In a recent post for The Berkeley Blog, Professor Robert Reich
proposes that the federal government respond to our ongoing
recession by initiating a new Works Progress Administration
(WPA). Almost seventy years having passed since the closing of
the original New Deal “alphabet agencies,” recent oral history
interviews can help us better comprehend the ongoing impact of
these programs. A major aspect of the New Deal was the creation
of over 100 federally-sponsored offices, so nicknamed “alphabet
agencies” due to their near-obsessive propensity for acronyms.
As a historian of museums and anthropology I have studied the
extensive impact of alphabet agencies (which ran from roughly
1935 to 1943) like the WPA, National Youth Administration (NYA),
and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) on museums and science in
the United States. Numerous other historians have illustrated
how these programs profoundly enriched cultural, environmental,
and even intellectual life in the United States. Along with
unskilled laborers, th