Reflections on Art and The New Deal

In today’s economic climate, policy-makers face a difficult question: how should the arts and culture figure into government spending? Surprisingly, the most ambitious government arts program flourished during the worst fiscal crisis in American history: the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal saw the arts as a means to social and economic progress.

During Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932, Americans faced unprecedented financial hardship. The stock market crash of 1929 unleashed a wave of unemployment that rose from three to twenty-four percent over just three years. Evicted workers built shantytowns in cities across the country. In New York City, makeshift villages sprang up along the East River, Hudson River, and Croton Reservoir in Central Park. Then-Governor of New York Roosevelt promised the Democratic National Convention, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” He won the election by a landslide.

President Roosevelt delivered his New Deal in the form of banking reform, industry regulation, farm subsidies, and work relief programs. His Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed up to three million people each month between 1935 and 1943. They built roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and libraries. In Queens, the WPA constructed Queens Boulevard, the Triborough Bridge and the Glendale Branch of the Queens Library.

Its Federal Art Project hired 5,000 artists, who produced 135,000 murals, paintings, sculptures, and prints. In New York City, they were displayed in WPA art centers, department stores, even street corners. The Queens Library had murals in the Richmond Hill, Woodside, Flushing, and Astoria branches.

President Roosevelt believed that art would raise the national spirit, and that a raised national spirit would in turn inspire art. In his 1939 radio address dedicating the Museum of Modern Art, he mused:
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions for a free life and you nourish arts, too. In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things we are furthering democracy itself.

The Federal Art Project dissolved in 1943 when federal funds were diverted to U.S. involvement in World War II. Artwork was distributed to tax-supported public institutions nationwide. New York City-based organizations received 20,000 works, and the Queens Library received over 450 drawings, etchings, paintings, and murals. Sixty years later, Painting for Progress presents over seventy works from this collection.

Jessie M. Benge, A Wedding Dress of 1848, watercolor rendering. Costume courtesy Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.