President Obama -- Put America's Writers to Work!

Among the few special interest groups not petitioning the government for a bailout these days are writers. Paul Greenberg, in the New York Sunday Times Book Review, speculates on what such a rescue package would look like. The bulge of his tongue in cheek is apparent, but underlying his geniality is an important reminder that although the official (according to National Endowment for the Arts) ranks of professional writers are modest at 185,000, their combined voice represents a significant influence on American culture and needs to be heard.

Unlike the crybabies in the financial and automotive sectors of our economy pleading with Congress to compensate them for their own greed and stupidity, writers are a proud and independent lot, and though they're not above pocketing the occasional windfall - an unexpected movie option or foreign sale - I don't know of many who would go hat in hand to their legislature to lobby for a bailout just because their agent can't find a publisher for their latest novel.

No, writers don't want a bailout. What writers want is work, and Greenberg reminds us that in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt acknowledged the value of their profession by creating the Federal Writers' Project. Over 6,500 writers were put to work writing guidebooks, local and regional histories, photographic essays, oral memoirs and the like. (A film about this era, Soul of a People, is currently in development.) "The most well-known of these publications," Wikipedia tells us, "were the 48 state guides to America (plus Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) known as the American Guide Series."

President Elect Obama has established, at the heart of his economic recovery program, a plan to rebuild our nation's long-neglected infrastructure of rutted roads, crumbling dams, rusting bridges and leaking sewers. A student of American history and in particular of President Roosevelt's New Deal, Obama sees parallels between Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and Obama's own determination to put Americans back to work on meaningful projects that will restore pride to its wounded citizens.

I'm relatively certain that the crumbling infrastructure of the publishing business will not be found on the list of federal projects requiring urgent attention. But as our community of writers, journalists and poets surveys the landscape, we see newspaper, magazine and book publishers on a precipitously downward slope. Some of their decline is self-inflicted, through failure to envision, understand, and take advantage of the revolutionary power of digital delivery of information. And some of it is their unavoidable blindsiding by market and technological forces. But whether writers are witting or unwitting victims of upheaval, we find our profession upheaved, and we lift our eyes to our new leader for help.

Luckily for us, our new leader is a writer (and a damned good one, too). He's one of us. So, perhaps, as he and his cultured and literate brain-trust set out to repair America's physical plant, they will recognize that there's a lot of writing to be done to support and celebrate our nation's reconstruction and to give it a voice and intellectual underpinning. We'll need artists, too, and musicians, just as we did when President Roosevelt launched his program to haul his country's citizens up by their own bootstraps.

President Obama, when you open up those envelopes from your publishers and shake out the handsome royalty checks rewarding you for your inspiring words, remember your fellow writers. They are a priceless resource. Put them to work. They will cost a fraction of what the government is paying to bail out banks and insurance companies and automobile manufacturers (the secret is out - writers will do it for love), and they will reward you and the American people a thousandfold.

Richard Curtis