Works Progress Administration

On this day, May 6, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal's largest and most ambitious agency. During its run, which ended in 1943 and cost about $11 billion, the WPA employed 8.5 million out-of-work people on 1.4 million individual projects; it built 651,000 miles of roads, streets, and highways; constructed or repaired 124,000 bridges, 125,000 public buildings, more than 8,000 parks, and nearly 900 airport runways. The projects had to provide a real and lasting contribution, and could not take business away from private companies.

It wasn't always the most efficient operation, however, and its critics gave it nicknames like "We Poke Along," "We Play Around," "We Piddle Around," and "Working Piss Ants." WPA employees were derided as "shovel-leaners," an accusation John Steinbeck addressed in his essay "A Primer on the '30s": "It was the fixation of businessmen that the WPA did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel-leaning was necessary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn't have, that he couldn't shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day's work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again."

As an example:

It's also the birthday of filmmaker Orson Welles, born George Orson Welles in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1915. He was hired by John Houseman to direct a production of Macbeth in 1936. The production was part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project, which put unemployed theater people to work. Welles, 20 years old, set the play in Haiti, and substituted witch doctors for the weird sisters; he was hailed as a prodigy.

Aldous Huxley

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." 

Vladamir Nabokov

 "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."

Marcel Proust

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." 

I Did Not Know This

It's the birthday of physicist Leo Szilard, born in Budapest, Hungary (1898). In 1939, a few years after coming to America, knowing that German scientists had discovered nuclear fission, he drafted the famous letter that Albert Einstein sent to President Roosevelt advocating the development of an atomic bomb. Three years later, in the Manhattan Project, he and Enrico Fermi oversaw the first nuclear chain reaction. "We turned the switch and saw the flashes," he wrote later. "We watched them for a little while and then we switched everything off and went home. That night there was no doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief." In 1961 he published a book of satirical fantasies on the misuse of science called The Voice of the Dolphin, and the following year he founded the Council for a Livable World, a lobbying group for arms control.

Galway Kinnell

"Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."

Marcus Aurelius

" Everything is in a state of flux, and nothing remains the same. So be prepared for change, and embrace it as a natural part of life."