8 8 The Legacy of the New Deal Arts Programs
Striking industrial workers and protests by unemployed councils were not the only form of social agitation in the Great Depression. Lack of employment affected those in cultural and clerical fields as well. Intellectuals had their own picket lines and were among the most politically leftist members of the working class.1 As Robert Whitcomb, secretary of the Unemployed Writers’ Union, wrote in 1934 to the Civil Works Administration:
The unemployed writers of New York City do not intend to continue under the semi-starvation conditions meted out to them.… If the government does not intend to formulate some policy regarding the class of intellectual known as the writer, who is trained for nothing else in this economic emergency, then the writer must organize and conduct a fight to better his condition.2
The federal work programs that were intended to take the place of the demeaning dispersals of money and goods known as “relief” were at first centered on building and repairing the nation’s infrastructure and taking care of the land. Eventually, however, New Deal administrators recognized that lack of employment affected those in cultural fields as well as industrial workers and youth. The result was what has been called “a governmental adventure in cultural collectivism, the like of which no nation has experienced before or since.”3
Prior to the establishment of the federal arts programs, most cultural workers had to depend on a network of wealthy patrons to support their work and to get it presented to a wider audience. Not only did the Depression dampen private support for the arts, but technological changes—the invention of the radio, phonograph, and movies—were fast displacing live performance artists. Some 30,000 musicians had been displaced by these new technologies, and the government estimated that well over 30,000 theater workers were made expendable by the mid-1930s.4 Aside from the immediate effect of reducing the relief roles, these projects had an unprecedented effect on the practice and appreciation of the arts in the United States—an effect that has left an indelible, if often unrecognized, mark some eighty years later. This chapter looks at the origins of the various federal arts programs, the difficulties faced by government officials in managing such a unique series of enterprises, the extraordinary outpouring of art and culture that resulted, the tangible and intangible benefits this had for the country, and the lessons we can learn from this experience for today.
The nation’s legacy from this period of cultural expansion has been little praised and sometimes mocked, and in general was little known until recently, other than by specialists. For many years, the social content and recognizable styles of many of the public works of art produced during the New Deal years were deemed old-fashioned, if not faintly ridiculous. With reference to the visual arts especially, we were and remain much more aware of the influences emanating from Europe in the early years of the twentieth century—that is, before the rise of fascism and the Depression. Then, cubism, abstraction, and surrealism, as practiced in Europe, were the experimental modes that attracted a small coterie of American artists who were, for the most part, from a prosperous, urbanized middle class and élitist collectors.5 However, during the 1920s, there were few sales of modern American art, and artists were unable to make a living from their art, despite the existence of several galleries devoted to marketing their work; the few who were in a position to collect works of art were oriented toward the European product.
The federal programs initiated in the 1930s had both economic and cultural goals. They were intended to alleviate the economic hardships experienced by those occupied in cultural areas of work—and perhaps as important, to popularize art among a much wider segment of the population than just a small coterie of enthusiasts living in urban centers, notably New York City. Though he had no particular knowledge of or judgment about the arts, Roosevelt had many friends who were artists, and when the Civil Works program was getting underway, it was his decision to include artists. These programs made possible literary, musical, theatrical, and visual expression under a variety of alphabetical entities—the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Treasury Relief Art Program (TRAP), the Federal Art Project/Works Project Administration (FAP/WPA), and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Various movers and shakers, among them George Biddle, Harry Hopkins, Hallie Flanagan, Harold Ickes, Edward Bruce, Holger Cahill, Henry Alsberg, Nikolai Sokoloff, and Roy Stryker, were charged with seeing that these projects were initiated and completed; they also ran interference with congressional critics who found expenditures on culture to be politically radical or unnecessary.
In 1933, the idea that art might enhance public life had been suggested to President Roosevelt by painter George Biddle. Biddle had been impressed by government-funded Mexican murals (in particular those painted by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco) that made use of themes from that country’s history. (Both Mexican artists later received privately sponsored mural commissions in the United States.) As a consequence of the interest of Roosevelt and Biddle in public art, the federal government established several public art projects. Though established for different periods and under different names, all had in common that their products—mostly murals, sculptures, and paintings—were to enhance and decorate public buildings. They were, of course, economic programs designed to put money in people’s pockets, but they also had a less tangible purpose—to boost public morale during a time of deep stress and pessimism. It is well known to psychologists that exposure to the arts and participation in creative activity can have a beneficial effect on people’s sense of well-being.6
The first such experiment in employing cultural workers was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which, in its short life (December 1933—June 1934) and with funds transferred from the Civil Works Administration, put 3,700 unemployed graphic artists (about a third of the nation’s estimated unemployed artists) to work in beautifying public buildings and parks and producing over 15,000 works of art. Its guidelines stressed that “artists were to improve the craftsmanship of furnishings” of public buildings; embellish federal, state, and municipal buildings and parks; and make pictorial records of such national projects as the CCC dams.7 Taking a phrase from a speech given by Franklin Roosevelt on December 6, 1933, Edward (“Ned”) Bruce, an attorney and the program’s director, called the PWAP an example of the president’s desire to give Americans “a more abundant life” with “the first completely democratic art movement in history.”8 Bruce set the PWAP in motion quickly to preempt political blowback because many people thought that government funding of art was frivolous and a waste of taxpayers’ money. Within days, all sixteen regional directors, selected by Bruce, had accepted their jobs and were forming volunteer committees to identify artists across the nation. Within eight days, the first artists had their checks, and within three weeks they all did—an amazing administrative accomplishment.9 The legacy of the PWAP was: 99 carvings; 1,076 etchings; 42 frescoes; over 1,000 mural designs and projects; 3,821 oil paintings; 1,518 prints; 43 pieces of Pueblo pottery; 2,938 watercolors, plus an array of bas reliefs, drawings, light fixtures, mosaics, Navajo blankets, portraits, poster prints, stage sets, and tapestries.10 In 1934, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington held an exhibit of the works, to an overwhelming response. The New York Times gave a glowing review, and members of Congress, as well as Cabinet secretaries lined up to request paintings for their offices.11
As the PWAP was running out of money another program was begun to employ artists and sculptors. Called by various names (Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture, or simply, the Section), and also headed by Edward Bruce, it operated from October 1934 through July 1943. Unlike the PWAP, however, this program was not a relief program. Instead, it sought to employ artists through a selective competition regardless of whether or not they were penurious. Once chosen, an artist essentially became an independent operator, signing a contract to complete a specific project, rather than assuming a regular salaried position, thus making it a precursor of the much-later National Endowment for the Arts. One of the benefits of the program was that it allowed lesser-known artists, including a large number of women, to compete with more established painters and sculptors.12 The Section had five main goals: 1) to secure the best-quality art to embellish public buildings; 2) to stimulate the development of American art; 3) to employ local talent wherever possible; 4) to secure cooperation of the art world in selecting artists for this work; and 5) to encourage project proposal competitions where practical. Seeking to make art a part of everyday life, the Section commissioned outstanding pieces to be located in places such as post offices, court houses, schools, and hospitals that citizens would visit frequently and at no cost.13 The Section was administered with central oversight to ensure that themes that appeared in the art were neither radical nor embarrassing to the New Deal. Ultimately some artists saw this as censorship and protested that their creativity was being stifled. By December 1942, when the program was terminated, over 1,100 towns and cities could boast federal buildings with New Deal murals and sculpture embellishing both exteriors and interiors.14 These works remain a legacy to this day, though many people who see them may have no knowledge of the history that produced them.15
The Treasury public art programs culminated in the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) under Olin Dows and Cecil Jones. TRAP ran from July 1935 to June 1939. It expanded its focus to include all kinds of art, not just murals and sculptures. At least 75 percent of participants had to qualify for relief in addition to being competent artists. One percent of construction costs for new buildings was set aside for the purchase or commissioning of artwork. For the TRAP endeavor, painted and frescoed scenes of historical events and everyday life that might also embrace themes promoting New Deal reformist ideas were chosen by competition among the artists. Their works, selected on the sole basis of quality, adorned the walls of post offices, state and federal offices, schools, libraries, and airports. It is safe to say that few ordinary Americans at the time were knowledgeable about many of the painters involved or aware of the varied aspects of life that their works revealed. For example, the decoration of the Interior Department building in Washington, D.C., included scenes of indigenous life painted by a little-known Native American artist. TRAP was finally closed by the Treasury Department as the result of a dispute between the Artists Union and the program director over the issue of quality versus quantity. It was meant to be a small program, yet there were more people clamoring for jobs than the funding could sustain. During its active period, 356 artists completed 85 murals, 30 sculptures, and 10,215 easel paintings.
With unemployment still raging and the arts and cultural community becoming more restive, a more elaborate arts program was eventually established under the WPA. The WPA Art Project, known as Federal One, which was to include theater people, visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians, conservators, and clerical workers, became the best known of the New Deal arts and culture programs. Its contributions to American culture are incalculable. Under the national directorship of Holger Cahill, Federal One was begun in August 1935 and was to last until 1943. Federal One programs differed from the other New Deal arts programs in that they were decentralized and largely run at the state or municipal level (albeit with federal oversight and often federal guidelines). Regional directors worked with state federal art programs and community committees to carry out tasks of public improvements and service. The WPA provided wages while state or local entities and sponsors were responsible for providing materials and equipment. This decentralized structure, however, could often make for friction between state-level WPA officials and national leadership, and it led to a somewhat chaotic and conflictual experience. Nevertheless, the output of Federal One through all of its various programs was vast and varied.
By far, the best known of all the New Deal visual arts programs was the Federal Art Project (FAP/WPA) initiated in 1935 as part of Federal One and lasting until March 1942. Employing at the height of its tenure more than 5,000 artists, the majority of whom would otherwise have been applicants for relief, it maintained an easel painting division, a graphic arts section, and its own relatively small mural effort. Among the now well-known artists supported by this effort were painters Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Raphael and Moses Soyer, Lucienne Bloch, and sculptor Louise Nevelson.
The FAP underwrote projects to supply posters and illustrations for books and theater and eventually the war effort.16 The fully furnished print workshops set up under the WPA prepared the ground for the flowering of the graphic arts in the United States, which until that time had been limited in both media and expression. Moreover, since prints were portable and cheap and were allocated to schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, government offices, and army bases, they became a vehicle for broadening the public’s understanding and appreciation of the creative arts.17 Under the FAP/WPA aegis, artists also made a pictorial record of all manner of vernacular objects. This compendium of 22,000 plates provided the nation with its first Index of American Design. The program expanded the appeal of this commonplace material—much of it folk art—from a fancy held by a coterie of well-to-do “connoisseurs,” to one that a wider public might experience—a forerunner perhaps of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. Small works of art, both easel paintings and prints, produced in workshops throughout the nation were given to government offices, while murals completed under the aegis of FAP were seen mainly on the walls of schools, libraries, post offices, and hospitals. Over the course of its eight years, the WPA commissioned over five hundred murals for New York City’s public hospitals alone. The breadth of the imagination to which the public was exposed can be seen in the finely preserved collection of the Norwalk, Connecticut Transit District. Murals commissioned for public buildings in that city depicted not only scenes from American history and contemporary life and work, but also stylized scenes from Chinese, Egyptian, and Venetian cultures, as well as illustrations depicting famous literary works.18
One of the unique features of this program was the community art centers—some one hundred of them established in twenty-two states—but particularly in areas where opportunities to experience and make art were scarce. These centers included galleries, classrooms, and community workshops, and served an estimated 8 million people.19 Here, both experienced artists and amateurs, including children, could take classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, and other forms of artistic expression. This effort afforded individuals who may never have seen a large painted scene or a piece of sculpture an exceptional opportunity not only to experience a finished work of art but also to participate in the actual process of creation. According to Smithsonian author David A. Taylor, “the effect was electric. It jump-started people beginning careers in art amid the devastation.”20
The Federal Writers’ Project, under Henry Alsberg, provided employment and experience for some 6,686 writers, editors, art critics, researchers, and historians, many of whom later flowered in the genres of the novel and poetry. In finding a way to employ writers, many of whom had leftwing sympathies, Alsberg and his team came up with the idea of putting them to work writing well-researched state and regional guidebooks that were to portray the social, economic, industrial, and historical background of the country. In this way, their political sympathies were not likely to intrude into their writing and thus upset conservative critics who were critical of the entire arts enterprise.
The implementation of the program was fraught with conflict from the beginning. Determined to have writers’ projects creating guidebooks in all forty-eight states, the Project’s directors often found it difficult to find qualified writers or experienced project managers in regions far from urbanized cultural centers. According to Jerre Mangione, who served as coordinating editor of the Project, in addition to attacks from Congress and the press, which characterized the project as a blatant boondoggle, conflicts between national Project directors and state-level WPA directors—frequently men with engineering backgrounds who had no understanding of the literary requirements—often erupted. Field offices often fell short of meeting deadlines, and professional writers occasionally rebelled against having to write according to national guidelines or to meet the demands of self-appointed censors, who, “in the name of patriotism or civic pride, objected to New Deal attitudes expressed in some Project publications.”21
By 1942, despite these difficulties and the constant threat by Congress to cut off the Project’s funding, the Writers’ Project had produced an estimated one thousand books and pamphlets, although, according to Mangione, no one knows exactly how many published items it produced, as many have since been lost or destroyed.22 Among the works were guidebooks to each of the 48 states, to cities, small towns, major regions, and interstate roadways—a vast treasury of Americana from the ground up that included facts and folklore, history and legend, histories of the famous, the infamous and the excluded, embracing, as one observer noted, a pluralism “that countered racism at home and fascism abroad.”23 There were, as well, the Slave Narratives—seventeen-volume oral histories of the last people who could give first-person accounts of what it was like to have lived under slavery. These volumes, now held in the Library of Congress, have been an invaluable resource to historians. An additional set of folklore and oral histories of 10,000 people from all regions, occupations, and ethnic groups are now part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection. Despite the almost incessantly negative press received during the Project’s buildup, by the time it was finished, the critics were generally favorable. Robert Cantwell wrote in the New Republic in 1939 that the guidebooks to cities, towns, and regions represented the first effort to write American history in terms of its communities. In the past, he wrote, American history had been written in terms of its “leading actors and its dominant economic movements but never in terms of the ups and downs of the towns from which the actors emerged and in which the economic movements had their play.”24 Bernard De Voto saw the books as an “educational force, and even a patriotic force, an honorable addition to our awareness of ourselves and our country.”25 Alfred Kazin summed up the serendipitous nature of the entire collection:
So the WPA state guides, seemingly only a makeshift, a stratagem of administrative relief policy … resulted in an extraordinary contemporary epic. Out of the need to find something to say about every community and the country around it, out of the vast storehouse of facts behind the guides—geological, geographical, meteorological, ethnological, historical, political, sociological, economic—there emerged an America unexampled in density and regional diversity.26
The Writers’ Project thus produced an unparalleled store of American history and folkways that continued to provide help to writers and editors in the development of characters and locales long after the program’s demise.27
Although many writers were ashamed at the time to be “on the dole” and even afterwards tried to ignore their role in these programs, the experience of working in the New Deal programs gave many who would go on to become this nation’s most famous literary figures a means to survive at a time when joining the Project was a matter of life and death, and set them on the road to their future careers. One of the fringe benefits of the Project for young writers was that of associating with published authors. The poet, Margaret Walker, for example, received valuable advice from Nelson Algren when she showed him her unfinished poem, “For My People,” which later won the Yale Award for young poets.28 It also gave them material and techniques that appeared later in novels and plays.29 Richard Wright, who had been a Post Office employee before joining the project, found new material through his work for the Writers’ Project that would later appear in his books. Studs Terkel used the oral history techniques learned through his work with the Writer’s Project to write his famous collection of oral history books. Ralph Ellison might never have written The Invisible Man had it not been for the Writer’s Project. Ellison is quoted in a Library of Congress document as saying that the Writers’ Project helped him better understand the powerful connection between serious literature and folkways.30 With their publications, the Writers’ Project authors contributed not only to their own development, but in absorbing, in the course of their work, genetic information about their country and its people, they could “destroy false myths, dethrone phony heroes, eliminate racial barriers, and promote assistance for disadvantaged Americans.”31 Among the other now-famous writers to benefit from the Project were Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, and Frank Yerby.
Long before the Great Depression, changes in the theater industry had limited quality theater productions to a select metropolitan clientèle, leaving the Middle West, the Far West, and large parts of the South deprived of first-rate theatrical entertainment. By the late 1920s, technology was replacing even those who did find work in the theater business. Large numbers of actors, stagehands, technicians, musicians, and vaudeville performers were displaced by the movie industry. “Sound films had replaced the orchestra; recorded music replaced live performance; the training of actors became less important than publicizing the Hollywood star. The popularity of radio and a change in public taste added to the plight of those who were often thought of as a ‘dispensable luxury’ anyway.”32 With the onset of the Depression, theater doors, even in New York City, the theater capital of the country, were closed, leaving thousands of people without jobs or means of support, except for sporadic help from theatrical unions.
Under the leadership of Hallie Flanagan, who had been recruited from her post as director of the Vassar Experimental Theatre by WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins, all this was to change. Hopkins believed that society had an obligation to conserve the talents of men and women in the arts as well as of those in the factories. This belief also coincided with the desires of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt for a national theatrical project or projects that would provide musical and dramatic entertainment for small and remote communities.
The Federal Theatre Project was the first and only attempt to create a national theater in the United States. In writing a brief for the program, Flanagan pointed out that ancient Athens and the modern countries of “France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Italy and practically all other civilized countries appropriate money for the Theatre.”33 But beyond the fact that most other countries supported the theater, there was the fact that thousands of unemployed actors, dancers, directors, playwrights, designers, stage technicians, ushers, box office personnel, and clerical staff “could get just as hungry as unemployed accountants and engineers, but—and this was much more revolutionary—that their skills were as worthy of conservation.” Harry Hopkins, she pointed out, “believed that the talents of these theatrical workers, together with the skills of painters, musicians, and writers, made up a part of the national wealth which America could not afford to lose.”34 Flanagan was also convinced that theater could be an agent of change. In a report on the first summer Federal Theatre, she expressed her belief in the socially transformative function of theater.
By a stroke of fortune unprecedented in dramatic history, we have been given a chance to help change America at a time when twenty million unemployed Americans proved it needed changing. And the theatre, when it is any good, can change things. The theatre can quicken, start things, make things happen. Don’t be afraid when people tell you this is a play of protest. Of course it’s protest, protest against dirt, disease, human misery. If, in giving great plays of the past as greatly as we can give them, and if, in making people laugh, which we certainly want to do, we can’t also protest—as Harry Hopkins is protesting and as President Roosevelt is protesting—against some of the evils of this country of ours, then we do not deserve the chance put into our hands35
It was Flanagan’s conviction that the project must not just repeat theatrical forms of the past but be responsive to the technological, economic, and cultural changes the country was undergoing. In addition to performances of classical plays by well-known playwrights, circuses, dance performances, musical comedies, puppet shows, light opera, children’s theater, pageants and spectacles, vaudeville, and religious drama were all given space, not only “in city Theatres, but in parks and hospitals, in Catholic convents and Baptist churches, in public schools and armories, in circus tents and universities, in prisons and reformatories and in distant camps.…”36 Touring companies brought plays to parts of the country where drama had been nonexistent and provided training and experience for new actors who would later became prominent.
One important, but overlooked, aspect was the program’s emphasis on preserving and promoting minority cultural forms. At a time of strict racial segregation, with arts funding non-existent in African American communities, black theater companies were established in Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Hartford, Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Raleigh, San Francisco, and Seattle. Foreign language companies for which funding had become impossible also performed works in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish to eager audiences. In addition, the Federal Theatre Project employed photographers in every major city who recorded performances, rehearsals, and images of performers and also captured behind-the-scenes work, stage sets, costumes, audiences, and theaters.37
The Federal Theatre project, however, was not an easy program to pull off. As one historian of the theater has written:
The organizational problems were, of course, always aggravated by the financial limitations and by the hostility and obstructionism of certain elements both inside and outside the government. Congressional disapproval, WPA regulations, and anti-Roosevelt newspaper columns vilified the efforts of the Theatre project from the beginning. Even professional theatre people opposed Federal theatre performances at nominal prices, charging they took business from the commercial theatre.38
The Federal Theatre Project was especially effective in bringing controversial social and economic issues to the foreground, making it one of the most embattled of all the New Deal programs. Plays about labor disputes, economic inequality, racism, and other such issues infuriated a growing chorus of political critics who sought to shut the program down and at other times threatened and then succeeded with funding cuts. One innovation, the Living Newspaper unit, which dramatized stories from the newspapers, was especially offensive. Even though plays about controversial issues were wildly popular with audiences, Flanagan recognized that the Federal Theatre Project had to walk a careful line between producing “safe” plays and more controversial ones if it were to survive.39 In contrast to the amount of criticism of the program, fewer than 10 percent of the plays dealt with issues that were likely to draw fire. Nevertheless, the program had become “a microcosm of all the New Deal represented to the enemies of the administration, notably in its spending policy and its liberal attitude toward labor, aliens, and minorities.”40
Flanagan had hoped that this experiment in national theater might lead “toward an art in which each region and eventually each state would have its unique, indigenous dramatic expression, its company housed in a building reflecting its own landscape and regional materials, producing plays of its past and present, in its own rhythm of speech and its native design, in an essentially American pattern.”41 Sadly, this vision was not to come to fruition, although the development of local community theater in many places in the country may be seen as one legacy of this experiment. Falling victim to the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities under Chairman Martin Dies, and the House Committee on Appropriations, the Federal Theatre Project was finally shut down by an act of Congress in 1939. Nevertheless, the program, however, brief, had left a lasting legacy. Seventy-seven new plays had found audiences in more than one city. Thousands of aspiring actors, directors, stagehands, and playwrights were either supported or got their start in the Federal Theatre Project,42 among them many now-famous theatrical figures such as Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, John Houseman, Helen Hayes, and Eugene O’Neill. The creative formats that characterized many productions greatly enlarged the contours of dramatic presentation. Thus, it would be difficult to conceive of present-day theater and even film culture without reference to the aesthetic developments in the 1930s WPA theater productions.
The Depression arrived in an era of flourishing popular music—both jazz and folk. Nevertheless, thousands of professional musicians were unemployed. To provide these musicians with opportunities to perform, former director of the Cleveland Symphony Nickolai Sokoloff promoted live concerts of such music at low cost or for free under the aegis of the Federal Music Project. The Project provided financial assistance for existing symphony and concert orchestras and created new ones in states and cities that had never had an orchestra. The musical menu was not limited to this fare, however; band concerts and opera were among the offerings, and work by popular American musicians—ethnic ensembles, musical comedies, and jazz—were also highlighted. A lesser effort, though not insignificant, resulted in the gathering and recording of the folk music heritage of the nation. John and Alan Lomax’s collection, now housed at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, stands as an incomparable product of this effort.43
One important aspect of the program was education. Music classes for all ages and ability levels were offered in parts of the country and to populations that had never had access to such instruction, and lectures on music theory and appreciation were also offered. In 1939, an estimated 132,000 children and adults in 27 states received instruction every week.44 There was even a “Composers’ Forum Laboratory” where composers could play their compositions before an audience and get feedback from it. According to one music scholar, the Federal Music Project increased the technical ability of many musicians who were employed by it.45 The music project eventually became the largest and most expensive of the arts projects, employing more than 15,000 instrumentalists, composers, vocalists, and teachers.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography program, under Roy Stryker, oversaw the production of more than 80,000 photographs, produced as part of the effort to make the nation aware of the plight of displaced rural populations. These images—produced by a changing group of photographers—among them such luminaries as Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott—were used in news and magazine articles and at country fairs and exhibitions, helping to humanize the verbal and statistical reports of the terrible poverty and turmoil in the agricultural sector of the economy. Categorized at the time as “documentary” photography, this approach to image-making remained a viable form of expression into the postwar period, with the result that this body of work continued to receive considerable attention, unlike much of the graphic art and painting of the 1930s. The photographs provide a vivid picture of the many faces of the Depression that remain iconic to this day. Photographs were also produced under the auspices of the WPA; its most complete project, Changing New York, was the work of photographer Berenice Abbott and historian Elizabeth McCausland.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, visual art expression in the United States had been considered a somewhat suspect activity—indeed, it was thought by some to be a pursuit for dilettantes. The notion that there should be government support for the arts was unheard of. Other than portraitists and those few who provided commemorative painting and statuary for public purposes, only individuals with unusual interests involved themselves in making art, while to acquire art objects required knowledge and means. The New Deal Arts programs had changed all that. Art making and appreciation had gone from being an activity valued and practiced by a relatively small group of the “enlightened” to an experience that gained participants from a wider range of the American public, including population groups and artistic subjects and styles that would normally have been ignored. Hundreds of Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans were now contributing their talents and their worldviews to the country’s heritage. Art historian Milton W. Brown commented that the lack of a color line in the arts had “a telling effect on racial relations in the United States.”46 As one historian of the period has estimated, projects that produced graphic art reached an audience of millions. In that many more people came in contact with “art”—whether they recognized it as such or not—their ideas about artists and their products evolved. One has only to note the current large museum attendance to acknowledge the lasting effects of WPA efforts to make art experience available to the people. Art had been democratized and, for a time, de-commodified. The legacy of experiencing visual art in all its many forms, which the art projects made possible, remained a potent force long after the initial programs had ended.
Not only did more people get to experience art during this period, but they also were able to participate in making it. Classes for young and old in the various visual and plastic arts and in both the appreciation and performance of music were held in settlement houses, community centers, and schools, where they acquainted a generation with the idea that art was not merely a frill but something they might themselves aspire to, or at least want to experience in an intelligent way. In the New York City area alone, an estimated 50,000 children and adults participated in classes under the Federal Art Project auspices each week. (As a 10-year-old child, one of the authors was a thankful recipient of these programs, studying painting and sculpture in settlement house classes in the mid- to late 1930s.) Community art centers in impoverished rural areas were visited by some 3 million people who had no previous experience with art production of any kind.
Additionally, the arts programs were thought to have turned American artists away from their attraction to European styles and reintegrated them with their homeland experiences. Support for artists by government agencies during the Depression years was accompanied by resurgent interest in American history and in ordinary people and events. During the early years of the twentieth century, this direction had already been demonstrated in literary works such as Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology and in visual works produced by the so-called Ash Can painters whose subjects were frequently drawn from urban street life. The subject matter of the somewhat later “American scene” painters of the Twenties expanded that vision. Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield, for instance, were drawn to rural life in places like Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Taos, New Mexico, as well as to that in cities. A later group known as Regionalists concentrated almost entirely on rural themes. But interest in the American landscape and experience expanded during the New Deal. Artists like Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood sought to express what they considered a uniquely American experience, highlighting the significance of the agricultural sector and presenting it in a positive light. In contrast, other Thirties artists known as Social Realists were concerned with city life and its disparities and travails; often, but not invariably, their political orientation was to the left of the overall spectrum. Whatever their subject matter and political orientation, these painters for the most part rejected the modernist styles emanating from Europe in favor of portraying aspects of reality in an accessible manner. One consequence of both more accessible formal language and the wider existence of art works during this time was that many more people were able to see and understand examples of visual expression. Still, there was also government support for artists who adhered to more abstract styles in their work, notably Stuart Davis and Burgoyne Diller. The fact that there were differing ways of handling reality was also a factor in opening up public understanding of visual art. These developments helped prepare the way for a continuing national interest in the visual arts—even after the programs were terminated.
In past eras, American artists had gathered together in societies mainly to acquire exhibition space and promote their work, but the tenor of the times now led them to join together to affect economic and political developments on the national and local levels. The Artists’ Congress, organized in 1936, embraced those with differing styles and attitudes about artistic production as well as those with various political views. To deal specifically with the economic problems and issues of censorship that arose with the development of publicly supported artwork, the Artists’ Union was formed. Its publication, Art Front, featured writers—among them Harold Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro—who later became esteemed critics of the new art of the postwar period. In the mid-Thirties, photographers of the urban scene came together in the Photo League to promote the kind of imagery that portrayed working-class people in their neighborhoods, both to celebrate an unheralded aspect of society and call attention to deplorable slum housing.47
While the Federal Art programs were greeted with high expectations by many artists—and not only because they made it possible for them to live while producing art—ideas about their efficacy and quality varied. Acknowledging that art enriched ordinary life, some supporters held that the American government had long needed to catch up with European countries in underwriting the arts. It was, to some, a social necessity for democracy and the welfare of the people, and should be given a permanent bureau in the government—a sort of Fine Arts Ministry. Others felt that art programs were a necessary part of a democratic ethos but should be run by state agencies rather than by a centralized federal bureaucracy that promulgated rules often deemed nonsensical. Still other artists felt that government interference in artistic matters did not accord with the general laissez-faire principles on which society was predicated, or with the right to choose style and subject matter according to one’s individual interests. Business interests sometimes complained that federal projects (such as an effort to revitalize glass-blowing in New Jersey) competed with private enterprises, even though the objects produced were not sold but donated to public institutions so as to avoid this kind of conflict. Still other voices at the time referred to government support of the arts as “boondoggling,” that is, a waste of the taxpayers’ money. And a virulent and noisy few suggested that the programs were prone to exploitation by left wing interests. This latter argument against government support of the arts gained strength toward the end of the Thirties, with denunciations that claimed that various aspects of the programs were infiltrated by radical political ideas, in particular, Communism.
With the onset of United States entry into World War II, federal support for the arts was discontinued, with the exception of some programs that contributed to the war effort. The WPA arts program, however, ended in 1943, and for nearly sixty years the U.S. government paid little or no attention to the disposition of hundreds of thousands of works of art that it had commissioned. Consequently, the art
languished in warehouses, was offered to public agencies, given to museums, was thrown out, taken home by employees, sold as scrap, and otherwise disseminated throughout the country. Few records were kept, hardly anyone knew what was going where and, as a result, many of the pieces that were not destroyed or kept within public agencies ended up in private hands.48
It is only in recent years—in the 1990s—that the General Services Administration has initiated efforts to locate, identify, and catalogue WPA art, realizing its unique importance for the country. The products of the WPA Writers’ Project suffered a similar fate. Because the American Guidebooks were not published by any one publishing house, they had not been brought together as an entire series, so many ended up in dustbins or, as in the case of the original Idaho Guidebook, were destroyed in a warehouse fire.49 Much of the original source material that could have been valuable to scholars and manuscripts that never made it into print but might have been published had sponsors and publishers been found in time were subsequently lost to history when the program was closed.50 Jerre Mangione was later to lament, “the general indifference to the [Writers’] Projects unpublished materials constituted a shocking waste of a precious national resource.”51
As previously suggested, however, in some important respects the effects of the WPA arts programs were long-lasting. Prior to the Thirties, the United States government had not acknowledged either art or artists as an occupation or group worthy of support, but this attitude was no longer tenable in the postwar years. While the WPA was no longer the paymaster for artists as teachers, some found employment in colleges, universities, and trade schools as a result of other federal legislation. As these institutions expanded their art offerings to accommodate those taking advantage of the educational opportunities funded by the federally mandated GI Bill, artists were able to fill this niche.
In the immediate post–World War II period, the economic scene was more optimistic than it had been in a long while, and money had become available for spending on culture as well as on consumer goods. The taste for books, concerts, and artworks, which had been nurtured by the federal programs, now carried over, as individuals who formerly were unaccustomed to acquiring cultural goods began to do so and, due to the economic recovery, could now afford to do so. However, without the federal programs that as a matter of policy employed artists, performers, and writers, the funding dynamics were profoundly altered. On the federal level, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was established by Congress in 1965, modeled on a similar organization initiated as the New York State Council of the Arts.52 Philanthropic foundations, such as the Guggenheim Foundation, took over one aspect of support for the arts by awarding fellowships on a competitive basis. Indeed, competition became the significant factor in deciding which individuals and projects might receive awards. Ostensibly decided by one’s peers in the field under consideration, this process also invited favoritism, depending to some extent on one’s friendships in the particular area under consideration. This format was quite different from one that in theory supported individuals on the basis of need, no matter the opinions or styles of one’s colleagues.
It also returned the artist to a state of individualism in that he or she became free to produce an art object that might be difficult to comprehend or that was purely decorative, and to work in any style that appealed to its maker or to the art market. While the postwar period did not reestablish Paris as a mecca to which artists must travel, it did renew their interest in earlier European experiments with form, such as abstraction and non-objectivity.
The purchase of art objects became a greatly expanded commerce, with hundreds of art galleries centered at first mainly in New York City, and then on the West Coast, handling the work of individual artists. Decisions about quality were predicated on what was saleable and left up to gallery owners and art critics. These figures directed the attention of the art-buying public to what they believed aesthetically important, often promoting work that was difficult to understand or purely decorative.
Despite this expansion of the art market, it is doubtful whether most visual artists today are able to make a living from their art. In other words, a business model for the arts became the norm. Concerts and theatrical events flourished, but they, too, became commercial enterprises, although often still requiring philanthropic and government support. Visual art remained accessible to the public at museums, where attendance grew enormously throughout the postwar period, even after these formerly free-access institutions initiated fees. With some notable exceptions, the distribution of public works of art such as murals and large sculptural pieces now became the province of architects in charge of erecting commercial or public edifices. Influenced by the commercial art market, such endeavors often favored abstract or decorative works rather than those with public messages.
In the archives and memoirs of those who participated in the Federal Art Project there can be found numerous anecdotes “illustrating the insensitivity of bureaucrats, the clumsiness of politicians’ interventions, the attacks of censors and the perils of centralized control.”53 Despite Harry Hopkins’s vow that the WPA would never institute censorship, censorship did happen, although there was never an official federal policy. State and local officials prodded by conservative critics of the New Deal were the most likely to be censorious, particularly because of the leftist political nature of some of the art.
In retrospect, however, the arts programs’ extraordinary accomplishments far outweigh the criticisms that have been leveled at them, both then and more recently. In terms of sheer output, the program’s effects are staggering. Between 1933 and 1942, 10,000 artists produced some 100,000 easel paintings, 18,000 sculptures, over 13,000 prints, 4,000 murals, over 1.6 million posters, and thousands of photographs. As noted above, the Writers’ Project produced more than a thousand books and pamphlets, and the Federal Theatre Project produced thousands of plays in its relatively short life. WPA projects were highly popular with audiences and critics, and reviews were generally favorable. In summing up the legacy of the Federal Theatre Project, for example, Hallie Flanagan explained,
Quite aside from their primary and most important function, that of enabling people to live decently and happily by the practice of their profession, these public theatres indicated certain things which no one knew when Federal Theatre started: that the government could operate theatres, sign leases, pay royalties, raise curtains, and take in admissions; and that millions of Americans want to go to the theatre if it can be brought geographically and financially within their range.… This audience proved that the need for theatre is not an emergency. Either the arts are not useful to the development of the great numbers of American citizens who cannot afford them—in which case the government has no reason to concern itself with them; or else the arts are useful in making people better citizens, better workmen, in short better-equipped individuals—which is, after all, the aim of a democracy—in which case the government may well concern itself increasingly with them. Neither should the theatre in our country be regarded as a luxury. It is a necessity because in order to make democracy work the people must increasingly participate; they can’t participate unless they understand; and the theatre is one of the great mediums of understanding.54
One example of the way in which the Federal Theatre Project moved audiences that had never been exposed to theater before was in the overwhelming enthusiasm met by the production of Macbeth, set in Haiti, performed by an all-black cast, and staged by the then-unknown 21-year-old Orson Welles in New York’s Harlem on April 14, 1936. Reporting the day after the opening, the New York Times observed that the Lafayette Theatre, packed to overflowing, “rocked with excitement,” and that police had to hold back the crowds outside.55 Another little-noticed legacy of the Federal Theatre Project was the new uses for theater talents that it developed in an exploratory way in the fields of education, therapeutics, diagnosis, and social and community work.56 The contemporary use of psychodrama, role play, dance, and music therapy, and many other forms of theatrics to heal and educate may be seen as a legacy of this period.
Another little-recognized lesson of the New Deal arts programs was the way in which they served to promote the New Deal itself. Posters and photographs made by WPA artists, for example, were used to advertise and recruit for the CCC, to advertise to the public the New Deal’s musical and theatrical events and the availability of music and art lessons, to tout the accomplishments of the Resettlement Administration, the TVA, and the Soil Conservation Service. The New Deal posters were also used to inculcate in the public values such as environmental conservation, the importance of visiting the great outdoors, of reading, of the dignity of manual labor and to promote such efforts as noise abatement, good nutrition, better housing, fire prevention, and other beneficial causes.57 Musicians and filmmakers were also employed in this way. Woody Guthrie, “the People’s Troubadour,” was hired in 1941 by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency created to market and distribute electricity from the Columbia River hydroelectric projects, to write a set of songs about the federal projects to gain support for federal regulation of hydroelectricity. Songs such as Roll On, Columbia, Grand Coulee Dam, and Pastures of Plenty, which came out of this period, are among the iconic folksongs of the twentieth century. Documentary films, like The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), with music by Virgil Thompson, and The River (1937) were also commissioned to educate the public about the agricultural practices that had led to the Dust Bowl and the great Mississippi and Tennessee River floods. The focus of WPA photographers on everyday life in the cities and in rural America served to awaken those who were not so dramatically affected by the Depression to the suffering of those less fortunate. In this way, the New Deal arts programs served as a kind of indirect propaganda machine for the importance and role of the federal government in the lives of ordinary people and, more importantly, for the values that are essential to a viable democracy. This democratizing function of the New Deal arts programs is all the more remarkable when we realize that it was occurring at the same time as art in Germany was being used to inculcate the values of racial superiority and militarism.
In the more than half a century since its existence, many factors have influenced the ways that art is made and received, but there can be little question that before the advent of the federal art projects, neither art nor artists had much of a presence in the American consciousness. The recognition of the change that the arts projects had rendered in the country was recognized as early as 1934 by George Biddle, who observed that the New Deal had made “America art conscious as never before” and the artist “conscious of the fact that he is of service to the community.”58 But it is perhaps best summed up by Roosevelt in a speech in 1941 dedicating the National Gallery of Art.
A few generations ago, the people of this country were often taught by their writers and by their critics and by their teachers to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves—something imported from another continent, something from an age which was not theirs—something they had no part in, save to go to see it in some guarded room on holidays or Sundays. But … within the last few years—yes, in our lifetime—they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors—people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen … rooms full of painting and sculpture by Americans, walls covered with painting by Americans—some of it good, some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive—all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved. The people of this country know now … that art is not something just to be owned but something to be made: that it is the act of making and not the act of owning that is art. And knowing this they know also that art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all the living and creating peoples—all who make and build; and, most of all, the young and vigorous peoples who have made and built our present wide country.59
The arts projects not only gave many who later became icons of American culture both the support they needed at a critical time in their lives, but also new subjects, new aesthetics, and new audiences. For example, since the program did not discriminate between representationalism and abstract expressionism, it gave artists like Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner a start before Abstract Expressionism developed a commercial audience. Moreover, poor, minority, and working class people who would never have had access to the so-called higher arts were invited to participate both in the making and enjoyment of those arts. Sometimes politically embarrassing subjects like slavery and class exploitation were also portrayed for American audiences, thus giving Americans a truer picture of their own history. Writers, filmmakers, historians, actors, artists, photographers, and musicians not only found a way to sustain themselves through hard times, but also got training for careers that would produce some of the country’s best-known works of art and culture.
The epitaph for the federal arts programs is best given by Roger G. Kennedy and David Larkin in their stunning book on the period, When Art Worked: “Throughout the long chronicle of redemption of the American dream, artists have often been summoned ‘to coax the soul of America back to life.’ In the New Deal period, that was their most important work.”60 The WPA arts programs not only brought hope and beauty and a new sense of accomplishment into the lives of ordinary people at a time of immense economic distress, but they made significant contributions to the country’s lasting cultural heritage, a realization that has only recently begun to be acknowledged by museums, historians, and even the federal government. According to John Cole, who has worked on cataloguing the material from the Federal Writer’s Project for the Library of Congress, “it’s an amazing collection. The Federal Writers’ Project helped us rediscover our heritage in a more detailed and colorful way than it had ever been described.”61 Such a legacy can also provide inspiration for future artists as illustrated by the gifted young composer Gabriel Kahane, who produced to critical acclaim in 2013 a new musical work, “Gabriel’s Guide to the Forty-eight States,” based upon excerpts from the American Guide series. Interviewed by the New York Times, Kahane said that he was “immediately spellbound by the aesthetic values of those books, and by their craftsmanship.”62 We may finally be coming to the acknowledgement of Roosevelt’s prophetic remark to his friend and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that “one hundred years from now my administration will be known for its art, not for its relief.”63 The question for us today is: Are we now neglecting our contemporary national heritage? One writer has suggested that a modern FWP, employing laid-off journalists, might document the ground-level impact of the Great Recession, chronicle the transition to a green economy, or capture the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion.64
Although the recession that began in 2008 is not as deep as the Great Depression, its effects—joblessness, anemic growth—seem likely to continue well into the future. Under the threat of tight budgets, arts programs in the public schools are being slashed, and government funding at all levels for the arts has fallen precipitously since 1990. Between 1990 and 2011, government per capita arts funding (adjusted for inflation) dropped by 48 percent. While private funding for the arts is much higher, it, too, has dropped by about 18 percent since the start of the Great Recession.65 This means that regional theaters are closing for lack of patrons; public libraries around the country are closing or on shorter hours; and the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have all faced significant cuts, threatening their ability to support cultural activities throughout the country. What is more, public funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, some of which goes to PBS, one of the few sources of fine arts programming in a sea of crass, commercial culture, has been cut and is under constant threat from conservative politicians who would like to eliminate it entirely. With a significant segment of Congress that views such programs as a waste of taxpayer dollars and would like to do away with nearly all federal funding except for the military, the future of the arts as both a heritage of democracy and as a contributor to it does not look very hopeful.
Numerous people today lament the fact that our nation is not producing enough scientists and mathematicians in order to compete in the global world. While more emphasis in our educational systems should certainly be directed toward math and science, equally important is support for arts education. Cognitive scientists recognize that there are many ways of learning and many forms of intelligence that are distributed differently within a population. The arts provide a path to knowledge and understanding that offer benefits that other kinds of learning may not provide and that may even transfer to other kinds of learning. Music, for example, has been connected to spatio-temporal reasoning as well as math and reading.66 New research offers empirical evidence that reading literature can help us become more empathetic toward others.67 Empathy, including feeling for those less fortunate, is something that our society could use more of. It could help to soften the harshness of our current social philosophies. The arts can also contribute to our sense of happiness and well-being. Preliminary results from a large research project on happiness have found that of the top six most happiness-inducing activities after intimacy/making love and exercise, the other four are all arts-related. They include: theater, dance, concerts, singing or performing, attending exhibitions at a museum, and hobbies or arts and crafts.68 Making art may also operate like yoga and other mindfulness exercises to mediate depression and anxiety and create a feeling of well-being and connectedness to the whole.69 The noted settlement house founder Jane Addams, with whom some of the New Dealers had worked in the early part of the twentieth century, had early understood this function of the arts as providing solace, comfort, beauty, and joy to those suffering from the stress of social deprivation, and thus the arts were an integral part of her program for impoverished immigrants.70
A large body of studies present compelling evidence connecting student learning in the arts to a wide spectrum of academic benefits—including greater proficiency in reading, language development, mathematics, and critical thinking—and social benefits, such as self-confidence, self-discipline, self-control, conflict resolution, collaboration, empathy, and social tolerance.71 Critical thinking and social tolerance are other characteristics that are badly needed in our society. One national study using a federal database of over 25,000 middle and high school students found that students with high arts involvement performed better on standardized achievement tests than students with low arts involvement. Moreover, the high arts-involved students also watched fewer hours of television, participated in more community service, and reported less boredom in school.72 Other researchers contend that support for arts education should not have to rely on its supposed benefits for doing well on standardized tests, but should be supported for its own intrinsic benefits. Students who study the arts seriously, they find, “are taught to see better, to envision, to persist, to be playful and learn from mistakes, to make critical judgments and justify such judgments.”73 Parents’ groups across the country have objected to the de-funding of arts education in the schools, reflecting what a Harris poll, conducted in 2005, showed—that 93 percent of the public agree that the arts are vital to providing a well-rounded education for children, and 79 percent agree that incorporating the arts into education is the first step in adding back what is missing in public education today.74
If art, literature, music, dance, and drama are critical to the development and education of the young, they are even more critical to the spiritual health—the soul—of a people, and the creative talents and expression they give voice to are essential to the development of a collective imagination that is needed if we are to resolve the enormous challenges that confront us in the twenty-first century. It may be useful to speculate that had a Federal Writers’ Project been able to continue to nurture a true picture of the diversity of the American people, or had Hallie Flanagan’s vision for the Federal Theatre been extended—a theater that could “interpret region to region, emphasize the united aspect of the states and illuminate the United States for the other Americas”75—perhaps the country might have been able to escape the polarizing tendencies that so cripple our democracy and dull our imaginations about how to move toward a future of justice, peace, and ecological sustainability. The lessons of the New Deal arts programs are, if anything, more important than ever.
1. Jerre Mangione, who served as coordinating editor of the Federal Writers’ Project, reported that intellectuals in the 1930s were particularly attracted to the radical ideology of the Communist Party, and many of them were members of the left wing John Reed clubs, and later, the CP’s popular front organization, the League of American Writers. Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (New York: Avon Books, 1972), 29–50.
2. Whitcomb, quoted in Mangione, 36.
3. Mangione, 42.
4. Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard, New Deal Cultural Programs: Experiments in Cultural Democracy, 1986, 1995, accessed May 2, 2012, available at http://www.wwcd.org/policy/US/newdeal.htm.
5. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 141.
6. Seymour B. Sarason, The Challenge of Art to Psychology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
7. National New Deal Preservation Association, “Art Projects,” accessed May 16, 2012, available at http://www.newdeallegacy.org/art_projects.html.
8. David A. Taylor, “What’s the Deal About New Deal Art?” The Smithsonian, May 19, 2000, accessed May 16, 2013, available at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Whats-the-Deal-about-New-Deal-Art-.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Kathryn A. Flynn, The New Deal: A 75th Anniversary Celebration (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2008), 28.
11. Taylor, 2.
12. Eleanor Mahoney, “Post Office Murals and Art for Federal Buildings: The Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture in Washington State, 1934–1943, The Great Depression in Washington State,” Pacific and Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Projects, University of Washington, accessed May 16, 2013, available at http://depts.washington.edu/depress/Section.shtml#_edn7.
13. Ibid.
14. This was probably a reaction to the public furor that had erupted over the image of Vladimir Lenin that Diego Rivera had painted in a mural commissioned by the Rockefeller family for New York’s Rockefeller Center. Flynn, 30. The mural was eventually chiseled off the wall at Nelson Rockefeller’s request.
15. Surprisingly, there is no national archive of what the New Deal bequeathed to every state in the nation. Several groups around the country, spurred by the current recession, are seeking to remedy this ignorance. See, for example, the website of the Living New Deal, accessed February 17, 2013, available at http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/;
16. For a collection of these posters, see Posters for the People, accessed May 16, 2013, available at http://postersforthepeople.com.
17. Milton Meltzer, Violins and Shovels: The WPA Arts Projects (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976), 76–77.
18. These murals can be found at Norwalk Transit District, available at http://www.norwalktransit.com/ntd_murals.htm.
19. Adams and Goldbard.
20. Taylor, 1.
21. Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (New York: Avon Books, 1972), 193.
22. Ibid., 352.
23. William Robin, “Traveling 48 States by Orchestra,” New York Times, April 21, 2013, AR 12.
24. Robert Cantwell, quoted in Mangione, 353.
25. Bernard De Voto, quoted in Mangione, p. 360.
26. Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature (1942), quoted in Mangione, 365.
27. Mangione, 366.
28. Ibid., 123.
29. Adams and Goldbard.
30. Ibid.
31. Mangione, 373.
32. As early as 1910, increased costs of railroad travel made touring companies less profitable and by 1929–1930, the movies had supplanted most touring companies. Lorraine Brown, “Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest and Genius,” accessed August 1, 2012, available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftbrwn00.html.
33. Hallie Flanagan, “Brief Delivered Before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives, February 9, 1938,” Library of Congress, accessed February 14, 2013, available at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=ftscript&fileName=farbf/00040002/ftscript.db&recNum=0,1.
34. Ibid.
35. Hallie Flanagan, “Theatre as Social Action,” in “First Summer Federal Theatre: A Report,” in Federal Theatre, ed. Piere de Roban (June–July 1937): 36. A project newsletter is available in the Federal Theatre Project collection, Library of Congress, accessed June 15, 2013, available at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5103/.
36. Ibid.
37. “Coast to Coast: The Federal Theatre Project, 1935–1939,” Library of Congress, February 17–July 16, 2011, accessed March 16, 2013, available at http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/federaltheatre/Pages/default.aspx#__utma=37760702.2104218719.1315239933.1344196243.1344360594.5&__utmb=37760702.21.9.1344360854700&__utmc=37760702&__utmx=-&__utmz=37760702.1344360594.5.3.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=(not%20provided)&__utmv=-&__utmk=40777568.
38. Brown, “Federal Theatre.”
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965 [original copyright 1940]), 371.
42. At its peak, the Project supported 12,700 people. Flanagan, Brief Delivered Before the Committee on Patents.
43. The Lomax Collection houses approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6,400 sound recordings, 5,500 graphic images, and 6,000 moving images of ethnographic material created and collected by Alan Lomax and others in their work documenting song, music, dance, and body movement from many cultures. The collection includes field recordings and photographs Lomax made in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales, 1930s–2004. A guide to the collection can be found at http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/.
44. Adams and Goldbard.
45. You Young Kang, “The WPA Federal Music Project and Its Enduring Legacies,” lecture given at Scripps College, March 21, 2011, accessed July 7, 2012, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWv1XKAla0Q.
46. Milton Brown, quoted in Meltzer, 87.
47. For a visually stunning and inspiring history of the Photo League, see the film Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York, by Daniel V. Allentuck, Nina Rosenblum and Mary Engel, available at http://www.thephotoleaguefilm.com/about-ordinary-miracles/about-the-film/.
48. “The Government Wants Its WPA Art Back,” accessed May 16, 2012, available at http://www.artbusiness.com/wpa.html. For a film documenting the GSA’s effort to retrieve New Deal art works, see “Returning America’s Art to America” available at: http://www.gsa.gov/graphics/admin/recovering_americas_art.swf.
49. The American Guide series, available at http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/WPAStateGuides.pdf. In recent years, however, the American Guide series has begun to be recognized as a valuable resource. Some state governments have reissued works, and books in the series have now become valuable collectors’ items.
50. Mangione, 370.
51. Ibid., 371.
52. The NEA is the largest annual funder of the arts in the United States. It solicits proposals and makes grants for performances, exhibitions, festivals, artist residencies, and other arts projects throughout the country in a number of different disciplines/fields, including artist communities, arts education, dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, local arts agencies, media arts, museums, music, musical theater, opera, theater, and visual arts. “NEA at a Glance,” available at http://www.nea.gov/about/Facts/AtAGlance.html.
53. Adams and Goldbard, “Federal One in Retrospect”.
54. Flanagan, Arena, 372.
55. “Crowds Jam Street as Macbeth Opens,” New York Times, April 15, 1936, accessed April 14, 2013, available at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F50A17FB3D5E167B93C7A8178FD85F428385F9.
56. Flanagan, Arena, 372.
57. Meltzer, 79.
58. George Biddle, “The Artist Serves His Community,” Magazine of Art, 27, no. 9 (September 1934, Supplement): 31–32. Quoted in Roger G. Kennedy and David Larkin, When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art and Democracy (New York: Random House, 2009), 26.
59. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at the dedication of the National Gallery of Art, March 17, 1941. The American Presidency Project, accessed May 23, 2013, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16091.
60. Kennedy and Larkin, 323, quoting from a letter written to Aubrey Williams from the sculptor Gutzon Borglum in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1950), 59.
61. Douglas Brinkley, “Unmasking Writers of the WPA,” New York Times, August 2, 2003, accessed March 1, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/02/books/unmasking-writers-of-the-wpa.html?pagewanted=all.
62. Robin, AR 13.
63. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in an interview with Erica and Lewis Rubenstein for the Archives of American Art, November 9, 1964, the Smithsonian Institution. Quoted in Kennedy and Larkin, 25.
64. Mark I. Pinsky, “Write Now: Why Barack Obama Should Resurrect the Federal Writers Project and Bail Out Laid-off Journalists,” The New Republic, December 8, 2008, accessed February 26, 2013, available at http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/write-now?id=428819dc-f4bf-4db3-a6e8-1b601c8fe273.
65. Samantha Cook, “Government Support for Arts Down Dramatically over Time,” Remapping Debate, March 27, 2013, accessed May 23, 2013, available at http://www.remappingdebate.org/map-data-tool/government-support-arts-down-dramatically-over-time. Information was gathered from data on appropriations to the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from state and local arts agencies and from private corporations, foundations, bequests, and individuals. Sources included: National Endowment for the Arts, National Assembly of States Arts Agencies, Americans for the Arts, and “Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy 2012,” published by Giving USA Foundation. The author cautions, however, that private giving includes support for non–arts-related institutions, like science and technology museums, so the data may actually underestimate the percentage by which it has fallen for the arts.
66. Larry Scripp, “An Overview of Research on Music and Learning,” in Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Achievement and Social Development, J. Richard Deasy, ed., (Washington, D.C.: Arts Education Partnership, 2002), 143.
67. Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, Maja Djikic, and Justin Mullin, “Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences Before, During, and After Reading,” Cognition & Emotion, 25, (2011): 818–833,
68. Clayton Lord, “Art and Happiness: New Research Indicates 4 out of 6 Happiest Activities are Arts-related(!),” Arts Journal.com, December 2, 2011, accessed May 26, 2013, available at http://www.artsjournal.com/newbeans/2011/12/art-and-happiness-new-research-indicates-4-out-of-6-happiest-activities-are-arts-related.html. Lord is reporting on email correspondence he had with London School of Economics researcher George MacKerron, who is conducting a large-scale study of the environments that are conducive to happiness.
69. Cathy Malchiodi, “The Healing Arts: The Restoring Power of the Imagination,” Psychology Today, September 27, 2011, accessed May 26, 2013, available at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-healing-arts/201109/art-and-happiness-is-there-connection.
70. The very first building erected for Hull-House contained an art gallery, to be followed by studios for practicing art, music classes, concerts and recitals, and drama. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter 16 (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1910), 371–399.
71. Sandra S. Rupert, Critical Evidence: How the Arts Benefit Student Achievement, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, 2006, 11–14, accessed May 26, 2013, available at http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Arts-Education/critical-evidence.pdf. See also the articles in Deasy, ed., Critical Links.
72. James S. Catterall, Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School, Americans for the Arts Monographs 1, no. 9, 1–10, accessed July 17, 2013, available at http://www.americansforthearts.org/NAPD/files/9393/Involvement%20in%20the%20Arts%20and%20Success%20in%20Secondary%20School%20(′98).pdf.
73. Robin Pogrebin, “Book Tackles Old Debate: Arts Education in the Schools,” New York Times, August 4, 2007, accessed May 20, 2013, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/arts/design/04stud.html?_r=0.
74. Harris poll cited in Rupert, 5.
75. Flanagan, Arena, 373.