A taste of America's past

It was an exciting moment: I was in the Library of Congress, watching as a cart approached packed with dozens of dull gray boxes. I was about to open what amounted to a time capsule and plunge into the 1940s, an America most of us today can barely conjure. A good way to understand our own times is to examine the past.

Our entry into World War II started a process of inexorable change in America. After 1942, among the biggest immediate shifts: Social programs were closed down and their funds diverted to the military. (We never reversed that. When the war ended, the military spending continued, which is how we ended up with such inadequate healthcare and educational systems.)

Among the first programs to be shut down was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic stimulus package for the Depression, the Works Progress Administration. The WPA put Americans to work on a wide variety of projects. One, the Federal Writers Project, operated in all 48 states and employed more than 4,500 writers, including Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Claude McKay, Conrad Aiken, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Kenneth Patchen, John Cheever and Kenneth Rexroth.

By February 1943, when the WPA was finally closed down, these writers had published a million words about America. There were at least 276 books, some still in print and enjoyed today. In all, with pamphlets and brochures included, the group produced more than 1,000 publications.

Now the raw, unedited manuscripts of the project's last creative effort -- canceled after Pearl Harbor and never assembled -- was contained in the gray boxes before me. That ambitious effort explored the social and gastronomic traditions of American food. Novelists, anthropologists, out-of-work reporters, teachers, secretaries, typists and penniless people who had always wanted to be writers were instructed to send in recipes, interviews, stories of parties and picnics, pancake breakfasts and weddings, and anything else they could find that had something to do with food and eating in America.

Some of what the time capsule revealed was surprisingly familiar: Even back then, they were writing about empty-headed New York literary events and health-food trends in Los Angeles. On the other hand, Georgians no longer gather solely for the novelty of drinking Coca-Cola. And you know it was a different America when an Italian American in New England writing about her ethnic traditions explains to the readers what ravioli is.