Book Review/Ken Winkes

Hard Work Over the Decades

How about a two-fer, two books about America’s workers, set in two very different decades 80 years apart?

One is an uplifting history of the Works Progress Administration, Franklin Roosevelt’s premier effort to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work during the Depression. The other recounts an early 2000s campaign by a community organizer to free hundreds of eastern Indian welders brought to the United States under false pretenses and then held captive in Mississippi and Texas by the company that imported them.

On the surface, the stories told in “American Made” and “The Great Escape” couldn’t be more different. During the 1930s, when unemployment reached nearly 25%, people who were willing to work for pennies a day still couldn’t find jobs. In contrast, in the post-Katrina world of “The Great Escape,” employers saw the dearth of the cheap labor to be their greatest employment problem.

Nick Taylor’s 500-plus page account of the WPA moves along at a steady and lively pace, from the 1920s and its post WW I boom to the election of Herbert Hoover, the subsequent 1929 Crash and Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

As most know, FDR’s administration hit the ground running. Programs to deal with the crisis multiplied seemingly overnight, along with an alphabet of initials that identified them. And along with the programs came the people: Among them, Harry Hopkins, an accomplished social worker whom Roosevelt brought with him from New York to head what became the WPA, and Harold Ickes, whom Roosevelt plucked from progressive Republican Ohio politics to lead the Public Works Administration (PWA).

“American Made” is far more than a recitation of facts. Taylor interleaves his readable history with stories of individual Americans who benefitted from their WPA employment. Among many others, who could forget the woman who delivered library materials to isolated Kentucky communities on horseback?

The sheer numbers of WPA accomplishments are unparalleled in our history. In its seven years, it employed millions of Americans to build thousands of schools and libraries, as well as building or improving thousands of miles of roads. It cleaned up and rebuilt after floods and hurricanes. It produced art, plays and travel guides for every state. And it initiated the school lunch programs that have become an American standard.

“The Great Escape” is a far different story from a time much closer to our own. And it is a more personal story, that of Saket Soni, the community organizer who wrote the book, of the dozen or so men from India whose histories he details, and of the more than 200 others who accompanied them to the US to improve their lives, but were badly victimized by those who recruited and employed them instead.

In debt for the recruitment fees of more than $20,000 these men left India to ply their welding skills in Mississippi and Texas. Once they arrived, they were locked behind cyclone fences, housed in hastily erected, overcrowded buildings, fed the poorest of food and provided only scant sanitary facilities. They were virtual slaves.

Their rescue did not happen easily or overnight. Once they walked away from their jobs in Pascagoula and Beaumont, their path to salvation had only begun. Led by Soni, and supported by many worker and human rights organizations along the way, they traveled to Washington, D.C. to make their case before Congress. Badgered by ICE, their eventually successful five-year odyssey through a thicket of entrenched bureaucracy makes for dramatic and heartbreaking reading.

As different as they are, looked at together these books tell the same familiar story about what work is like for the powerless. That much hasn’t changed in 80 years or in thousands, but today it is foreign workers’ powerlessness in the face of visa and immigration laws that render them so vulnerable and hence so much in demand.

The other story that emerges from holding “American Made” and “The Great Escape” side by side is Biblical. When Jesus said, “…as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” I don’t believe he wasn’t talking about capitalism.

“American Made” by Nick Taylor. Bantam Dell, 2008
“The Great Escape” by Saket Soni. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2023

Ken Winkes is a retired teacher and high school principal living in Conway, Wash.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2024

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