Put people back to work through uplifting national service

 

Bill Knight column for 3-22, 23 or 24, 2021

 A year ago next week, two national-service proposals were introduced by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). The Pandemic Response and Opportunity through National Service Act was backed by Illinois’ Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin, but it was sent to the Finance Committee to languish. The Undertaking National Initiatives to Tackle Epidemic Act (UNITE Act) was sent to another committee.

They should be revived and expanded.

Both focused on COVID-19 and its consequences, arguably from contact tracing to child-care, drawing on AmeriCorps, FEMA volunteers, Fulbright scholars, the Peace Corps, the Senior Corps, etc.

Now, another crisis – joblessness – shows such help is needed. It’s the right thing to do and also a smart move for the country.

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said 86 years ago during the Great Depression, “Continued dependence on relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics this month reported 18 million received unemployment checks as of mid-February, and 2 million more filed for jobless benefits during the rest of the month. That’s 20 million Americans without work.

Already, President Biden on Jan. 27 signed an executive order creating a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) providing “good jobs” to restore public lands and train in environmentally friendly careers, patterned after the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed about 3 million Americans from 1933-42.

“The Civilian Climate Corps could be about more than conserving public lands, expanding its focus to other pressing problems, like cleaning up polluted towns,” writes environmental journalist Kate Yoder. “In his executive order, Biden declared that the corps should ‘bolster community resilience’ and ‘address the changing climate’.”

FDR’s New Deal – which aimed for “relief, reform and recovery” – left a government-coordinated legacy of grassroots efforts and successes by Americans in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and allied efforts.

Just as the old CCC planted trees and constructed parks, shelters, trails, roads and dams, a new CCC would create jobs while helping protect clean water and air and start to realize a more sustainable future, and it also would let the less fortunate pick up themselves, develop skills, build pride and dignity, and help inspire the nation. And a return to a successful blend of a jobs program and national service need not be limited to the climate.

Restoring a CCC is popular. Polling by Data for Progress shows 60% of all voters favoring the idea (and 85% of Democrats), and Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication said 85% of Americans back reviving the original Civilian Conservation Corps.

“Just as picking up a rifle to defend our country is ‘American Service,’ so is helping out a food pantry for those at risk of hunger, assisting students with remote education, and helping patients make critical health-care decisions,” Duckworth said. “We should be doing everything we can to make sure these vital service programs are accessible to all Americans who wish to serve during times of crisis like these.”

Other WPA operations included the Federal Art Project and similar endeavors for writers, music and theater. Thousands of artists in all states were employed, and some became prominent – Thomas Hart Benton, Willem de Kooning, Dorothea Lange, Jackson Pollack and Grant Wood – making murals, statues, posters and more.

The writers project also hired folks who became renowned, from Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow to John Cheever, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Among that program’s creations was the 48-volume American Guide Series. Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck said, “The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has approached it.”

For wages of $24/week (about $400/week in current dollars), they were tasked with recording the country’s situation, conveying advancements, and reassuring and maybe exciting everyday Americans – giving them hope in hard times.

“I think this could be a very hopeful enterprise,” says David Kipen, a professor at UCLA who formerly was director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts. “I think America is as short on hope these days… as it’s short of liquidity and health and all the other things it’s obviously running low on.

“There is America enough to cover and writers in need of work enough to cover it.”

Why not try it again?

“During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said that no country can afford the waste of human resources,” said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, CEO of the Corps Network. “During this current crisis, a bold investment in national service would mobilize and unite the American people to confront a myriad of needs.”