PORTLAND, Maine — Boosting the creative economy may sound like an unusual way to help lift a country out of recession, but that was exactly what President Franklin Roosevelt tried to do 80 years ago.
As part of the Works Progress Administration — the huge stimulus package that formed the backbone of the New Deal — thousands of artists were paid to make music, write plays, and produce sculptures and paintings.
New England documentary-maker Michael Maglaras tackles the subject in his latest film, which premieres tonight in Portland.
At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, more than 12 million Americans were out of work. The unemployment rate was more than 25 percent.
As concerns grew that the U.S. might be heading toward a revolution, Roosevelt's priority was to put Americans back to work, including artists.
As part of the New Deal, nearly $30 million went into the pockets of visual artists, actors, writers and musicians such as blues singer Juanita Hall, who sang one of the anthems of the depression, "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out."
Maglaras's latest film, "Enough To Live On," examines this bold initiative by the Roosevelt administration.
The title is a quote from one of the artists employed by the federal government, William de Kooning, who went onto become a world-renowned expressionist painter. But in depression-era America, de Kooning's circumstances were modest and Maglaras says the artist was grateful for the opportunity to be paid a plumber's wage to create his work.
"De Kooning in fact was painting houses when he took advantage of the federal art project funding and he in fact is the derivation of the quotation 'Enough to Live On,'" Maglaras says. "He said 'the WPA gave me enough to live on.'"
He says de Kooning was one of a number of future artistic legends kept in work by the WPA during the 1930s.
"And it's doubtful that their work would have prospered as much as it did eventually without this public funding which sustained them in their 20s and 30s," Maglaras says. "I mean Jackson Pollock was painting neckties when he was pulled into the WPA ranks. He was doing that for a living."
More than 7,000 artists were put to work, creating more than 25,000 works of art — giant murals, paintings, sculptures and prints, many of which can still be seen today.
Maglaras says there was some congressional push-back to the idea of injecting all this money into a sector where the returns were largely intangible.
"Wouldn't we be better off giving these people a pick and shovel and putting them to work in the labor force?" they said.
The response of the Roosevelt administration, says Maglaras, was that these people will be more effective going back to work doing what they know how to do.
"So imagine for example putting writers back to work so they can write the 50-state guide to America, which is the federal writers project," he says. "Imagine putting painters back to work so that you can walk in to more than 5,000 post offices in the U.S., including here in Maine, and see works of art. So there was a real belief that if we all collaborate in that effort and pull ourselves out of that depression, then we make our society stronger."
When asked whether it is possible to quantify or address to what extent the project helped bring America out of the depression, Maglaras says the "soft answer" is, "We are all enhanced as individual citizens, our lives are enhanced, and the collective body of who we are as American citizens in our culture is enhanced when the arts flourish. I can't quantify that value, but I know it's true."
And then there's so-called hard answer, says Maglaras, which focuses on the practical importance of keeping America's artists busy.
"What we did was we prevented anarchy, and Franklin Roosevelt realized something very important as many writers did at the time: we came perilously close to losing our democracy," he says. "As Erika Doss, professor Doss says in this film, you want those people off the streets, you want them doing something with their minds and their talents. And FDR was no fool — he wanted them of the streets too and he wanted them gainfully employed."
"Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA" was made in Maine and will premiere at USM's Portland campus at 7 p.m. Thursday.