of the buildings in incredible detail.

And the reason for that was that they wanted to plan subways, for example, and tram systems, et cetera.

So they had to know the topography, and a flat map doesn't work.

And this is one of the few that remains, which is too bad because this is an artwork in itself.

The museum has done a marvelous job of multimedia interpretation that show you how the New Deal actually created Los Angeles through projects like Hoover Dam, for example, making it possible for a city like Los Angeles to just sprawl in all directions.

So, in many ways, Los Angeles is a product of the New Deal.

The highways or the airports, the public swimming pools, the zoos, our schools all through the L.A. Basin were largely built by the WPA or the PWA.

So we're using New Deal public works all the time without knowing it.

It's like rediscovering a lost civilization, and the Living New Deal project is like that.

David: The Living New Deal project was founded by Gray and some colleagues in 2005.

It aspires to chronicle every last WPA project in America--buildings, murals, bridges, you name it.

So how do people make use of the Living New Deal app?

Gray: The core of it, actually, is a map, an interactive map, where you can go to thousands, tens of thousands of sites around the country, and learn about New Deal projects in your own town, and you can get a background on them.

And we're constantly adding to it.

We're at about 17,000 projects around the country, and that looks impressive when you look at the map.

We know we've got hundreds of thousands to go.

We want people to see that these aren't just scattered incidents in the landscape.

This is an enormous matrix.

It's all linked together, and it's not also just physical objects.

It is a lost ethical language of what we could be at our best.

David: What, conceivably, could a new New Deal do for us artistically in any other way in Los Angeles and anyplace else?

Gray: A new New Deal could make us a healthy society again or at least a healthier one than we are at this point.

An arts program could immensely enrich all of our lives.

It could put artists back to work embellishing our cities, teaching us about our history.

Artists always have a tough time unless they are among the minuscule few who make it to the very top.

Roosevelt said, "Necessitous men are not free men."

We talk about freedom all the time.

We throw that word around, but we forget that if people are in poverty, if they are in want, they are not free.

Announcer: This is CNN breaking news.

Erin Burnett: Stay at home.

That is the order tonight from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic spreads.

Reporter: Goldman Sachs now estimates 2.25 million Americans filed for their first week of unemployment.

Reporter 2: Is there panic mode at the moment in the art world?

Would you say that?

Woman: Yes.

Reporter 3: The Greek Theatre is canceling the entire 2020 season.

It's the first time in 90 years.

Official: We were among the first to close, and we'll be one of the last to reopen.

David: Making it in the arts has always been tough, but now, in the wake of covid, it's even harder.

For starving artists to survive and thrive, the government has to invest in them.

And arts investment pays enormous dividends.

Matthew-Lee Erlbach is determined to erase the Romantic cliché of the starving artist.

He's a writer, an actor, and an eloquent champion of federal investment in the arts.

We met at Burbank City Hall, a beautiful WPA Landmark, where, as in every government building, all-important budget decisions get made.

Matthew-Lee Erlbach: Live events people, our industry was the first to close and the last to reopen, so we couldn't go to work.

We were locked down.

We could not go to our jobs because there were no jobs to go to.

And we thought that the government wasn't coming to put an economic floor underneath our community.

The creative workforce in America is 5.2 million arts and culture workers, driving over $919 billion across 675,000 small businesses across each and every one of our 435 Congressional districts.

This is labor, local American labor, that's driving these numbers.

It's not just TV in Hollywood, it's not just Broadway, it's local businesses.

There is no American recovery without a creative economy recovery, full stop.

David: Surely, there's never been a time like this, when the artists were in such crisis as they are today.

Or can you think of an era when perhaps there was some precedent for this?

Matthew-Lee, sarcastically: You know, I can't, David.

That's really interesting.

Um, yeah, of course.

The Great Depression.

And what FDR understood was that investment in our arts and culture was not only a point of American pride and civic engagement and infrastructure but local economic stimulation.

David: We are in Burbank City Hall, which was built by the WPA.

I think working in such a place has an effect.

Now, talk about art and infrastructure.

How justified are we in thinking of art as part of infrastructure?

Matthew-Lee: Wholly and completely Justified.

There is a civic pride, there is an engagement.

There is a common unity that brings us together in a place like this, that tells us, "Wow, I'm in a functioning society that cares about its infrastructure."

DMVs don't normally look like this.

Maybe they should.

Maybe it would be a nicer place.

The WPA was an investment in culture.

It was an investment in small businesses and independent workers.

It was an investment in America.

It wasn't funding.

It was investing.

And that's a really important distinction that I think we all need to start making.

Art is an industry, not a cause.

David: Public art in Los Angeles didn't end with the New Deal.

You can find modern examples around town, but funding is different now.

The WPA put artists to work full-time.

Nowadays, though, most public artists have to make do with freelance project-specific grants.

In L.A., these are administered by Kristin Sakoda and her staff.

If the national arts industry had its own cabinet department, Kristin would be our local secretary of labor, commerce, and education rolled into one.

She's the director of the L.A. County Department of Arts & Culture, which is very different from the WPA's Federal Arts Projects.

I had some questions about what qualifies as public art and why we need it.

So, how do you define public art?

Kristin Sakoda: Well, I think a lot of folks often think of it as something that's based in visual art, something that is in the public realm, meaning anyone can go see it or participate in it, or maybe it's even part of public infrastructure.

It's interesting because public art actually can encompass other kinds of disciplines.

It can include performing arts and any other kind of medium that you might want to use, but, certainly, art that's intended to be cited in and experienced in the public realm.

David: And you mentioned infrastructure.

I think very often, public art is thought of as some sort of augmentation of infrastructure.

I gather you might feel differently about its role as infrastructure.

Kristin: Well, I certainly believe that art is infrastructure, and what we're now, I think, getting better at explaining, at sharing, at demonstrating is that arts are at the core.

Arts are integral to civic life.

As we move forward, I think it's critical whether it's public art, arts education, supporting arts organizations that we're really, clearly moving in a way that brings forth the invaluable role of arts in our society for us as individuals, as well as on a community level.

It's really a must have, and it's really a vital part of healthy communities and, yes, of infrastructure in all the meanings of that word.

David: It reminds me, inevitably, of the New Deal Art Projects because a lot of what they've bequeathed to us is stuff that we still admire, still benefit from nowadays.

And as luck would have it, right between us, out that window, is the building where the WPA in Los Angeles were headquartered.

How do you take inspiration from what they did 80, 85 years ago?

Kristin: One of the things that was so clear, I think, in this time and this era of the covid pandemic was, this is a kind of a moment where to come out of this, we are going to need something akin to the New Deal, and the arts must be part of it.

And so, how do we sort of begin to think about that?

And really then result in not only the immediate kind of recovery or jobs but also things that can last and can continue to tell us stories about who we are, what are our experiences, and bring joy and vibrancy to our communities.

David: Visit South L.A.'s Crenshaw District, and you'll see just the kind of project Kristin's talking about.

It's called Destination Crenshaw, and it coincides with the imminent opening of the new Metro K Line.

Along with a handful of other funding sources, Kristin's department helped make it happen.

As with Burbank City Hall or the WPA murals and sculptures in parks and post offices all over town, the art here doesn't just decorate a public project, it's part of the project.

Here along Crenshaw, hard hats and artists are working side by side.

Man: Destination Crenshaw was started as a community-led project after the metro decision was made to create an at-grade portion of an LAX Crenshaw line.

Community members noticed that there was a section of that line that was 1.3 miles between Vernon and Slauson Boulevard, and it was at street level.

Man: In L.A. county, whenever a rail line is installed, typically rents go up about 30% higher along the rail than they do in the surrounding neighborhoods.

And so, there was a real question about what impact this investment would have.

Jason Foster: Destination Crenshaw grew organically.

Community members led a series of community meetings, really looking at everything from how to amplify the message around permanence for us, but, ultimately, how do we stay?

How do we improve this place?

How do we benefit from this train construction and make lemonade out of these lemons?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: The reason why we say "Destination Crenshaw" is we're in a community, and as we're laying out the history of the line, the late, great Nipsey Hussle raises his hand and says, "Oh, so this line was really meant to be a pass-through.

Like, our community is a pass-through between the airport and the beach.

We need to make sure our community is the destination."

And so he tweeted out "Destination Crenshaw," and from there, it just took off like wildfire.

So it's a 1.3-mile people's museum in the open air, public art that will tell the story of African-American people in Los Angeles and the West Coast more broadly.

So it will contain fine art; it'll contain street art; it'll contain 3-D installations, 2-D installations, almost 4 acres of landscaping that will also be a contribution of art in the tradition of African Americans in this community.

Jason Foster: Thinking about the Destination Crenshaw project as a public works project for artists really is twofold.

It helps these artists kind of stimulate their careers at a time where it's been very challenging to do so.

The other thing is it stimulates the community to think aspirationally, hopefully around, like, what they want and what they want to see, and be able to tell stories around the things that are really happening throughout time.

So we are an actual current execution of what public funding can mean for our culture, can mean for our artists in our community, and can ultimately mean for beautification and public art in our spaces.

David: The WPA's visual arts project made plenty of muralists out of painters, including L.A.'s own Jackson Pollock.

But sculptors had to carve out a living, too.

The WPA underwrote the creation of beloved L.A. landmarks, like the Astronomers Monument in front of the Griffith Observatory.

Today, Destination Crenshaw has commissioned artists like Charles Dickson.

He's a sculptor based in Compton, who's been making public art in Los Angeles for decades.

Charles Dickson: What's exciting for me is that the whole build of the piece was basically how you make cars, so it's all ribbed.

And then after I got all the ribbing really tight, I reached a point where I used foam.

Then I carved the foam back, and then I used Bondo to cover it and then perfected that, those surfaces.

And so, it made it easy for the Foundry to come out to the studio, pick it up, and carry it here.

Charles: I use stainless steel because stainless steel is one in which once it's formed and polished like this, you don't have to worry about it anymore.

It'll be like this 100 years from now.

It is also a material that matched this bumper quality that I was looking for.

I wanted something that would talk about the quality of a fine finish on a car, and so this piece is definitely something the community could get into.

Jason Foster: We're super excited about Charles Dickson's piece, Crenshaw "Car Culture."

You know, Crenshaw was not only the home of, you know, low riders on Sundays, but it was also how Goodyear tires got their merchandise, basically, from their factory throughout Los Angeles in the fifties.

There was car dealerships along the boulevard, so I think it really does tell the story around the community.

Charles: The piece consists of three figures that are 10 feet tall created from stainless steel, and on top of their heads is a truss system that has vehicles of various ages.

And then on top of that is this motor that's morphing into something that we've never seen before.

And I think it's talking about that we've entered an era of electronics.

You know, the wheels are the motors now.

The Senufo figures are traditionally used by shamans in old Africa.

It's so Black in nature.

Figures like this in the community will bring about a real self-awareness of worthiness, empowerment.

I've never seen a Senufo figure this size, so this represents a breakthrough in public art.

Destination Crenshaw has enabled me to do something like this and to wake up community to who they are as a culture.

The opportunity to do something like that is very rare.

And as a community artist and person that's worked in public art as long as I've worked in public art, it's everything I dreamed about as a sculptor.

Doing something really wonderfully like this brings about that conversation of spiritual connection and understanding that we are one human spiritual element.

I think that is the salvation for humanity at this time.

David: When people think of WPA art, they usually think of stuff you can look at, like murals or statues or architecture.

Or if they want to butter me up, WPA guidebooks.

But the New Deal did at least as much for the performing arts.

Take music.

The Federal Music Project created everything from orchestras and choirs to bluegrass bands.

It taught music classes to kids who didn't know a tuba from a two-by-four but who wound up appreciating music all their lives.

The Hollywood Bowl hosted many a WPA concert and even got funds for remodeling the amphitheater and creating its famous statues out front.

Derek Traub knows the Bowl and its New Deal history from center stage all the way up to the dollar seats.

Why are we here?

Why aren't we in Chavez Ravine or Santa Monica Canyon or anywhere else in town?

Derek Traub: We are here at the beautiful Hollywood Bowl because some people think that the bowl refers to the shell because it kind of looks like a cereal bowl on its side, but the bowl is actually this naturally formed canyon.

It was discovered a century ago by some music lovers in Los Angeles.

David: And was the city involved or the county?

Derek: Originally, it was just community members led by a woman named Artie Mason Carter, who believed profoundly that music was an instrument of democracy.

And if you wanted to build a community, the best way to do it was to get a bunch of people together and make and listen to music.

To this day, the Hollywood Bowl is a County of Los Angeles park that is managed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who play concerts all summer long.

David: So what were people listening to in the thirties?

Derek: L.A. was a musically diverse and interesting place.

Because it was such a cosmopolitan, international city, you had the Los Angeles Philharmonic but many orchestras as well.

There was incredible Mexican music, jazz clubs, and jazz music all over town.

There were night clubs and dance halls.

And, interestingly, as recorded music came in and the movies went to sound, there were lots of musicians who performed in movie theaters who were out of a job.

David: L.A. was a mecca for working musicians until the Depression hit.

But what happens to a horn player when nobody can afford to go to a concert or a jazz club anymore?

First, they wonder where to play.

Pretty soon, they wonder how to eat.

Derek: Fortunately, through the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Music Project, they had a WPA orchestra, and it was a way to keep musicians employed, thousands and thousands of musicians over the years!

And then millions enjoyed these concerts that became a huge part of the cultural fabric of Los Angeles.

David: But the WPA Orchestra was hardly the only music that the Federal Music Project sponsored, right, here in Los Angeles?

Derek: Right.

There were a whole host of different musical organizations from Mexican music, jazz music.

I think there was a Hungarian orchestra that was funded by the WPA.

Women were excluded from many orchestras at that time but not from the WPA orchestra.

David: What was the Federal Music Project's presence at the Bowl like?

Derek: The very first L.A. Phil show, actually, here was for something called an Easter Sunrise service, which started in 1921, and those Easter Sunrise services continued.

And so the WPA orchestra actually performed at some of the Easter Sunrise concerts and other WPA-supported choirs, including Black choirs, were performing here for Easter Sunrise services.

WPA musicians performed at what were known as "I am an American" rallies, celebrating newly naturalized citizens.

And they would have children talk about their experience of becoming an American, like, right on the Bowl stage in front of thousands of people.

David: Like any star 15 years after their debut, the Bowl in the 1930s needed some work done.

The WPA made a slew of improvements to it, including the construction of its fondly remembered tea house.

Derek: So what's interesting is, when the tea house was originally conceived, at some point, they decided to build this stone house, and it's a very different style.

And so they had a ton of out-of-work stonemasons and stonecutters, and they thought, "Can you build this out of stone?

Can we help put people to work?"

And so that's why they built this beautiful stone structure.

The tea house is gone now, but we've replaced it with the lovely Hollywood Bowl Museum.

And surrounding the Bowl Museum is this stone fence, and some of those stones are actually from the original stones cut by those WPA workers that they preserved and turned into this little bit of the tea garden tea house that survives.

David: But there's a lot more here in evidence that they built besides just a wall outside the tea house, right?

Derek: Yes.

As you enter the Hollywood Bowl, you are greeted by the Muse of Music.

It's a fountain complex with three statues, and it was funded by the WPA.

It was designed by who was then an out-of-work sculptor named George Stanley.

Stanley is most famous for designing the 13-and-1/2-inch tall Oscar statuette.

He also worked on Griffith Observatory, the Astronomers statues.

He's just an exceptionally talented artist.

There are three statues.

The Muse of Music is the biggest one.

She's kneeling, playing the lyre, and then on either side, there is the Muse of Drama, who is wearing the comedy and the tragedy masks, and then the Muse of Dance.

And they placed the statue right on Highland, because it wasn't just the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl, it was the entrance to Hollywood itself.

And the signal that George Stanley wanted to send was you are entering a community of art.

David: So where do you think the Bowl and the Federal Music Project's missions overlap?

Derek: The Bowl was founded with the belief that music could build community and bring people together.

The Bowl's founders always dreamed of not only having a venue but having a music school.

And today, we have Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, which is providing music education to young people, and then we work with community partners all over the city.

One of the community partners is the Expo Center in South L.A. We work with Harmony Project.

It does amazing work.

We work with the Heart of Los Angeles community center, and we have a program called YOLA at Torres.

It's funny.

When you look at the 1930s, when the Bowl were applying to the WPA, looking for funds to build the facilities, they would write deeply about how they saw this place as a place of music education.

I think part of what they were hoping to do would be to get the WPA to help invest in building a music school here, which they didn't get to do, but almost a century later, we know that the work that we are doing is supporting music education.

David: Over the last couple of decades, schools around the country have slashed their arts education budgets.

This makes for fewer artists, of course, but also for smaller audiences because young people aren't forming the habit of theater- or concert-going.

And especially since covid, cultural venues aren't drawing the audiences they used to count on.

For 20 years, the nonprofit Harmony Project has been doing everything it can to turn all this around.

Like the New Dealers, Harmony Project understands that offering art without arts education is like serving someone a salad when what they really need is a vegetable garden.

Student: I feel like Harmony Project is a home away from home.

Every time I walk through these doors, I am just entered a new world.

I'm like, "OK, nothing else matters."

Student 2: I grew up in a neighborhood that there's a lot of violence everywhere.

There's a lot of poverty, you know.

And for me, Harmony Project, I always would come.

You know, I can get my clarinet and just, just enjoy myself, just be myself, not have to feel like I have to be in some type of survival mode or anything like that.

[Drumroll] Conductor: 1, 2, 3 and... [Orchestra playing] Woman: When you think about music, when you think of students who never had access to it, Harmony Project really adds in the music instruction that was kind of taken out of schools, maybe about 10, 12 years ago.

Natalie Jackson: What we are trying to do is provide not just music instruction, but we're also trying to help build skills that they can keep for the rest of their lives.

Student 1: I think that I could definitely pursue a career in music.

I'm definitely looking into colleges with a good music program or at least a good marching band because I can definitely make a change in this world with music.

Even if I decide to, like, go off and become a lawyer or, like, a surgeon or something, I will always fall back on music.

Student 2: I went through the LAUSD school system.

Like, I'm not trying to throw shade, but not very supportive.

At the end of the day, they just see you as another statistic.

But I'm happy that here at Harmony Project, there's someone to take the time to help you.

I reached out to some of the counselors, and they would sit down for me for, like, an hour, and they helped me with my applications, and it worked out well because I got into, you know, Cal State, Northridge, which is where I'm going to be attending this fall, and I'm really happy with that decision.

David: The WPA gave laid-off Americans back their dignity, their self-respect.

Today, Harmony Project is following their example by nurturing the next generation of confident young artists.

Natalie: Years ago, we did brain research with Northwestern University all about the effects of music instruction and education on the brain.

And especially when you're working with students from a marginalized community that have a lot of trauma, music really can help.

I don't know if you can really say undo trauma, but definitely heal you in a way that help you just learn better as you move on.

So I think we build better neighbors and better communities.

And what city wouldn't want that?

Naielle: I wouldn't be the person who I am and where I am today if I never got into music.

It's a center for me to just fall back on when things get, like, too crazy or hectic or hard.

Steve: Music, to me, has added a sense of purpose in my life because you have people who support you--you know, your teachers, your fellow musicians, who just, they want to see you improve, and they want to see you get better.

And, you know, this program has always made me feel like you are not a statistic.

You are a musician.

I feel like every song that I've performed, I have, like, a connection to it and a really, like, core memory rooted to it.

And I guess that's what music has done for me.

It just gives me a sense of purpose.

You know, it adds more color to my life.

David: The same way covid hammered musicians and music venues around the world, many theater stages went dark during the Great Depression.

In response, the Federal Theatre Project mounted pioneering productions for young audiences and grownups alike.

It relit marquees and kept theater artists fed.

Among the houses that stayed alive thanks to the WPA was the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

Its executive director, Stacy Brightman, wrote her dissertation on the Federal Theatre Project in L.A., and she may just be as enthusiastic about the New Deal as I am.

Stacy Brightman: If I remember correctly, in 1900, L.A.'s, population is 100,000 people.

By 1930, we're a million, and by 1935, we're 1.5 million.

So there's just this fabulous explosion of different people coming to Los Angeles, and the Ebell for women was a home.

It was a place.

It was a community.

David: Now, how did that factor into the picture when the New Deal comes along as a result of the Depression?

Stacy: Theater in Los Angeles is just decimated.

You know, you'd had this wonderful boom of theaters being built in the 1920s.

The 1930s hit with the Depression, and they just all go moribund.

We were fortunate in that we were able to have performances here to invite different groups in.

So a place like the Ebell could actually host the very first Los Angeles Federal Theatre Project performances because we could open the doors for them.

And that happened December 31, 1935, and January 1, 1936.

David: So if we'd been here that night, what would we have seen?

Stacy: You would have seen a throng of 1,250 people pushing in, excited, not quite sure what they were going to be getting, people who probably had not seen a show for years because there was very little to see during that period.

David: Once up and running, the Federal Theatre Project in Los Angeles had units for drama, Vaudeville, experimental theater, Negro theater, Yiddish theater, puppet theater, and, most famously, a children's theater division, headed by a guy named Yasha Frank.

Walt Disney borrowed ideas from Frank's visionary adaptation of "Pinocchio," which later toured the country and went on to Broadway.

Stacy: Yasha Frank had a real sense of children's psychology, especially during a time of trauma in the Depression.

In his productions-- "Hansel and Gretel" was the very first one-- some pretty traumatic things happen.

You know, children almost get eaten.

You know, there's a witch.

And he said, you know, unlike Disney and unlike some other productions that might heighten the scary factor, in his productions, the witches were always revealed to be silly.

It's almost about releasing that tension and creating a sense of hopefulness, and we're going to get through this, and we're going to get through this together.

David: So aside from the Ebell, what other theaters around town were involved?

Stacy: Every theater practically was involved.

It wasn't until early 1936 that Federal Theatre was allowed to charge for admission.

They charged, like, 50 cents, but it was thanks to that very, very modest ticket price that they could start to rent some other theaters.

So some of the theaters were the Mayan.

I think the Belasco was used in downtown, the Beaux Arts, the Musart, the Greek Theatre.

There were some productions at the Bowl, as well.

Small spaces, too, and lots of, lots of alternative spaces.

The whole Los Angeles landscape was Federal Theatre.

David: Pinocchio's dearest wish was to be a real live boy.

The wish of the people who ran the Federal Theatre Project was to create a real live national theater, like England and so many other countries have.

But accusations of Communist infiltration brought inevitable budget cuts, and Congress eventually whittled the theater project down to nothing.

In the end, though, the project did a whole lot more than just give Walt Disney a few ideas.

What do you think is the legacy of the theater project in Los Angeles?

Stacy: This whole generation that, I think, would have sunk away from theater, that talent was conserved, and, therefore, it fed the next generation.

Theaters were preserved.

Spaces that might have gotten torn down or adapted into something else were kept vibrant and necessary.

You know, look at our theater.

We're here, and a large part of that is because we had Federal Theatre here.

I love the ambition of Federal Theatre because they were building a new kind of drama that was democracy.

Every person needs art.

We all need engagement with art, with story, with drama, with music.

It's the discipline of empathy.

It's why I care about you and you care about me, is because we do share some stories, or I can see where we have commonalities.

David: A couple of times now, you've used the word "building," and when people hear about the WPA, they think of buildings, they think of post offices.

And yet you're talking about a different kind of building, a different kind of infrastructure.

Stacy: Building community, building a sense of shared values, building a sense of hope, building a better country and a better citizenry.

David: Empathy, empowerment, community.

We can get a little touchy-feely when we talk about how the arts make you a better person.

Talk like that to people who've done time in prison and see how far it gets you.

But, damn, if it isn't actually true.

The Actors' Gang is a local theater troupe that runs a program called the Prison Project.

It brings theater into California prisons as a form of rehabilitation.

Here in MacArthur Park, they're using the techniques of classic Italian commedia dell'arte to help incarcerated people re-enter life on the outside.

Man: You guys want to try out this new program?

You're more than welcome.

Man 2: What program is it?

Man 1: The Actors' Gang.

[Indistinct chatter] So as always, the ask is, "What can I do to make a better circle?"

All right.

Who's here nervous?

All right.

I feel it, too.

We feel it.

Feeling nervous means you're alive, right?

You're feeling something instead of feeling nothing.

I was 16 when I committed my crime.

Ended up doing 30 years inside.

Being a lifer, coming in young, you can't show emotions, specifically showing that you're afraid or sad.

And there's not a lot of joyful moments.

Learning how to control and channel emotions is the number-1 tool that I learned and that helped me come home.

Participant: We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we react, you know, so...

I just learned to take accountability on a whole bunch of things that happened.

And I have stopped pointing the finger at anybody else and started to deal with myself.

Understand.

[Participants snapping fingers] Rich Loya: Why don't we do some fireworks, yeah?

Man: In 2008, there wasn't a lot of funding in the state of California for any arts programming.

So when we showed up for the first time as artists, like, "We're going to teach you this thing, we're going to play these games," everybody was just, like, "What?"

And then you start playing with folks, you start introducing art, it just breaks down all the barriers.

Everybody's having fun.

It takes you back to being a kid.

Participant: Boom!

[Laughter] [Participant 2 trills tongue] [Laughter] Participant 3: Boom!

Jeremie Loncka: And then you start asking the question of, like, "How many of you have had arts programming in your youth?"

And no hands go up.

We don't ask so much anymore because it became clear as we were learning, it's like, "Oh, yeah, this is like a piece that's missing."

It's powerful to watch folks navigate that.

Rich: All right.

All right.

We're gonna move on to the next one, all right?

Here we go.

Petey, watch the corner...

When we create the space where they find themselves between the Black, between the Hispanic, between the white, they're a brotherhood now, who get along really well.

And we hear from the staff how much now they see the house changes because there's relationships now as compared to just being strangers.

Because, unfortunately, inside, we're programmed that way.

[Actor speaks indistinctly] Actors: Aw.

Actor 2: Here we go.

Rich: All that that was said, right, let's try to carry that to the next exercises.

So we're going to suit up, grab some costumes, and then get half up and half down.

Let's go.

We're all going to take a breath.

Let's take a breath.

[All inhale and exhale] At the sound of the drum, you'll open your eyes and just simply walk as you, OK?

Don't worry about the character yet.

Your normal daily walk.

[Drum beats] [Actor speaks, indistinct] [Drum beats] [Actors speaking indistinctly] Jeremie: So, we take commedia dell'arte, this form of Italian theater from the 1600s, and essentially teach it as a form of therapy.

Rich: And freeze.

[Drum beats] Jeremie: We just play in four states: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger.

Rich: And everybody pass the food to Eddie.

[Beats drum] Actor: And someone else.

[Drum beats] Rich: And a sound.

[Drum beats] Actor 2: Hey.

[Laughter] Rich: Good, good.

All right.

And everybody go.

[Drum beating] Jeremie: The idea, that this works like a Trojan horse, and before they know it, we start to introduce this deeper emotional work, and it's all framed through these stock characters in the commedia.

Rich: Yeah.

Tell us who you are again.

Actor: I am Capitino.

Rich: All right, Capitino.

Your name changed for some reason.

Actor: Capitano.

Rich: Capitano.

All right.

Mark: Before Actors' Gang, I was kind of, like, in a box from being locked down for so long.

And then going through the program and playing the games and getting to act out all these emotions, it made me open up and have a craving for life now.

[Audience cheers] Jeremie: We do these culminations each year where we invite family members to come and watch.

And, I mean, the amount of times I've heard from a parent that they're seeing their son for the first time or seeing their son for the first time in a long time 'cause of the shells that, you know, we see put up as folks navigate the prison system.

Rich: For me, it helped reconnect me with humanity.

It wasn't something that I thought I'd be doing, but it's the reason why I'm home.

And so I am a 100% believer that the work works.

Actor: "The hard work and commitment you have shown is a tribute to your resilience and desire to create value in your life.

You can have a positive effect on society."

Jeremie: I think the last study we did, 77% of the folks who come to the class end up getting employed and through reentry.

Actor: It's crazy, because I just asked him earlier that I was interested into becoming a member of the group.

I like what they're doing, you know, trying to bring positivity.

Now, I'm that type of person, you know.

I like--like, I like seeing people laugh and I like seeing people in a good mood, no matter where they at, let 'em know, like, there's always hope.

[Cheering and applause] David: The best argument for arts investment isn't just that it helps people locked up go straight or even that early exposure to the arts may keep you out of prison in the first place.

No!

It's that art excites the imagination and invites us to conjure up a life more connected to the people around us.

When America was coming apart at the seams--sound familiar?-- The Federal Writers' Project's work helped knit us back together.

I met up with the author Jason Boog at Long Beach's dazzling new library under a WPA literary mural to find out which of us loves the Federal Writers' Project more.

So a little background.

What was the Federal Writers' Project?

Jason Boog: Yeah.

So the Great Depression landed, I mean, at the beginning of the 1930s, and hundreds of magazines, newspapers, they just shuttered.

Everything dried up.

All the work was gone.

So you had all these writers from the early 1930s until the mid-1930s who were really struggling.

You had out-of-work screenwriters, out-of-work newspaper people, magazine people, poets, all sorts of people here in Los Angeles.

And they started saying, "We need to do something."

Around 1934, there was a newspaperman named Hugh Harlan, who was out here in Los Angeles.

Hugh looked around.

He said, "We need to create something," so he called it the Newspaper Project, and it was here in Los Angeles.

He was able to hire 60 writers through a city grant, and writers would get together every single day, and he would give them assignments to go out and cover whatever he thought.

So at one moment, you could be writing a history of the police.

Another moment you could be writing a history of Thanksgiving.

And every day, you'd get a new assignment, and you would go out and cover that story.

And you would bring back that information.

And Hugh was just building kind of like a combination of Wikipedia and a wire service.

He was just gathering all these facts to share with the world.

It worked really well.

And so Hugh wrote a letter to Washington, DC.

And there were a lot of people writing letters to Washington, DC, at the time, but they took notice, and they said, you know, "Maybe this model could work."

So they launched a Federal Writers' Project by 1936, and things started to change pretty quickly after that.

David: How does it go from being this partial, at least, employment program for out-of-work L.A. writers to a federal project?

Jason Boog: So here in Los Angeles, Hugh just ramped up his program.

It was, between 100 and 200 writers were hired in its heyday.

And once it was a federal program, he added poets, he added screenwriters.

And the idea, now that they were launching the Federal Writers' program, was that all of this material was going to be gathered into a series of guidebooks.

They wanted to make guidebooks for every state in the United States.

So Hugh turned their work towards that.

Many years later, that would become a really amazing book about Los Angeles in the 1930s.

David: It must have changed the way Los Angeles thought about itself.

I know the California guide wound up being a selection of the Book of the Month Club.

Jason Boog: Mm-hmm.

As we said before, there was no Wikipedia, there was no historical collection of these facts, so they would just bring together as much documentation as they could, and they used that as a basis to research and come up with these facts about Los Angeles and these facts about the founding of California.

According to Hugh and his interviews, they wrote two million words.

David: Well, it was such a wonderful program and it created such lasting benefits not only for writers but for readers, what happened to the Federal Writers' Project?

Jason Boog: So there were two things.

The first one was the Communist problem.

There were many, many people in Congress who were saying the Federal Writers' Project and the WPA in general was infiltrated by Russian spies, "And we got to shut this down."

So that cut the funding way down.

You saw arguments here in Los Angeles, too, about Communist infiltration.

But if you read the guide, there's no politics there.

I mean, if anything, you do see a labor history.

The way they wrote about Hollywood was as if Hollywood's a factory, like, Hollywood is a creative factory, and they said, "Maybe we should be thinking about creative work as something that could be unionized.

Maybe we should think about writers as someone that deserves the same protections that a factory worker would have."

And then right as we start to step into World War II, which is the other factor that shut everything down, you see the funding just shrink, shrink, shrink, and then they just ended it all.

I think when it was all said and done, the program cost $27 million, which was 1/5 of 1% of the overall WPA budget.

So it's just a little fraction, little corner of it, but they produced millions and millions of words that we can still read and are important today.

David: Do you see parallels between the predicament that writers are in today and the country is in today?

Jason Boog: Yeah.

We do have Wikipedia now, so maybe that function that the Los Angeles Federal Writers' Project served, you know, that doesn't work anymore, but if you think about just the vast amount of misinformation that we have, now we have almost too much information.

It's really hard to tell what's real and what's not anymore.

And maybe if we were going to put some of these journalists and writers back to work, maybe that's where we start, is, How can we find a cleaner source of information?

How can we cut through all of the noise and tell you the facts once again?

And I think there's a lot of work that could be done.

David: Back in Boyle Heights, the Libros Schmibros Summer Fellows are attempting that important work.

They've returned from Hollenbeck Park and are brainstorming their rewrite of the "WPA Guide to L.A." With notebooks full of observations, the students now face the hard part.

Just like the original authors of the L.A. guide, they have to distill a whole lot of stories and information into a few sentences of deathless prose.

Tom: If we were to revise the "WPA Guide to Los Angeles," we'd want to pay particular attention to Boyle Heights, because it deserves more than five paragraphs.

You read this yourselves, and you said, "Well, no, this isn't enough.

There's a lot more we would say."

So this is what I'm going to ask you to do.

I'd like you to make a stab at revising it and rewriting it.

I want you to write as much as you can, and I don't want you to think too hard through this.

Go.

This is not a classroom in which there are any grades.

This kind of program does something very different.

It emphasizes students' observational powers and their analytical powers.

There are a lot of corners of Los Angeles, but there are a lot of corners of the United States that simply don't get a great deal of attention, and that's something the WPA tried to address with a great deal of success.

It's like creating a mirror through which the country can see itself.

And I think that mirror would be of such benefit right now.

All right.

Who would like to read theirs?

Student: I put "an unleveled park with many parts to explore."

Tom: An unleveled park.

Well, that's really interesting.

Next?

Student 2: "What may be perceived as a dirty park is someone else's treasure."

Tom: OK. That's really good.

Student 3: I put "L.A. changes from Spanish to English, sometimes mixing due to generations changing.

Language conformity is becoming a familiar feeling to both."

Student 4: "More quinceaneras happen every other day.

Memories are made every second, and when history will remain forever."

Tom: OK. You guys did fabulous work.

Places like Libros provide some of that public space and community building that, you know, government is not often doing as well as it used to.

I think this is an example of the kind of thing that the city and the country could be doing a great deal more of.

If you don't have an art that is local and intimate to the lives of the people who it serves, I think things fall apart.

David: The New Deal wasn't perfect, but by helping Americans rebuild our republic with useful, dignified, sometimes creative, work, some of us still say it helped save democracy.

Some of my true believer friends say it even prepared us to win a world war.

All I know for sure is, even if the New Deal did save the country, it didn't save us forever.

Bridges fail.

Murals fade.

Books date and go out of print.

Right now, if the country were any more divided, there'd be razor-wire checkpoints between neighboring states.

But if we look back, we can see all the New Deal did to unify the country.

Right here in town, we've seen what art can do, even on a shoestring, to bring us together over a book or at a concert, even on a cell block.

But imagine what we could do with even more.

The infrastructure investment that started last year is mostly rebuilding stuff that's falling apart rather than building anything new and inspiring.

You could say the same thing now about a lot of the ideas going around for arts investment, but if a zero or two were miraculously added to the arts and culture budget, what big idea for the arts in L.A. would you spend it on?

What about a miles-long arts corridor along the river, like the River Walk that the WPA built for San Antonio?

Or my idea: why doesn't L.A. have a city museum yet like Sacramento and even Mesa, Arizona, already have?

At best, the New Deal can only ever be a model, like the one Gray Brechin and I admired at the Natural History Museum.

A few years ago, the curators there found a dusty, corroded miniature city in a basement and restored it like new.

If artists and politicians today could only pull off a similar trick, well, that'd be a sweet deal for all of us.

[Music] Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Frieda Berlinski Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, on the web at arts.gov, and California Humanities,