WPA vs GWB

Ezra links a review of a new history of the WPA, which includes a passage about disaster relief that strikes sharp contrast to today:

On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 21, 1937, a vicious hurricane swept through the Northeast, bringing with it a tidal surge that smashed the Long Island coast, flooded the Connecticut River, and left nearly 700 dead. Within a day, employees of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal office charged with employing those on relief, were filling sandbags, rescuing survivors, and sorting through the wreckage. By Friday morning, 100,000 WPA'ers had been deployed to the afflicted region. As Nick Taylor chronicles in American-Made, his ambitious but uneven history of the WPA, their mobilization was remarkably comprehensive. "Through the region, WPA sewing rooms put aside their other work to produce clothing for flood victims. WPA nurses and nutritionists staffed refugee centers at schools and infirmaries, and kindergarten teachers set up children's playrooms." By November, the region had been almost entirely rebuilt, leaving the Red Cross chairman to observe that the WPA's response to the storm was "one of the most amazing disaster recoveries this organization has ever known."

For someone like myself, whose most indelible memory of the U.S. response to a domestic natural disaster is the image of President Bush strumming a guitar while New Orleans drowned, and whose entire conscious political life has taken place in the wake of the Reagan revolution, the sheer scope and approach of the New Deal in general, and the WPA specifically, is unfathomably alien. A government that marshaled 3 million people to build ski lodges, repair roads, stage avant-garde plays, excavate Indian ruins, and grow herb gardens sounds more like a strange cross between pharaonic Egypt and the Berkeley City Council than the Washington of today, which has outsourced every core function, from tax collection to war fighting.

And to think that was 70 years ago! Yet our ability to help has massively decreased -- because we chose to abandon it.