Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture 9780226247212

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Democratic Art

Democratic Art The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture

Sharon Ann Musher

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

S h a r o n A n n M u s h e r is associate professor of history at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­24718-­2 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­24721-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226247212.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Musher, Sharon Ann, 1972– author. Democratic art : the New Deal’s influence on American culture / Sharon Ann Musher. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-24718-2 (cloth : alkaline paper)— ISBN 978-0-226-24721-2 (e-book)  1. Federal aid to the arts—United States—History—20th century.  2. New Deal, 1933–1939.  3. United States. Work Projects Administration.  4. Art and state.  I. Title. NX735.M87 2015 700.973'09043—dc23 2014037015 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Mom

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix



Abbreviations xi



Introduction: Art as a Function of Government  1

1 May the

Artist Live?  11

2 Art as Grandeur  33 3 Art as Enrichment  63 4 Art as a

Weapon  100

5 Art as Experience  146 6 Art as Subversion  172



Conclusion: A New Deal for the Arts?  207



Acknowledgments 219  Notes 223  Index 275

Illustrations Figures

I.1  Jack

Delano’s photograph of a painting class at the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, Illinois, 1942  4



1.1  Diego



2.1  Aerial



2.2  Aerial



2.3  Esther



3.1  “Life



3.2  “Sweatshop,”



3.3  “Tenement,”



3.4  “Sweatshop,”



3.5  Victor



3.6  Arnautoff,



3.7  Bernard

Rivera, Man at the Crossroads of Life (mural in progress), May 1933  20 view looking down Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C., ca. 1930  46 view of Capitol and Federal Triangle, 1936  47

Bubley’s photograph of Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., 1943  56 Planned with Justice of Tomorrow,” a detail of George Biddle’s mural, Society Freed through Justice, 1936  69 a detail of Biddle’s mural, Society Freed through Justice, 1936  70 a detail of Biddle’s mural, Society Freed through Justice, 1936  71 initial sketch of a detail of Biddle’s mural, Society Freed through Justice, 1935–­1936  85 Arnautoff, City Life (detail of right side of mural), 1934  89 City Life (detail of left side of mural), 1934  89

Zakheim, The Library, 1934  90

i l l u s t r at i o n s



3.8  John

Langley Howard, California Industrial Scenes (detail of left side of mural), 1934  91



3.9  Howard,



3.10  Wendell

California Industrial Scenes (detail of right side of mural), 1934  92 Jones, First Pulpit in Granville, 1938  97



4.1  Irving

Spellens’s poster design for the Federal Theatre Project’s performance of One-­Third of a Nation, New York City, ca. 1937–­1939  106



4.2  Arthur



4.3  Dorothea



4.4  Marion



4.5  Wolcott’s



4.6  Esther



5.1  Federal



5.2  Federal



C.1  “The

Rothstein’s photograph of the First International Photographic Exhibit, New York City, 1938  135 Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA, 1936  136

Post Wolcott’s photograph of a “Negro woman dipping snuff,” Orange County, NC, 1939  140 untitled photograph, taken in Ashland, MT, ca. 1935–­1942  141 Bubley’s photograph of a “girl in the doorway of her room at a boardinghouse,” Washington, D.C., 1939  142 Art Project photograph of black boy with hammer, New York  160 Art Project photograph of the Community Art Center in Oklahoma City  164 Waterfront,” a detail of Anton Refregier’s mural, The History of San Francisco, 1948  208

Table

x

1  Expenditures

for Art by Select Countries  29

Abbreviations AAA

Agricultural Adjustment Act

AIA

American Institute of Architects

CFA

Commission of Fine Arts

FAP

Federal Art Project

FERA

Federal Emergency Relief Administration

FMP

Federal Music Project

FSA

Farm Security Administration

FTP

Federal Theatre Project

FWP

Federal Writers’ Project

PWA

Public Works Administration

PWAP

Public Works of Art Project

TERA

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (NY)

WPA Works Progress Administration (1935–39); Work Projects Administration (1939–43)

xi

Introduction: Art as a Function of Government In 1933, at the height of the worst economic crisis in US history, advocates of state-­funded art lobbied for the creation of a New Deal for artists. Rather than viewing such expenditures as an indulgence in a time of duress, these supporters argued that the government needed to intervene directly in the arts or the nation would atrophy cul­ turally. No less than Eleanor Roosevelt took up the cause. “The people as a whole. . . ,” she wrote, “must realize that they have to shoulder greater responsibilities, if we are not going to lose many of the things which have been of great value to us in the past. Everyone will have to give something for the development of science, for the development of art in its branches.”1 In the context of our current Great Recession and the relatively mild efforts to provide government assistance to needy artists and intellectuals, the New Deal investment in the arts appears robust. In 1935, at the height of Federal One, the collective name for a group of art projects under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the federal government devoted $27 million (roughly $461 million in 2014 dollars) to sustaining the arts.2 To put that figure into perspective, it represented 0.75 percent of the US gross domestic product that year. Between May 1935 and October 1937, the federal government drew on roughly 2.5 percent of the WPA’s funds for unemployed relief workers—­a key component of the New Deal version of a stimulus package—­to support nearly forty thousand out-­of-­work writers, 1

introduction

dancers, actors, musicians, and visual artists. Paying an average of $23 per week, the WPA maintained artists who demonstrated that they held minimal credentials in their field and were financially destitute. Such government employees created hundreds of thousands of works of art—­ books, murals, plays, and concerts—­that they performed for and showed to millions of Americans.3 In 2008, the seventy-­fifth anniversary of the New Deal, combined with the housing and credit crises, stimulated revived interest in the New Deal and a call for a new one.4 In terms of the arts, such advocates contended that government funding could enhance education and increase tourism, financial growth, and development in cities and local communities alike.5 But, within the context of sequestering, financial cliffs, debt ceilings, and gridlock over deficit spending and taxes, the prospect of Congress raising government funding for the arts remains remote. Why, then, was the New Deal different? Why did many working-­and middle-­class people during the 1930s temporarily embrace a strong, centralized government, with broad-­based public support for the arts? Why were the advocates of New Deal art able to prevail briefly over those politicians, artists, intellectuals, and critics who saw government spending on the arts as a frivolous waste of resources? In short, how did art advocates temporarily secure a New Deal for the arts, and what lessons does the past offer about government funding of the arts today? The New Deal cultural projects marked an important juncture in America’s ambivalent stance toward the role that the state should play in cultural life. While the arts projects put a number of unemployed artists and intellectuals to work, it raised concerns about whom the government should support, what type of art it should subsidize, and whether a creative experience was a good in and of itself that warranted ongoing funding or a commodity that needed to pay for itself, if not immediately, then in the near future. By tracing the range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s and what New Deal art meant for its creators, administrators, and audiences, this work seeks to understand both the temporary flowering of government funding of the arts at the time and why its success was so fleeting. In many respects, New Deal art projects made a huge difference in people’s lives. They provided creative young people, some of whom were destined for greatness—­such as the painters Ben Shahn and Alice Neel and the novelist Richard Wright—­with an artistic community, a job, teaching experience, opportunities for aesthetic exchange, and, most critically, a paycheck. Although not all artists and intellectuals embraced

2

art as a function of government

the New Deal art projects, many of them gratefully recalled the federal government’s patronage. When in the 1970s the renowned modernist painter Joseph Solman surveyed his former colleagues from the easel division of the Federal Art Project (FAP), he found that “there was practically a unanimous verdict on the important opportunity the job gave to them.”6 “We adored the Project, all of us,” recalled the writer Saul Bellow, who subsisted on WPA funds as a young man. “We had never expected anyone to have any use whatsoever for us.”7 The established sculptor and medal artist Robert Cronbach concurred. “For the creative artist,” he wrote, “the WPA/FAP . . . was an unequaled opportunity for a serious artist to work as steadily and intensely as possible to advance the quality of his art.”8 These projects had dramatic consequences, too, for the public that encountered them. They fostered creative opportunities for many people who had never before experienced original works of art, plays, and concerts. More than half of the one million people who saw Federal Theater Project (FTP) plays each month had never before attended live theater. The FTP director, Hallie Flanagan, recalled a barefoot old man helping children out of an oxcart in Ohumpka, Florida, to see a government-­ sponsored performance of Twelfth Night. “They must be pretty young to understand it,” he had explained, “but I want they should all be able to say [t]hey’ve seen Shakespeare—­I did once, when I was a kid.”9 The New Deal art projects furthermore influenced the nation’s cultural development in the second half of the twentieth century. Relying heavily on social-­realist iconography, the arts projects celebrated common people. But artists were not forced to conform to this style. Indeed, New Deal art fostered new techniques, styles, and ideas. The creative expressions and experimentation thus encouraged played critical roles in the development of silk-­screening, color graphics, color photography, and musicals.10 When few other institutions or individuals would support abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Stuart Davis, the FAP hired them as relief workers and provided them with venues to exhibit their work.11 And the arts projects also collected raw materials, such as folk music, designs, and stories, for later imaginative works. The young novelist Ralph Ellison was one of a number of writers who studied local dialects while recording the street games, rhymes, and experiences of the working class for the folklore division of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) in New York. Ellison even integrated a line from an interview he conducted for the FWP into his renowned novel Invisible Man (1952): “I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me.”12

3

introduction

Fig. I.1    Painting class at the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, Illinois, April 1942.

Photograph by Jack Delano. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­DIG-­fsa-­8d03180, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection /fsa/item/owi2001002991/PP.

The New Deal further endeavored to democratize the arts. It created a great body of distinguished work and fostered a national aesthetic that viewers who were unaccustomed to attending museums, the theater, and concert halls found meaningful and empowering. Because New Deal art catered to lay people’s interests, it was sometimes kitsch and mediocre. It also was inherently political. Its portraits of heroic, working-­class people promoted the New Deal agenda by challenging the traditional role assigned to the working class and creating images that helped working people realize their own dignity, power, and potential.13 Other works, such as those focused on African Americans, sought to emancipate and incorporate black Americans culturally, although decentralization and racist ideologies limited their opportunities within the art projects—­as well as other relief projects.14

4

art as a function of government

Despite all the creative works the arts projects made, collected, and allowed diverse publics to fashion and experience, they neither forged a renaissance in American art nor facilitated ongoing large-­scale public patronage of the arts. Indeed, many of the works created under the auspices of the New Deal virtually disappeared after the projects’ demise. Only some of those creations have been revived in the last twenty or so years. Support for federal patronage in the aftermath of the New Deal was weak. Many artists resented projects that had grown increasingly restrictive politically and creatively. Meanwhile, lay participants who felt sufficiently committed to the arts projects to want them to continue after New Deal dollars dried up concentrated their energy and resources on fund-­raising within local communities rather than lobbying government officials to maintain national funding. The cultural pivot the arts projects facilitated in the art world was tenuous and never represented a full turning point. Like the pin of an oscillating hinge, the projects briefly opened a door, revealing a new role that the state could play in cultural life and a range of different ways that government-­funded art could serve society. But the door swung closed with the demise of the art projects in the early 1940s. Of course, this closure was neither automatic nor complete. The fact that American publics did not besiege Congress with letters demanding that arts funding be restored immediately does not mean that the American public opposed it. Instead, the arts projects declined because of anxiety surrounding the politics and racial/ethnic backgrounds of those producing the art as well as the supposed concern over the form and content of the work itself. In addition, their emphasis on laypeople participating in the creative process above concerns over the marketability of government-­subsidized work challenged assumptions regarding what constituted American art. Throughout this cultural moment, five fluid and overlapping approaches toward the relationship between art and the state coalesced. New Dealers, artists, and intellectuals used government-­funded art to inspire (art as grandeur), enrich (art as enrichment), promote social and political ideas (art as a weapon), and encourage healthy and productive activities (art as experience). From the earliest days of the New Deal cultural efforts, critics of government funding of the arts accused the art projects of boondoggling, promoting radical ideology, and encouraging mediocrity (art as subversion). Each of these divergent visions of publicly funded art—­as well as the political contestations over them—­illustrates the complex forces shaping publicly funded art in the United States even in its golden age.

5

introduction

The actions of political leaders and rank-­and-­file artists within the economic, political, and cultural milieu of the Great Depression influenced the emergence of the New Deal cultural projects. Economically, a new emphasis on how to restore the nation to financial viability, preserve capitalism and democracy, and maintain the skills of laborers enabled the federal government briefly to play a substantially more significant role in the arts than it had before and than it would again. Culturally, new ideas emerged regarding taxpayers’ responsibility to support the arts, to keep the United States culturally competitive, to foster meaningful creative opportunities for US citizens, and to avert both radicalism and fascism. Contemporaries also contended that government funding of the arts could aid in the creation of a (or, as the case may be, multiple) national aesthetics. Art as grandeur, the aesthetic vision dominated by classically trained artists, architects, and urban planners such as Charles Moore and John Russell Pope, monopolized public art from the late eighteenth century into the early 1930s. Such cultural enthusiasts imagined public art as inspiring citizens through the creation of grand and monumental art and architecture by a small cadre of classically trained artists. The Great Depression and New Deal, however, shifted both public and professional sentiment away from this approach and, instead, toward art as enrichment. According to this vision, a more diverse and larger pool of state-­funded artists, including Edward Bruce and George Biddle, sought to enlighten and educate the populace from the bottom up with homespun themes. Art as a weapon focuses on a more explicitly political group of artists and art administrators, including Hallie Flanagan and Roy Stryker, who aimed to use their art as a lever for social change. Perhaps most revolutionary was the band of art enthusiasts, such as Holger Cahill and Constance Rourke, who advocated, to use John Dewey’s term, art as experience. This cohort hoped to make art part of everyday life by advocating community-­based art that democratized creative pursuits. Publicly funded art attracted a diverse array of opponents, including those who considered art subversive. Anti–­New Dealers, such as Texas senator Martin Dies and Virginia representative Clifton Woodrum, attacked the art projects for wasting government funds, sheltering modernists, leftists, and foreign-­born artists, and supporting leftist ideology and racially integrationist politics. Opposition also emerged from the Left, including anti-­Stalinist New York intellectuals such as Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro. By 1939, attacks on federally funded art—­as well as the economy’s recovery and the nation’s turn toward World War II—­shifted the creative locus from the public arena to universities, museums, and other 6

art as a function of government

organizations. Such privatization helped obscure the legacy of New Deal art for the next three decades. This work builds on a vast existing literature on the arts projects and on a body of artwork whose assessment has fluctuated over time. During the 1930s, New Deal art met with wide-­scale support by artists and audiences, including the educator John Dewey, the poet Archibald MacLeish, and the writer Lewis Mumford.15 But it did not find enough lay support to keep the projects afloat as World War II eclipsed the New Deal. By the time the war ended, the country’s priorities had shifted, and attacks against the politics of New Deal artists and their work in the context of the Cold War left support for them heavily attenuated. Many art historians and critics at the time emphasized the negative aspects of government funding of the arts, including its tendency to promote middlebrow work. As the art historian Jonathan Harris explained, contemporaries saw federal patronage as “curtail[ing] freedoms, distort[ing] the normative relation of the modern artists to society and ma[king] individual expression and formal experimentation all but impossible.”16 From the 1960s through the 1980s, and again at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, scholars have worked to recover the institutional histories of individual art projects, the stories behind the artists employed by them, and the actual works of art they created. The impetus for the art projects’ initial recovery was the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities and a desire to collect the works New Deal artists created and document their experiences before both their stories and their creations disappeared.17 More recent celebrations of New Deal art, which have grown out of parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, tend to reflect somewhat nostalgically on the decade’s creative endeavors, to emphasize the uniqueness of the moment, and to use the art projects to encourage increased government investment in the arts today.18 Cultural historians such as Karal Ann Marling, Lawrence Levine, and Morris Dickstein argued that 1930s mass or popular culture promoted a sense of hope, providing viewers with tools to cope with everyday life and maintain faith in their country’s ability to restore itself and the American Dream.19 Between the two revival periods in the 1960s/1970s and the early years of the twenty-­first century, scholars were more ambivalent about the arts projects. Researchers associated with the New Left argued that, like New Deal policies more generally, New Deal art naturalized bourgeois values and managerial capitalism by promoting hegemonic thinking. The historian James Curtis’s argument about the government photographer Dorothea Lange’s renowned Migrant Mother illustrates this argument. Curtis 7

introduction

contended that in framing the subjects of Migrant Mother to resemble a Madonna and child—­plus two other young children on the side—­Lange purposely ignored Florence Owens’s (later Thompson’s) four other children. The inclusion of her teenage daughter would, he felt, have highlighted the young age at which Owens became a mother. The incorporation of so many children would have further distanced her from white, middle-­class norms. Thus, Curtis argues, Lange intentionally framed an image that would conform to national, middle-­class, racial assumptions.20 Endemic to critiques such as Curtis’s is a broader assessment of the shortcomings of the New Deal. They suggest that Social Security and work-­relief programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the WPA shut down radical discourse and preserved hierarchical distinctions, particularly those based on gender and race. A second body of literature, led by Michael Denning, held that, rather than subverting leftist expression, New Deal culture provided a vehicle for the flowering and dissemination of industrial unionism. Denning argued that cultural developments in music, theater, writing, film, and cartoons challenged the traditional role assigned to the working class in the “age of the CIO.” Instead, New Deal art made visible previously forgotten publics, created positive representations of laborers working cooperatively, and helped a newly unionized working class realize its grace, strength, and possibility.21 This work broadens our conception of New Deal art beyond celebratory recovery work and debates over its contributions to the Left and multiculturalism. Artists on the Left certainly did play an important role in demanding the creation of government-­sponsored art projects, yet they were far from the only contributors to the New Deal cultural efforts. Like the economic policies of the New Deal, its cultural works were experimental and, at times, chaotic. No single ideology drove them forward. Instead, they incorporated an eclectic group of artists and intellectuals—­including ones who vehemently disagreed with (and even, at times, detested) one another—­and encouraged them to pursue diverse initiatives without a single principle uniting them. Despite their divergences, the New Deal cultural efforts can be grouped into overarching approaches. Thus, overtly political art (art as a weapon) juxtaposed art aimed to inspire (art as grandeur), enrich (art as enrichment), and encourage healthy and productive activities (art as experience). If an explicitly political group sought to use its art as a lever for social change, New Deal art also incorporated classically trained, elite artists who aspired to glorify the nation and a broader range of state-­funded artists who drew on regional themes to connect viewers with their local history. In addition, a band of art enthusiasts hoped to 8

art as a function of government

make art part of everyday life through encouraging the democratization of creative pursuits and building community art centers across the nation. While such approaches and those advocating them often differed broadly from one another, they were part of an explicitly cultural effort to bring art into the public consciousness and use it to shape ideas about, among other things, citizenship, politics, gender, class, and race. For a brief period, the New Deal art projects applied to cultural life the liberal creed: the idea that the government should play a central role in the nation’s development. Thus, cultural advocates sought to use the state to democratize and Americanize art, although they disagreed about what that meant and how best that might happen. Despite such disparities, they collectively sought to do something beyond restoring the economy by putting needy artists to work; they were also part of an explicitly cultural endeavor. Meanwhile, those who considered art to be subversion sought to undermine such efforts by associating public funding of the arts with waste and political radicalism. Earlier research on New Deal art tends to concentrate on specific projects, particular locations, or genres. In contrast, this work examines not only the best-­known New Deal art projects, the WPA’s means-­tested Federal One, which included the FAP, the FTP, the FWP, and the Federal Music Project, but also merit-­based New Deal art projects such as the mural and sculpture units associated with the Treasury Department and the photographic division connected with the Resettlement Administration/ Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Such programs are divided into concepts on the basis of the aesthetic visions of the art administrators who ran the various projects, the cultural traditions of the artists who worked under them, and the various demands of the audiences that engaged in their efforts. The categories examined are neither entirely new nor discrete. They have precursors in the late nineteenth-­century City Beautiful movement as well as the early twentieth-­century transatlantic Progressive reformers, modernists, and cultural nationalists.22 They also can overlap. For example, Flanagan and her Federal Theater appear in chapter 4, “Art as a Weapon,” but the plays she produced ranged from pageants to Shakespearean classics to Living Newspapers. Such works expressed aesthetics that were also consistent with the ideas of art as grandeur, art as enrichment, and art as experience. In retrospect, other groupings also could have been added to the typology, particularly art as labor, which might have placed artists on the left rather than art administrators at the center and then examined how they identified with, and attempted to organize themselves alongside, manual laborers. Nevertheless, such categories 9

introduction

are useful as analytic tools that help map the contours of government-­ funded art during the 1930s. They also illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to public art from the 1930s to today. This work frequently analyzes the creation and reception of a particular government-­funded work of art, such as a building, a mural, a play, or a community art center. Some of the examples are representative of the aesthetic approach described; others were chosen because of the extensive documentation around them describing, for example, artists’ intentions, their conflicts with a range of administrators, and audiences’ perceptions of the work. In analyzing such works, certain media, such as murals or photographs, were assigned to particular categories on the basis of the aesthetic visions articulated by the art administrators who ran the various New Deal art divisions. It can be difficult to uncover how audiences responded to specific works of art. At times, this work uses journalists’ interpretations to stand in for lay responses. When alternative sources were available, however, other measures, such as letters to the editor, exhibit response cards, and correspondence to the art administrators, were employed. Some of the ways that art administrators, their artistic staffs/relief workers, lay people, and politicians imagined public art functioning were more contentious than others. Sometimes, artists felt that lay leaders interfered with their creative efforts. At other times, community members found government-­sponsored art insulting. Such tensions—­even under Roosevelt’s liberal regime—­warn us that the relationship between the artistic community and taxpayers is inherently troubled. They also illustrate how a lack of consensus over who owns public art and what artists’ responsibilities to the nation are has impeded and continues to hinder government support for the arts. Although New Deal art exposes some of the key shortcomings of government funding, it also illustrates its potential. By uncovering the wide range of roles that New Dealers imagined art playing in society, this work aims to broaden how we think about the relationship between art and the state—­not only in the past but also today.

10

One

May the Artist Live? In October 1933, just seven months after FDR’s initial inauguration, Audrey McMahon, the director of the College Art Association, entitled an article she published in the association’s journal “May the Artist Live?”1 McMahon had spent considerable time mulling over this question. Beginning with the stock crash in 1929, the association she directed had become the first stomping ground for indigent artists.2 On the basis of her experiences, she attested that New York housed about eight thousand needy artists, and she estimated that, nationally, two or three times as many were destitute. Using McMahon’s figures and the 1930 federal census as a yardstick, somewhere between one-­third and almost one-­half of the country’s artists found themselves without work or a means to support themselves in the early 1930s (and this figure does not include those who might have been reluctant to identify themselves to census workers as artists).3 Although unemployment was worse in certain areas than others and such figures routinely underestimate the underemployed and underpaid, roughly one-­quarter of the national population was without work. Thus, the rate of unemployment among artists was, unsurprisingly, markedly higher than in the general population. Clearly, artists were particularly hard-­pressed. McMahon’s article represented a plea to continue support for the government-­subsidized experimental art project she oversaw in New York City from December 1932 until its funds ran out in August 1933. The project employed one hundred artists to decorate public buildings with murals and teach underprivileged children in settlement houses in 11

chapter One

exchange for a modest weekly stipend of $15. “For a very small expenditure,” she wrote, it is possible to put the artist to work. Throughout the land are vast public buildings with glaring, hideous walls—­these can be decorated and art brought to people of every community. . . . Or shall our walls remain blank, and blank the minds of our people to art, and blank of hope the lives of our artists? Shall our children, who could be taught so much, to wield a brush, to enjoy a line or love a color, learn nothing while those who could teach them starve? Shall this age be known to posterity as a dark era during which we turned all our thoughts to material fears and closed our minds to the hope and relief offered by beauty? It need not be so.4

Calls by McMahon, her colleagues, and unemployed artists themselves for government investment in the arts might have fallen on deaf ears had they not developed in the context of new economic and political thinking about the role of the state in the nation’s economic and cultural development. Artists benefited from new ideas regarding who should provide relief and what it should constitute. New Dealers—­and artists and intellectuals themselves—­viewed those in the art world as art workers.5 Although the work they produced was cultural, this cohort envisioned it as legitimately constituting labor like that produced by other workers in Great Depression America. The art projects, thus, fit into a broader government attempt to jump-­start the economy and preserve the skills and morale of the unemployed able-­bodied (largely, but not wholly, defined as white and male) by putting them to work. Although the idea of work relief was central to the foundation of the art projects, new ideas about the state’s role in shaping culture were also critical. Cultural enthusiasts both on the Left and within the mainstream feared that the Great Depression put artists, private patronage, and national aesthetics more generally at risk of virtual extinction. To ward off such a fate and keep up with a growing international trend toward government subsidization of the arts and use of culture to promote overtly political ends, they argued that taxpayers needed to support the arts and to forge a democratic culture. Government-­funded art had the capacity, they contended, to address the problems of leisure as well as the crisis of faith raised by the specter of mass unemployment. It could help lay audiences to live more meaningful lives, safeguard democracy, and oppose fascism. Of course, there were points of contention among those who developed and participated in the cultural projects of the New Deal about who should create government-­sponsored art, the 12

M ay t h e A r t is t L i v e ?

conditions under which it should be created, and how it should look, in terms of both content and style. Despite such concerns, the 1930s marked a critical—­albeit short-­lived—­moment during which a tenuous alliance emerged between artists and the state and new ideas emerged regarding the role that government should and should not play in the arts. What conditions and ideas drove the New Deal cultural turn? The growing gap in 1933 between the needs of artists and intellectuals and the resources available to them, coupled with key turning points, such as the Nelson Rockefeller–­Diego Rivera scandal of 1933 and the formation of the Popular Front, spurred an array of leaders—­within the president’s administration, within the established art world, and among rank-­and-­ file artists and intellectuals—­to imagine, demand, and create a wide range of approaches to government support of the arts. Objecting to the constraints that private patrons like Nelson Rockefeller placed on the artists they commissioned, this cohort turned, instead, to the government to provide useful and self-­sustaining work for artists as it was doing for other unemployed laborers. They hoped that such public commissions would preserve their autonomy and encourage experimentation, even as they feared that it would impede them. Two vital forces driving the development of the New Deal art projects were the crisis of the Great Depression and its impact on artists and intellectuals. The stock market crash intensified artists’ and intellectuals’ preexisting struggles by wiping out the art market. The downturn hit the pocketbooks of wealthy benefactors and reduced private patronage by individuals and corporations.6 Those who continued to buy works of art tended to search for good financial investments and safe, aesthetically pleasing works. The well-­being of living artists was not at the forefront of their decisions.7 Criticizing the limited efforts of patrons to support present-­day art, the artist-­activist Chet La More explained: “Private patronage had failed in the function it must perform to have validity as an instrument for sustaining a vital development of contemporary art.”8 Beyond the shortcomings of individual supporters, artists could not find work outside the art world either. The Depression impaired secondary employment for artists and intellectuals, many of whom had previously made their living as teachers, graphic designers, advertisers, or menial laborers. Within this context, artists and intellectuals found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. “Regardless of what talents or gifts we were favored with by the gods,” complained the influential modernist painter Max Weber, “in order to obtain a hearing and a return commensurate with our creative gifts, we must live in slums, lose our reason, cut off our 13

chapter One

ears and noses, and finally commit suicide if we hope for a considerable audience a half-­century after our flight from this planet.”9 The novelist Sinclair Lewis similarly lamented the absence of institutional support for young writers in his 1930 lecture accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. “A true-­blue professor of literature in an American university,” he explained, “considers literature to be something other than that which a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead; it is something magically produced by super human beings who must, if they are to be regarded as artists at all, have died at least one hundred years before the diabolical invention of the typewriter.”10 Musicians also suffered. The journalist I. A. Hirschman poignantly described their plight in the face of the Depression and longer-­term trends, including the development of radio, records, and talking films. “Hundreds of . . . street musicians,” he wrote, “stroll . . . about the cities, shivering in winter, playing for pennies as best they can with numb fingers and running noses.”11 Philanthropists, unions, mutual aid societies, and professional organizations like McMahon’s College Art Association and the American Federation of Musicians struggled to fill the gap the Depression had created. Professional organizations used free performances to raise funds for artists and increase popular interest in live music and theater.12 But such private efforts were, as the art critic Suzanne La Follette explained, “unsystematic and wholly incommensurate with the need.”13 McMahon’s experimental program, just like her provocative question, “May the artist live?” marked a growing sense of frustration and a call for increased long-­term government intervention in the arts. This call paralleled a similar endeavor to enhance government involvement in relief, work, and poverty. In the late nineteenth century, responsibility for providing relief for the indigent rested on local communities, which tended to stigmatize them, investigating their behavior and using it to distinguish between those who were worthy and those who did not deserve to receive aid.14 New Deal policies maintained such distinctions in terms of the relief they provided for women and racial minorities, who were more likely to receive means-­tested direct relief than work relief.15 Yet the provision of work relief reflected a new attempt to nationalize relief and recast employment as a civic right. Harry Hopkins, a trained social worker who provided funding for McMahon’s project as the director of New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA)—­ the

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first state relief organization in the United States—­perhaps best embodies this shift in orientation. His work on relief and the challenges faced by the unemployed began well before the Great Depression. In 1912, as a twenty-­two-­year-­old, the young Grinnell-­educated Iowan moved to New York City to work at Christodora Settlement House, where he was charged with visiting the poor in their homes to determine their needs. But his experiences with a growing cohort of aid recipients—­ first at Christodora and then through the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, where he was charged with researching why relief applications had risen—­led him to conclude that the roots of poverty lay in unemployment rather than personality or cultural shortcomings.16 In an address on federal relief at a Works Progress Administration (WPA) luncheon, he criticized the old stingy approach to the poor characterized by the Elizabethan Poor Law, which, he argued, was based on a moral philosophy that assumed that “if anyone’s poor it’s because something is wrong with them.” Instead, he contended that the unemployed should not be made to beg. As he put it: “They are American citizens like the rest of us. It is no fault of their own that they are out of work, and it is the business of society to take care of them.” “I made up my mind early in this game,” he continued, “that relief was a matter of right and not a matter of charity.”17 Hopkins was determined that the government should provide work for the unemployed, but he was also clear that just any job would not do. “Our major thesis,” he had declared at a conference geared to administrators of white-­collar projects a few months earlier, “is determining that these unemployed people are to have decent jobs, that we are not going to let them lose their skills, and that we are going to put them to work on the things that they are best adapted to, and best qualified to do.”18 Hopkins’s consciousness regarding the difficulties that unemployed artists faced was reportedly raised shortly after the stock market crashed. In 1929, he volunteered with the Red Cross, an agency whose southeastern division he had run in the 1920s. While assigning privately funded jobs in the park system to unemployed men, he allegedly “noticed men carrying violin cases standing in line for pick-­and-­shovel jobs and, struck by the thought that fiddlers’ hands were probably disastrously vulnerable to such work, saw to it that the lightest jobs went to them.”19 Even if this story is apocryphal, by the time Hopkins was in a position to distribute work-­relief jobs more broadly, he paid particular attention to the special needs of artists and intellectuals. Following his work for TERA, he helped create and oversee programs oriented specifically to cultural

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laborers within the series of relief programs he oversaw, from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to the Civil Works Administration to the WPA. Hopkins did not draw a distinction between unemployed artists and writers and other out-­of-­work laborers. He believed that each should be hired to do what he or she did best. “We decided,” he explained, “to take the skills of these people wherever we found them and put them to work to save their skills when the public wanted them. Sure we put musicians into orchestras. Sure we let artists paint.”20 Jacob Baker, another WPA administrator, clarified the administration’s position on providing targeted work specific to white-­collar workers—­artists or otherwise—­as vital to maintaining morale. “We realized early,” he explained, “that it is more harmful to a man’s morale to put him to work at a job he was not fitted for, to put a doctor of philosophy or a mechanic to digging ditches, than to give him a dole, and let him remain idle.”21 The WPA administrator Aubrey Williams concurred. As he explained: “We don’t think a good musician should be asked to turn [into a] second-­rate laborer in order that a sewer may be laid for relative permanency rather than a concert given for the momentary pleasure of our people.”22 When addressing critical journalists regarding government funding of the arts, Hopkins was blunter in its defense: “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”23 The other Harry—­Harold Ickes—­articulated an alternative approach to work relief. Whereas Hopkins and his various relief programs focused on rapid spending to employ as many people as possible, Ickes’s Public Works Administration (PWA) was as cautious, formal, and fastidious as he was. The PWA concentrated on, and funded, infrastructure more than work relief. Ickes and his agency were wary of spending government money for projects that might be deemed controversial or unworthy. And they insisted that cities match PWA funding locally. Thus, even as Ickes oversaw the construction of some of the major New Deal developments, including the Triborough Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Grand Coulee Dam, and the Key West Highway, he spent government resources slowly, never fully dispensing his budget, which was originally set at $3.3 billion.24 As it turned out, the first New Deal art project—­the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP)—­and a series of art programs based in the Treasury Department that succeeded it—­including the Section of Painting and Sculpture, which later became the Section of Fine Arts—­implemented neither Hopkins’s work-­ relief organization nor Ickes’s infrastructure-­ based agency. Instead, the art administrators and New Dealers who built

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such programs focused primarily on aesthetics. PWAP, which Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. created by executive order on October 16, 1934, preserved and promoted the “best art the country was capable of creating with merit as the only test.”25 PWAP and the Treasury Department’s efforts to create high-­quality art sought to counter a sense of cultural inferiority in the United States, where aesthetics had long been rooted in European cultural models and assumptions of European superiority. PWAP art officials were keen to emphasize what they considered to be meritorious artists and artwork rather than relief employment. For example, the Whitney Museum director and PWAP New York regional director, Juliana Force, turned away nearly six artist applicants for every one hired. She did not contact the Unemployed Artists Group when she wrote to a range of organizations soliciting lists of needy artists, and she hired some artists who did not need the support.26 Charles Moore, the chair of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), articulated the type of philosophy informing Force’s perspective in a lecture delivered in 1922 in Kansas City. He clearly believed that the employment of artists had to be based first and foremost on the quality of the work they created. “Let it be taken as an axiom,” he explained, “that no small man mentally can make a great statue. Better far get a copy of a good work of art than put up with a poor original. And never be led to patronize home talent, unless the home talent be competent. Your first and great object is to obtain a work of art, not to provide a job for a local craftsmen.”27 Force and Moore’s emphasis on artistic quality over the relief of needy artists reflected a broader aesthetic movement to locate and create a new American modernist aesthetic during and after World War I. A corps of transnational artists and intellectuals sought to use their work to engender shared sensibilities as well as universal feelings of refinement, uplift, and transformation. Beginning with an assumption of American exceptionalism, such efforts emphasized industrialization, the machine, and New York to highlight what made America unique. But, even as these artists explored cultural nationalism, they did not essentialize America. Instead, they debated what styles and subject matter would constitute a distinctively national aesthetic. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, the rise of regionalist consciousness moved that search for what Georgia O’Keefe called “the Great American Thing” to the American heartland.28 Artists, art administrators, art critics, and audiences hotly contested which artists and works of art represented this new national aesthetic and merited government funding. Despite such disputes, the Treasury

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Department was an obvious body to oversee the selection of artists and works of art to decorate government property since it had been responsible for the acquisition of art in public buildings since the early nineteenth century. In addition, the CFA, which, since 1910, had advised the president and Congress on art, continued to influence New Deal artists and the works they produced. While the commission valued classical iconography created by a small cohort of academically trained artists, PWAP hired a more diverse array of artists on the basis of juried competitions and supported art that drew on American imagery. Scholars often point to the muralist George Biddle as the forefather of the New Deal art projects, especially attributing to him the creation within the Treasury Department of a section devoted to the fine arts.29 Biddle, who attended Groton and Harvard with FDR, wrote an often-­ cited letter to the president on May 9, 1933, suggesting that American muralists could be paid “plumbers’ wages” as Mexican muralists had been “in order to express on the walls of the government buildings the social ideals” that FDR was struggling to achieve.30 Unlike McMahon, who was primarily focused on the need to provide relief for indigent artists, Biddle viewed a federally sponsored mural program as a propaganda tool to promote New Deal ideology. Although Biddle played an important role in shaping the New Deal art projects and especially in expanding their focus from the classical, elite world the CFA favored, he did not operate alone. He was one of many artists, dealers, and organizations petitioning the government for the creation of art projects.31 As Jerre Mangione, a former member of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) who became a professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania, explained: “Without the prolonged insistence of professional artists’ and writers’ organizations and left-­wing activity, Federal One might never have come into being.”32 Federal One, as it was often called, was a subsidiary of the WPA’s relief-­based effort to provide indigent or unemployed artists and intellectuals with work and an income. The Communist activist and painter Phil Bard concurred: “It is generally agreed that it is directly due to the formation, existence and activities of the Artists’ Union that government projects on a large scale were brought into being.”33 Within the context of broader agitation by artists on the Left and FDR’s First Hundred Days, Biddle’s letter piqued the president’s interest. His proposal countered the demands of destitute artists and also provided an innovative vehicle for mass communication just as the president was actively experimenting with a range of responses to the crisis of the Great Depression. FDR forwarded the letter to his art adviser Charles 18

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Moore for advice.34 But, particularly given the timing of the letter, it would be surprising if Biddle’s overtly political conception of government art—­and his explicit connection between American and Mexican artists—­met with anything other than condemnation from Moore and the CFA. Indeed, although Biddle’s letter does not allude to it, the very night he penned it the newly constructed seventy-­story RCA (now GE) Building had become an ideological battleground over the nation’s future, pitting the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera against the oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s son Nelson and the management team overseeing RCA. Rivera was known for his oversized personality and tendency to instigate controversy well before he arrived in New York that April with a commission from Rockefeller to decorate the RCA’s lobby. In 1929, the Mexican Communist Party had expelled the artist after he accepted a government post as head of the National School of Fine Art during a period when the Mexican government was attacking the Communist Party. Similarly, many on the Left in the United States, including the editor of the New Masses, Joseph Freeman, condemned him for selling out by accepting commissions from capitalists, such as the Rockefeller and Ford families. Rivera also stirred up controversy with his corporate patrons by inserting class conflict into the projects they hired him to do, including the decoration of buildings exemplifying capitalism, such as the RCA, which was home to two of the nation’s key cultural institutions: RKO Studios and NBC radio.35 Rivera’s Marxist politics and social-­realist iconography were not unknown to his corporate sponsors before they hired him. Just before arriving in New York to paint the RCA Building for Nelson Rockefeller, Rivera had completed a controversial twenty-­seven-­panel fresco of the city’s industrial history in the Detroit Institute of Art at the bequest of the car magnate Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. Nelson Rockefeller was even aware of a portrait that Rivera had painted in Mexico City of his father, in which he literally eats money at a dinner party. Neither Rivera’s anticapitalist stance nor his politics, however, discouraged Rockefeller, who wanted to secure a leading artist for the wall.36 Initially, no problems arose between the artist and his patrons. Nelson and his mother, Abby Rockefeller, a modern art collector who had first bought works painted by Rivera in the Soviet Union in 1927, approved the sketches of Rivera’s mural, entitled Man at the Crossroads of Life, Looks with Uncertainty at the Future but Hopes for a Better Solution. Along with a large cohort of artists and admirers, they frequently visited the muralist as he painted. 19

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Fig. 1.1    Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads of Life (mural in progress), May 1933, RCA

Building, Rockefeller Center, NY. Photograph by Lucienne Bloch. © 2014 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Nevertheless, on the evening of May 9, 1933, representatives of  Rocke­ feller Center’s management team, Todd, Robertson, and Todd, informed Rivera that his mural was no longer acceptable to the Rockefeller family. After removing the one hundred or so art students and admirers who nightly gathered around the artist to aid and observe his work, the management agents escorted Rivera off his scaffolding and outside the building past the mounted and foot police who were present to prevent demonstrations. Once home, Rivera found a letter from the same firm dismissing him, along with a $14,000 check, which constituted the unpaid portion of his $21,000 compensation for completing the mural.37 Rivera’s insertion of the revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin just to the left of the mural’s central figure—­Contemporary Man (a skilled worker)—­ motivated the management team’s actions. Despite Rivera’s claims to the contrary, Lenin’s visage was not indicated in the original approved sketch of the mural, which instead contained the figure of a nondescript leader. Lenin was to have been holding hands with a Caucasian soldier as well as a Caucasian and an African American laborer. When Nelson Rockefeller 20

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wrote Rivera insisting that he substitute an unknown face for Lenin’s, Rivera refused to do so. Instead, he offered to expand the mural to include Abraham Lincoln and other nineteenth-­century abolitionist figures such as John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.38 Failing to reach an agreement, Nelson and Abby Rockefeller investigated having the mural moved to the Museum of Modern Art. When their efforts proved unsuccessful, RCA’s management team intervened. At midnight on February 9, 1934, workers contracted by Todd, Robertson, and Todd smashed the painting to pieces. Despite Rivera’s polarizing tendencies, the painter and his mural became a cause célèbre. Those supporting his dismissal organized the Advance American Art Commission to exclude foreign painters (and presumably their radical ideology) from the United States. Those opposing his treatment, in contrast, used it to highlight the vulnerability of artists to patrons’ caprices, equating the Rockefellers’ actions with the “vicious deeds of Hitler,” especially the Nazis’ decree three days after Rivera’s dismissal that May 12 would be a book-­burning day for Jewish authors, including the works of Karl Marx.39 Growing constraints on freedom prompted the California-­based sculptor Benjamino Benvenuto Bufano to ask: “How can a cultural pattern be developed for America if art and the artists are subjugated to the whims and idiosyncrasies of a few overfed decadent merchant princes, carryovers from the days of feudalism?”40 Increasingly those sharing his concerns took to the streets. By the evening of May 14, four hundred men and women from fifteen different organizations, including the John Reed Club, had temporarily coalesced to protest Rockefeller’s treatment of Rivera’s work.41 Three days later, three hundred artists and intellectuals participated in a mass meeting at Columbus Circle followed by picketing first of Rockefeller Center and then of Rockefeller’s home at East Fifty-­fourth Street.42 Even those who did not sympathize with Rivera’s Leninist politics opposed the idea that a patron could destroy an artist’s work. Biddle fell into this camp. On May 15, he joined a committee of artists and writers that met with Rivera’s lawyer to draw up a statement protesting Rockefeller’s actions as infringing on an artist’s right to complete a contract.43 Biddle was ultimately one of forty-­six people who signed the letter. Other signers included Rockwell Kent, Suzanne La Follette, H. L. Mencken, and Lewis Mumford.44 Although the Rivera-­Rockefeller scandal did not directly prompt the creation of the first New Deal art project (PWAP), by highlighting problems inherent in the traditional relationship between artists and patrons it encouraged the exploration of other alternatives. Additionally, it 21

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galvanized artists on the Left, whose ongoing organizing and protests—­ especially in the aftermath of the formation of the Popular Front, a broad alliance between the Communist Party USA and liberals, including supporters of the New Deal—­played a key role in the creation of Federal One. Unsurprisingly, FDR’s aesthetic adviser Moore firmly cautioned the president against associating his administration with such controversial figures. Describing Biddle and his colleagues as “painters of easel pictures of an incidental nature” who have recently stirred much controversy and embarrassed those who commissioned them, Moore threw the weight of the academic art world behind his condemnation of a federally sponsored mural program. He explained that both the National Society of Mural Painters and the American Academy of Rome accused recent muralists of painting “chaotic composition[s], [that were] inharmonious in style and scale with the building[s they occupied].” Furthermore, he attested in a statement—­that easily could have alluded to Rivera’s politics and work—­that their subject matter frequently “profess[ed] a faith which the general public does not share.”45 Roosevelt heeded Moore’s warning to the extent that he told Biddle that he did not want young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Department.46 Despite such concerns, the president sent Biddle to consult the man who oversaw the construction and decoration of public buildings: the assistant secretary of the Treasury, Laurence W. Robert Jr.47 Robert recommended bypassing the CFA and, instead, creating a “sponsoring committee representing a ‘sufficient variety of art interests so that he would be protected in acting on their advice.’ ”48 Working together with the artists-­administrators Edward Bruce and Olin Dows, Biddle helped establish a series of art programs in the Treasury Department, which initially secured 1 percent of the $144 million set aside for federal buildings to commission some of the nation’s best painters and sculptors to decorate newly constructed public spaces.49 Because of its emphasis on merit, the Treasury programs focused more on preserving what its officials deemed to be high-­quality American art than on relief. Nevertheless, it succeeded in creating an institution that espoused a substantially more democratic ethos than that adopted by the CFA. The Treasury’s art programs reflected the Progressive-­ style reform liberalism that characterized the early days of the New Deal. At that time, reformers such as Rexford Tugwell and Henry Wallace set out to remake corporate capitalism into a genuinely cooperative, harmonious, and ordered economic system with the federal government serving 22

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as the economy’s chief planning agent.50 Just as New Dealers wanted the federal government to mediate between labor and businesses, they also imagined the state moderating the often-­problematic relationships among artists, patrons, and lay publics that had emerged so recently in the battle over Rockefeller Center. The federal government could monitor this relationship by altering the nature of the patronage system. Lay publics would become artists’ patrons as government support replaced private benefaction. Thus, instead of private patrons selecting the artists they deemed meritorious to decorate private spaces, taxpayers would empower leading cultural representatives to commission artists to decorate public arenas. This national system provided support for many needy artists and also redistributed cultural capital geographically. But the system also aroused critics. Artists on the Left objected to the Treasury’s power to select and define the best artists and works of art. They argued that the New Deal program concentrated power in the hands of established cultural leaders, excluding rank-­and-­file artists from the decisionmaking process. And they also objected that the government was not doing enough to help artists. According to one estimate, in March 1935, only 11 percent of workers on relief were white-­ collar, while one-­twelfth of the nation’s white-­collar male workers and one-­third of its female workers remained in need of assistance.51 Such rates underestimated the number of disadvantaged artists, given their reluctance to identify as white-­collar workers. Nevertheless, to protest the administration’s negligence and its control of publicly funded art, artists on the Left joined a growing rebellion characterized by strikes, food riots, boycotts, and dissident political movements. Artists, for example, responded to the termination of McMahon’s art project for needy artists in 1933 by creating the Unemployed Artists Group, a small, militant organization that lobbied the government to provide work relief for needy artists. These newly politicized artists and intellectuals added their voices to the growing body of un-­and underemployed. Such discontented individuals criticized the administration for failing to respond adequately to the crisis of the Depression. Like many other working-­class people in 1933–­34, artists and intellectuals joined various groups—­the United American Artists, the Artists’ Committee of Action, the Writers’ Union, and the Artists’ Union—­to improve their collective lot. Such groups used the media, especially the left-­leaning Art Front, to increase pressure on the government to support living artists without dictating a national aesthetic and also engaged in union drives, mass picketings, strikes, and sit-­ins to draw attention to their cause. From the summer of 1934 to January of the following year, the Artists’ Union grew nine-­fold (from one to 23

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nine hundred), becoming a national institution with members in major urban centers across the country.52 By the spring of 1937, membership in the Artists’ Union had grown almost four times larger (to four thousand), and branches existed in twenty states.53 As street activists, this cohort integrated art into their protests, decorating their marches with posters, lithographs, and billboards—­even performing theater and dancing in the streets—­to persuade the public that art workers deserved to be paid the prevailing wage and should be given the autonomy to express themselves freely.54 In 1935, Roosevelt responded to the demands of dissident political leaders and organized laborers—­including artists—­by shifting his political agenda to the left and adopting a series of new programs that directly supported needy Americans.55 The WPA, which brought Hopkins’s work-­relief approach to the legislative forefront, exemplified FDR’s altered stance. On May 6, 1935, as part of his third Executive Order, the president federalized work relief. The WPA devoted $4 billion to moving 3.5 million “employable” people—­typically defined as healthy white adults who were neither mothers nor senior citizens—­from direct relief to work relief to the private sector. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA “built or improved more than 2,500 hospitals, 5,900 school buildings, 1,000 air fields and nearly 13,000 playgrounds.”56 In addition to hiring blue-­collar workers, the relief administrator also employed statisticians, bookbinders, architects, and fifty thousand teachers. Hopkins also set up Federal One, which received roughly 2.5 percent of WPA funds, including the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Art Project (FAP), and the FWP. Overall, the WPA managed to create eight million jobs, which as a percentage of today’s population would be equivalent to employment for eighteen million.57 Unlike the Treasury’s art programs, which sought to create culture, the main thrust of Federal One was to make work and provide jobs for the unemployed. In addition to street protests, shifting economic thinking played a role in FDR’s enhanced concentration on work relief and incorporation of the arts into it. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935–­36), the British economist John Maynard Keynes provided a theoretical rationale for the notion that short-­term deficit spending, including wide-­scale investment in public works and the hiring of the unemployed, would restore the economy. But, even earlier in the decade, Sweden and Nazi Germany had been experimenting with the use of government expenditure to ease unemployment, and Keynes had been developing his stabilization principle in lectures at Cambridge University.58 New Dealers were early adopters of this developing approach. And they 24

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extended to the arts the idea of government spending on the building of roads, swimming pools, and post offices. Art, as much as business, agriculture, and labor, was a vital national concern. Similarly, unemployed artists and intellectuals needed work as much as indigent laborers and farmers did.59 Plus, providing such individuals with paychecks would flush money into the economy and, therefore, reinvigorate the consumer base in addition to enhancing the national infrastructure. Furthermore, it could remove unemployed citizens from the streets and provide them with useful activities that would, or so the argument went, deter radicalism. Such ideology clearly shaped Federal One. Yet relief alone did not drive the creation and maintenance of Federal One. Its supporters also drew on new cultural theories, including the idea that economic redistribution would exhaust the resources of the wealthy, thereby ending private philanthropy. As the physicist Arthur Compton explained: “With the present tendencies of our economic organization, which are directed toward more equal distribution of wealth, the arts and sciences cannot look forward in the future to support on anything like the same scale from individual patrons that they have received during the past generation.”60 Rather than trying to convince more people to buy art (as New Dealers would do later in the 1930s) or asking artists to limit their activities, New Dealers contended that direct government intervention was crucial. “I don’t think for a minute,” Hopkins attested, “that the U.S. Government, or some public body, is ever going to be out of the theater business again. . . . The days of the Medicis financing the arts are all over. . . . [The rich] are going to be taxed so much that they can’t possibly finance them.”61 Even as they were inaccurate, such predictions illustrate a contemporary perception that federal support was necessary to ensure the continued development of the arts and sciences. Encouraged by tax breaks on charitable deductions, private philanthropy provided (and continues to provide) substantial support for the arts to this day. The Artists’ Union further echoed that sentiment. Like other organized labor groups at the time, the Artists’ Union, which unsuccessfully attempted to join the AFL in 1935 and then affiliated with the CIO from 1938 to 1942, relied on militant techniques, including picket lines, demonstrations, work stoppages, and sit-­ins, to influence government policies. As the “de facto bargaining agent for project personnel,” the union negotiated relatively high wages (the highest allowed by the WPA) and played a key part in setting hours and work conditions.62 It also resisted layoffs and wage cuts, insisting on quotas for hiring nonrelief workers on the arts projects, countering censorship and racism, and advocating 25

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for the establishment of a permanent art project.63 But its confrontational tactics—­including the six-­hundred-­person takeover of the Forty-­ second Street office of New York City’s Federal Arts Project and holding hostage for fifteen hours the project’s new director, Harold Stein—­made them the targets of anti–­New Deal attacks.64 Still, from its earliest stages, the Artists’ Union turned to the government to improve the conditions artists faced. Both in manifestos and in magazines on the Left, such as the Art Front, this cohort echoed Hopkins’s understanding that “private patronage [was] dead” and that the state needed to fill in the gap.65 New Deal art advocates hoped that federal patronage would illustrate the importance of national development beyond the bottom line. They believed that government should forge what the historian Jane de Hart Mathews called a “cultural democracy”—­a society where art would be accessible, integrated into mainstream life, and expressive of the nation’s spirit.66 The Great Depression, they argued, had produced a crisis of faith by challenging the ethos of rugged individualism and highlighting the problems inherent in a society that values economic growth over moral development. As the director of the Treasury Department’s art program, Ed Bruce, explained, federal funding represented “a recognition that things of culture and of the spirit contribute to the well-­being of the nation.”67 New Dealers were also influenced by aesthetic ideas that had been circulating since the turn of the century. They were drawn to methods outlined by the philosopher, educator, and reformer John Dewey, the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, and the librarian and museum administrator John Cotton Dana. Using government funding, New Dealers sought to popularize art and restore it to the everyday. They wanted to democratize high art and to encourage ordinary people to engage in creative experiences. Exposure to and participation in the arts, they envisioned, would improve Americans as citizens and as human beings. Dewey, for example, argued that creative encounters could facilitate social responsibility by breaking down preexisting barriers and assumptions. The “moral function” of art, he contended, was “to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, [and] perfect the power to perceive.”68 Art, furthermore, could help people achieve a significant, meaningful, and fulfilled life.69 By democratizing art, government funding offered to address two key issues that vexed New Deal art advocates: the problem of leisure and the crisis of faith. The Great Depression turned leisure into a national calamity. During the early twentieth century, many reformers imagined 26

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and feared that the working class had too little work to do. Since the Depression left roughly 30 percent of the population unemployed, their concerns about what workers would do in their free time only heightened. Social scientists, public intellectuals, and reformers cautioned that increased leisure would translate into more time devoted to mass media, popular culture, and spectator sports, which would promote passivity, inertia, and social maladjustment.70 Many warned that such conditions would make Americans susceptible to radicalism and fascism.71 In a study of social trends commissioned by President Herbert Hoover, the sociologist J. F. Steiner called for the government to play a more active role in shaping Americans’ leisure activities. Steiner suggested that the government ought to counter “undesirable” working-­class amusements such as film, radio, dance halls, billiard rooms, cabarets, and horse racing by “providing recreational facilities of a wholesome kind,” such as playgrounds, swimming pools, and summer camps. “What is needed,” he insisted, “is a larger degree of statesmanlike planning than has yet been attempted in order that the further development of the recreation movement [reformers’ efforts to engage citizens in physically and psychologically useful leisure activities] may be as much as possible in the interests of the general welfare.”72 For New Deal art advocates, government funding of the arts offered just the type of “wholesome” activity that Steiner advocated. According to a brochure for the publicly funded Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the arts provided people “not only a constructive use of their [free] time but a satisfying personal expression.” Federally funded art centers provided the functional equivalent of parks and playgrounds for individuals who were more attuned to “work of a . . . personal and creative nature” than to “games and play.”73 The journalist John Huseby argued that art centers could also reorient Americans away from spectatorship, encouraged by mechanization and new forms of entertainment such as movies and radios, and toward active engagement in the world. “In the creative use of time off,” Huseby asserted, “art stands almost alone in giving free rein to personal expression. In addition it develops self-­assurance and an appreciation of skills which otherwise may be lessened or destroyed by the mechanical aids which are so rapidly supplanting hand work.”74 Art activities also promised to make Americans’ lives more meaningful by providing them with what Van Wyck Brooks described as a “usable past,” a national tradition that unified contemporaries around common principles and values.75 According to Constance Rourke, a literary critic and the director of the FAP Index of American Design, Americans shared a common spiritual legacy that would help them create a fulfilling way 27

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of life. Influenced by the eighteenth-­century European writers Johann Herder and Giambattista Vico, Rourke argued that this national heritage lay not in literature created by isolated geniuses but rather in the practical arts made and enjoyed by working people.76 Rourke, along with other New Deal art administrators such as the art museum curator Holger Cahill, the musicologist Charles Seeger, the writer Henry Alsberg, and the folklorists Alan Lomax and Benjamin Botkin, used government funds to preserve folk culture and gather cultural expressions. These New Dealers hoped that identifying a usable past and uncovering what made people’s lives meaningful in the past would help Americans forge new and purposeful ways of living in the present and future. They also trusted that collecting folklore would provide participants with a socially meaningful role while simultaneously creating “a wellspring to which all artists and designers may turn for a renewed sense of native tradition.”77 As cultural enthusiasts reexamined the relationship between art and the state, international developments further led them to argue for a more direct federal role in the nation’s cultural maturation. Artists and intellectuals on the Left, including the New Deal art administrators, especially Hallie Flanagan, made their case for increasing federal government support for the arts by highlighting the comparative weakness of US investment in the arts. In a brochure entitled Art as a Function of Government: A Survey, the Long Range Committee of the Supervisors Association of the FAP noted the extent to which other countries supported their nations’ cultural development. As table 1 indicates, public support for the arts in Denmark and the Netherlands as a percentage of those countries’ total budget far outstripped other countries’ contributions. Although the per capita expenditure for the arts in the United States matched that in Germany and was slightly ahead of that in Italy by 1935, relative population sizes made US art subsidies markedly less generous than those provided by other countries. Although statistics on the Soviet Union’s art patronage are not available, many artists and intellectuals, reflecting the Left’s misplaced romance with communism at the time, believed that their Russian peers received substantially more government support than they did. At the first American Artists’ Congress, the Russian-­born printmaker Louis Lozowick explained that Soviet artists were full members of trade unions and received generous compensation for their work. The Soviets, he contended, viewed artists as “part of the vast army of workers” and as “indispensable . . . in the socialist reconstruction of the country.”78 At the same conference, the photographer Margaret Bourke-­White reported 28

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Table 1.  Expenditures for Art by Select Countries

Denmark Netherlands Czechoslovakia Sweden France Germany United Statesa Italy Great Britain Mexico

Date

Total for Art ($)

Total Budget ($)

Art as % of Total Budget

1936 1936 1935 1935 1936 1935 1935 1936 1934 1930

1,370,646 4,440,360 1,881,168 1,448,695 8,686,703 4,592,081 27,450,000 2,666,670 7,306,384 334,200

93,936,235 483,442,600 319,320,000 268.540,622 2,670,326,064 1,704,024,000 10,000,000,000 1,063,429,980 3,821,115,629 N.A.

1.46 .92 .59 .54 .33 .27 .27 .25 .19 N.A.

Sources: Federal Art Project, Art as a Function of Government: A Survey ([New York]: Supervisors Associa­­ tion of the WPA Federal Art Project, 1937), app. 1, p. 28; Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935, Public Resolution 11, 74th Cong.; Francis V. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1969), 56; US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1940), ser. F 47-­70. a US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1940), ser. F 47–­70. Note that the Long Range Committee did not include statistics on the United States. The figure in this chart denoting the total spent in the United States on art in 1935 is a rough estimate based on Federal One’s budget and an annual average of the total expenditure on the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Art Project. It does not include spending by the Historical Section, nor does it account for direct govern­ ment funding of the arts in public schools. The total US budget is based on historical statistics.

that the national arts were flourishing in the Soviet Union and mistakenly insisted that artists and writers “form the highest salaried class in the country”: “Every artistic experiment that individual artists wish to carry out they can.”79 The virtual exclusion of Trotskyites and other critics of the Soviet regime from the American Artists’ Congress and other Popular Front institutions largely explains Lozowick’s and Bourke-­ White’s hyperbole. Serious challenges to artists’ and intellectuals’ idealization of the Soviet Union would emerge with a growing awareness of Stalin’s purges, knowledge of the banning of modernism from Russian art in 1938, and, most dramatically, cognizance of the Nazi-­Soviet nonaggression pact and the Soviet attack on Finland in 1939.80 While the Soviet Union did support the arts generously, its patronage came with dictatorial strings.81 Mexico offered another model of arts patronage. In 1922, Mexican minister of education José Vasconcelos paid painters like Rivera the wages of laborers to decorate public buildings with frescoes celebrating the agrarian laborer and protesting capitalism and industrialism. Such publicly funded artists created murals rather than easel paintings and reproduced their works in syndicated publications to convey the ideas of 29

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the Mexican Revolution to a broad public.82 Over the following decade, many North American artists—­including Ben Shahn, Anton Refrieger, and Lucienne Bloch as well as less-­ well-­ known female muralists such as Eugenie Shonnard and the sisters Marion and Grace Greenwood—­ traveled to Mexico to view these works and to learn from those who had created them. The Mexican muralists’ approach traversed the border not only as such individuals returned home but also as their teachers traveled to the United States to complete commissions. In addition to Rivera’s work at the Detroit Museum and in the RCA Building, José Clemente Orozco was commissioned to create murals at Dartmouth College, and David Alfaro Siqueiros was asked to decorate the Experimental Workshop in New York.83 Although many cultural enthusiasts were drawn to the models of federal sponsorship proposed by Communist and socialist states, they recoiled from the artistic efforts of fascist countries. They particularly detested the model presented by the Nazi regime, which used German government funds to construct monuments and new buildings, such as the Reich Culture Chamber, along neoclassical lines.84 The Nazis did not so much back art as control it. At the First American Artists’ Congress, a German artist refugee spoke anonymously and fearfully about how, in July 1933, the Department of Culture and the National Socialist Society for German Culture had removed all works created by non-­Aryans from German museums; they unframed and tagged each work to indicate whether a Jew, an insane person, or a divorced person made it; and they displayed them all in a traveling exhibit entitled Chambers of Horrors. When the Reich’s suppression of art, book burning, and racist discrimination did not provoke conformity and emigration, the speaker warned, “incarceration, suicide, and starvation” followed.85 Hitler’s stifling of creative expression met with predictably harsh denunciation from cultural enthusiasts in the United States. “How can a state which imprisons its most courageous minds,” asked the poet and diplomat Grace Overmyer, “fail ultimately to destroy that priceless inner state, whose first laws are freedom and truth?”86 Artists attending the First American Artists’ Congress expressed their discontent with the Third Reich’s aesthetic approach by boycotting the Berlin Olympic art exhibition, among other forms of protest.87 Aware of fascists’ exploitation of the arts, a number of American artists and intellectuals argued that they should use their own work to fight totalitarianism. The prominent sculptor Paul Manship, for example, saw a moral obligation to make the “unthinking man” who risks being “herded like sheep into the corrals of a Fascistic state” aware “of 30

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the danger of loss of his freedom.”88 Acting collectively, artists and intellectuals could defend culture and democracy. “Dictatorships fear artists,” the urban historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford explained in his opening address at the artists’ congress, “because they fear free criticism. They rightly believe that if the forces represented by the artist are allowed to exercise their will, they will disrupt the Fascist regime. The irrepressible impulse of Art may upset the whole Fascist program.”89 Donald Ogden Stewart, the Hollywood screenwriter and president of the League of American Writers, described writers as occupying the “front-­ line trenches” of an “international army,” firing off words as if they were bullets to defend “culture” from national prejudices.90 Given fascist governments’ highly manipulative art policies, the New Deal art administrators and other federal art advocates had to walk a fine line. They sought to support creative expression, and some who themselves identified with the Left even attempted to use publicly funded art to advocate for social change. But, even as they looked to the government (both at the national and at the local levels) to fund art, they simultaneously feared official censorship and national chauvinism. The heads of the various arts projects were particularly cognizant that their programs needed to appeal to and not offend taxpayers to ensure institutional longevity. If publicly funded artists used their work to lobby for social justice and to defend against fascism’s encroachment, they needed to do so without alienating middle-­of-­the-­road Americans. Otherwise, they would find themselves—­as they often did—­under attack for “biting the hand that feeds them.”91 By the mid-­1930s, a growing cohort of artists and intellectuals had come to imagine themselves as cultural laborers who produced works of art that served as weapons in a battle to safeguard democratic and antifascistic principles, including the autonomy of working people. Like other unemployed laborers, they too needed to preserve their skills and to support their families. Believing that private patronage would not survive the Great Depression, they looked to the government to create work-­relief opportunities that would allow them to continue both to create art and to sustain themselves. They found allies in Harry Hopkins, who facilitated the creation of art-­relief projects, and in the promise that government-­sponsored art could create a usable past, provide experiences that engage the unemployed, and offer meaning beyond economic growth. But, unlike other unemployed workers, many of them saw government patronage of the arts as a double-­edged sword. Mindful of the Rivera-­Rockefeller scandal, they turned to the art projects to seek protection from the idiosyncrasies of private patrons. But they were also 31

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cognizant, given what they were learning about the treatment of art and artists in the Third Reich, that government sponsorship might impede their freedom of expression. Idealistically, but perhaps unrealistically, they advocated government support without the strings that so frequently accompany that privilege. One of the first conflicts that emerged within the New Deal art projects was between the art administrators who had previously overseen the creation of public art based on classical iconography and the New Deal artists and administrators. Unsurprisingly, as we have already begun to see, Charles Moore and the CFA strongly opposed the New Deal art projects and attempted to undermine them from their very inception with the Treasury’s PWAP. Moore and his companions were markedly older, slower to adapt, and less sensitive to the needs of a younger generation than the bulk of those associated with the New Deal art projects. But Moore’s world helps reveal the aesthetic foundation against which New Dealers worked. The following chapter examines the existence—­ and persistence—­of a vision of public art that sharply diverged from, yet nevertheless managed to inform, New Deal aesthetics.

32

Two

Art as Grandeur Six months before the 1929 stock market crash, in his first postinaugural address in Washington, DC, President Herbert Hoover pledged his administration’s support for changes to the nation’s capital that would “express the ideals and standards of our times.”1 Hoover’s commitment to the capital’s reconstruction was driven less by politics than by aesthetics. On April 25, 1929, the former businessman was the keynote speaker at a two-­city annual conference sponsored by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), which had made “The Development of the National Capital” its central theme in anticipation of the upcoming Washington bicentennial.2 Hoover’s speech at a dinner in the US Chamber of Commerce Building, which was broadcast coast-­ to-­ coast two hours later, described the urban crisis brewing in the capital. Since World War I, Hoover reported, the total number of government employees working in Washington, DC, had swelled from thirty-­five to seventy thousand. Twenty-­five thousand of those employees were working in rented buildings. Government departments were divided—­Agriculture was in forty-­six locations across the city, Treasury in twenty-­seven, and Commerce in twenty. And many of the buildings were unsanitary, particularly those built during World War I, which were originally designed to last only a year or two but had never been replaced.3 In his speech, Hoover declared: “It is our primary duty to do more than erect offices.” He explained that, because of its symbolic status, the nation’s capital needed to be redesigned purposefully to convey its significance. “By its 33

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dignity and architectural inspiration,” he asserted, “we stimulate pride in our country. We encourage that elevation of thought and character which comes from great architecture.” He called for the creation of “new buildings [that] shall comport with the dignity of the Capital of America, that . . . shall meet modern requirements of utility, that . . . shall fulfill the standards of taste, [and] that . . . shall be a lasting inspiration.”4 A trained engineer, Hoover insisted that the reconstruction should marry utility to a style that would befit the nation’s capital and uplift its people. By 1929, little was new about Hoover’s call for remaking Washington, DC, into what contemporary promoters described as a “City of Splendor,” a “Glorious City,” a “Center of Culture,” and a “City of Ideals” as well as a “Work of Art.”5 Initial plans for it harked back to the 1790s, when Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French volunteer in the American Revolution, designed the nation’s capital to reflect the grandeur of the newly founded democracy. His proposal for the city included monumental public buildings, wide boulevards, and formal parks. Building on the capital halted in 1792 when Congress dismissed L’Enfant for his autocratic style and excessive spending. But a Senate-­appointed commission, led by Michigan senator James McMillan, revived and reformed L’Enfant’s plan more than a century later. Their revised plan included removing the Pennsylvania Railroad station and tracks from the Washington Mall to the newly created and centralized Union Station as well as creating the Federal Triangle, a neoclassical configuration lining the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue from Ninth Street to Fifteenth, including the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce, the National Archives, the Departments of Labor and Justice, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the Interstate Commerce Commission.6 The blueprint that Hoover endorsed reflected the reigning aesthetic in the construction and decoration of public buildings in the late nineteenth century, one that remained a key manifestation of official—­ meaning government-­sponsored—­art and architecture throughout the early twentieth century. Art as grandeur was grounded in a Gilded Age classical revival forged largely by male artists, architects, and urban planners, such as the country’s leading designer of neoclassical buildings, Charles McKim, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-­Gaudens. Their style continued by their colleagues and intellectual heirs Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., John Russell Pope, Glenn Brown, and Charles Moore, adherents of this aesthetic rejected what they considered to be American provinciality and commercialism. Instead, they argued that art and architecture should be beautiful and great in a universal and timeless sense, which 34

Art as Grandeur

was not actually global but instead translated into Greek-­and Roman-­ influenced forms, spaces, and colors. Inspired by the Beaux Arts movement, which developed in Paris in the late nineteenth century, academic artists and architects of monumental buildings attempted to integrate the fine arts, including architecture, sculpture, and painting, in harmonious ways. They viewed cul­ ture—­defined as high art—­as a moralizing force, meaning that it was capable of both uplifting audiences and maintaining their commitments to democracy and capitalism. This concept of culture and its influence was shaped by the British poet, literary critic, and school inspector Matthew Arnold. In a series of lectures delivered in the United States in 1883 and 1886, Arnold had argued that governments should seek to inculcate middle-­and working-­class children with “culture,” which he defined as a “social idea” or a process of pursuing perfection through the “sublime,” the “sweetness and light,” or “the best that has been thought and said.”7 According to the critic and bureaucrat, such cultural exposure would promote personal enlightenment, repel anarchy, and satisfy the mass public. His antirevolutionary approach to conflict resolution particularly attracted those who feared the mounting contests between labor and management seen in incidents such as the Haymarket bombings and in the strikes by Amalgamated Iron and Steel and Pullman railroad workers. In the early twentieth century, a number of US academics, including W. E. B. DuBois and John Dewey, reworked Arnold’s conception of beauty’s function in civic society. They argued that aesthetics provided more than individual satisfaction and a shield against chaos. Beauty, they contended, could unify democratic culture, facilitate ethical citizenship, and create a common sense of identification among human beings.8 Art as grandeur advocates sought to use beauty both to ameliorate growing discontent and to inspire civic feeling.9 They believed that beauty had the power to shape citizens’ thoughts and behaviors and viewed urban reform as key to “spur[ring] a renaissance of public consciousness and public life.”10 Proponents of art as grandeur sought to restrain the negative results of industrialization and provide psychic relief for urban dwellers while simultaneously improving both cities and private enterprise. Unlike many other community planners who rejected cities and instead advocated moving their inhabitants to a “rural or arcadian past,” art as grandeur advocates attempted to transform cities in order to enhance the patriotism and productivity of especially the working-­class immigrants living within them.11 The greatness such advocates aspired to reflected assumptions about 35

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America’s cultural and racial exceptionalism. America had become the modern locus of ancient world ideas and cultures to legitimize the nation’s transition into an imperial world power in the aftermath of the Spanish-­American War. Neoclassical forms decorated public buildings and squares to construct symbolic capitals, ones that would communicate the nation’s cultural ascendance while conveying the government’s significance, universality, and permanence. Art as grandeur promoters further sought to democratize such greatness by using civic buildings as “palaces for the people.”12 Through architecture and its decoration, they attempted to gentrify the urban middle class and to convey the dominant social values and ideals to the working class, especially the wave of immigrants flooding cities at the turn of the last century. Proponents of this approach thought that audiences would strive toward great perfection—­defined according to genteel and highbrow notions of culture and tradition—­as a result of viewing allegorical narratives of fig­ ures garbed in neoclassical attire. Murals illustrating an ascent from the primitive past toward the “civilized” and technologically driven Euro-­ American present, in particular, were thought to mold citizens’ behavior and to encourage them to aspire to greatness.13 Criticism of the neoclassical style had been growing since the early twentieth century with the emergence of a new generation of artists and architects who increasingly emphasized efficiency, industry, national roots, and modernism. They chafed at the constrictions that an older generation placed on who should create public art, its form, and its content. They attacked art as grandeur advocates for being pompous, out of touch, and “excessively concerned with monumentality, empty aesthetics, grand effects for the well-­to-­do, and general impracticality.”14 Instead of highlighting the signs and symbols of ancient Greece and Rome, they looked for a new and especially national and local iconography that would more accurately reflect current times and address con­temporary justice. But, because those advancing the idea that art represented a fixation with grandeur had embedded themselves in key institutions, such as the Senate Park Commission (also known as the Mc­ Millan Commission) and the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), their public influence persisted until World War II. The Great Depression and the advent of wide-­scale government funding of the arts, however, provoked a reconsideration of the appropriate nature of official art and architecture in academic, professional, and popular circles. An article published in 1934 in the Washington Post illustrated the growing debate. “Classicism or Realism?” asked which aesthetic style should decorate the recently constructed public buildings in 36

Art as Grandeur

the Federal Triangle. The article included competing renderings of the nearly completed neoclassical post office on the top of the Federal Triangle: a symbolic work by a French painter versus a realistic depiction of an ice house painted by a New Yorker employed by the New Deal Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). The journalist asked: “Which will it be—­a nude lady leaning against a symbolical mailbox and holding a scroll in her hand or a red-­blooded Pony Express rider frapping his horse’s flanks with the whooping Indians about to catch up?”15 Despite the gendered and imperialist assumptions informing both these approaches, a clear distinction could be drawn between American Scene painters, who tended to portray American history realistically (although they disputed how to do so), and academic artists, who were oriented toward a classical, mythological, and European-­inspired past.16 The red-­blooded Pony Express rider clearly won out in terms of the decoration of newly constructed public buildings during the 1930s. Re­ alist expressions are visible in murals decorating public buildings as well as the capital’s Federal Triangle, Jefferson’s memorial, and public schools, libraries, museums, and even waterworks built and decorated across the country during the Depression.17 The presence of federal funds, the government’s broad employment of relief workers to do shovel-­ready work, and the ongoing assumption that public buildings and monuments should conform to the neoclassical style explain the style’s persistence through the New Deal. Yet, by the end of the decade, this approach no longer marked official government-­funded architecture or art as steadfastly as it once had. New Deal architecture, like New Deal art, was eclectic in style, incorporating everything from Streamline Moderne and Federal style to traditional adobes, log cabins, and Spanish mission style.18 How and why did this aesthetic transition occur, and what were the consequences of this change for the relationship between art and the state? Past treatments of monumental art and architecture during the 1930s have either under-­or overplayed the intergenerational and aesthetic conflicts between those creating it and those in modernist camps, including American Scene painters. Those telling the story from the perspective of urban redevelopment in Washington, DC, tend to focus on the history of the revival of L’Enfant’s plan and discuss the debates that emerged over individual construction projects, without placing those debates within the broader context of artistic approaches.19 In contrast, New Deal scholars tend to accept contemporaries’ criticisms of the older cohort without seriously taking into account that cohort’s aesthetic vision. One of the key proponents of art as grandeur during the 1930s, 37

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Charles Moore, who chaired the CFA for twenty-­two years, formed a unit of elite white men who appear to have been entirely out of touch with the struggles to make a living of most American artists, much less their desire to express and explore national symbols and images. In a letter that he sent to the industrialist and urban planner Frederic De­ lano, Edward Bruce, who would soon direct the Treasury Department’s PWAP, used only slightly veiled language to deride Charles Moore and his colleagues. “There are a lot of old dodos,” he claimed, “that have never done a thing for American art or American artists. Now we want to get rid of the sort of academic art that paints a lot of semi-­nude ladies, draped in cheesecloth with a ribbon under their nipples, holding scales in one hand and a lamp in the other.”20 Scholars on and of the Left have been equally dismissive of Moore and his peers’ approach. The art historian Anthony Lee, for example, argued that, far from representing some sort of Arnoldian vision of the best that has been thought and said, European-­trained muralists during the 1920s and 1930s merely codified the city’s business culture on the walls of private buildings.21 Such scholarship underestimates the impact of art as grandeur on New Deal aesthetics. Charles Moore, Hans Paul Caemerrer, and the CFA were no “dodos.” Yet their refusal to alter their understanding of public art in the context of the Great Depression—­for the artists and architects who created it as well as for the public that interacted with it—­ultimately proved fatal. In the context of failing banks and growing expectations regarding the state’s responsibility for the well-­being of its citizens, classical art and architecture evoking the monumental and grand offered far less solace and meaning than did art and architecture based on national and local iconography. Reexamining art as grandeur’s persistence and decline during the 1930s reveals the extent to which neoclassicism—­ both the approach and the opposition to it—­shaped New Deal art. It is no coincidence that a mushrooming of aesthetic approaches accompanied the decline of such official art.

Guarding the Past: Charles Moore and the Quest for Grandeur Art as grandeur was most clearly embodied and driven forward by Chicago’s Great White City, part of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a world fair honoring the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America. Much has been written about this event, which the art historian Wanda Corn aptly describes as “a theme park, a destination site, a commodified spectacle, [and] a showcase for colonialist ideology.” 38

Art as Grandeur

Created by the architect Daniel Burnham and his associate Edward Bennett, the White City represented a utopian space including five neoclassical buildings crafted in the Beaux Arts tradition and made to look as if they were marble. The designers carefully grouped the buildings around a lagoon that sprouted two fountains. The emphasis on classical architecture was intentional. Although located in the city that eight years earlier saw the first skyscraper—­the Home Insurance Building—­ grace its skyline, the White City purposely rejected both modern forms and modern materials. Instead, it promoted a classical interpretation of what constituted beauty, control, and success, juxtaposing that against the Midway, which Corn characterizes as “a rambunctious and rambling entertainment zone of rides, foods, and people from around the world,” to highlight the type of progressive narrative from a primitive past to an enlightened future that art as grandeur advocates embraced.22 According to Moore, the White City had an immediately transformative impact on viewers—­one that restructured the national landscape more generally. “All the world came to the White City by the Lake,” he recalled in a speech delivered at Syracuse University in 1931. “Captivated by the vision of beauty,” he continued, they went away conscious that a new, vivid, compelling force had come into American life. The dignity and impressiveness of the orderly arrangement of monumental buildings; the cumulative effect of a uniform style of architecture and common cornice-­line; the charm of winding water-­ways, and wooded islands, the satisfying adornment of sculpture suited to the architecture; the enrichment of wall surfaces by historical and symbolic painting; all these achievements were nothing less than a revelation to the American mind. That mind responded immediately. A new era had dawned. What was done at Chicago must be done everywhere. Order, dignity, beauty became American criteria.23

Certainly the White City inspired future generations of urban planners. Burnham himself went on to redesign Washington, DC, Cleveland, Manila, and Baguio in the recently acquired Philippines. (His plan for Chicago was rejected in 1909, and his drawings for San Francisco’s reconstruction were destroyed in the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire.)24 By 1925, municipal art societies in twenty-­one cities across the country were working to remake their cities in a similar style.25 Yet, despite such enthusiasm, the actual move toward neoclassical architecture was neither as immediate nor as unanimous as Moore suggested. The costs associated with the creation of monumental art discouraged the movement, especially as reinforced steel, concrete, and 39

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glass made the construction of less grand architecture substantially more affordable. Efforts within the art world to develop a new American modernist aesthetic that would emphasize industrialization and the country’s urbanity further impeded the importation of a Roman and Greek style. In addition, modernism’s emphasis on innovation did not comport well with the adoption of an ancient style intended to be permanent and unchanging. Thus, the reconstruction of Washington, DC, and several state capitals along neoclassical lines emerged slowly in response to a public relations campaign led by architects, urban planners, and corporate sponsors who had been inspired by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Because of the time it took for such ideas to gain political momentum, especially in the nation’s capital, it fell to an older, second generation of art as grandeur advocates to complete L’Enfant’s plan in Washington. Drawing on well-­placed connections, this cohort managed to maintain into the 1930s the increasingly challenged idea that art represented a type of greatness, even as a number of alternative aesthetics vied for dominance. One of the key advocates for renovating Washington according to L’Enfant’s plan—­and for art as grandeur more generally—­was Charles Moore.26 Neither an artist nor an architect, Moore came to the arts circuitously via journalism, politics, and business. Born in 1855 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, he attended Harvard College, where he studied humanities and was strongly influenced by the scholar Charles Eliot Norton, who taught him to appreciate art and to value architecture as an artistic form. Norton also encouraged him to believe that great art, and especially that which merited display in federal buildings, should be rooted in the classical past.27 But Moore’s career began in journalism rather than the arts. Moore purchased and invested in three Michigan-­based newspapers, his hometown Ypsilanti Commercial and two papers in Detroit. Although he lost his investments in a fire at the Detroit Times in 1884, his reporting introduced him to Michigan’s senatorial prospect, the millionaire James McMillan. McMillan appointed him his political secretary, a position he held for thirteen years until McMillan’s untimely death in 1902, just as Congress was considering enabling legislation to implement the McMillan Commission’s restoration of Washington, DC, according to L’Enfant’s original design. The restoration required costly projects, and Moore remained in Washington to push through the bills. After a brief return to Michigan and business pursuits, he spent the remainder of his career in Washington, chairing the CFA, and overseeing the restoration of Washington, DC.28 40

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In many senses, Moore was a Victorian gentleman and a product of the Gilded Age. He adeptly wielded McMillan’s patronage system and ably operated within a business culture that drew close connections between politicians and the moneyed class. He frequented some of the best-­known private social clubs of the day—­the Century Association in New York and the Cosmos in Washington, DC—­and used McMillan’s entertaining style, including lavish meetings and informal poker and billiard games, to build alliances among conservative businessmen, politicians, professionals, and socialites.29 Although Moore looked to the past culturally, his enthusiasm for urban development and his confidence in trained professionals as agents of change marked him as a Progressive reformer and a participant in the City Beautiful movement. At the turn of the last century, Progressives combined both aesthetic impulses and political efforts to reconstruct cities in order to uplift their residents as part of the Progressive movement’s more general urban and municipal relief efforts.30 City Beautiful activists feared that industrialization and its consequences for the urban working class would corrode the nation’s heart and soul. Operating in a post-­Darwin world, they viewed human beings as organic and easily influenced by their environment. If they came of age in safe housing with access to healthy places to play, they would mature into productive citizens. In contrast, if they grew up in unsanitary conditions deprived of decent housing and playgrounds, they would turn to degeneracy and crime. Thus, problematic environments posed not only aesthetic and health dilemmas but also moral ones. They illustrated dysfunctions within the nation, particularly its emphasis on materialism over the common good.31 Moore was not adverse to capitalist growth even as he used urban planning to minimize materialism. Far from it, he wanted to see owners and corporate managers benefit financially and build factories and office spaces that would enable them to do so. But, like other City Beautiful advocates, he also wanted to create an atmosphere that would enhance what he considered to be the spiritual and emotional well-­being of workers.32 For example, he praised corporate managers who tried to join efficiency and amenity to make “well running” machines to lessen labor turnover and to build industries that would “last beyond [his] day and generation.”33 Like other leaders of the City Beautiful movement, Moore assumed that educated leaders—­understood as college students and graduates—­ should play a key role in urban reform. According to the historian William H. Wilson, the City Beautiful movement forged a new set of 41

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urban institutions and lay leaders to direct them. It also encouraged a new type of municipal politics—­what Wilson calls a “politics of accom­ modation”—­that called for negotiations between expert planning professionals and the “enlightened citizens” chairing and directing these new institutions.34 Moore actively attempted to prepare potential lay leaders for such roles. In lecture after lecture given on tours across the country, he charged college students and graduates with a responsibility for using aesthetics to reform cities. Neither money nor power, he warned, should divert educated people from using their minds and consciences toward that end.35 He encouraged his audiences to pursue cultivated ideas of taste rather than ostentation both for themselves and for their communities.36 He was deeply invested in the idea of teaching lay people what he called “standards of taste” and appreciation. “To enjoy knowledge,” he explained, “we must have trained minds; to appreciate works of art we must have a trained taste, and if I add to that requirement also a trained heart, I shall be well within the truth.”37 He did not think that lay publics could become artists, but he did believe that they could and should learn to value art and beauty just as he had under the tutelage of Norton. While advocating aesthetic training and advocacy, Moore also engaged in transatlantic exchanges. Like other Progressive reformers in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, he borrowed, debated, and transformed a range of European social-­political ideas, considering them alternatives to the newly emerging capitalist, urban, industrial world. The power broker traveled internationally to learn how others were approaching urban improvement. In 1901, he took the McMillan Commission on a six-­week tour through European cities, including Paris, London, and Berlin.38 Whereas many transatlantic Progressives connected urban reform with the development of an activist welfare state, including services and amenities for working people, Moore and the McMillan Commission were more focused on the aesthetics of the cities they examined.39 For them, culture played a key role in reform. Thus, the commission sought to replace slums and older neighborhoods, phenomena it attributed to unplanned and rapid development, with European-­style public squares, broad streets bordered by monumental buildings with classical colonnades and ornamented street signs, parade grounds, fountains, public sculptures, and city-­owned services all built through massive public works. Although many New Dealers would disagree with him, Moore argued that neoclassical art was relevant to the present despite its emphasis

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on the past. One important function of art education, he believed, was to teach lay people how the fine arts fit into past civilizations. He described the province of art as “open[ing] to the student the life of peoples past . . . , simulat[ing] the creation and enjoyment of works lived beyond the conditions of time and place; and . . . enrich[ing] the experiences of today by knowledge of their relations to former ages and to the great men who wrought those wondrous works.”40 Art represented to him a relationship between past and present. He argued that all great art should look to the past but must nevertheless record an “enduring record” of “its own ideals, its own problems, its own revolts.”41 The critic even used military metaphors to describe how current artists have used the solutions their predecessors drew to engage in today’s fights. As he put it: “All great men use the achievements of the past not as models to copy, but as an arsenal from which to draw weapons for their battles of today.”42 Led by educated lay people and professionals engaged in transnational exchanges, Moore viewed classical art and architecture as the essential forms for public buildings and their decoration. With their elegant proportions, sturdy materials, and rich historical resonance, they replaced chaotic and haphazard growth with order and harmonious planning. At the same time, art as grandeur drew meaningfully from the past to combat modernity, industrialization, and materialism. Considering this approach to be universal rather than Euro-­American and male dominated, Moore would eventually pay for his rejection of change in the face of shifting times.

Institutionalizing Art as Grandeur Moore’s aesthetic vision was much more than the voice of an itinerant lecturer and public intellectual. Moore represented and promoted the “artistic establishment of the time.”43 His leadership helped make and maintain the national significance of art as grandeur and particularly its importance for the nation’s capital. While during the 1930s a number of New Dealers vilified Moore for his aesthetic approach, during the first two decades of the century many people strongly admired him and his cohort for their civic volunteer work. As did Moore, members of the CFA, among them some of the country’s leading artists, sculptors, and architects, served as aesthetic advisers to the president and Congress, recommending artists and

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models for monuments and statues, selecting their location, and generally overseeing what they considered to be the beautification of the capital in accordance with the McMillan and L’Enfant plans.44 In its first year of operation, the CFA considered forty-­five separate matters and decided on forty-­one of them, costing a total of $16 million, yet commission members received no monetary compensation for their efforts. They were reimbursed only for train tickets and hotel rooms, the cost coming to a total of $10,000. In addition, the secretary of war provided them with rent-­free offices, and the Library of Congress stored their architectural plans.45 The Washington Post referred to commission members as “patriotic men” who “contribute their services without charge to the United States, their recompense being the pride they feel in the high standards of their profession and the gratification their professions feel in the proper protection of the Capital City.”46 By the mid-­1920s, the CFA had clearly differentiated itself internationally, a significant evolution from twenty years earlier when it had aspired to ape the designs and reforms of European cities. By 1923, the Royal Academy in London was looking to the CFA as a model for the type of advisory commission it sought to create for the British government. As a London architect, put it, compared to many parts of London American cities generally exemplified “orderly and more consistently harmonious architectural treatment.”47 In 1924, the French ambassador furthermore awarded Moore a medal on behalf of the American branch of the Société des Architectes Diplômés par le Gouvernement Français to honor him for “distinguished service in the advancement of art and architecture.”48 “There is not an art commission in the United States, and probably in the world,” wrote the president of the American Civic Association, Frederick A. Delano, and the association’s secretary, Harleau James, in a 1926 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, “which has exercised so potent an influence on the permanent structure of any city in the period of sixteen years [as the CFA].”49 Despite the high esteem in which some held the commission’s volunteers, others reflected on their lack of authority. According to an Executive Order issued by President Woodrow Wilson on November 28, 1913, the president, congressional committees, and executive officers were to consult the commission on the decoration of public spaces “whenever questions involving matters of art and with which the Federal Government is concerned are to be determined.”50 Yet the board remained advi­ sory and continued to lack administrative power. It could, for example, make recommendations to executive officers and members of Congress as well as promote standards of taste within public opinion (as Moore 44

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regularly did through his public lectures), but it had no authority over the development of private property, and it remained wanting in terms of official compulsion. In his autobiography, Moore recalled that especially in its early years its advisory position left the commission weak, with little social standing, and an “object of derision.”51 Writing in 1926, a journalist described the commission as having “little power” and being “forced to stand idly by while the suburbs and suitable sites for future parks are being destroyed.”52 Brigadier General William Harts, the secretary and executive officer of the commission in its earliest years, similarly corroborated such descriptions, recalling: “When anyone in those early days mentioned the Commission of Fine Arts on the Hill one heard only criticism and even sarcasm.”53 This situation began to change in the late 1920s and early 1930s. First, institutional and legislative alterations enabled the reconstruction of Washington, DC. In 1926, the National Capital Park Commission expanded from an advisory to an executive capacity charged with ensuring the implementation of the McMillan plan. It worked with the CFA and Congress, through the Shipstead-­Luce Act (1930), to police the development of private property bordering on public spaces. Such an alliance gave the CFA the legal authority to enforce an art as grandeur aesthetic not only on recently developed public buildings and parks but also on newly constructed private ones next to or abutting those public areas. At the same time, the two commissions collaborated to develop a comprehensive plan for the capital and its environs. By 1929, Congress had authorized more than $200 million for public building in the capital, including $25 million to buy the Federal Triangle lands, $125 million for public buildings, and $25 million for buying land generally in Washington. In doing so, it approved construction of what would become the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Department, and the National Archives.54 Thus, before the Great Depression hit, Congress had already empowered the CFA to oversee the capital’s restructuring along monumental lines and provided the funding that would make it one of the early shovel-­ready projects. Thus, these earlier financial and legal commitments helped maintain the salience of an aesthetic approach that otherwise contradicted the needs of the times. Unsurprisingly, the Great Depression made a neoclassical revival controversial. Censure by artists, architects, engineers, housing experts, and city planners expanded as the reality of the economic crisis moved their complaints from the halls of professional meetings and the pages of institutional journals to popular magazines and newspapers. By the 1930s, 45

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Fig. 2.1 Aerial view looking down Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C., ca. 1930, ARC

Identifier 5928154 in “A Short History of the National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.,” National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov/about /history/building.html.

as the preservationist Sally Kress Tompkins explained, “the muffled criticism of the 1920s had become a roar directed against an architecture that was applied archeology, and civic leaders were increasingly rejecting a conception of city planning that built a court of honor rather than dealing with growing urban ills.”55 In a biting article published in Harper’s magazine in 1934, the journalist Harlan Hale offered a withering assessment of neoclassicism’s persistence into the Depression years. Hale harshly criticized the supervising architect under the Treasury and the CFA for wasting $100 million of taxpayers’ money to transform the capital from “the executive seat of a democracy to the Rome of an empire.” He panned the “vast jumble of colonnades, porticos, arches, and arcades” included in the newly constructed Department of Commerce, Labor Building, National Archives, and Supreme Court, which all had been built according to the Beaux Arts tradition. Referring to the new buildings as a virtual “parade of monumental structures that are copies of French palaces when they

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are not reconstructions of pagan temples,” he further accused City Beautiful advocates of creating a “useless,” if “serene,” environment. Rather than building “the modern, efficient, stripped-­for-­action office buildings which every federal department has been needing so badly,” the Treasury and the CFA had overseen the construction of monumental buildings where government employees could “not even find parking spaces.” Hale advocated instead for the use of an “American idiom,” reflecting the “decorative ideas of a Frank Lloyd Wright . . . the progressive technic [sic] of a William Lescaze . . . [or] the more conventional but vigorous metropolitan design of a Hood or a Corbett.”56

Fig. 2.2 Aerial view of Capitol and Federal Triangle, 1936. Still Pictures, General Services

Administration, Series: Historic Photograph File of National Archives Events and Personnel Compiled, 1935–­1975, ARC Identifier: 3493231, RG 64, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, http://research.archives.gov /description/3493231.

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Hale was not the only cultural critic to argue that reconstruction of the nation’s capital should promote an American modernist aesthetic rather than a foreign importation. Charles Harris Whitaker, a sixty-­ two-­year old-­philosopher and authority on modernism, echoed Hale’s message in an article published in the Washington Post later that year. “Architecturally,” the former editor of the AIA’s journal wrote: “The Nation’s Capital has deliberately transformed itself from . . . a modern democracy to the grandiloquent Rome of an imperial empire.” Again, this was particularly jarring in the context of efforts in the art world during the interwar period to develop a national aesthetic that would highlight the uniqueness of American culture and its regionalist expressions while debating what form, style, and subject matter it would take.57 Whitaker also highlighted the disjunction between the neoclassical architecture of the capital’s new buildings and their intended functions. He described the new office buildings as “massive and costly mausoleums of the long dead past, into which Government employees have been crowded with far more regard for the structure’s ornate appearance than for its functional utility.” For example, he mentioned that the Department of Commerce has twelve thousand employees but parking for only two hundred cars. Similarly, he argued that the lighting was poor in the Treasury Department. As he described it: “Workers are now stumbling through dark corridors and working under electric lights at high noon.” He went on to criticize the concept of the Federal Triangle for exacerbating parking and traffic problems and excluding parks and trees. “Washington,” he continued, “is still the Capital of the Romans, and, if we were as far behind in other ways as we are architecturally, we would still be running around in togas.” Current buildings, he continued, should be designed for use rather than for “ancient traditions.”58 Other objections came from visual artists, especially Edward Bruce and George Biddle. The growing needs and demands of unemployed artists led them to criticize earlier policies regarding who decorated public buildings, how such people were selected, and what types of decorations they created. They vociferously objected to the CFA’s tendency to endorse the hiring of only a few European-­born and/or -­trained artists and to encourage the payment of exorbitant sums.59 Artists demanded that the government respond to growing poverty in their ranks by making work and hiring more broadly on the basis of a wider set of credentials and greater stylistic diversity than Moore and the CFA had done. Instead of paying large sums—­ for example, the $634,000 that compensated the few artists who decorated the National Archives and the Supreme

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Court—­art activists like Biddle argued that many more artists should be hired for much less money to decorate public buildings.60 On the eve of the Great Depression, Moore had rarely approved the designs of anyone who had not attended a small coterie of schools or joined a select group of architecture firms and professional associations.61 Although women played a key role in the City Beautiful movement and female painters, sculptors, and architects had built and decorated an entire government-­funded building (the Woman’s Building) in the White City as part of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair,62 the art as grandeur world largely remained hierarchical and exclusive. Gendered, racial, ethnic, and class-­based assumptions regarding entrance into the various art and academic societies, schools, and exhibiting associations prevented professional diversification. For example, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­Arts, where many American architects and sculptors, such as Richard Morris Hunt and Charles Follen McKim, trained, excluded women until 1897. The art societies were similarly selective. One could not apply to become a member either of the National Academy of Design or of the Academy of Arts and Letters. Instead, election depended on recognition and selection by one’s peers, a process that tended to augment insularity. Similarly, academic artists’ and architects’ emphases on peer evaluation over popular and market support served to further divide them from lay people. The gendered assumptions of art critics and art galleries created additional barriers for female artists. Art critics and galleries tended to distinguish work created by women from work created by men, considering the former “essentially feminine” and the latter masculine and virile.63 Such distinctions and restrictions had powerful consequences for commissions. Politicians generally relied on male-­dominated professional associations to design buildings, monuments, murals, coins, fountains, and traveling exhibits. As a consequence, with the significant exception of the Woman’s Building, men tended to dominate the ranks of government-­commissioned artists and architects.64 Prior to the Depression, exclusivity based on training in such elite institutions garnered opposition in the arts world, particularly among those on the Left. But hard times, coupled with a new infusion of public funds into arts projects, exacerbated these tensions. If art was to serve the public, if the government was to aid artists as laborers, then artists would expect public commissions to go to a larger and more varied pool where diversity included demographics as well as aesthetics. Indeed, although artists on the Left would criticize the Treasury’s section for

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remaining elitist, its approach was markedly more democratic than the exclusionary environment in which academic artists and architects had previously trained and operated.65 Moore and the CFA, however, opposed such reforms. Their resistance was particularly evident in their attitude toward the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture and its various successors. In April 1933, one month after President Roosevelt’s first inauguration, Moore wrote the president, reiterating the need for the CFA to “retain its status as an independent advisory body.”66 As we have already seen, when Biddle approached FDR the following month about building a New Deal arts agency, Moore did not veil his opposition. And, although he could not prevent the emergence of the Treasury’s section, the CFA continued to try to undermine it. On March 8, 1935, Moore wrote the respected architect William A. Delano that he was concerned about how artists would adorn post offices and feared that he would not be able to control their work—­a fear that he was right to have in the context of the Rivera-­Rockefeller affair. “I have not much confidence,” Moore continued, “in the idea that if the decorations are not satisfactory they can be whitewashed out.”67 Other commission members shared Moore’s reservations. For example, two months later, Egerton Swartwout, a renowned classical architect who chaired the AIA’s competition committee, wrote H. P. Caemmerer, the secretary of the CFA, regarding his concern about the relief emphasis of the Treasury’s program: “It would be a great pity,” he wrote, “to have some of our important public buildings spoiled by poor murals.” He meant, presumably, murals created by the “great number of people who call themselves artists whose vocation is entirely misplaced.”68 In a letter to Moore included in the CFA’s meeting minutes that September, the sculptor Lee Lawrie, a relatively recent member of the commission, suggested that the section should focus on hiring and leave the advising and judging—­aesthetically related activities—­to the commission. Speaking specifically about the development of Washington, DC, he warned that this approach was necessary to preserve L’Enfant’s plan, a task with which the CFA was charged from its inception. If the commission did not remain in charge of aesthetics, he felt, the whole “American-­Classical Washington” plan would disappear.69 Interestingly, this was not a position that Lawrie had always held. The following year, in a letter to Moore, he confessed that he better understood the commission’s significance after serving as a member. Previously, he explained, he could not understand why the judgments of juries consisting of a national cross section of art museum administrators might be “glaringly 50

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unsuitable for the special location for which it is intended.” “I could not,” he continued, “as an outsider, have given opinions that would be likely to be consistent with the ideals of Washington. It is only through the experience of working with the other members of the Commission that my eyes have been prepared to see the necessities.”70 Driven by a desire to safeguard L’Enfant’s monumental vision for the nation’s capital, a project to which they had dedicated themselves for more than thirty years, Moore and the CFA wholeheartedly opposed the more modern aesthetic approaches that many architects and New Dealers were advancing by the mid-­1930s. They feared that competitions, broadening the number and types of artists who created public works, and democratizing the creative experience would undermine their efforts to preserve L’Enfant’s monumental vision and to enforce an orderly development to the nation’s capital. The Treasury’s insistence on democratizing and Americanizing art only solidified the CFA’s efforts to preserve what it considered to be standards of taste—­classical European and allegorical work—­rather than providing jobs for needy artists. In an address delivered before the Association of American Colleges in 1930, Moore credited Elihu Root for controlling who received government subsidies. He explained that Root “knew the true artists and saw to it that they, and not the smaller, self-­seeking men, got the work.”71 He feared that democratizing government-­commissioned art and emphasizing local artists would translate into such “smaller, self-­seeking men,” including those in need of relief, decorating public walls. Even as the Treasury Department began to respond to the demands of unemployed artists by making commissions—­or at least the chance to compete for them—­more widely available, Moore remained hostile to the idea of expanding creative opportunities for artists. Allowing any­ one to make art, he argued, would only “place before impressionable youth crude and unnatural work in painting and sculpture” that would “pervert their minds to their lasting hurt.”72 He found even more reprehensible the idea of paying a stipend to needy artists. He did not want to see untrained artists granted access to public spaces, although he described artistic ability in his lectures as a form of genius that was “naturally” endowed.73 Moore furthermore criticized the use of competitions, arguing that they unnecessarily cost artists in terms of both time and money. Like many of his peers in the art world, including a number of artists on the Left, he objected to the idea that artists were asked to produce sketches for competitions without compensation. In perhaps his least successful argument, he confidently asserted in a speech delivered in Savannah: 51

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“Today almost every competent artist is employed.”74 Such a statement was particularly jarring given the struggles artists faced during the Depression, especially in 1932, when he delivered his speech, well before the advent of New Deal funding for the arts. In another speech, he went on to argue that, even if other viable artists existed, competitions would not lead to their identification. “The probability,” he explained, “of the discovery of genius by means of competition, however, is so rare as to be practically negligible; and the development of artistic capability may safely be left to the ordinary method of slow ripening.”75 Within that system of “slow ripening,” Moore relied on professional advisers, including architects and urban planners, to select public art on the basis of the standards of taste that he himself sought to cultivate through his lectures. A core component of this critique of competitions was skepticism regarding lay audiences, whom Moore described as “an unstable body, compounded of the intelligent, unintelligent, and indifferent.”76 According to Moore, the general public tended to select “pretty pictures” above serious work created by trained artists and, thus, the “resulting work . . . [of competitions tended to be] a perpetual disappointment.” He saw competitions as empowering untrained audiences. “The competition,” he explained, “makes a mistaken appeal to the innate American desire for fairness. Fairness to whom? I ask. Are you seeking fairness for the artist or fairness for the community he is to serve?”77 In a speech given to Kansas City’s Patriot and Pioneers Memorial Foundation, Moore asserted that laymen should have “either no voice or at most the smallest voice” in all aesthetic decisions.78 To support his stance, he drew on the words of the Beaux Arts architect Charles McKim, who wrote in a letter to the superintendent of the Library of Congress: “The selection of an architect for a great monumental building in Washington should not be dependent upon the personal selection of the layman (rarely a safe guide in such matters), but rather upon results actually proved by executed work.”79 He was particularly wary of giving untrained laymen a say in aesthetic decisionmaking because he believed that they were too easily swayed by fads. As he explained in a speech given in 1930 both to the Association of American Colleges and to Harvard University’s Topiary Club: “The things that catch the popular fancy of today are the ruination of the artist.”80 As Moore’s speeches and writings indicate, the Great Depression only solidified his commitment to the inherent worth and durability of classical art and architecture created by a small cohort of European-­trained visionaries. Unlike their peers in other New Deal Art projects, especially 52

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the Works Progress Administration’s Federal One, Moore and the CFA refused to use art commissions to hire needy artists. While Federal One sought to provide jobs that would support unemployed artists and preserve—­and even at times enhance—­their skills, Moore and his cohort maintained a strict emphasis on a narrowly defined approach as to who should create the nation’s art and architecture and how it should look. They would eventually pay a stiff price for their resistance to change. When the octogenarian Moore retired in 1937, in certain respects the notion that art represented a type of greatness appeared to be in its heyday. The formal dinner replete with speeches, commissioned medals, portraits, and caricatures that the Washington Society of Fine Arts organized to honor him also celebrated the completion of key parts of the L’Enfant plan.81 By his retirement, the Pennsylvania Railroad station and tracks had been removed from the Washington Mall, making it a broad and manicured meadow, construction had finished on the Federal Reserve Building, and John Russell Pope had completed designing two of the final key landmarks of L’Enfant’s plan: Jefferson’s memorial and the National Gallery of Art. Even as people struggled to support their families and live day to day, the ongoing construction of monumental buildings, especially in the nation’s capital, continued to communicate the government’s faith in classical values and its confidence in official culture to enlighten and uplift struggling citizens. Despite the persistence of such an aesthetic, Moore’s retirement—­ and his death five years later—­marked a key turning point for art as grandeur. John Russell Pope also died in August 1937, the same year Moore retired, while constructing the National Gallery of Art after having completed the National Archives. The loss of both men marked a change of guard that had profound consequences for art as grandeur. In addition, by the end of the decade, New Deal programs related to employment and housing had sapped the McMillan Commission of its earlier political influence and government support. Rapid development replaced the commission’s comprehensive planning efforts, including the construction of the Federal Triangle, which halted. Such trends were further enabled by another transition, one that saw an older generation replaced by “new figures . . . [who] seemed unable to inspire either the confidence or the attention of federal officials responsible for agency plans.”82 At the CFA, Pope and Moore passed the gavel to a younger cohort, including Ed Bruce, the director of the Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, whom FDR was adamant about putting in charge of the commission. Indeed, the president rejected all four of the men the commission recommended for the position, saying that he wanted 53

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someone with a national outlook, suggesting that the art as grandeur vision had become a local relic, more relevant to Washington, DC, than to the nation as a whole.83 Criticism of neoclassical architecture in professional and public forums also escalated. In the academic world, it could be found in professional discourse. For example, by the middle of the decade, H. P. Caemmerer, the CFA secretary, could not find a publisher for his dissertation, which lauded classicists as “the well trained, conservative group that stands at the head of their profession of architecture in this country” and condemned modernists for being “foreign born” and producing mod­els that are generally “poor in design, ugly, and even grotesque in appearance.”84 In response to the manuscript, Fiske Kimball, the director of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, wrote the following: “Forgive me for saying that I doubt whether this book will have quite the public success of your [1932] book [on Washington reconstruction].” “The trouble is,” Kimball continued, “that times are changing and, as we have lately seen to our sorrow, many people are no longer prepared to accept the classical influence as a boon.”85 Across Caemmerer’s final chapter, “The Future of Classical Art in the United States,” Kimball wrote in red pen: “Omit entirely.”86 Censure of the notion that art represented a type of greatness was not limited to academic exchange. Even as the Federal Writers’ Project defended Washington’s reconstruction, it adeptly summarized critiques of it in its American Guide Series entry on Washington, DC. “Opinion of the Washington city plan, especially that part of it growing out of the Chicago Fair ‘Court of Honor,’” the guide explained, has been by no means unanimously favorable. City planners and architects have said that the Federal Triangle concentration . . . [has] created an unholy traffic situation without attempting to apply a remedy, that the departments have been grouped in the lowest and hottest part of the city, that employees must for the most part cross the congested business district to reach them . . . , that monumentality has been carried beyond the point of diminishing return, that it would be better to build decentralized departmental buildings and encourage the development of villages around them for departmental employees, that it would be better to build places to work in the surrounding hills than places to play, and so on.87

A generation after Hoover advanced Washington’s renewal at the AIA meeting, a renegade group created an exhibit at the 1939 professional meetings criticizing the capital’s development. The exhibit, entitled “Washington the Planned City without a Plan,” argued that the capi54

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tal’s facelift translated into a historical restoration, what we might today consider Colonial Williamsburg, rather than an urban plan taking into account transportation developments such as new patterns in car usage and the growth of roads.88 Whereas the CFA dismissed criticism of its work earlier in the decade, after Moore’s retirement his successors felt compelled to respond to rising complaints. Caemmerer, for example, surveyed the architects and the people who worked in the newly constructed buildings in the capital during the summer of 1937. He asked questions about the buildings’ functionality and solicited a defense from those who used the buildings most intimately against complaints that they were “cold and uninteresting and looked as though they are unoccupied.” He also investigated the lighting situation in the newly constructed Federal Triangle buildings to see whether they required “artificial lighting on a clear day.”89 He found that there was one spot—­the arcade on Twelfth Street—­ where there was not enough light, but, according to an associate, “it was very necessary as an architectural feature adding to the beauty of the building and to the Circle which will be completed when the Internal Revenue Building is finished.”90 The CFA defended its ongoing use of monumental architecture, arguing that it continued to mesh form with function even if it occasionally prioritized the former over the latter, particularly in the pursuit of a holistic design for the city. But the CFA’s critics were not easily persuaded by such arguments. Heightening discontent with the notion that art is a type of greatness can be seen in the conflict that emerged over the creation of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The disregard that the Jefferson Memorial Commission and President Roosevelt expressed toward the CFA as well as the broad-­scale criticism that some of the later classical buildings faced further illustrate the decline of the art as grandeur vision—­even as buildings and monuments continued to be constructed in that aesthetic.

Jefferson’s Memorial: The Persistence and Decline of Art as Grandeur In 1934, while strikes and dust storms roiled the country, Congress passed a resolution to plan, design, and execute a memorial to Jefferson. Unlike the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, which took several years to create, Jefferson’s $3 million memorial was completed in 1943, less than a decade after Congress formed its Jefferson Memorial Commission. The commission selected John Russell Pope, DC’s leading 55

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Fig. 2.3 Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., April 1943. Photograph by Esther Bubley.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USW3–­ 021024-­E, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001022402/PP.

architect in the Beaux Arts tradition, to design the memorial. And, despite the hardships of the time, Pope took inspiration from a building that the former president created at the University of Virginia modeled on the Parthenon. Given his positive evaluation of the Lincoln Memorial and proclivity toward classical architecture, one might have assumed that Moore would support Pope’s plan, but even he was ambivalent about the design. Shortly after attending meetings with the Jefferson Memo­rial Commission, Moore unofficially expressed his fear to its chair, Democratic representative John J. Boylan of New York. “The design for the memorial itself,” he wrote, “while conforming to Jeffersonian ideals, raises questions quite apart from the style in which it is designed. . . . Will not 56

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the two structures [the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials] so nearly alike in purpose and expression come into competition, even into conflict, one with the other? Would it not be better to make the Jefferson Memorial a distinct creation by an entirely different treatment of the central feature and the surrounding lands?”91 The CFA did not offer a formal assessment of the proposed memorial until after the Jefferson Memorial Commission formally submitted designs to the CFA for review. By waiting until March 20, 1937, shortly after Moore retired and just before Pope died, to submit its paperwork, the memorial commission undermined the authority of the CFA. Unlike other similar projects, which submitted proposed designs for early stage feedback, the Jefferson Memorial Commission did not solicit the CFA until it had already approved the site for the Jefferson Memorial, finalized designs, and publicized its story.92 Since the CFA held neither executive authority nor veto power and was able to influence urban planning and design only through its powers of persuasion and its position as aesthetic adviser to the president, it was left with little control over the memorial. Gilmore D. Clarke, Moore’s interim successor before FDR appointed Ed Bruce, was particularly disturbed by the Jefferson Memorial Commission’s blatant disregard for the CFA’s input. “In connection with this matter,” he wrote, “I find it difficult to be temperate. I have been on the Fine Arts Commission for five years; this is the first time in my memory that a most important project has been referred to the commission after it has been completely ‘frozen’ as far as the designers are concerned.”93 In a letter to Boylan, Clarke explained his criticisms of Pope’s plan. Although the CFA “heartily approve[d]” the memorial’s location at the South Shore Tidal Basin, it “‘consistently opposed’ the erection there of a pantheon type of building in the form designed for it by the late John Russell Pope.”94 Clarke suggested that the commission choose “a design of greater freshness.” “Never, at any time,” he explained, “has the commission [i.e., the CFA] considered Mr. Pope’s design suitable for the site on the Tidal Basin.” Instead, he attested that the CFA “has always expressed preference for a design more open in character, possessing in silhouette relatively long, low horizontal lines, harmonizing in architectural character with the lightness of the design of the White House, and with the principal axis kept open or at least partly so.”95 Clarke told the New York Times that the CFA preferred a building “of more grace and lighter in expression” than the one designed by Pope. It wanted something classical but “not slavishly classical.”96 He furthermore argued that the memorial commission needed a plan and estimated costs for “the 57

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entire area south of the Washington Monument and west of Fifteenth Street before Congress approved Pope’s design.”97 He pointed out that Congress took nine years before approving McKim’s studies for the Lincoln Memorial, the Memorial Bridge, and the Watergate building. He explained: “Time should not be the essence of a great memorial project in Washington, more particularly when that project is of sufficient importance to qualify for the last great site in the composition of the Mall.”98 Surprisingly, one of the issues that most upset Clarke was that there was no competition to determine who would create the Jefferson Memorial. In an article, he explained that he had “always hoped, and had been led to believe, that the design for this Memorial would be open to competition.” In a clarification that marks a clear change from Moore’s earlier stance on competition, Clarke contended: “[A competition] would have been stimulating to all the professions interested; it would have been of Nation-­wide interest; it would have brought out something new rather than transporting an ancient parti from Rome to this site in the form of the pantheon.”99 A number of politicians and architects agreed with him. Democratic representative Kent Keller of Illinois, for example, introduced an amendment to the act creating the memorial commission for a competition to determine the memorial’s architect and sculptor. It also called for congressional approval of the selected individuals and further requested that the House Appropriations Committee withhold funds for the memorial until it was approved.100 Predictably, the head of the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts, Edward Bruce, agreed.101 The Washington District Chapter of the AIA similarly argued that “designs for all government-­financed structures in the District of Columbia be selected by competition.”102 More than fifty architects formed an independent group, the National Competitions Committee, to open for competition the designing of the Jefferson Memorial and other federal memorials and buildings.103 As the art critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote: “If establishment of a truly competitive system result [sic], the late John Russell Pope, through a fascinating chain of circumstance, will prove not to have dreamed his pantheon dreams in vain.”104 The overwhelming support for a competition to determine who would create the Jefferson Memorial indicated growing efforts to democratize public arts and incorporate works created by less well-­established artists. But neither the Jefferson Memorial Commission nor FDR was particularly swayed by this vision. On April 1, 1938, despite the CFA’ earlier rejection of the plan, the memorial commission announced that the memorial would be built a few hundred feet west of its earlier announced location and that it would include a slightly smaller—­but otherwise 58

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unchanged—­ version of Pope’s pantheon. The commission reviewed three other designs for the structure before endorsing the smaller pantheon. The CFA accepted one of these, also created by Pope, but this time including two semicircular colonnades with a statue of Jefferson in the center. The memorial commission, however, rejected this design when members realized that Pope had originally planned this in 1926 for a memorial, later rejected, to President Theodore Roosevelt.105 Ignoring the CFA’s advice, in May 1938 Roosevelt endorsed the Jefferson Memorial Commission’s proposal and allocated $500,000 toward the $3 million needed for the overall project. Less than twenty-­ four hours after the president staked his position, Clarke made public his letters to Boylan and FDR and released a statement to the press to clarify the CFA’s unanimous disapproval of the pantheon memorial.106 “It is regrettable,” Clarke explained to Roosevelt, “that a lay commission has found it desirable to proceed to build upon the last great site in the national capital a structure which, in the considered judgment of a commission of artists, is unsuitable.” Approval of the Jefferson Memorial against the will of the CFA marked a significant blow to one of the primary institutions charged with preserving L’Enfant’s vision. As Clarke put it: “The decision to proceed contrary to advice cannot help but seriously affect the prestige of the Commission of Fine Arts, with the result that the future development of the plan of Washington may suffer serious impairment resulting from the establishment of so unfortunate a precedent.”107 A number of Democratic senators, including William H. King of Utah and Joseph F. Guffy of Pennsylvania, opposed allocating funds for the Jefferson Memorial. Senator Vie Donahey of Ohio explained his position in a telegram to Stuart G. Gibboney, the president of the Jefferson Memorial Foundation. “In the face of millions of unemployed,” he wrote, “the erection of the proposed memorial at this time will not promote life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.”108 Nevertheless, in June 1938, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee approved a $500,000 initial appropriation. Construction began that December.109 Criticism of the Jefferson Memorial illustrated the extent to which the art as grandeur approach had fallen from prominence. Frank Lloyd Wright described the design as “eclecticism’s funeral wreath placed by itself upon its own brow.” The director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Dr. J. T. Frary, a Jefferson authority, similarly rejected the neoclassical model of “splendid architectural masterpiece[s] that . . . glorify the genius of the . . . architect.” Instead, he hoped that Jefferson would be “immortalized in the Capital City by means of something that will 59

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express his passion for benefiting mankind.” The editor of the Magazine of Art, Frederic Allen Whiting, attested that “America of today found no expression ‘in columns and shallow domes.’ ”110 Contemporary editorials and letters to the editor regarding the memorial further illustrate lay people’s growing discontent with neoclassical architecture. An editorial in the New York Times sided with the CFA in advocating for a classical, but simpler, structure. “To a layman,” the author wrote, “[such a structure would seem] more dignified, less fussy, and infinitely more American than the domed Pantheon.” The editorial board went on to suggest that Congress delay in allocating the $3 million already authorized. “Jefferson can wait and so can the selected site,” it advised. “Congress would do well to think the matter over before acting. As the years go by and new architectural ideas gain sway over our imaginations. Any classical structure that is not precisely right will seem either painful or funny. The dead hand of Greece and Rome is bound to hang over the public buildings of Washington for generations to come. Let us at least seize upon its most graceful and inviting phrases.”111 An unsigned letter to the editor in the New York Times noted the incongruity between the modest gravestone Jefferson requested for himself—­consisting of “a plain die or cube of three feet, without any mouldings, surmounted by an obelisk of six feet height, each of a single stone”—­and the memorial pantheon to be constructed in his honor. Instead, the author called on the memorial commission to reconsider Pope’s Teddy Roosevelt memorial design. “One can readily understand,” wrote the author, “the reluctance of Mr. Pope’s family and friends to have his design altered. Yet it would be a misfortune if a structure too pretentious for the modest man it honors or out of keeping with the Federal architecture, should be accepted for this reason alone.”112 Other letters to the editor advocated replacing the classical structure altogether with something more utilitarian, such as “an auditorium, a children’s hospital or even a planetarium.” They were particularly keen to use the monument to enhance “real estate values in neglected sections of the city.”113 The American Federation of Arts, an organization committed to raising public awareness of the arts through traveling exhibitions and other means, used the completion of designs for the Jefferson Memorial as an opportunity to reevaluate the art as grandeur vision. It conducted a symposium on classical architecture and published key comments in the Architectural Record. Responses to the Jefferson Memorial clearly indicate the shifts in sentiment against the idea that art represents a type of greatness. Symposium participants tended to lump together the 60

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Jefferson Memorial with L’Enfant’s more general plan. They blamed the CFA for constructing a memorial to which commission members had objected in the first place. The urban planner Carl Feiss criticized the impracticality of monumental architecture and the City Beautiful movement. “There is something inherently awkward,” he wrote, “about the Grand Plan in the modern American City. The busy humming and buzzing of city traffic, the clatter of the street car, the lumbering of a behemoth of a bus, shatter the classic calm of the colonnades. The tinkling of a fountain seems foolish when a truck comes bumping by.” The products of the City Beautiful movement, such as the Fairmount Parkway in Philadelphia, may hide the slums behind them, but “despite the wholesale application of Art with a capital ‘A,’ and despite the millions of dollars spent upon them, [they fail] to make those cities beautiful or add one whit to the art of living within them.”114 Another opponent of classical architecture at the symposium, Joseph Hudnut, the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, explained that a city’s architecture should illustrate varied historical periods and that the inclusion of only one would inhibit the city’s growth. As he put it: “A living organism would be compressed into a rigid mold, just as the feet of Chinese ladies were compressed in iron shoes.”115 A third participant, the architect William Lescaze, objected that the United States should develop its own architecture instead of continuing to imitate Greek or Italian works and “counterfeit[ing] the beautiful architecture of the past.” He called on architects to focus on function (how people will actually use buildings) before form (external appearance). Describing the L’Enfant plan as out of date, he challenged: “Are we still as formal as people were then? How could L’Enfant foresee such changes in our habits? How could he prepare and plan for the automobiles?”116 The creation of Jefferson’s memorial along neoclassical lines, combined with the outpouring of discontent it elicited, illustrates both the architectural persistence of the art as grandeur vision and its decline in professional and popular circles. This approach continued to be popular especially in terms of the construction of neoclassical government buildings and monuments well beyond the 1930s, as can be seen by the National World War II Memorial, dedicated in 2004, which consists of large granite pillars in two semicircles around a plaza interrupted by two triumphal arches. Yet, by the end of the 1930s, art as grandeur was markedly less common than it had been, particularly in terms of the construction and decoration of public buildings. Beyond architecture and urban planning, a flowering of experimentation and aesthetic approaches emerged in the arts, including works that directly contradicted 61

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the neoclassical ideals that Moore and the CFA had previously sought to reinforce. The cultural projects of the New Deal funded artists across the country and resulted in works of art that highlighted the American scene rather than classical mythology. They hired artists on the basis of the quality of the work they produced—­or their need for financial support—­rather than their résumé. They promoted competitions rather than appointing commissions, empowered lay people to create art, and emboldened audiences to make decisions about and actively participate in aesthetic experiences. No wonder the animosity between New Dealers and Moore was so profound. Such tensions help illustrate how profound the cultural shift in public art and architecture was during the New Deal as art as grandeur was replaced by more democratic approaches. Perhaps the clearest approach that replaced art as grandeur was the Treasury Department’s representational vision of public art as enrichment. This approach, created by artists who hailed from city and country, the Midwest, the West Coast, and the Northeast, drew on local traditions and materials. Since many New Deal muralists trained in the 1920s with Mexican muralists, they looked to Latin America for guidance more than Europe. The representational images of working people they portrayed on the walls of public buildings presented an alternative national aesthetic, one that in its own ways provoked as much admiration and vitriol as art as grandeur.

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Art as Enrichment Just as the Great Depression challenged an aesthetic based on grandeur, it also called into question the success ethic of individualism, affluence, consumerism, and personal gratification. The difficulties individuals faced contradicted the idea that they could control their own fates, that unemployment and poverty were signs of personal failure, and that anyone displaying sufficient talent and industry could succeed. Many Americans believed that the economic crisis reflected a fundamental problem with the American way of life and the American Dream, terms that became common during the 1930s.1 In Harper’s magazine, the socialist writer Aldous Huxley referred to the crisis as a “problem of faith.” “Our time is afflicted with a strange incertitude,” he explained. “Our uncertainty is not only, or fundamentally, an uncertainty about economic ways and means. It is a profounder and more universal bewilderment. We cannot decide what we are or what we want to become. . . . We are, in a word, without a generally accepted faith and without a generally accepted philosophy.”2 In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested that the government needed to respond to the spiritual crisis that Huxley had outlined. Before describing his “New Deal,” Roosevelt called for ethical reform. Using rhetoric that echoed the Progressive urban planner Charles Moore, he suggested that Americans needed to develop “social values more noble than monetary profit.” Like Huxley, he agreed that happiness would emerge, not as a result of individuals pursuing their own self-­interest, but rather as a consequence 63

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of people working together for the common good. “Happiness,” he explained, “lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the job of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”3 Nine months later, in an address delivered at a special meeting celebrating the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Roosevelt elaborated on the ethical component of his New Deal by asserting that the state and the church shared the same great objective: the creation of “a more abundant life” for every “man, woman, and child.”4 Drawing on Jesus’ statement, “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly” ( John 10:10), the president suggested that the federal government could enrich life by balancing the rights of individuals against those of the community.5 As Arthur Krock of the New York Times explained, Roosevelt was promising, not “silk shirts . . . , two cars per family . . . , [or] a chicken in every pot,” but rather to use federal money, legislation, and institutions to improve every person’s chance of living an emotionally and psychologically rich life, full of “comfort and happiness.”6 The day after Roosevelt coined the phrase “a more abundant life,” Edward Bruce, a corporate lawyer turned publisher, financier, artist, and lobbyist, gathered a consortium of cultural figures from across the country in his home in Washington, DC, to discuss how artists might contribute to the president’s vision.7 This cohort’s interest in state sponsorship of the arts had preceded Roosevelt’s speech. Bruce, a large man who looked more like a politician than a painter, and the muralist George Biddle, a former Groton and Harvard classmate of the president’s, had already devoted several months to discussing the possibility of federal patronage with journalists, architects, artists, critics, directors of art associations, museum directors, and government officials.8 Leftist artists’ organizations, such as the Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group and a network of artists’ unions across the country, also had been lobbying the administration to support needy artists.9 But the president’s countermaterialist message and the nation’s search for an alternative source of faith gave the art advocates an opportunity to justify government support. “The work of artists and craftsmen,” explained Assistant Secretary of the Treasury L. W. Robert Jr., “greatly aids everyone by preserving and increasing our capacity for enjoyment, and is particularly valuable in times of stress.”10 Art, in other words, represented much more than mere decoration. It could, as the art as grandeur cohort concurred, reinforce a sense of community, stimulate creativity and self-­confidence, promote national consensus, and counter Americans’ ceaseless striving for material wealth. Government funding of the arts, Bruce attested, 64

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“is a significant example of the motivating force behind the President’s whole policy—­to give to all the people of our country ‘a more abundant life.’ ”11 Despite the antipathy between the Treasury Department art administrators and the art as grandeur cohort, both groups believed that art could uplift its viewers. But, instead of advocating for large, public commissions for relatively few artists, who were generally white, male, and European educated,12 the Treasury’s art administrators promoted competitions among artists across the United States and asked them to decorate public buildings in ways that celebrated the American scene without alluding to allegory or using neoclassical garb. The Treasury hoped that the beauty of such realistic works and the messages they conveyed about the nation’s strength would remind Americans of their own resilience and help them cope with daily life during the Depression. Despite the strong objections that artists on both the Right and the Left expressed toward the Treasury’s approach, it nevertheless illustrated the efforts of a dedicated group of New Dealers to use public art to respond to the con­ temporary crisis.

On Beauty, Politics, and American Scenes The artists and art critics who ran the Treasury’s multiple art programs—­ Edward Bruce, the art commentator Forbes Watson, the painter Olin Dows, and the gallery director, visual artist, and teacher Edward Rowan—­ sought to enrich the nation by democratizing what they deemed to be high-­quality, noncontroversial contemporary art. They argued that public art should reflect the “local interests, aspirations, and activities of the public for whom the work is intended” and propose solutions to “new [and] vital” problems.13 To attract the finest contemporary artists in the country, the Treasury’s art administrators widely advertised their contests, opened competitions to artists regardless of their qualifications, and selected well-­known and geographically representative jurists with “catholic taste” to distribute commissions.14 To prevent even the appearance of controversy, art administrators monitored the political stances and images created by the artists they employed. They warned artists not to give unauthorized interviews, use avant-­garde styles, paint nudes, or promote leftist propaganda.15 Despite their efforts to appear apolitical, the art bureaucrats envisioned an art with its own political mission: to combat social, spiritual, and political anarchy by celebrating the New Deal’s “forgotten man” and fostering community and consensus. 65

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Like the art as grandeur cohort, the Treasury’s art administrators viewed beauty as representing artists’ most vital weapon for transforming national values. In the Atlantic Monthly in 1935, Bruce argued that the Depression ended the “era of easy money,” rapid growth, and boundless frontiers. “We are out of the wilderness period,” he insisted, “and into the garden period; the time has come to cultivate what we have . . . [and to explore a] new frontier of beauty and spiritual uplift.” Artists were uniquely qualified to help Americans in this new endeavor. They could make daily experiences attractive, fill leisure time with “new hopes and sources of interest,” eradicate physical ugliness, and foster “all the simple pleasures of life which are not important in terms of dollars spent, but are immensely important in terms of a higher standard of living.”16 Testifying before Congress for the continuation of public funding of the arts, he explained that beautifying the nation is “the essence of the service that an artist can render to the people.” Artists find their rewards, he felt, by seeking and recording both spiritual and material beauty: “If through him [the artist] others come to see it [beauty], and by seeing it, gain that sense of well-­being and contentment that beauty gives, he has had his reward.” Federal sponsorship of art, he argued, was in the nation’s best interest since it had the potential to “form the stimulus and create a demand for an America beautiful,” which, in turn, could “lift us out of the Depression.”17 In many respects, the Treasury’s emphasis on beauty reflected the approach toward art and literature articulated by the critic Matthew Arnold and embraced by art as grandeur advocates. The Treasury’s art administrators, like their predecessors in the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), believed that beauty should both ameliorate growing discontent and inspire civic feeling. During the Depression, the need to respond to potential social upheaval was even more accelerated than it was at the turn of the century. Although many Americans did not take to the streets at the beginning of the crisis, by the end of the 1930s nearly two mil­lion people, including farmers, military veterans, members of labor unions, and the unemployed, had engaged in sit-­ins, strikes, and other demonstrations.18 While many protestors demanded relief and reform more than revolution, discontent was widespread. “None of us who are more or less in contact with the youth of the country,” Bruce wrote, “can fail to realize the bewilderment and almost despair of the young man or woman of today who, after their school or college, go out into the world to carve a career and find the world does not want them, and that there is no place for men, that opportunities such as their parents had to find useful and profitable employment do not exist 66

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for them. . . . Conditions like those existing today breed the kind of spirit that revolutions are made of.”19 Like advocates of art as grandeur, New Deal art administrators anticipated that beautiful art in public spaces could combat discontent and inspire civic unity. The very act of mural making promised to bring together directors, architects, builders, masons, and painters in a common cause. But the Treasury’s art administrators differed from the art as grandeur cohort in terms of their understanding of the function of government funding of the arts and their concentration on realistic portrayals of local American scenes as opposed to allegorical representations of ancient times. The American scene the Treasury’s art administrators promoted grew out of, but also differed in significant ways, from the umbrella term art historians would later use to describe a naturalist style of expression popular in the first half of the twentieth century that was part of a broader interdisciplinary movement. Beginning during the interwar period, a wide range of artists and writers sought to counter homogenization, to create a usable past, and to forge an indigenous and national aesthetic representative of the nation’s greatness and exceptionalism by capturing and preserving regional diversity as seen in local folkways, culture, stories, lore, songs, etc.20 The term American Scene incorporated two groups—­regionalists and social realists—­that differed from one another ideologically and sociodemographically, although their style and subject matter overlapped. Regionalists are often associated with an agrarian past, midwestern values, and the uniqueness of local heritage and people. In contrast, social realists have often been credited with portraying urban scenes, images of factory workers, and representations of strikes and class conflict.21 More recent scholarship, however, indicates that artists associated with both groups sought to reflect the experiences of working-­and middle-­class Americans in ways that ennobled them while countering inequalities based on class and race.22 Rather than turning to ancient mythology, the Treasury’s art administrators drew on inspiring images of working people from local histories and current events to help people to confront their anxieties about the nation’s future and to imagine creative solutions to contemporary problems. “The great need,” as the muralist Lewis Rubenstein explained, “is for murals that will deal constructively with the chaos and conflict about us, for works that will examine closely the forms of our world to find new meanings, and new relationships in them.”23 The Treasury’s art administrators sought to restore the self-­confidence of a diverse nation by hiring a range of artists who would illustrate and explain the nation’s 67

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central values not through ancient symbolism but through direct representation of regional myths, heroes, and heroines. In the Treasury’s art bulletin, a free publication distributed to eighty-­five hundred people interested in the project’s development, the administrator Forbes Watson wrote: “Without being sentimental, the Section of Painting and Sculpture hopes that in employing the vital talents of this country, faith in the country and a renewed sense of its glorious possibilities will be awakened both in the artists and in their audiences, and that through this, the Section will do its full share in the development of the art and the spiritual life of the United States of America.”24 Art appreciation, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau explained, would allow citizens “to develop that knowledge of and feeling for works of grace and beauty which is an essential part of a National culture.”25 But how might a mural actually develop the nation’s aesthetic and spiritual life? What images of America might help artists and their audiences cope with the difficulties they faced during the 1930s? And how did the images the art as enrichment cohort supported differ from those advanced by advocates of art as grandeur?

Society Freed through Justice: George Biddle Paints Order and Reform Society Freed through Justice (1936), a mural created by George Biddle, embodied many aspects of the Treasury’s approach. A painter living in Croton-­on-­Hudson, New York, Biddle belonged to an influential family that was comfortable but not affluent. He was descended from Edmond Randolph, the nation’s first attorney general and its second secretary of state. And his brother, the New Deal adviser and labor advocate Francis Biddle, served Roosevelt as attorney general from 1941 until the president’s death in 1945. Like his brother, George also trained in law, graduating from Harvard Law School after studying at Harvard College and Groton—­the elite New England boarding school that he attended with Roosevelt. But, after passing the bar in Pennsylvania, he pursued the arts instead.26 He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris (1911–­12) and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1912–­14), traveled through Europe and Latin America, and forged connections with leading artists, including Mary Cassatt, Gertrude Stein, and Diego Rivera. The Treasury’s art administrators selected Biddle, who played a critical role in the formation of the art project, to decorate the Justice Department in Washington, DC, one of the Treasury’s first and largest 68

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Fig. 3.1  “Life Planned with Justice of Tomorrow,” a detail of George Biddle’s mural, Society

Freed through Justice, 1936, fifth floor stairway, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., 2007. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­DIG-­highsm-­02880, http://www.loc .gov/pictures/item/2010720191.

commissions. On three adjacent walls on the fifth-­floor landing, Biddle painted Society Freed through Justice—­a utopian and agrarian future sandwiched between overcrowded and miserable sweatshops and tenements. Interestingly, the narrative told by this mural represented a different type of progress than that conveyed by the neoclassical murals promoted by art as grandeur advocates. It does not move from a primitive past to a civilized industrial future. Instead, it highlights the lack of civilization within the industrial world and visually suggests ways to make that world more humane and, in a sense, less mechanical. To be more specific, Biddle portrayed the world of yesterday as dreary and depressing. He illustrated the exhaustion, fear, and alienation experienced by many working-­class urban dwellers during the early twentieth century. In tenements, men, women, and children chopped firewood, 69

Fig. 3.2  “Sweatshop,” a detail of George Biddle’s mural, Society Freed through Justice, 1936,

fifth floor stairway, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., 2007. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­DIG-­highsm-­02879, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item /2010720190.

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Fig. 3.3  “Tenement,” a detail of George Biddle’s mural, Society Freed through Justice, 1936,

fifth floor stairway, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., 2007. Photograph by Craig Crawford.

sewed and ironed clothing, and tended to babies and lodgers while the young and the old crowded into sweatshops, where they sewed dresses and suits by hand and machine. Far from illustrating opportunities for advancement, Biddle’s portrait of the past suggested the inaccessibility of the American Dream. Biddle’s depiction of the future, in contrast, promised a world in which people appreciated what they had rather than striving endlessly for what they did not. In a “Life Planned with Justice of Tomorrow,” men, women, and children engaged in farm work—­milking a cow, feeding 71

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chickens, planting, and hoeing—­while a group that appeared to consist of family and friends gathered around a dining table laden with the fruits of their labor. A third group of men walked toward industrial jobs that, unlike jobs in the tenements, were a comfortable distance from their collective domestic lives. Biddle’s future was a bucolic place where work and life merged seamlessly, appetites were sated, and moral, intellectual, and spiritual growth was possible. At dinner, people actively engaged one another in conversation. Mothers also attended to their infants rather than holding them in an exhausted stupor, as they had done in Biddle’s tenements.27 The muralist’s suggestions about how the nation might move from an oppressive past to a utopian future are noticeable only to the close observer. Biddle advocated an evolutionary approach to the law by incorporating quotations written by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis. In the sweatshop panel, two girls sit on a bench inscribed with the famous opening sentence from the first of twelve lectures that Holmes delivered in 1880 and published the following year as part of The Common Law: “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.”28 By placing the child laborers literally on top of Holmes’s quotation, Biddle suggested that the need to protect children from exploitation must take precedence over the previously sacred right to contract. The Brandeis quotation in the tenement panel complemented Holmes’s statement. “If we would guide by the light of reason,” asserted the line from Brandeis’s dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (285 U.S. 263 [1932]), “we would let our minds be bold.” Brandeis was defending the Oklahoma legislature’s 1925 law requiring a license for manufacturing or selling ice as a reasonable attempt to address the needs of a society undergoing continual technological change. By using these two quotations, Biddle suggested that lawyers could help free society by encouraging the court to adopt a social rather than a formalistic view of law and allowing citizens and their representatives to experiment legislatively. He used actual, prominent New Dealers as models for his mural. This gesture further suggested that government reform could create a “planned” and “freed” society. For example, in the upper-­left-­hand corner of the sweatshop panels, Biddle painted the secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, a passionate advocate for abolishing sweatshops and child labor, protecting female workers, and creating public works projects, including the murals project. Next to Perkins the seamstress, Biddle painted himself as a tailor. Standing above the two was the social theorist and writer Stuart Chase, who had coined the slogan “A New Deal” in his 1932 book that carried the same name and 72

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created the framework that shaped Roosevelt’s policies.29 Through his subtle use of text and portraits, Biddle argued that, if the courts allowed states room to experiment, the industriousness of the urban poor, coupled with the planning and guidance of New Dealers and the utopian visions of artists like himself, would herald a new day of justice. As he put it, such forces could turn “the tenement and sweatshop of yesterday . . . [into] the life planned with justice of tomorrow.”30 In many respects, Biddle’s mural illustrated the Treasury’s ideas about art and politics. It presented a progressive narrative from past to present, it addressed current issues, and it portrayed the future of the nation in an uplifting manner. Biddle’s romantic depiction of the world to come particularly fulfilled the Treasury’s art administrators’ aesthetic visions by encouraging viewers to value collective endeavors above material acquisition. Society Freed through Justice further reflected Biddle’s own conception of the muralists’ social function. It attempted to affirm life in, as he put it, “a language understood by all” and to show that “life is drab and ugly, [but] life can be beautiful.”31

Refinement, Nationalism, and Regionalism The desire of the Treasury’s art administrators to make life beautiful stemmed, in part, from the patrician worlds in which they came of age. Like Biddle, the men who ran the Treasury’s art programs—­Edward Bruce, Forbes Watson, Olin Dows, and Edward Rowan—­ were largely well-­heeled, well-­connected, and well-­traveled Ivy Leaguers. With the exception of the sole midwesterner of the group, Edward Rowan, who was born in Chicago, the other section men were northeasterners. All four attended Ivy League universities—­ Harvard, Columbia, or Yale—­ where they obtained undergraduate or graduate degrees. They were Republicans who switched party affiliation during the 1930s either because of disillusionment with their former party or as a result of their encounters with New Dealers.32 They were also men of privilege. Despite the Depression and its financial uncertainty, they were able to support themselves reasonably well by balancing private savings against philanthropic grants, commissions, and professional work outside the arts. Olin Dows, the director of the Treasury’s Relief Administration Project, retrospectively admitted that he had “never lived” on what he earned as a painter and that he became “conscious . . . of the plight of the American artist” only as a government administrator.33 Like Dows, most of the art administrators accepted bureaucratic positions, not out of 73

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desperation, but rather because they were passionate about the idea of federal funds supporting the arts. They were “dollar-­a-­year men,” part of a then-­widespread practice in which industrialists and corporate lawyers worked for the federal government in exchange for nominal pay. Bruce proposed running the Treasury’s art project for six months without compensation. “I expect no financial return for my services,” he explained, “but simply want to be helpful in the movement which I think will have far-­reaching effects for good and will redound very much to the credit of the administration.”34 The Treasury’s approach reflected Bruce’s personal belief that one must not ignore spiritual development in the interest of material advancement but must learn to balance the two. Bruce was born in 1880 in Dover Plains, New York, and painting was his passion from childhood. While attending Columbia University, he studied with the well-­known landscape artists J. Francis Murphy and Arthur Parton. During the eight years he lived in East Asia, he became well versed in Chinese art and amassed a private collection of paintings and porcelains. Art, however, represented a luxury and an avocation for Bruce rather than a legitimate career. Indeed, before becoming a professional artist, he pursued three different callings. First, after graduating with honors from Columbia Law School, he worked as a corporate lawyer in New York City. After four years, he moved to the Philippines, where he continued to practice law and also bought the Manila Times. Next, he went to China, where he organized and promoted Chinese-­American trade as the director of the Pacific Development Company, a foreign trade and banking institution that operated throughout China and East Asia. It was only in 1922, when his company was faltering, that he turned professionally to his first love, painting. With his wife and a friend, the American painter Maurice Sterne, he moved to Anticoli Corrado, Italy, to paint. Sterne taught him to value “good drawing, careful observation of nature, and the development of instinct to assure an individual approach.”35 Dows described his old friend as an “indefatigable worker” who “would get up with the sun, paint all morning, lunch, sleep during the hot noon, and paint in the afternoon until the sun set.”36 After destroying his first year’s work, Bruce sold every painting that he had made during the following two years. By 1929, he was selling sixteen paintings a year, each for between $1,000 and $5,500.37 Despite his initial struggles, Bruce eventually achieved an international reputation for his classical realist landscapes that appealed to tyros and critics alike. The Depression, however, altered the balance that Bruce had achieved between his financial needs and his artistic yearnings. He left fascist 74

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Italy in 1929 and attempted to resume his artistic career in the United States. Despite positive reviews in exhibits at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1931 and at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1933, he could not find buyers for his work. When the Depression left him with insufficient funds to continue to work independently, he returned first to law and then to Washington, DC, where he lobbied for the Calamba Sugar Estate of San Francisco. He had initially sought to resume painting professionally as soon as it was financially possible to do so. Instead, he worked fervently for federal patronage of the arts until his death in 1943.38 The artist-­turned-­administrator not only ran the Treasury’s art program—­despite a stroke in 1936 that paralyzed his left hand—­but also attempted to make federal patronage of the arts permanent and to create a government-­funded museum on the mall in Washington, DC, where artists could display their work. Bruce’s personal attempts to achieve recognition and support for his own work encouraged him to help other artists who were similarly struggling. Convinced that inheritance and income taxes would prevent the rich from sponsoring artists, Bruce fought to make the state artists’ primary patron. His elevation of artists’ communal interests above his own personal advancement was typical during the 1930s.39 “Artists,” the Russian-­born painter Anton Refregier explained, “were willing to give up even painting for a while to help to plan for [their] fellow painters. . . . [They sought] to make the greatest possible contribution.”40 Bruce’s conviction that aesthetic encounters would encourage moral, ethical, and spiritual development largely grew out of his friendship with the art critic Leo Stein. Bruce met Stein, the brother of Gertrude, when he was living in Europe, and the two men instantly struck up a personal and a professional relationship.41 Stein saw in Bruce’s paintings a fitting stage for the type of “aesthetic seeing” that the art critic developed in The A-­B-­C of Aesthetics (1927), a book that he dedicated to Bruce and his wife, Peggy. Stein was attracted by the ecumenical appeal of Bruce’s work. “The man in the street who likes pictures,” he contended in an introduction to one of Bruce’s exhibits, “should be glad to find that there is at least one place where he and the crabbed, crusty, cruel critic can meet and not make faces at each other.”42 Both Bruce’s landscapes and Stein’s aesthetic philosophy merged artists with publics and fine art with objects from daily life. In The A-­B-­C of Aesthetics, Stein sought to popularize both art’s definition and its meaning to viewers. He argued that ordinary people—­those who had no formal training in the arts—­were often better able than experts to appreciate art’s intrinsic value because they were rarely sidetracked by the market value of a work 75

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of art. According to Stein, “aesthetic experience” is a “cognitive attitude in which things are known through the co-­ordinate of the self, that is, through feeling.”43 In other words, by viewing art one learns not only about an object but also about oneself. Bruce’s discussions with Stein shaped his desire to democratize art and to use it to enhance spiritual well-­being. The Treasury’s special art adviser and chief publicist Forbes Watson was less interested in the type of ethical reform that federal patronage might promote than in the national aesthetic it could foster. Watson was born in the same year as Bruce, 1880, and also raised in an affluent Northeastern home. Yet, despite his genteel upbringing, he had a caustic edge. Some called him the H. L. Mencken of art criticism. Although he maintained a critic’s concern regarding art’s quality, he sought to close the distance separating artists and audiences by making art vital and personal.44 He promoted American and democratic art, encouraging artists to exhibit without juries and viewers to trust their tastes. Watson first attempted to nationalize and democratize art in 1921, when he left his position as a columnist for the New York Evening Post to launch, write, and edit his own magazine, The Arts. His journal challenged the art as grandeur aesthetic for ignoring both the tastes and the experiences of most Americans. Watson criticized academic artists both for painting unrealistic scenes and for dismissing the concerns of the masses. Rather than pompously proposing to “save the republic” with uplifting images, the critic saw art as fostering artists’ independent expression and viewers’ “unalloyed enjoyment.”45 But he also expressed ambivalence about how lay people responded to various forms of art. Even as he called for artists to make works that would foster joy in onlookers, he criticized those that left them gaping. For example, he offered a biting critique of the new Supreme Court building (completed in 1935), describing it as an “astounding white marble extravaganza, wedding-­cake tomb of a dead period and glaring morgue of wasted millions” filled with “thousands of tourists . . . gaping and wondering.”46 Before accepting an invitation from his charismatic old friend Bruce to serve as an art administrator, Watson argued that museums, dealers, and private patrons could build an independent American art better than the state could. Government, he assumed, would only standardize art and encourage mediocrity. “As soon as art and politics join hands,” he attested, “something corroding happens to both.”47 Throughout the 1920s, he sought to distance art from the state. He opposed the creation of a national gallery of art in Washington, DC, a congressional bill to

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create a department of fine arts, and the imposition of a tariff on imported art.48 As late as 1932, he continued to argue that artists should support one another through outdoor markets and other methods that allow them to preserve their “complete independence,” rather than looking to the state for help. “I believe,” he wrote, “that before Chief Big Thunder could satisfy his penchant for art by convincing his harassed aldermen that they should give an annuity to every hungry artist, so many of the painters and sculptors would have starved to death that capitalism could support the rest out of its pin money without noticing the dent. A less heroic solution must be found.”49 Watson’s conviction that the government should not provide relief to artists in need resonated with those of the director of the CFA, Charles Moore, who advocated for government commissions to go to artists on the merit of their work rather than in response to their personal needs. As the decade progressed, however, Watson found himself increasingly drawn toward federal patronage of the arts. The economic constraints of the Depression, combined with his blatant disregard for the strings attached to private patronage, took a personal toll. In 1932, the sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney stopped supporting The Arts, which she had financed for eleven years. Whitney’s assistant, Juliana Force, eliminated Whitney’s support for Watson both because she needed to rechannel the philanthropist’s diminished funds toward the newly created Museum of Modern Art and because she wanted to punish Watson, her lover throughout the previous decade, for his unabashed philandering.50 Without his benefactor’s support, Watson had to struggle to attain financial security. The successor magazine that he tried to establish folded after only three months. He published two monographs and wrote a few book reviews before the director of the College Art Association, Audrey McMahon—­who, as we saw in chapter 1, oversaw the first government-­funded artists’ relief project in New York—­offered him a stable job as a contributing editor to Parnassus. Although he was able to make ends meet, the Depression made Watson more aware both of his own financial vulnerability and of the personal strings that were attached to all philanthropy, whether it came from private individuals or from the state. As a special adviser to the Treasury’s art programs, Watson altered his notion of the role that the state should play both in the art world and in the nation’s aesthetic. Although he continued to rally against academic art, he argued that the problem with such work was aesthetic and not based on its source of benefaction. During the 1930s, the state

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became Watson’s ally rather than his enemy. In his writing and lectures about the Treasury’s art programs, which he delivered to art groups, museums, and universities throughout the country, he praised the government’s art projects, suggesting that they forged a national aesthetic that balanced community with creativity. He furthermore argued that the steady income the government provided for artists encouraged their creativity rather than stifling their independence. “Knowing what is going to happen to him materially,” he wrote about the federally sponsored artist, “has freed his imagination from the irritating interruptions certain to enter into the working life of a man who does not know how he is going to pay his rent, his bills for materials, and the grocer.”51 In addition, he embraced the idea that government support fostered artists’ social integration and their creation of relevant artwork. He encouraged artists to interact with diverse publics because it would improve their work. “Instead of struggling in isolation and becoming over refined from the very loneliness of his endeavors,” he argued, “[increased social contact with other artists and diverse publics would] thicken . . . the bloodstream of his [the artist’s] work.”52 According to Watson, artists could best socially integrate themselves by representing American dreams and beliefs. By World War II, he was openly promoting art as a form of propaganda. “I am sorry this word [ propaganda] has come to mean something evil,” he wrote in the forward to a catalog entitled Art for Bonds, “because the idea of propagating faith in our country and in the aspirations of the American people is to me a beautiful idea. That is what every artist represented in this exhibition has attempted to do—­to propagandize patriotism.”53 During the 1930s and especially the early 1940s, he shifted from advocating a firm separation between art and politics to encouraging artists to integrate the two. Art became, for him, a political tool that could celebrate the nation’s achievements, beauty, and unity. While the New Deal art programs encouraged Watson to alter his attitude toward art and politics, they allowed Edward Rowan to nationalize the experiments with regionalism, art education, and community building that he had begun prior to the Depression. In his demeanor, Rowan differed from the other section men. Unlike the statesman-­like Bruce, whose mien conveyed power and vigor, or Watson, who appeared suave and sophisticated, Rowan was a skinny chain smoker—­a “bundle of nervous energy.”54 He also emerged from a different social and geographic setting than the other section men had. Although he received a master’s in art from Harvard, he was a midwesterner from Chicago who received his undergraduate degree from Miami University in Oxford, 78

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Ohio. He neither grew up with the same elite circle of childhood friends and classmates as his Treasury colleagues nor frequented the galleries they attended. Instead, he met Watson when the latter was traveling across country and lecturing in 1929.55 Rowan piqued Watson’s interest. Here was an independent gallery owner and the director of an art colony who had a clear vision of how art could foster community. In 1928, with a $75,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Rowan had founded the Little Gallery in the small town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For the next six years, he and his wife, Leatta, exhibited local artists’ work, promoted the efforts of aspiring artists in Iowa, and provided classes in art, dance, music, and literature for children and adults. With the help of $1,000 from the Carnegie Foundation, Rowan also established and operated in rural eastern Iowa the Stone City Art Colony for two summers in 1932 and 1933. He worked with two friends, both of whom would later be employed by the New Deal arts projects: the regionalist painter Grant Wood and the former director of the Flint Institute of Art and a Little Gallery art teacher, Adrian Dornbush. In the colony, artists from Iowa and the rest of the Midwest whom Rowan and Dornbush had selected lived in white wagons with flower boxes, immersed themselves in the Iowa landscape, and worked and lived communally.56 Here was the antithesis of what Charles Moore had advocated. Where Moore warned against frequenting home talent on the basis of what he assumed would be its poor quality, Rowan purposely set out to develop it. After two successful summers, Stone City faced serious obstacles in terms of finances and personnel. Grant Wood’s new teaching position at the University of Iowa and his administrative responsibilities as the Iowa director of the Treasury’s first relief-­ based program, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), would have kept him from the colony during the summer of 1934. In the face of such changes, Rowan left the colony to become Watson’s assistant in Washington, DC. As an art administrator, he directed juries, criticized designs, and offered technical assistance to artists and the program. He was markedly better organized and disciplined than Watson was and had taken over as the PWAP technical director by the end of that summer. While Watson remained a special adviser to the various Treasury art programs, Rowan, Dows, and, for a short period after Bruce’s heart attack in June 1935, Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of the secretary of the Treasury, divided the administrative responsibilities among themselves. When Bruce died, in 1943, Rowan briefly assumed his position as director of the Section of Fine Arts until it dissipated a few months later for lack of funding and political support. 79

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Like Watson, Rowan imagined a national aesthetic that differed dra­ matically from the one that academic artists constructed. He urged art­ ists to “extol the American scene” rather than representing a classical past.57 He used the Treasury’s program to encourage his network of artists and cultural experts to apply for government commissions. He further ensured that midwestern artists received national recognition.58 He also offered some of the most prestigious commissions to the so-­called regionalist triumvirate, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. Indeed, Benton toured the country in 1934 promoting the program, while Wood directed the Treasury’s Iowa division and supported its efforts in his manifesto Revolt against the City (1935).59 In Revolt, Wood argued that the government’s cultural endeavors were helping foster a regional movement in which artists turn, not to European or American cities for inspiration, but rather to their own hometowns.60 Like Wood, Rowan hoped that government patronage would develop an American renaissance by fostering the relationship between artists and their native communities. The primary founders and administrators of the Treasury’s art pro­ grams—­Bruce, Watson, and Rowan—­all sought alternatives to the gen­­teel tradition, which employed classical and romantic motifs to decorate public buildings. Instead, they supported government funding of American artists and encouraged them to portray American scenes. Despite their similarities, each of the Treasury’s art administrators articulated slightly different ideas regarding the political function of art. Bruce viewed government art as a means to enlighten and refine individuals, Watson saw art as reinforcing national rather than individual identity, and Rowan emphasized its fostering of regional ties. Collectively, their ideas translated into the development and democratization of a new type of high-­ quality art that countered classical and allegorical representations with contemporary American iconography that both celebrated and encouraged communal, regional, and national bonds. It also restrained overtly political art, which both helped preserve the Treasury’s art program and elicited criticism, especially from artists on the Left.

Praise from Artists Many artists were drawn to and greatly appreciated the Treasury’s vision. The regional orientation of the Treasury’s program and its open and anonymous competitions granted opportunities to talented artists

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across the country who might not have received commissions had it been known that they were undiscovered. Throughout the program’s ten-­year term, the Treasury’s various art projects provided positions to more than five thousand artists.61 Artists communicated their gratitude to the art administrators through letters, hard work, and voluntary contributions. Biddle, for example, threw himself passionately into the work. In his diary, he wrote that he spent nearly every waking moment designing his mural on “pricked tracing paper” while sitting, standing, and crouching on the scaffolding in front of his assigned walls in the Department of Justice.62 “I never worked so hard or with such enthusiasm,” he insisted. “I get up at 6 o’clock, am on the scaffolding before 7 and always work 10, 11, or 12 hours.”63 Biddle was not alone in his industry. “Every artist I have spoken to and whose project I am aware of,” wrote an artist living in Woodstock, New York, “is so keyed up to the importance of the situation, amounting practically to a revolution for him, that he is, without exception, putting every ounce of his creative energy and creative ability into his work as never before.”64 According to one estimate, the program’s artists devoted more than thirty hours per week to the adornment of public buildings. Artists were so enthusiastic about contributing to the government program that those who were too established to qualify for relief under the PWAP donated their time and their work.65 Commissioned artists appreciated both the professional opportunities the Treasury provided and their socially integrating effect. Recipi­ ents of federal commissions thanked art administrators for keeping them off relief programs. “I had not been on the commissary,” one artist living in Birmingham, Alabama, attested, “but I have been almost there many times.”66 Another artist living in Philadelphia called the Treasury’s efforts “a godsend to my mother and myself”: “[The work] has kept my home together, my mother in warmth and food and myself also.”67 Government sponsorship also allowed artists to remain in, or migrate to, rural areas rather than forcing them to move to cities. “Many of the artists,” Bruce wrote the president, “have been able to either buy or settle down on farms and they write me the happiest letters of the pleasure of their existence and how comfortable the assurance of even a few hundred dollars a year makes them feel.”68 Artists employed by the Treasury also valued the communal recognition that the projects offered them. “Never in my career,” one artist wrote, “have I experienced such a sense of lift as I feel now in my work for the government. No newspaper criticism, however kind, no

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exhibition of my work, no scholarship, no patronage, has fired me as does this project.”69 Biddle recalled having had a “feeling of elation, of mastery of my medium, [and] of faith in the outcome of the two years’ preparation and work.”70 Bruce’s evaluation of hundreds of similar letters led him to conclude that federal patronage provided artists with as many emotional as material rewards. “While the economic relief afforded them by the project was enormously appreciated and greatly needed,” he wrote, “the spiritual stimulus to them in finding that they were recognized as useful and valuable members of the body politic and that the government desired their work has been simply amazing.”71

Art as Grandeur: Academic Artists Respond Despite such enthusiasm, not all artists praised the Treasury’s aesthetic approach. On the Treasury’s right flank, the art as grandeur cohort saw nothing beautiful and uplifting in the subject and style of its murals. Much of the animosity between the Treasury’s art program and the CFA resulted from a turf war. The Treasury wanted to transform public art as it had been created for the previous century to make it more contemporary and American. Although the CFA resisted these efforts, the Treasury’s art administrators adeptly incorporated academic artists into their infrastructure to encourage their cooperation. They gave Moore, the chairman of the CFA, and Jonas Lie, who headed the National Academy of Design, two of the twenty-­one seats on the Treasury’s Sec­­ tion of Painting and Sculpture advisory committee that assigned commissions. The art administrators were strategic about such placements. Incorporating academic artists within the Treasury’s juries would allow them to influence—­but not dictate as they previously had done—­who would decorate the nation’s capital. To explain his inclusion, Bruce insisted: “[It’s] better to have Moore peeing from the inside out than peeing from the outside in.”72 Stated less crassly, art administrators acknowledged their classically oriented colleagues while simultaneously minimizing their visual impact on the art program. The art administrators also lessened academic artists’ control over the actual design of public works. The CFA’s confrontation with Biddle over his proposed mural for the Justice Department—­and the ensuing showdown—­illustrates the triumph of the Treasury’s approach to art over that espoused by academic artists. With the exception of a few aesthetic criticisms, the Treasury’s art administrators were largely pleased with Biddle’s sketch. The CFA, however, was markedly more skeptical of 82

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his work and jarred by its contemporary content and compressed composition. Lee Lawrie—­the architectural sculptor and CFA member who described himself as a late convert to the commission’s art as grandeur vision—­advised Moore to reject Biddle’s sketches on the grounds that they clashed with the architecture and that they represented “copies” of a style that, he wrote, was “somewhat French and very Mexican—­a style popular today because of its novelty, but intrinsically unAmerican and ill-­adapted to express American ideas and ideals.”73 When Moore contacted Rowan at the Treasury, he echoed Lawrie’s concern about the clash between the murals and the broader architectural plan for the nation’s capital. Reminding Rowan that the Department of Justice was part of the Federal Triangle, he insisted that “its interiors are made up of broad, quiet surfaces requiring similar qualities of decoration.” In contrast, Moore found Biddle’s sketches to be “disturbingly busy in both pattern and scale . . . , too big for the allotted spaces . . . , crude and harsh in color, and even grotesque.”74 Unsurprisingly, Biddle was furious about the commission’s verdict. In his memoir, he complained: “After due rumination and cud-­chewing, they [the commission] brought up a considerable belch of mephitic disapproval.” In an unsigned letter to Biddle on the commission’s stationary, which presumably Moore penned, it was suggested that the “social” content of the sketches would have been more appropriate in the Department of Labor than the Department of Justice. Biddle read this comment as an attack on his own leftist orientation. More significantly, the letter quoted Lawrie’s un-­American accusation against Biddle based on his “somewhat French and very Mexican” style. Incensed by the review and the several-­month delay in his work, Biddle had a nervous breakdown and “retired” to Florida’s west coast.75 Biddle was far from the only artist who found working for the Trea­ sury’s art program frustrating. The sculptor Oskar J. W. Hansen, whose work decorated the Hoover Dam, refused to compete for the opportunity to embellish the reception room in the new post office in the Federal Triangle because of the uncompensated costs associated with enter­­ing such a competition. In a letter to Rowan, he estimated that his entry alone would cost $500. Multiplied by forty-­eight entrants, that would translate to $24,000 uncompensated dollars spent by competing sculptors. “I cannot participate in the doing of such an injustice to my fellow artists,” he explained, “not knowing as well as I do the starvation which accompanies the tremendous efforts which such a ‘competition’ demands.”76 Others objected to the aesthetic control the Treasury exerted over its muralists. Assigned to small and awkward spaces, Benton never 83

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completed a federal commission. Instead, he left the Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture for a privately funded opportunity to decorate the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City.77 Although Henry Varnum Poor completed his assignment, he still objected to the constraints that the CFA placed on him and his colleagues. “I wouldn’t have joined the group,” he wrote Biddle, “if I had known the conditions.”78 But Biddle’s discontent had less to do with the Treasury’s section than with its competition with the CFA. Indeed, the Treasury’s art administrators worked over the next few months to defend Biddle’s project to the CFA. Bruce requested evidence that would disassociate Biddle from the Left, Diego Rivera, and any other sort of radicalism. “I would be happy if you would let me have anything along the lines of showing how completely free from Mexican influence your work is,” Bruce wrote Biddle. “Anyhow, you know the kind of stuff that I want to poke at them,” he continued, presumably referring to Biddle’s patrician roots.79 In the long term, Bruce’s intervention served to narrow both political and aesthetic discourse. But, for the moment, it allowed Biddle to resume his work after a hiatus of a few months. Despite the pressures he experienced—­or perhaps inspired by them—­Biddle portrayed the laborers in the final version of Society Freed through Justice as more confrontational than they appeared in his initial sketch. The smiles of at least two workers are muted, two girls are turned into boys, and a number of eyes that had been humbly cast down in the initial sketches look searchingly, if not accusingly, at the audience in the final mural. The resolution of Biddle’s crisis indicated the Treasury’s triumph over the CFA. In a New York Times review written shortly after Biddle’s reinstatement, the art critic Duncan Aikman commented that the Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture was “winning a war” against the CFA’s efforts to decorate classical buildings with “general[s]-­ on-­horseback, embattled dragons and brooding statesmen with the-­ hand-­in-­the-­breast type of theme and treatment.” Instead, the Treasury was commissioning murals that, according to Aikman, “bristle with violence and action rather than grace and stateliness, stress and accentuate realism rather than charm, and often to boot, borrow a compositional device or two from cubist direction. . . . [T]he feeling of togas is absent.”80 Despite its success, the Treasury’s new approach came at a price. It alienated academic artists. In doing so, it created a cohort of well-­ established artists and architects who would later challenge the quality of art produced under government sponsorship and suggest that public patronage fostered mediocrity rather than true cultural development. 84

Fig. 3.4  This is Biddle’s initial sketch of “Sweatshop,” which should be compared with the final

mural. Changes from the sketch of “Tenement” to the mural were less extreme but included raising the eyes of two women to engage directly with viewers. Source: George Biddle, Sweatshop (1935–­36), 1974.28.372, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, http://americanart.si.edu/images/1974/1974.28.372_1a.jpg.

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Conflict and Censorship: Protests by Artists on the Left While the battle against academicism represented a fight on the Treasury’s right flank, there was also a struggle with artists on its left side. Such artists objected to the Treasury’s adoption of a narrowly defined American scene that focused more on regionalism than social realism. Midwestern regionalism was a social construct that journalists and critics invented in the mid-­1930s to describe a group of artists, including Benton, Wood, and Curry, who developed their aesthetic approaches independently of one another but shared realistic portraits of the Amer­ ican heartland.81 Artists working within this so-­called tradition glossed over their European training, time spent living abroad and traveling domestically, radical pasts, experimentation with modernism, and contentious representations of race and class conflict. Instead, they—­especially the pugnacious Benton and his primary booster, Thomas Craven—­ promoted antiurban, antimodernist, anti-­immigrant, anti-­Semitic, and homophobic rhetoric.82 In one of the more egregious examples, Craven infamously referred to the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz as a “Hoboken Jew without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical American background.”83 Scholars continue to debate the politics of the midwestern regionalists, viewing them differently if their research relies on the artists’ works as compared to their speech and writing, but during the 1930s artists on the Left were quick to label their flag-­waving, rugged nationalism as chauvinistic and even fascistic. As the art historian Andrew Hemingway argues, the Americanism adopted by the Treasury Department was markedly more liberal and inclusive than was the rhetoric articulated by leading regionalists.84 Nev­ertheless, the Treasury’s aesthetic choices—­and the type of artistic revisions and distancing from the Left that the Treasury asked of artists like Biddle—­led those on the Left to lump them together. Many artists on the Left, thus, attributed to the Treasury’s art projects the regionalists’ exclusive definition of American art. Social realists were particularly sensitive to such marginalization because of their global perspective: they considered art created by immigrants and the range of US-­based Latin American and Asian artists working in the United States at the time to be American. Social realists tended to be on the Left, often members of the Communist Party and/or fellow travelers, and frequently were first-­or second-­generation immigrants, many of them urban, northeastern Jews. The art historian Helen Langa coined the term social viewpoint to refer to

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this group since both regionalists and realists employed realism and the so-­called realists included those experimenting with abstraction. Social viewpoint, Langa argued, better characterized this group since it alluded to their social justice efforts to reveal labor unrest, racial violence, and rising fascism.85 Predictably, the Treasury’s art administrators were wary of how overtly political and stylistically experimental art might alienate taxpayers and sabotage government funding of the arts. Thus, they shied away from the social viewpoint perspective and instead emphasized regionalism in their calls for competitions and juried contests as well as negotiations with artists over sketches. In addition, even with blind juries that expanded the types of people receiving commissions, the Treasury’s record regarding diversity was more impressive at its inception than it was in its later years. After operating for two months and employing an estimated 1,071 artists, Rowan boasted in the project’s bulletin that the Treasury’s art program had hired 526 (49 percent) women, 25 (2 percent) Native Americans, and 10 (1 percent) blacks.86 The numbers were much less impressive for the Treasury’s smaller but longer-­ lasting Section of Painting and Sculpture (later renamed the Section of Fine Arts). Between May 1934 and January 1943, the section hired 850 artists, 150 (18 percent) of whom were women and only three (0.4 percent) of whom were black.87 Thus, while it provided some women and minorities with jobs, most positions went to white men. The Treasury’s art administrators were a political lot who tried to walk a line between creating art that would address current problems and restoring faith in a disillusioned generation without funding works that would be so provocative that they would undermine the section. Thus, at times, they defended commissioned work that raised contentious issues about American freedom, such as Biddle’s Society Freed through Justice. But, overall, they called for art that would enrich its citizens by creating and celebrating local traditions that would inspire faith without challenging it. In contrast, artists on the Left held alternative views about what government support of the arts should constitute. Rather than re-­creating a patronage relationship in which artists are subject to the interests of those who commission them, some artists believed that the government should protect them from the demands of private patrons. Federally funded artists should not be subject to viewers’ preferences, even if taxpayers supported them. Instead, they should be free to express themselves independently. A permanent national arts foundation

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would allow such autonomy by creating opportunities for artists to display their work without tailoring it to someone else’s needs. It could provide free exhibition spaces and pay artists for entering competitions and displaying their work in galleries and museums. Artists on the Left were particularly interested in extricating their work from critical judgment and believed, somewhat unrealistically, that the government could help them do so. Government-­funded artists and exhibits could circumvent juries, in which museum administrators, established collectors, prominent community members, and other representatives of the cultural elite—­but rarely artists—­judge the merit of creative expressions. Artists on the Left furthermore did not want patrons to be able to censor their work if it affronted their sensibilities, as they had seen done in the Rockefeller-­Rivera scandal of 1933. Instead, they sought government protection from the shortsightedness and biases of benefactors and viewers. Such policies would, they believed, support artists financially and emotionally, thus facilitating their unencumbered expression. But artists on the Left were wary of how well the government could divorce itself from popular opinion and protect the freedom of expression of artists and intellectuals. In 1934, the summer after the Rivera affair, an incident at Coit Tower, a gray monument recently built on Telegraph Hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay, illustrated the tensions between social viewpoint artists on the Left and the Treasury’s art administrators. Its resolution manifested some of the constraints that consensus-­based public art can place on aesthetic and political experimentation and individuality. In the wake of the Rivera affair, Edward Bruce selected the German émigré Dr. Walter Heil, the new director of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, to chair the fifteenth district, in San Francisco, of the PWAP.88 In many respects, Heil and his supervisory committee, which included a number of old-­time San Francisco art patrons, shared the Treasury’s ideas regarding art and politics. They too sought to use public art to neutralize potential discontent.89 It is therefore somewhat ironic that Heil and his committee selected a newly emerging group of leftist muralists to decorate Coit Tower, the Treasury’s largest and most ambitious project to date. Two of the twenty-­eight artists chosen were particularly controversial: Bernard Zakheim and Victor Arnautoff. San Francisco’s leading muralists, Zakheim and Arnautoff were both immigrants from religious families who rebelled against Judaism and Russian Orthodoxy, respectively, fought in World War I and the Russian Revolution, and then pursued careers in the arts in California, where they met Rivera and developed a radical ethnic painting scene.90 88

Fig. 3.5  Victor Arnautoff, City Life (detail of right side of mural), 1934, Coit Tower, San

Francisco, CA, 2011. Photo by Jim Steinhart (Travel Photo Base). Ref: CAF432, http://travelphotobase.com/v/USCAF/CAF432.HTM.

Fig. 3.6  Victor Arnautoff, City Life (detail of left side of mural), 1934, Coit Tower,

San Francisco, CA, 2011. Photo by Jim Steinhart (Travel Photo Base). Ref: CAF435, http://travelphotobase.com/v/USCAF/CAF435.HTM.

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Fig. 3.7  Bernard Zakheim, The Library, 1934, Coit Tower, San Francisco, CA, 2011.

Photo by Jim Steinhart (Travel Photo Base). Ref: CAF426, http://travelphotobase .com/v/USCAF/CAF426.HTM.

The committee probably included Zakheim and Arnautoff in the decoration of Coit Tower in an effort to control their work and influence.91 Although the committee initially asked Zakheim to design the overall project, when he recommended that the muralists focus on the contemporary economic crisis in the tradition of social realism, it rejected his proposal. Instead, it requested a regionalist-­style celebration of the state’s agriculture, landscape, and seascape.92 Despite the PWAP’s desired approach, a sickle and a hammer still emerged alongside representations of leftist books, newspapers, and strikes on the walls of Coit Tower. The conflict over four of the murals in the tower began in the spring and early summer of 1934, in the midst of the militant Pacific Maritime Strike, in which longshoremen, teamsters, seamen, and municipal workers closed down San Francisco’s port and disrupted business on the coast from Seattle to San Diego.93 Perched on Telegraph Hill, the Treasury’s muralists were well placed to witness the strike. For artists on the Left,

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Fig. 3.8  John Langley Howard, California Industrial Scenes (detail of left side of mural), 1934,

Coit Tower, San Francisco, CA, 2011. Photo by Jim Steinhart (Travel Photo Base). Ref: CAF415, http://travelphotobase.com/v/USCAF/CAF415.HTM.

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Fig. 3.9  John Langley Howard, California Industrial Scenes (detail of right side of mural), 1934,

Coit Tower, San Francisco, CA, 2011. Photo by Jim Steinhart (Travel Photo Base). Ref: CAF414, http://travelphotobase.com/v/USCAF/CAF414.HTM.

the presence of, and close proximity to, working-­class dissent encouraged them to use their art to respond to the contemporary crisis. Some did so more overtly than others. Arnautoff’s City Life, a portrait of a busy street scene in San Francisco’s financial district, for example, illustrated conflict within the city by highlighting leftist papers, such as the New Masses and the Daily Worker, and unpleasant sights, including a car crash and a robbery. Zakheim’s Library also contained radical newspapers and books, including Karl Marx’s Capital. To connect the ideas in such texts with radical politics, Zakheim painted the controversial muralist John Langley Howard removing Marx’s manifesto from the shelf. Howard’s California Industrial Scenes is more overtly confrontational than either Arnautoff’s or Zakheim’s work. His mural includes a May Day, interracial demonstration against hunger, war, and fascism. More clearly than that of the other muralists, his work also highlights inequality. For instance, it juxtaposes migrant workers hand-­washing clothes, cutting wood, and panning for gold against limousine-­driven, fur-­coated, and tailor-­suited

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tourists who appear to have come to witness the power of the Shasta Dam. The demonstrators suggest that collective action might offer one route toward the redistribution of such goods and services. When the San Francisco Art Commission previewed the murals, it ordered the Park Commission to lock the Tower. Lewis Hobart, the president of the art commission, argued that the artists took too much creative latitude. “I have no complaint,” explained Hobart, “as to the individual expression of the artists. They were given great latitude in their designs and conceptions but that does not give them the liberty to . . . exploit . . . their personal views in opposition to the generally ac­ cepted tradition of national Americanism.”94 Heil claimed that the artists had not included the controversial details in their original designs and appealed to the national office asking how to proceed. Watson and Bruce agreed that artists could not be permitted to alter their initial designs. Bruce further insisted that “the objectionable features [must] be removed,” either by the artist who originally painted the murals in question or by others in the group. “Artists of San Francisco,” he continued, “should realize that propaganda of this kind is hurtful to the best interests of American art and likely to discourage further government patronage.”95 Bruce even approached his old friend and former law school mentor Chief Justice Harlan Stone to assess the Treasury’s legal options.96 Stone warned that altering the mural could result in a legal liability but that “effacing or destroying . . . the mural in question would not give rise to a cause of action in the artist.”97 Conservative reporters working for the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst publicized the controversy, highlighting the use of government funds to tout the type of radicalism brewing on the waterfront a few yards away from the tower. The San Francisco News, for example, accused at least three of the thirty Coit Tower muralists of being Communists and referred to them as “the naughty boys [who] had indulged in a little Communistic propaganda . . . at the expense of the U.S. government.”98 Journalists specifically criticized the presence of leftist newspapers and books in the murals of Arnautoff, Zakheim, and Howard. Most offensive, however, were three panels by Clifford Wight that portrayed different economic solutions to the problems of the time. In the first panel, Rugged Individualism, Wight included the motto from the American dollar bill, “In God We Trust,” inside a chain shaped into a circle. The second, The New Deal, illustrated the blue eagle of the National Recovery Administration, and the third frame, Communism, portrayed a hammer and sickle alongside the phrase “United Workers

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of the World.”99 Newspapers stirred up further controversy by doctoring photographs of the mural. They visually juxtaposed Wight’s Communism panel with a hammer and sickle against Zakheim’s library. Regional newspapers widely reproduced and published the falsified image to draw attention to the artists’ radicalism.100 The Artists’ and Writers’ Union organized to support artists’ freedom of expression. Its members picketed the tower to prevent the San Francisco Art Commission and the Treasury from destroying the work. Their protest echoed those of the longshoremen on the waterfront below and similarly lasted through July 5, otherwise known as “Bloody Thursday,” when the national guard erected machine gun posts, killed two longshoremen, and wounded several hundred other strikers. Artists continued to protest through the ensuing two-­week-­long general strike. The Artists’ and Writers’ Union, however, folded shortly after the Pacific Maritime Strike was resolved in favor of the longshoremen. When Coit Tower reopened in October 20, 1934, a few months after the controversy ended, an unidentified artist had removed Clifford Wight’s provocative symbols but left the other murals untouched. The Coit Tower incident encouraged artists on the Left to view the Treasury’s approach skeptically. The painter Stuart Davis accused the Section of Painting and Sculpture of serving as a palliative to revolution by moving artists from one exploited position to another.101 The socialist art historian Meyer Schapiro similarly warned that the public art projects would only “serve the governmental demagogy” if the artists they employed did not have the freedom and ability to represent the experiences of workers, farmers, and the middle class “intimately, truthfully, and powerfully.”102 Davis’s and Schapiro’s perspective mirrored the Communist Party’s attitude toward Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the arts projects prior to the formation of the Popular Front, a broad alliance that existed between 1935 and 1939 between the Party and liberals, including supporters of the New Deal. According to the art historian Andrew Hemingway, before the Popular Front, the Party’s position discouraged participation in government projects, lumping together the president’s New Deal with one of its conservative political opponents: the American Liberty League. Yet, despite criticism of the Treasury for prejudice and incompetence, individual artists were grateful for support before the Popular Front and a number of them, including Joe Jones, Phillip Evergood, and William Gropper, repeatedly applied to work on New Deal projects. Such artists used commissions for public buildings to present meaningful—­if not radical—­images of working people.103 94

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Appreciation, Faith, and American Scenes Despite the objections to the Treasury’s approach from both academic artists and artists on the Left, many painters and muralists, particularly those who identified themselves as regionalists or were willing to assume the regionalists’ style and subject matter, continued to vie for the Treasury’s commissions.104 The art administrator Ed Rowan’s ties to the Midwest and his orientation toward native subject matter combined with the Treasury’s orientation toward regionalism to facilitate the relationship between such artists and the Treasury. Regionalists further appreciated the Treasury’s emphasis on the American scene, their restriction of certain competitions to local artists, and their commitment to portray the nation in a favorable and optimistic light. The similar aims of and personal connections between regionalists and the Treasury’s art administrators helped facilitate a relatively smooth relationship between the two groups.105 In emphasizing the nation’s positive values and past achievements rather than its current crisis, many American Scene painters turned to the past. More than one-­third of the murals created by the Section of Painting and Sculpture (415 of 1,116) had historical content, and more than sixty were exclusively historical.106 The past that American Scene painters recovered frequently highlighted the stories that were impor­ tant to local communities: the raising of a house, the fighting of a battle, and the distribution of mail. They emphasized ordinary people, local events, and folklore. The past they relayed was neither entirely consensual nor limited to small-­town, white America but rather differed from region to region and building to building. When Treasury-­commissioned artists portrayed national figures, they included blacks, Native Americans, and women as well as political radicals. Through their representations of the past, Treasury-­commissioned painters conveyed a twofold message: first, everyday Americans were the heroes of the national narrative; and, second, the nation’s leaders emerged from ordinary roots. In this way, they implied the potential power inherent in each person who walked by a mural, regardless of his or her background. One of the reasons why the past held such great appeal was because of the solutions it seemed to offer to the “problem of faith” that Huxley had outlined. American Scene painters who used the past to rediscover and redefine the American way adopted an approach that echoed earlier quests in national rediscovery. For example, in a widely read article published in 1918, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks argued that America 95

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lacked a cultural heritage and that it needed to discover or invent one to find a “cultural economy,” “a sense of spiritual values,” and a “body of critical understanding.” According to Brooks, a “usable past” could help Americans understand their identity and articulate values beyond material wealth. “The past,” he explained, “is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals.”107 A usable past would allow people to explore alternatives to themselves and their society.108 Wendell Jones, a member of the Woodstock Artists Association and a muralist who completed several commissions for the Treasury, also saw the past as a resource that could address the contemporary crisis.109 He called the past a “spiritual reservoir” that community members could draw on to acquire “faith, courage, strength, and a sense of the abiding goodness of life.” Like Brooks, he was interested in the history of the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. He was drawn to the story not of “the self-­conscious and heroic but [of] the simple functions of man’s contact with man in cooperation and trust.” He believed that muralists should represent “contemporary epics” to illustrate that the “brotherhood of man can weather another storm.”110 A mural that Jones painted for the Granville, Ohio, post office in 1938 shows how he used art and the past to enhance viewers’ faith in their future. On receiving the commission, he visited the town in search of a topic that would be meaningful to the community. He soon learned of “a spiritual event,” which he described as “a good symbol of the character of Granville.”111 According to the local historian Henry Bushnell, on November 17, 1805, a Sabbath morning, ninety-­three pioneers cut down a beech tree, sang hymns, and wept to mark their arrival in Granville after months of difficult travel from their original homes in Granville, Massachusetts, and Granby, Connecticut. “The memory of their old homes and house of worship,” the local historian wrote, “rushed upon them in vivid contrast with their present circumstances,—­in the wild forests, on the frontier of civilization, no floor under their feet save the damp earth, no covering over their heads but God’s canopy, no seats but those improvised for the occasion out of logs and blocks and what their wagons afforded, no pulpit but the stump of that beech tree, and no pastor at all.”112 Their prayers, according to Bushnell, helped fortify the community and prepare it to endure the work that lay ahead.113 Jones’s mural, entitled First Pulpit in Granville, portrayed the emotional moment that Bushnell described. Jones was less interested in accurately representing those who were present than in conveying their attitude, which he assumed was one of “reverence.”114 He portrayed a community congregated around a tree and singing hymns of praise. Although 96

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Fig. 3.10  Wendell Jones, First Pulpit in Granville, Granville, OH, 1938, RG 121, GA-­Jones,

Wendell-­3–­2710, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

individuals in the scene differ from one another in terms of their dress, facial expressions, and demeanors, no leader emerges from the group. Jones focuses on their collective rather than their individual achievements and on their spiritual rather than their material well-­being. The pioneers do not appear to possess material goods other than the animals that accompany them, the clothing they wear, and the tree they carry. Nevertheless, they spontaneously break into prayer to express their gratitude for having arrived in Granville and their faith that they will be able to settle and prosper there. Through First Pulpit in Granville, Jones illustrated a “contemporary epic” to illustrate the resilience of a town’s founders and the heritage that they left their descendants. Granville’s founding moment, the mural suggested, could restore contemporaries’ sense of hope by renewing their faith in the resilience of community. Drawing on government funds and the heroic history and actions of farmers, laborers, and pioneers, American Scene painters such as Jones decorated the nation with optimistic images. The works they created illustrated the power and potential of working people and the communities they form. Treasury-­commissioned painters used such representations to help contemporaries overcome their difficulties and build a new, more resilient and meaningful American way than one based on individualism and economic growth.

Audiences Respond Viewers, like artists, both praised and criticized the Treasury’s aesthetic effort. Some spectators disputed factual details, unflattering portraits, contentious religious representations, modernist styles, and leftist symbols. School boards and administrators of hospitals and penitentiaries were 97

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particularly concerned that the murals failed to beautify public spaces and to educate their buildings’ inhabitants according to what the administrators themselves considered to be traditional American values. In 1937, when the principal of the Lucy Flower Girls’ School in Chicago called her school board to install new light fixtures to improve the visibility of a recently installed mural, the school’s officials were appalled by the work they saw. The six-­panel mural by Edward Millman portrayed significant historical episodes in the life of American women, including the first woman using a sewing machine, Clara Barton’s creation of the Red Cross, Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage advocacy, Jane Addams’s assistance to immigrants, and Frances Perkins’s aid to miners’ wives. In its final report, the board labeled the work “dismal,” “depressing,” “misery laden,” “ ‘inappropriate for a public school,’ . . . , [and] lacking in ‘the spirit we wish to have in a public school to inspire young American womanhood.’ ” It furthermore accused Millman of “stressing poverty and the failure of our democracy to uplift its people.” Shortly after issuing its report, the board ordered the work destroyed and all six panels whitewashed.115 Despite such incidents, there is evidence to suggest that those people who felt reassured and inspired by the Treasury’s cultural efforts outweighed those who objected to such work. “Art in public places,” the writer and lecturer Maxine Davis attested, “naturally arouses controversy, but for the most part the people of the cities and towns adorned by the Section of Fine Arts’ murals and sculptures have been delighted. The pictures belong to them. . . . [T]he material has come out of the community.”116 Many viewers saw the Treasury’s murals and sculptures as beautifying the nation, confirming their faith in themselves and in national ideals, and using the past to remind them that the Depression was only a blip in a more general march toward progress.117 According to one writer, the placement of murals on the walls of public buildings awakened a new interest in art among “the millions of passersby who had never thought about it before, but now began to pay attention because it was there for them to see.”118 “The introduction of these murals into thousands of small post offices,” a journalist explained, “is kindling an esthetic awareness in millions of Americans, just as centuries ago it was kindled in Italian peasants by the introduction of pieta and other paintings into village churches.”119 Particularly in areas lacking artistic institutions, such as museums and art schools, government-­sponsored art made citizens feel culturally incorporated into the nation. Viewers also wrote the Treasury to express their gratitude. “When I entered the vestibule of the Roosevelt High School Auditorium,” one 98

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man wrote, “and saw the murals displayed there and the type of esthetic development which they represent, I felt that we were at last becoming a thoroughly civilized people.”120 Others requested that the Treasury send them art. Mrs. Adda Gentry George from Galesburg, Illinois, asked the president if sketches of the Treasury’s murals could be sent to her local library to restore her community’s faith in the American Dream. “Pictures from the mural competition,” she wrote, “would feed souls hungry for beauty, and would give people courage and incentive seeing what is being done all over the country.”121 Voluntary monetary contributions further illustrate audiences’ enthusiasm for the Treasury’s endeavors. Despite the Depression and numerous competing priorities, local communities contributed materials and scaffolding, donated studio and exhibition space, provided art students to assist in the Treasury’s mural making, and even offered artists lunches and evening entertainment.122 In Santa Monica, California, townspeople “from every walk of life” raised $1,000 with pledges ranging from “50 cents to $100.00” to defray the expense of “paints, canvasses, and other materials.”123 Similarly, small subscriptions from African Americans across the country funded the construction of a mural commemorating Marian Anderson’s Easter Sunday concert in Washington, DC.124 Although the Treasury allocated $85,000 per week to pay its staff in 1934, during one week it paid as little as $175 for materials. The rest of the project’s costs were covered by local contributions.125 During the decade 1933–­43, the Treasury sponsored the creation of heroic images of workers and farmers that represented a new trend in government-­funded art. Such images suggested that ordinary people did not need to look to ancient Greece or high culture to uplift them. In­ stead, they could recognize the power and potential in their own pasts. Drawing on government funds and the brave actions of farmers, laborers, and pioneers, American Scene painters decorated the nation with optimistic images. They hoped that such representations would help contemporaries overcome their difficulties and build a new, more resilient and meaningful American way than one based on individual and financial growth. In order to sustain the Treasury’s cultural initiative and maintain the confidence of taxpayers with Catholic tastes, its art administrators emphasized uplifting images of small-­town America more than overtly political works of art and limited the aesthetic experimentation of the artists it employed. Although Americans, artists among them, did not uniformly agree that the Treasury’s approach enriched them, the program succeeded in invigorating the spirits of many people who otherwise were enduring troubled times. 99

Four

Art as a Weapon On January 20, 1937, roughly four years after FDR’s speech about abundance inspired the Treasury’s art administrators, another cohort of cultural enthusiasts found encouragement in the president’s words. In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered outdoors on a frigid and rainy afternoon, Roosevelt responded to the interests of the broad coalition of progressives, liberals, western and southern farmers, the urban working class, the poor, the unemployed, and blacks in northern communities who had returned him to the presidency with the greatest landslide in American history to that date. His speech urged the nation not to become complacent with the restoration of economic vitality, courage, and confidence to many Americans but to continue to act on behalf of the dispossessed. “I see one-­third of a nation,” Roosevelt proclaimed in his now famous speech, “ill-­housed, ill-­clad, and ill-­nourished. It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—­ because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. . . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”1 Rather than offering specific reforms, the president painted a picture. In doing so, he highlighted the role that images play in creating social change and illustrated the extent to which visual culture—­and art more generally—­had become integral to the New Deal by 1937. He suggested that spectatorship could raise awareness about poverty, ex-

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pand the way in which Americans imagined themselves, and justify a redistribution of goods and services. The president’s speech aroused Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), to ask how she and her organization might contribute to his mission. “What part,” she wrote, “could a government-­ sponsored theatre take in the commitment of the Second Inaugural, a pledge backed at the polls by the majority of citizens in the U.S.?”2 Roosevelt’s speech hardly initiated Flanagan’s efforts to use theater to promote changes in public policies. It did, however, grant legitimacy to an overtly political approach to art that was increasingly falling under careful observation and virulent criticism. In contrast to the Treasury’s art administrators, Flanagan was part of a cohort of art administrators, including the documentarian Roy Stryker, the folklorist Benjamin Botkin, the writer Katherine Kellock, the scholar Morton Royse, the musicologist Charles Seeger, and the poets Sterling Brown and Archibald MacLeish, who sought to use art as a weapon. Like the Treasury’s art administrators, such art activists attempted to integrate art into daily life and use it to alter self-­conceptions. But their approach was more overtly political and didactic than the Treasury’s was. Instead of enriching the nation with celebratory images of America’s people and past, art activists adopted social viewpoints. They used their work to highlight the nation’s problems and attempt to solve them. Their work promoted New Deal reform, advocated entry into World War II, and fought broader injustice. Unlike the Treasury’s art program, which tried to attenuate leftist iconography and squelch artistic activism, art activists were drawn to the Left, particularly to its aesthetic approach. All art is political. As the political scientist Murray Edelman explains, it “supplies images that construct the world in which we live,” thereby engendering political behavior. For example, “images, scenarios, and narratives about the poor as victim or as cheaters and malingerers,” or, in our case, as citizens, shape—­and have the potential to unsettle—­our collective thinking about poverty, welfare, and the responsibilities of individuals, government, and society toward them.3 Yet overtly political New Deal art was unusual because of the ideological forces and political arguments shaping it.4 New Deal art emerged as global Communists and fascists actively used new mass-­producible technologies, such as photography, film, and silk screen, to influence broad publics.5 Like the propaganda efforts promoted by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union, art as a weapon relied on core themes (labor and the land), styles (social realism), and audiences (mass).6 Yet experimentation, particularly

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in the relief projects, remained more central to New Deal art than it was for other government-­supported aesthetic programs at the time.7 Art as a weapon also developed in the context of artists’ increased radicalization and activism. During the 1930s, a wide range of artists and intellectuals conceived of themselves as cultural laborers at a moment of intensive political organizing of and by workers and the unemployed. Expressions of this new self-­perception ranged from extensive political activity—­including demonstrations, pickets, and sit-­ins regarding their status and treatment—­to the creation of works of art that addressed issues related to social justice, including fascism, racial violence, and labor exploitation.8 Unlike the Treasury’s celebratory aesthetic, art as a weapon epitomized the political activism of the decade and the attraction of artists and intellectuals to Communist institutions and ideology. The idea that art should serve as a weapon in class struggle preceded the New Deal. In 1918, the Soviet-­Marxist theorist Alexander Bogdanov argued that Proletcult—­a term he developed to describe a discrete proletarian culture unconnected to bourgeois influence—­would attend to the spiritual and cultural needs of working people while the Communist Party accommodated them politically and trade unions catered to their economic concerns.9 Bogdanov contended that Proletcult and its precursor agitprop (agitation propaganda) were particularly powerful vehicles for forging international revolutionary socialism. To encourage the creation of art that might heighten class consciousness and encourage class struggle, the Party organized workshops all over Russia, teaching workers to read and write, and encouraging them to produce novels, plays, and poetry. The Party, furthermore, created an international bureau that established institutions abroad to produce and distribute proletarian culture.10 In the United States, the Party founded the John Reed Clubs, the Workers’ Dance League, the Workers’ Music League, and the Theatre Collective. Within such institutions, artists and writers on the Left explored how a range of styles and subject matter might raise class consciousness and appeal to the working class.11 The formation of Federal One by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in May 1935 drew creative people on the Left toward federal patronage. Prior to its creation, financial need and optimism about the possibilities of government-­sponsored art led many artists to apply to the Treasury’s art programs for commissions. But the Communist Party’s opposition to Roosevelt and his first New Deal discouraged a number of them from vying for assignments. Despite blind juries that did not discriminate against artists on the Left, the Treasury’s aesthetic, with its 102

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emphasis on regionalism and realist art, generally excluded overtly political as well as abstract works. In contrast, Federal One’s art projects—­at least initially—­increased opportunities for those on the Left to work for the government. Under Federal One, before loyalty oaths became commonplace, artists and intellectuals could find WPA employment on the basis of their financial distress and professional history regardless of the content of their work or their political affiliations. In the summer of 1935, the implementation of the Popular Front, a broad alliance between the Communist Party USA and New Deal Democrats that lasted until the Nazi-­Soviet Pact in the fall of 1939, further encouraged those on the Left to join the arts projects. When the Communist Party dissolved most of its art organizations and called for the creation of new institutions that would appeal to a wider range of needy poets, writers, actors, directors, composers, visual artists, photographers, and filmmakers, many creative people on the Left moved into federally funded organizations. In the New Deal art projects, artists and intellectuals radicalized by the inequities of capitalism largely transcended doctrinaire aesthetic approaches. Instead, they worked through the arts projects to disseminate work that challenged the traditional roles assigned to the working class. They drew attention to previously forgotten publics, promoted a cooperative ideal, empowered working people, and challenged racism. They also shifted their focus away from class struggle and, instead, cooperated with middle-­class cultural workers to counter fascism and war.12 As we have already seen, the Treasury’s art administrators rejected the leftist politics of the artists they employed. Yet of the two models art as a weapon and art as enrichment neither supplanted the other. Instead, they coexisted. In 1937, when the FTP produced Power, a dramatization of the history of the electric industry that argued for government control of power, muralists continued to paint uplifting images on the walls of public buildings. Some artists even changed from one style to another as they moved from short-­term commissions for the Treasury’s section to longer-­term positions on the Federal Art Project (FAP). The social realist painter Ida Abelman portrayed poverty and the daily struggles of New Yorkers in the lithographs she created while working for the FAP. In contrast, the two murals she painted for the Treasury in 1941—­Lewistown Milestones in Illinois and Booneville Beginnings in Indiana—­commemorated local history. The Treasury’s concentration on celebration largely protected it from political criticism and allowed it to maintain its funding until 1943, when Congress abolished funding for all the New Deal art projects. 103

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Other art administrators, however, were attracted to the Popular Front’s strategy of using art to fight inequality. Embracing the term propaganda, they argued that art should address social and political concerns more than psychological and personal ones. Good art, they contended, was synonymous with persuasion. Unlike the Treasury’s Forbes Watson, who only gradually came to see art as a means to convey overtly political messages, this cohort experimented with overtly political art before working for the government. They sought to use art to challenge discrimination and to promote justice and equality rather than to celebrate the nation’s accomplishments and idealized futures. During a cross-­ examination in front of the House Committee on Un-­American Activities (the Dies Committee), Flanagan redefined propaganda as “education focused on certain things,” by which she meant better housing, enhanced understanding of power and its uses, and “fair labor relations.”13 Artists and intellectuals who embraced Flanagan’s interpretation of propaganda tended to use their work to teach viewers about contemporary subjects and struggles and demand their engagement. The political activism of New Deal art administrators, unsurprisingly, provoked the wrath of anti-­Communists, anti–­New Dealers, and other cultural and political conservatives. Federal efforts to fund controversial art during the 1930s were, as they remain to this day, dangerous endeavors. They were also short-­lived. First art administrators and then external investigatory bodies sought to control the messages conveyed by government-­funded artists and intellectuals. By 1939, when growing attacks by the Right met a disillusioned Left and the nation increasingly turned from the New Deal to the War, fewer artists and intellectuals dared to use federally funded art in overtly political ways. Nevertheless, from 1935 until 1939, when the Popular Front flourished and the relief-­based art projects were at their height, some art administrators tenuously allied with artists and intellectuals on the Left to engage in a series of aesthetic including progressive wars. Rather than using the Treasury’s strategy—­ narratives, lovely images, and imagined futures—­in order to transform national values, they turned to art to counter injustice and promote social change. Using the weapons at their disposal—­bodies, pens, paint, and cameras—­they encouraged working-­class pride, countered racial segregation and discrimination, and occasionally challenged gender inequity. Media that could be mass reproduced, like prints and photographs, and created and experienced communally, like theater, tended to be more readily adaptable to political demands and activist concerns. More than other genres, the New Deal theater attracted those on the Left. Flanagan, a dynamic theater director with a socially conscious agenda, 104

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appointed regional and local representatives on the Left and encouraged them to use the FTP to promote New Deal ideology. The collective nature of both theatrical performance and audience reception made New Deal plays even more politically engaged.

Lights, Fire, Action: Drawing Attention to the Bottom Third The summer after FDR’s Second Inaugural Address, the managing editor of the FTP’s Living Newspaper, Arthur Arent, wrote a play that used the theater as a weapon in the New Deal’s efforts to improve poor housing. The curtain rises in One-­Third of a Nation to expose an unusual protagonist: a dilapidated four-­story tenement house that could be located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Long Island. Wisps of smoke emerge from the basement, the cellar, and the third floor to interrupt domestic scenes of everyday life, and chaos ensues. People leave the house in various stages of deshabille, policemen blowing whistles club their way through the crowd, and screeching sirens herald the emergence of firemen. A man climbs onto the fire escape only to slip on a broken ladder and find himself trapped between flames and a twenty-­four foot jump. “Look!” cries the crowd as they rush over to the man dangling above. They freeze, the lights go out, and the story begins.14 Sandwiched between fires in the opening and closing acts of One-­Third of a Nation is an exploration of the causes of tenement fires and their high death tolls. In the second scene, for example, the audience watched a typical fire investigation in which the commissioner quickly became caught in a quagmire of bureaucratic confusion obscuring accountability. The modern dancer and choreographer Helen Tamiris staged the commissioner’s movements around the fire inspector, the building department inspector, and the tenement house inspector to emphasize the red tape restricting legal enforcement. The commissioner’s steps illustrated how each understaffed department evaded responsibility for not having properly inspected the tenement.15 While the official investigation failed to explain the underlying causes of the fire, two characters prodded the play’s analysis forward: the loudspeaker and an audience member referred to as the Little Man. To understand what he saw, Buttonkooper ascended the stage and traveled through time and space. The play used his journey to address the limitations of three possible solutions to the housing crisis: collective action, private philanthropy, and government action. One-­Third of a Nation ultimately concluded by blaming the nation’s apathy for the 105

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Fig. 4.1

Irving Spellens’s poster design for the Federal Theatre Project’s performance of One-­Third of a Nation, New York City, ca. 1937–­1939, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection, LC-­DIG-­ppmsca-­31218, http://www .loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/item/95509661.

continuation of the housing crisis. In the finale, the Little Man’s wife, Mrs. Buttonkooper, climbed on the stage. She insisted that, to change the situation, politicians, housing authorities, tenant leagues, and tenement dwellers must demand decent housing. Her inchoate cry was met by a second fire. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the loudspeaker announced, “this might be Boston, New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia—­but just let’s call it ‘one-­third of a nation!’ [reiterating the president’s words].”16 Like Mrs. Buttonkooper’s cry for unspecified change, the play urged popular intervention to alter the nation’s housing crisis without advanc106

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ing a particular policy or reform. The timing of the play, however, provided more specific guidelines for viewers. First produced one month before Congress passed the Wagner-­Steagall Housing Act, One-­Third of a Nation indirectly aimed to raise popular support for the measure. After Congress passed an underfunded and decentralized version of the act, the play provided ideological fodder for local housing agencies. Wagner-­ Steagall made such organizations responsible for identifying communities’ needs and volunteering resources for construction and maintenance. One-­Third of a Nation used slides and statistics to call lay people’s attention to the housing crisis in their own communities and to demand that they address a problem that plagued their neighbors and fellow audience members.17 Initially, the FTP used One-­Third of a Nation to retrain forty unemployed directors and prepare them for reentry into the theater world. They traveled during the summer of 1937 from twenty cities in seventeen states to a six-­week training program based at Flanagan’s Experimental Theatre at Vassar College. The play, however, went on to become a success in its own right. In New York City, it ran for ten months in 1938 to a total audience of 217,458. Nationally, it played 7,641 times on stages in cities including Detroit, Cincinnati, Portland, Hartford, New Orleans, Seattle, and San Francisco.18 The New Jersey–­born playwright Arent, who had composed sketches and staged reviews for a resort in the Borscht Belt prior to working for the FTP, won a Guggenheim Fellowship for One-­Third of a Nation.19 Furthermore, the play received rave reviews. “Three Thirds of the Critics Praise . . . ‘One Third of a Nation,’ ” announced the headline on an FTP publication that included excerpts from theater critics’ reviews printed in twenty different New York City and suburban periodicals. Richard Watts Jr. of the Herald Tribune called it “the most dramatic of the [Living Newspaper] series.”20 “It’s one of the few ‘musts’ of the year,” agreed Walter Ralston of the New Masses.21 Indeed, the play was so sought after that Paramount Pictures paid $5,000 to the Federal Screenwriters’ Guild to buy the film rights to the play; the screen version was released in 1939.22 Concerned citizens and housing organizations latched on to the play as ammunition for their public relations campaign for housing reform. “This play, performed as it was tonight,” exclaimed Langdon Post, the tenement house commissioner for New York City, “can do more to convert people to proper housing than all the shouting I have done in the past three years.”23 Elmer Beck, the editor of the Sheboygan ( WI) Times, a labor-­oriented newspaper, seemingly agreed. He wrote Arent for permission to publish the script in his newspaper in order to encourage local 107

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performances that might aid the city’s newly formed housing committee and encourage interest in local housing concerns.24 Similarly, the City-­Wide Tenant Council of New York sponsored a special broadcast of scenes from the play “to arouse greater public interest in a common problem, [which was] pressing for immediate solution.”25 Despite theater critics’ and reformers’ enthusiastic reviews, it is dif­ ficult to ascertain the play’s political effect. According to the teacher, scholar, and Communist activist Annette T. Rubenstein, socially concerned theater strengthened the political commitments of those on the Left. “It was not so much a matter of preaching to the converted,” Rubenstein explained, “as strengthening one’s faith; as the Catholic Church learned over the centuries, it is very important for the converted to be constantly refreshed in their adherence.”26 It is, however, less clear whether people who had never before seriously considered housing problems saw or were influenced by One-­Third of a Nation and other Living Newspapers. Nevertheless, the play’s performances did coincide with a growing grassroots interest in housing. By the end of 1938, thirty-­three states had passed legislation to fund and support the Wagner-­Steagall Housing Act on the local level. By 1942, despite a shortage of funds, 221 local housing authorities had built 130,000 units in three hundred projects across the nation.27 Thus, it seems possible that, along with multiple other forms of communication, the play helped raise popular concern about tenement living and encourage reforms.

Controversial Art and Government Funding: Alternative Strategies The federal government would not have funded overtly political art like One-­Third of a Nation if not for the dedication of a set of art administrators. Four of them—­Hallie Flanagan, Sterling Brown, Henry Alsberg, and Roy Stryker—­in particular used their government positions to encourage the creation of public art that would educate, communicate, and persuade the nation. Flanagan, whose ideas about the intersections between art and politics influenced One-­Third of a Nation, believed that theater could inform the public about contemporary issues and politicize them. While Flanagan used the stage to change society, Alsberg and Brown turned to the written word to promote cultural democracy and to argue for racial equality, respectively. The camera represented Stryker’s vital weapon. Stryker believed that images would evoke view-

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ers’ identification with and sympathy for the nation’s poor, thereby encouraging popular support for government relief. Like the Treasury’s art administrators, all four of these art officials received training at Ivy League institutions: Brown at Harvard, Flanagan at Radcliffe, and Alsberg and Stryker at Columbia. The academy, however, played a more substantial role in their lives than it did in those of the Treasury’s art administrators, who moved into business, art criticism, or the privately funded art world after graduation. In contrast, those art administrators who used art as a weapon largely found homes and livelihoods in the academy. As scholars, they used words, images, and theatrics to document rural folkways and dialectics, class discrepancies, and contemporary concerns. As teachers, they were concerned with communicating ideas and information to their students, raising their social awareness, and convincing them to act on behalf of others who were less privileged than they were. They often wore this teacher’s hat into government positions. As federal employees, they used art and propaganda in a war on knowledge. They employed facts and symbols to educate an expanded classroom—­the nation—­and call it to arms. Art officials, however, needed to balance their political visions against administrative and congressional obligations if they hoped to maintain institutional viability. Their ability to balance the two—­to continue to produce controversial art without losing federal funding—­depended on several factors. The fiery personalities and radical commitments (past or present) of artists, intellectuals, and New Deal administrators who used art as a weapon set off opposition from the Right. Material that was highly visible and experienced collectively, such as theater and murals, elicited stronger resistance than writing, photographs, music, and easel paintings, which federal employees could edit, discard, or hide rather than disseminate. Not surprisingly, art projects such as the Treasury’s that attenuated controversial messages had an easier time surviving politically than those that failed (or refused) to do so. In contrast, those organizations such as the FTP that continued to create and to disseminate highly visible and controversial work in the face of conservative reaction were the first to lose government support.

“A Thorn in the Flesh”: Hallie Flanagan and the FTP Hallie Flanagan, who embraced both explosive rhetoric and overtly political theater, represented the most dramatic of the art administrators.

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Born in Redfield, South Dakota, in 1890, she grew up in Iowa. She attended Grinnell College, taught high school, married her college sweetheart, and had two children. After the premature deaths of both her husband in 1919 and her older son in 1922, she immersed herself in directing, teaching theater, and playwriting. Three pivotal experiences shaped Flanagan’s commitment to use theater to educate people about government and politics: her undergraduate education and early years teaching at Grinnell College, her training at Harvard University in the drama professor George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop for playwriting, and her exposure to the Workers’ Theater both in the Soviet Union and in the United States. At Grinnell, which Flanagan attended with a coterie of people who would later work for the New Deal, including Harry Hopkins, Florence Kerr, and John McGee, she experienced art not as an extravagant luxury but rather as “necessary and normal expressions of life.”28 Under Baker’s tutelage, she developed an interest in innovative playwriting, directing, and performance. While traveling through Russia and Europe in 1926 as a Guggenheim scholar, she learned the new staging methods that would inform her later work.29 In contrast to the “dead” theater she witnessed in England during her fellowship year—­theater that viewers encountered “in moderation, after dinner, along with biscuits and cheese”—­Flanagan was impressed by the vibrancy of the Russian workers’ theater. She viewed it as stimulating social and political change by emphasizing daily experiences, social conflicts, and the spiritual essence of life in the Soviet Union.30 She was less interested in the theater’s dialectical aspects than in its social function. In the Russian Workers’ Theatre, she identified art that had become a living part of working people’s lives and a vital part of the new political order. Flanagan sought to build the type of living theater that she had established at Vassar College’s experimental theater the year before she went abroad. In 1931, she wrote and produced a play at Vassar that exemplified her developing creative approach. Can You Hear Their Voices?—­which would become the prototype for the FTP’s Living Newspapers—­drew on histories, reports, the Congressional Record, and newspaper articles, including Whittaker Chambers’s story in the March 1931 edition of the New Masses six years before he gave the Soviet Union documents from the senior State Department official Alger Hiss. The play highlighted the desperation of poor sharecroppers, their attraction to communism, and the gulf separating them from wealthy conservative politicians. Bridging the divide between rich and poor was someone who easily could have passed for a “Vassar girl”—­a congressman’s liberal, university-­educated, soon-­to-­be-­a-­debutante daughter, who challenged her father’s passive 110

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response to the crisis of the Depression by raising the Soviet model. The congressman refused to listen either to his daughter or to his struggling constituents, and the play cautioned against the consequences of such inattention. Although most of the sharecroppers walked away from a conversation initiated by a self-­proclaimed radical at the beginning of the play, communism became more attractive to them after the local cow died, a mother smothered her baby because she knew that the child would otherwise starve, the Red Cross ran out of blankets, and Congress refused to provide relief. In the finale, when the police pursued two radical sharecroppers, the couple sent their young sons to the local Communist headquarters. A slide concluded the show with the following words: “These boys are symbols of thousands of our people who are turning somewhere for leaders. Will it be to the educated minority? Can you hear their voices?”31 The play’s final admonition implied that, if the audience (and society more generally) did not listen to the bottom third, if their voices did not find outlets in a democratic arena, then they would turn to communism. Through Can You Hear Their Voices? Flanagan attempted to expose viewers to how the underprivileged lived, to teach them about the roots of poverty, and to provide arenas for debating possible solutions. The play also inspired viewers to action. In Poughkeepsie, students collected clothes and money for farmers and wrote letters to politicians and newspapers to raise awareness about the plight of the rural poor.32 According to Flanagan, theater had the potential to teach Americans about the “natural, social, and economic forces around them” and to allow them to create “a better life for more people.”33 In a farewell address given at Vassar College before she moved to Washington, DC, to lead the FTP, she conveyed her vision of the project’s power. “From it we shall learn,” she contended, “through it we shall mutually create a theatre which need not be just the frosting on the cake. It may be the yeast which makes the bread rise.”34 Harry Hopkins was responsible for placing Flanagan at the helm of the FTP. Hopkins was drawn to his former classmate both because of what she was and because of what she was not. He had been following her work since graduation and admired the plays she had written and produced. In addition, he liked that she was neither a New Yorker nor a commercial theater person. He wanted someone who would be more concerned with the quality of federal theater than with its moneymaking abilities. Despite Hopkins’s insistence that the job was “just down [her] . . . alley,” Flanagan was reluctant to accept the offer. When he first approached her to run a New York–­based theater program in the 111

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winter of 1934, she declined the position on the grounds that she was about to leave for a semester abroad studying theater in Italy, Africa, and Greece. Hopkins, however, persisted. In the spring of 1935, as he was assembling administrators to run the newly formed art programs within Federal One, he called her again. This time, she took his request more seriously and went to Washington, DC, to meet him. During her visit, she also encountered Eleanor Roosevelt, who inquired about her observations of theater in Europe and at Vassar and then asked whether “the time had come when America might consider the theatre, as it was considered abroad, a part of education.” Excited by the prospect of creating a federal theater that could serve as a teaching tool, Flanagan accepted the position. On her forty-­sixth birthday, August 27, 1935, she became the director of a federal theater project that Hopkins promised would be “free, adult, and uncensored.”35 Flanagan’s belief in the theater’s revolutionary potential made her program one of the most fertile government sites for artists on the Left. Although most of the FTP’s plays were apolitical, focusing on classical drama, puppetry, musical theater, children’s performances, and radio broadcasts, at least 10 percent of them addressed social justice themes.36 Under Flanagan’s purview, the FTP produced works that analyzed the history and experience of unionization, warned Americans of their susceptibility to anti-­ Semitism, racism, and dictators, educated viewers about the origins of contemporary crises in housing, power, agriculture, and labor, and challenged segregation and racially based stereotypes by providing black actors and actresses with substantial roles and, occasionally, by integrating casts. In addition to Flanagan’s radical vision of the theater’s function, the FTP’s geography made it more overtly political than the other art divisions were. Despite Flanagan’s efforts to create a federation of theaters, the FTP’s employees were primarily New Yorkers (4,336 of 7,095 in 1939), and the majority of its funds went to the city ($22.7 million of $46.2 million).37 Relief restrictions further limited the mobility of theater troupes (although a show like the hugely successful Voodoo Macbeth engaged in a cross-­country tour, in which the all-­black cast and crew challenged racial assumptions about the ability of black actors to perform Shakespeare as well as racial segregation in theaters, restaurants, hotels, and transportation).38 But, generally speaking, rather than spreading theater from the nation’s cultural capital to its periphery, Flanagan’s project reinforced the divide.39 The concentration of the FTP in New York City, where unemployed actors, actresses, dancers, playwrights, and directors

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struggled and leftist activism flourished, made it particularly amenable to Flanagan’s overtly political aesthetic. Furthermore, Flanagan’s alliances with playwrights, directors, actors, and audiences on the Left in New York and elsewhere facilitated her efforts to use theater to foment change while simultaneously making the program she ran vulnerable to attacks from the Right. The censorship of Ethiopia, the first of the FTP’s avant-­garde documentary Living Newspapers, quickly taught Flanagan that, if she wanted the government funding necessary for the theater to survive, she would need to temper the messages it conveyed. Ethiopia, which condemned the United States for failing to prevent Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, was scheduled to open in late January 1936—­four months after Mussolini’s invasion of that country. Shortly before the premiere, however, the head of the WPA’s white-­collar division, Jacob Baker, shut down the play.40 Baker wrote Flanagan on January 18, 1936, that the State Department objected to the play’s representation of foreign dignitaries, including Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and Mussolini.41 Despite the support of Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the president—­who told his wife that it would be “deplorable to drop” the play—­Baker canceled the performance.42 His censorship reflected both the State Department’s concerns and his own efforts to discourage the Living Newspaper unit from producing controversial works. Baker was particularly concerned about a play that Elmer Rice, the director of New York’s Theatre Project, had supposedly proposed and outlined called The South that would have concentrated on unemployment, the Scottsboro case, lynching, racism, and labor organizing.43 Rice resigned over the incident. The next day, he invited journalists to a private showing of Ethiopia and expressed his anger over its censorship.44 As far as Rice was concerned, the government’s censorship illustrated that the FTP was not living up to Hopkins’s promise that it would be “free, adult, and uncensored.” Flanagan too was upset by Baker’s censorship of Ethiopia and, aware that censorship was likely to continue, considered resigning herself. But, loath to admit defeat, she decided to remain in her post.45 Publicly, she praised her assistant’s resignation. In a speech to the FTP’s regional directors, she called his action a “fearless stand” and suggested that it should warn the staff of what might be the limits of government sponsorship. “In this probing study we are making,” she warned, “[we must consider] . . . how far, in America, government funds can be used for establishing the sort of people’s theaters in which all of us around this table believe.”46

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In practice, the Ethiopia incident led Flanagan to monitor more carefully the plays created and performed under her auspices. “This now doubly cautious lady,” the former director of the FTP wrote of herself in Arena, “believed that she must achieve a balance between ‘safe’ plays and socially relevant plays if the project were to survive.”47 Flanagan continued to support some overtly political plays, such as Triple A Plowed Under, even after they came under scrutiny and disapproval. But she censored those plays she believed advocated a single highly controversial position rather than broadly explaining contemporary concerns. Thus, the FTP never performed Rice’s The South and Liberty Deferred, the latter a living newspaper about black history written by two young black play readers, Abram Hill and John Silvera, that advocated passage of the Costigan-­Wagner Act, an antilynching bill.48 In addition, Flanagan prematurely shut down Injunction Granted, an account of relations between labor and law in the United States written by Arent, Morris Watson, the managing producer of the Living Newspaper unit and a union militant, and Joseph Losey, a playwright with past associations with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.49 The most dramatic act of censorship, however, occurred on June 15, 1937, when The Cradle Will Rock, a proletarian opera promoting industrial unionism, was scheduled to open. The timing of this provocative play written by the Communist avant-­garde composer Marc Blitzstein was significant. It was supposed to open in the midst of efforts to organize the steel industry and just two weeks after the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, where Chicago police attacked a racially mixed group of workers and their families from Republic Steel as they attempted to march peacefully (and legally) toward the steel plants after picnicking together. The police killed ten people and left more than ninety wounded.50 More generally, however, the play was scheduled to open in the midst of a wave of labor strikes stimulated by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, otherwise known as the Wagner Act, which protected the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. Before the play could open, Congress voted to reduce its support for the arts by 30 percent in response to controversies stirred by some government-­funded art, artists, and administrators, including the anticipated response to The Cradle Will Rock. On June 10, 1937, the WPA administrator Ellen Woodward distributed a memo to all national directors forbidding new plays, musicals, and art galleries to open before July 1, when the budget cut would take effect.51 Flanagan appealed directly to Woodward and David Niles, the work-­relief director of information, to save the show, which already had sold fourteen thousand seats and was 114

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scheduled to open six days later. But both Woodward and Niles refused to alter their stance in response to either Flanagan’s appeals or those of Orson Welles, one of the play’s directors.52 Welles and the play’s other director, John Houseman, however, refused to be deterred. In a spectacle later dramatized in Tim Robbins’s 1999 film Cradle Will Rock, more than six hundred audience members gathered outside the Maxine Elliot Theatre on June 15, the play’s opening night. A padlock prevented them from entering the building. Welles frantically phoned theaters around town looking for one that would have them. When the proprietors of the Venice Theatre agreed, the cast and audience together marched the twenty-­one blocks north to the new venue.53 Cast members risked both their government appointments and their standing within Actors’ Equity when they chose to perform since the FTP forbid the production and the union prohibited its members from performing without the FTP’s approval. The play began with Marc Blitzstein, who was not a union member, eating peanuts, playing a piano donated by a wealthy patron, and preparing to sing the entire musical. In a dramatic moment, the prostitute Moll, played by Olive Stanton, stood up in the audience to speak her lines.54 Even without government support, the work spread. The Cradle Will Rock played for two weeks at the Venice Theatre. That summer it moved to the steel towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The following December, it reopened at Welles’s and Houseman’s privately operated and experimental Mercury Theatre before moving to Broadway in January, where it played for the following three months. In January 1938, Random House published the play script as a book.55 Like the government’s censorship of Coit Towers, its cancellation of The Cradle Will Rock heightened some artists’ skepticism toward government patronage. Blitzstein and Arent, for example, criticized such suppression in a sketch they wrote for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union’s revue Pins and Needles. FTP Plowed Under, named after the FTP’s Living Newspaper Triple A Plowed Under, showed a Mrs. Clubhouse (representing Flanagan) editing a play written by a Mr. Hippity Bloomberg. Clubhouse and her peers removed references to boys and girls, a picnic in the woods, sex, a strike, and a radical. Then, they eliminated the ballet dancers altogether, explaining that dancers are notoriously prone to sit-­down strikes. Next, they rejected the title, Workers also Love, calling the term worker “a bit inflammatory . . . just now.” After several edits, all that remained was the following stage direction: “The Curtain Rises.” “Why,” asked an art administrator, “can’t the play open smack like that? Do we have to have a curtain?” At that, Bloomberg fainted, and the stage 115

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went black.56 By the summer of 1937, the FTP’s censorship and firings had discouraged participation by some of the more radical and less financially needy staff members, such as John Houseman, Elmer Rice, and Orson Welles. Unable to rescind Congress’s cuts, Flanagan sent out eight thousand pink slips, firing more than half the relief workers under her jurisdiction despite extensive and dramatic protests by artists and intellectuals across the various arts projects.57 She also halted publication of the Federal Theatre Magazine and, in January, downsized the FTP’s headquarters, moving from the elegant but declining McLean Mansion in Washington, DC, to the rundown Ouray Building in New York. “We had become,” she recalled, “less a theater project and more a bureaucratic concern—­ small dull offices with dull tan walls and dull brown woodwork and brown burlap screens chastely concealing corner hand-­basins. Could we think in such a place except in dull brown thoughts?”58 Despite her doubts and the clear message that Congress had sent her regarding the potential consequences of producing overtly political theater, Flanagan continued to urge her staff to use the theater as “a thorn in the flesh of the body politic.”59 After 1937, those hired by the FTP still used the stage as a weapon. However, they limited their aesthetic battles to promoting New Deal reforms, advancing the concerns and experiences of “forgotten men,” and illustrating the ordinary roots of extraordinary figures, such as Abraham Lincoln.60 The creation and promotion of James Truslow Adams’s Epic of America illustrates the FTP’s reorientation. Adams, a Brooklyn-­born former member of the New York Stock Exchange and the winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize in American history, wrote Epic in 1931 to criticize American cultural development and persuade contemporaries to refine their notion of success to include intellectual and spiritual development as much as economic growth. In many respects, his vision matched that of the Treasury’s art administrators. He used the past to challenge Americans to reconsider their values and destiny. Adams’s best seller traced the origin, development, and, ultimately, the corruption of the American “mission” or “dream” by outlining a shift in morality from quality to quantity, from values to money, and from spirituality to materialism. Like the Progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Adams argued that the closing of the frontier in America lessened democratic possibilities, increased the tensions between labor and capital, and encouraged foreign imperialism and expansion. In order to solve such problems, he suggested that cultural, rather than political and economic, reform was necessary. He advocated a national 116

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clarification of values and an increased investment in intellectual and spiritual life.61 In contrast to the FTP’s censorship of The Cradle Will Rock the previous spring, Epic, the thirteen-­part radio show developed by Leo Fontaine based on Adams’s book, met with international approval. At least two million adults and children (1.5 percent of the national population and just under 10 percent of American households with radios) crowded around their sets to listen to the program.62 More than fifty thousand “enthusiastic and appreciative” letters arrived in the radio division’s central office in New York City from thirty-­six states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Alaska, Colombia, and Puerto Rico.63 The boards of education in Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York City each requested that the series be rebroadcast in the classrooms, and forty-­nine New York high schools tuned in to the program, exposing a million and a half students to the biweekly accounts over WNYC, New York City’s municipal station.64 In other areas, fifty-­one teachers or principals of schools independently wrote to the radio division requesting copies of the Epic series for use in their classrooms.65 The popularity of Epic can be attributed to the multiple ways in which audiences interpreted its episodes. A national essay contest sponsored by the American Auxiliary Legion, the women’s division of the largest veterans’ association, asked listeners to expound on “what the Epic of America has taught me about the future of America.”66 In contrast to Adams’s aspirations, the moral lesson that some listeners took away from the program was steeped more in unreflective patriotism than in national introspection. Given the political orientation of the American Legion, particularly its promotion of patriotic observances and its attempts to prevent un-­American activities, it is not surprising that the winning essays from the contest it sponsored contain anti-­immigrant sentiment and view the past nostalgically as a progressive national narrative in which the Depression represented a temporary aberration.67 “Our country has many times passed through disaster and depths of gloom,” wrote the winning essay contestant, the California resident Mrs. Delphine Dale, “but always it has recovered, usually to become more prosperous, more powerful than before.” Dale, who received $100 and a silver plaque as an award for her work, continued by describing the past as “radiant” and “exuberant” and insisting that any existing “earlier crises” were “met and mastered.” Her view that there were no unsettled national issues contrasted with Adams’s description of the conflict between the dream and the reality of America. In an expression of unbridled patriotism engendered by her interpretation of the radio 117

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show, she argued for antialien legislation, the suppression of “pessimistic utterances,” “doubt,” and “defeatism,” and the institution of classes in citizenship, attendance of which would be a prerequisite for voting.68 While some listeners heard Epic as reassuring them in their bigoted ways, the radio show taught others to consider the opinions, ideas, and actions of ordinary Americans. Fontaine’s show satisfied Flanagan’s defi­ nition of vital theater by historicizing the experiences of “forgotten men,” including historical farmers, merchants, and tenement dwellers. As the narrator of the program explained, the show presented “a story not of military and naval exploits, political triumphs or diplomatic victories—­ but the unvarnished tale of the common man and woman in America from Colonial days to 1930.”69 When describing European migration to America, Fontaine did not focus on grand forces encouraging migration but rather conveyed a conversation between a Puritan couple who intended to go to America and London-­based sympathizers. The focus of Epic on the daily experiences of its characters personalized historical dilemmas and humanized heroic figures. The economic historian Thomas Childs Cochran explained that the show put historical figures “on a plane with normal, everyday people.” “It shows,” he continued, “[that] there were no demi-­gods in the past in whose name we may deride pygmies of today—­but simply earnest, confused human beings trying then, as now, to wrestle with the new problems that confronted them.”70 By revealing a past filled with everyday people, Epic empowered individual citizens to view their actions as historically significant. Making citizens aware of how their seemingly ordinary decisions affected historical processes was a far cry from demanding that they pass New Deal reforms, join picket lines, and counter racial discrimination. Nevertheless, by emphasizing the significance of ordinary people and events, the FTP continued to encourage historical agency and activism. Despite the popular appeal of Epic and the creation of some memorable works of political art such as The Cradle Will Rock, the FTP ultimately failed as an institution. In 1939, conservatives in Congress singled it out for closure even as the other art projects were maintained. Its size, cost, and focus on New York, as a consequence of the concentration of actors and actresses in the nation’s cultural capital, biased many congressmen against it.71 Although funding for the FTP accounted for less than 0.75 percent of the 1939 work-­relief appropriations, Congress stopped supporting it because it heightened political debate rather than building widespread grassroots support. Certainly, economics, demographics, and leadership played roles in the institution’s demise. Ulti-

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mately, Flanagan’s insistence that the program remain “a thorn in the flesh” (even when internal censorship blunted the thorn) made the institution vulnerable to the whims of Congress. Despite repeated warnings, the FTP continued to address controversial topics, hire black actors, and even occasionally allow them to perform together with whites.72 In her history of the FTP, Arena, Flanagan suggested that politicians feared the program both because of its concentration on educating audiences “about government and politics and such vital issues as housing, power, agriculture and labor” and because of the cultural opportunities it afforded African Americans and the attention it drew to racial equity.73 Caught between Flanagan’s social agenda and the political environment on which it depended, the FTP met a premature death, four years before budget cuts ended the other New Deal art projects.

Writing and Integration: Henry Alsberg, Sterling Brown, and the Federal Writers’ Project The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) seemingly should have met a fate similar to that of the FTP in 1939. It hired many radical artists, perhaps even more than the FTP did, and both sets of government employees actively participated in sit-­ins, picket lines, and other types of leftist activity. The FWP, however, was smaller, less expensive, and more geographically diverse. It engaged in a more diverse range of projects than the FTP did, and the small amount of highly controversial material it produced rarely received the publicity and public scrutiny that the FTP’s plays encountered. It also policed itself even more than the FTP did, both on the local and on the national levels. Little of the most contentious work created under its auspices was published or distributed beyond the national office. Thus, it too fell short of the aspirations of the most radical writers it hired. One way in which the organization managed to survive the budget cuts until 1943 was by defanging the most ideological work produced by federal writers. Two Washington-­based leaders within the FWP—­Henry Alsberg and Sterling Brown—­illustrate the inner workings of this process. In an office across town from the FTP’s initial headquarters in Washington, DC, another art administrator attempted to use art to enlighten audiences and to bring them to action. Like Flanagan, Henry Alsberg had substantial theatrical experience before becoming an art administrator. He had written an adaptation of the Yiddish play The Dybbuk, which ran

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off Broadway for two years, and was a director of New York’s Province­ town Playhouse. Alsberg, however, entered the government’s art projects through writing rather than theater.74 He also adopted a less overtly political approach toward the arts than Flanagan did. Rather than using his craft to inform citizens about the root causes of current events, he employed the written word to show Americans their country.75 The American Guide Series was the primary vehicle that the FWP used to teach Americans about America. The series included multi­ authored tour guides for each of the forty-­eight states (Alaska and Hawaii were not yet included in the Union) and Washington, DC. The books borrowed their format from the Baedeker guides produced in Europe in the nineteenth century for middle-­class tourists. But, instead of condescending to the United States, as did the Baedeker guide, which was originally published in 1893 and last revised in 1901, the state guides highlighted the country’s diversity, achievements, and local culture. Using three sections—­essays, general descriptions of the state’s major cities, and automobile tours—­they attempted to awaken the interests of tourists and townspeople and to make an enduring contribution to American civilization and literature.76 Although the state guides did not incur as great a public outcry as did the FTP’s projects, the FWP was not without controversy. Alsberg’s attempts to combat an Anglo-­Saxon vision of the nation by introducing Americans to their country’s rich diversity, including its folklore and ethnic experiences, met opposition from both the Right and the Left. Conservatives refuted the representations of class conflict and miscegenation, while members of various racial and ethnic groups rejected official characterizations of their culture and history. Unlike the works produced by the highly visible FTP, however, most of the FWP’s overtly political work received scant attention since few of the interviews with and songs relayed by ex-­slaves and other working people were ever published.77 While his Americana rhetoric, cooperation with anti-­ Communists, and attacks on radical activity initially tempered opposition from the Right, eventually, at the height of the anti-­Communist attacks on the New Deal in 1939, Alsberg lost his job because of his history of leftist involvement during the 1920s. Born to a German-­Jewish family in New York City in 1881, Alsberg pursued a number of careers before becoming a New Deal art administrator. He attended Columbia College, became a lawyer, and then gave up the practice a few years later. He then studied English literature for a year at Harvard University before joining the editorial board of the New York Post. In 1918, he took a leave of absence to serve as a foreign diplo120

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mat in Turkey and then became a foreign correspondent in Europe and Russia, where he befriended Emma Goldman and a circle of leftist anarchists. In his early forties, he turned his attention toward the hunger victims of the Russian Revolution and became a director for the American Joint Distribution Committee.78 While working in Russia during the early 1920s, he learned directly about the Bolsheviks’ suppression of civil liberties. In 1923, he was arrested, held in a Soviet jail for several weeks, and then ordered to leave Russia permanently because of his antagonism toward certain state policies. After returning to the United States, he edited a book, Letters from Russian Prisoners (1923), illustrating the Soviets’ ill treatment of their critics. Stalinists sharply criticized him for publicizing the Soviets’ suppression of free speech, labeling him “a reactionary, [and] a liberal who is slipping.”79 His encounters with Bolsheviks in Russia and Stalinists in the United States made Alsberg markedly more skeptical of the Left than Flanagan had been. By the time he joined the FWP in 1935, he had become, as one of his underlings described him, “more philosophical and less anarchist.”80 In contrast to Flanagan’s fiery rhetoric and support for the political activism of many actors and actresses, he had limited tolerance for such activity. When federal writers in New York went on strike in the winter of 1936, he threatened to close the office and fired the city’s local administrator for aiding the strikers.81 Despite his wariness of the Left, Alsberg did encourage federal writers to engage in a controversial project: illustrating America as cosmopolitan and multiethnic in ways that went far beyond promoting platitudes about American myths. Toward that end, he hired a team of editors, including Sterling Brown, Benjamin Botkin, Morton Royse, William Couch, John Lomax, and Lomax’s son Alan, to record and disseminate slave narratives, ethnic studies, and oral histories, including the stories and songs of a wide range of immigrants, freed slaves, and other working people. Through such accounts, he hoped to highlight the nation’s pluralism, incorporating the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities into the stories he used “to acquaint Americans with their county.” He also aimed “to furnish cultural workers with a vast amount of material that has hitherto remained unexplored because no other agency has had the equipment and talent to bring it to the surface.”82 One of the most contentious bodies of work to emerge from this endeavor was a series of studies of African Americans overseen by the Howard University English professor Sterling Brown. As a federal editor, Brown set out to alter readers’ preconceived notions about blacks and race relations. He attacked the federal writers’ often condescending and 121

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demeaning representations of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation. Unlike Flanagan, who frequently allied with writers and scholars on the Left to produce theater that challenged class-­based assumptions, Brown tended to collaborate with scholars at all-­black colleges who saw in him and the FWP financial, editorial, and publishing resources for research projects they had previously pursued independently. Working with such like-­minded scholars, Brown used his office to challenge the exclusion of unemployed college-­educated blacks from the relief programs, to investigate slavery, to counter continuing racism and discrimination, and to highlight African Americans’ perseverance and social contributions. On November 22, 1935, four months after the FWP’s initiation, Alsberg and his assistant, George Cronyn, met at Howard University with fifteen black leaders and intellectuals, including Brown, to discuss hiring unemployed black college graduates and developing a series of books on African American experiences.83 Shortly after the meeting, Alsberg hired Brown to edit a series entitled “Negro Culture in America” and to supervise the representation of African Americans in the state guides. The editorship, which he held from 1936 until 1939, was a part-­time appointment that Brown juggled with his full-­time teaching load at Howard University. As the son of an emancipated slave who became a minister and a professor of divinity, Sterling Brown grew up among the black elite of Washington, DC. He received a B.A. in French and English literature from Williams College in 1922 and then an M.A. in English from Harvard, where he studied with George Lyman Kittredge, the leading American Shakespeare and ballad scholar whose interest in vernacular literature also influenced other art administrators, such as Alsberg, John Lomax, and Benjamin Botkin.84 After completing his formal education, Brown attended what he referred to as the “Academy of Black Folk.” While teaching at three different all-­black southern colleges from 1923 to 1929, the young professor surrounded himself with the stories, songs, and dialects of rural black southerners such as Big Boy Davis of Lynchburg, Virginia.85 Like Zora Neale Hurston, who would also serve on the FWP, Brown viewed southern speech as a form of literature and used it to inform his writing. Alsberg turned to Brown in an effort to incorporate such folk voices into the state guides and other FWP publications. In hiring Brown before employing an arts administrator to focus on the folklore of immigrant groups and religious minorities, Alsberg was responding to concerns expressed by African Americans.86 Black scholars had been lobbying the government to employ needy college graduates 122

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on the white-­collar relief projects since 1934. That summer, the historian Lawrence Reddick, who would later curate the New York Public Library’s Schomberg Collection, convinced the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) to hire unemployed black college graduates to interview ex-­slaves. The pilot program, however, stalled eleven months and 250 in­terviews later when the WPA replaced the earlier relief administration.87 In an effort both to restart and to broaden the scope of his former student’s work, the Fisk University sociologist Charles Johnson then approached the newly created FWP with his “Proposal for a Regional (or National) Project under the Federal Writers’ Project (Utilizing Negro Personnel).” Johnson recommended a wider study of contemporary racial patterns than Reddick had suggested. He urged the government to study the mores, heroes, and folkways of black communities in order to map racial assumptions. He suggested that the government hire unemployed blacks to trace the bizarre and contradictory patterns that confine the work and leisure activities of blacks in various communities, analyzing their development, and studying black accommodation to, and deviation from, them.88 Although the archives do not record a direct response from the FWP to Johnson’s proposal, Brown’s appointment suggests its general interest in research on race. Brown’s appointment represented a compromise between two sets of black scholars and artists: those who advocated race consciousness and those who sought to celebrate the music, stories, and dialects that shaped the everyday lives of African Americans. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Richard Wright articulated one version of the race-­conscious approach. He contended that black writers should merge Marxism with black nationalism to raise awareness about the collective black experience in America.89 In contrast, in “Art and Such” Zora Neale Hurston argued that race consciousness stifled creative expression by forcing black artists to choke back beautiful songs about the “star and the morning” because “Race Champions,” such as Frederick Douglass, had falsely led them to believe that “the one subject for a negro is the Race and its sufferings.”90 Instead, she argued that black writers and artists should concentrate on the trials and tribulations of daily life. Brown stood between Wright and Hurston. While he objected to “chauvinistic” work that focused solely on black achievements, he did not fully eschew race consciousness.91 Unlike Hurston, he saw investigations of black folklore—­and more generally black history—­as a means to counter racial inequality. He sought to fight racial stereotypes by portraying a range of African Americans rather than focusing only on those who had more notably contributed to the nation’s development. He 123

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attempted to illustrate blacks diversely as Americans who, like other citizens, were both beautiful and flawed. As an editor with the Negro affairs division, Brown sought to reshape the FWP. One federal writer recalled him serving as an “itinerant trouble­ shooter . . . traveling to a number of states to establish Black Studies programs and to help resolve personnel problems affecting Blacks.”92 Yet his position as an editor rather than an administrator largely circumscribed his power to influence some of the FWP programs that dealt most directly with race, such as the Slave Narrative Collection. Under the supervision of the folklorist John Lomax, primarily white federal writers interviewed octogenarians who had been children during slavery about their antebellum experiences. While some federal writers recorded former slaves’ thoughts and feelings, Lomax was more concerned with preserving the practices of a people nearing extinction than with documenting how slavery and racism affected the nation. Thus, more federal writers asked questions about the clothing the slaves had worn and the food they had eaten than about their experiences of servitude and freedom.93 Brown, however, attempted to shift the focus of the ex-­slave narratives from descriptions of daily life to criticisms of slavery and racism. When Lomax went on a ninety-­day furlough in 1937, Brown distributed a questionnaire to supplement Lomax’s original interview script. He suggested that federal writers ask ten additional questions addressing slave rebellions, Reconstruction, voting, office holding, and secret societies.94 He also sent a memo to state directors requesting that federal writers report the ex-­slaves’ words as objectively as possible without imposing inaccurate dialects on them and interjecting “pompous” and demeaning expressions, such as “a comical little old black woman,” “darky,” and “nigger.”95 Few federal writers, however, altered their work according to Brown’s requests. In Mississippi, for example, interviewers appear rarely to have asked his questions and recorded responses to them only if they confirmed stereotypes. Interviewers further protested Brown’s recommendations on dialect, accusing him of promoting official standards that distorted local vernacular.96 Brown exerted somewhat greater control over completed manuscripts than he did over the ex-­slave narratives. In editing federal writing, he generally criticized the writers’ representations (and neglect) of black experiences, especially in areas with large African American populations. He also condemned racial stereotypes, particularly descriptions that denied agency to blacks. He heatedly protested depictions of blacks in the Mississippi state guide as “carefree,” “shrewd,” and “having abnegated 124

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responsibility for the Negro Question to the white man.”97 But, because he needed to negotiate with provincial local editors and regional directors, his views and opinions were only sometimes incorporated into final texts. Mississippi’s state editors, for instance, ignored his searing editorial comments.98 Although Brown could—­and did—­criticize biased representations of African Americans, ultimately national art administrators and state directors controlled racial depictions in texts written by federal writers. Administrators in the national FWP office largely supported Brown. Rather than leaving responsibility for the representation of blacks and for their hiring to the Office of Negro Affairs, both Alsberg and Cronyn actively engaged in these issues even after Brown’s appointment. In January 1936, Alsberg sent a memo to all state directors urging them to hire more black writers and to report on the numbers they currently retained.99 The national administrators of the FWP also admonished state directors for excluding black experiences from their state guides. Cronyn insisted that the director of Alabama’s project, Myrtle Miles, include Booker T. Washington in her essay about the state’s history.100 Alsberg even conveyed Brown’s ideas to state directors to emphasize them. Rather than asking Brown to write North Carolina’s state director to complain about his representation of the black population in Portsmouth, Alsberg wrote his own letter. “The Negro editor,” he explained, “does not feel that you have given a complete picture in the one sentence about the numerous Negro sections and their ramshackle houses. Nearly half of Portsmouth’s population is Negro. These people work at various occupations and professions, and perhaps do not all live in ramshackle houses.”101 Despite support on the national level, Brown found few allies among state directors, particularly those in the South. A number of the state directors attempted to avoid or to circumvent his revisions. Some limited the time he and his office had to review works prior to publication. Others ignored his comments or took their appeals directly to Alsberg. For fourteen months, from March 1937 until September 1938, Brown corresponded with the federal writer Mrs. Chlotilde R. Martin in Beaufort Country, South Carolina, criticizing her characterizations of African Americans in the area as “picturesque,” “happy,” “primitive,” “indolent,” “unmoral,” “suspicious,” “close-­mouthed,” “inordinate liar[s],” and “inveterate beggars.”102 South Carolina’s state director, Mabel Montgomery, eventually interceded by appealing directly to Alsberg. To support her subordinate’s racial representations, she contended that (1) the sponsoring agency had already approved the book, (2) the author’s sources were blacks whom she 125

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had known her whole life, and (3) the book would not sell if it reflected northern rather than local viewpoints. “The crux of the entire Beaufort matter,” she continued, “is whether you wish a picturesque, accurate, and interesting treatment of Beaufort, which we have given and which pleases Beaufort immensely, or a sociological discourse carrying a northern slant.”103 She went on to assert that her office preferred to withdraw the guide than to publish it with Brown’s revisions. “The crux of the matter,” Brown retorted in an undated response, “is whether the white residents of B. should be pleased, or whether less superficial truths should be told.”104 Ultimately, Montgomery won the battle. When the Review Printing Company in Savannah, Georgia, published the book in 1938, its portrait of Beaufort was unrevised.105 Even when state directors sought to hire black writers and to incorporate black experiences into the state guides, local politics often discouraged them. Some state directors explained the shortage of blacks on their staff as a result of few applications from those who both had the skills to be placed on the FWP and qualified for relief. “Nearly all of the colored people in New Mexico,” the unit director Ina Sizer Cassidy insisted, “are cooks or chauffeurs.”106 More than such flippant retorts, substantial structural obstacles explained their absences. First, segregation mandated that black federal writers work apart from white writers. Thus, black units developed only in areas where Brown was able to build connections with black editors, most of whom were academics who, like him, supervised federal writers, often without compensation and in their spare time. In addition, few unemployed black writers were hired as editors despite their credentials. Thus, even Zora Neale Hurston had to be certified as a pauper before she could be hired as a federal writer, although she had written more books and received more awards than Florida’s state director, Corita Corse.107 Alabama’s state director, Myrtle Miles, further illustrated the types of negotiations that prevented her from hiring black writers. In January 1936, she wrote Alsberg that she did not think it politically advisable to appoint a black writer if she could hire only one person. “The fact that we may employ only one person in that county,” Miles wrote, “makes me feel that it would be unwise to give a negro [sic] this job inasmuch as there might be some feeling engendered against the project itself. There is considerable racial sensitiveness in Tuskegee and vicinity.”108 Beginning in 1937, such exclusions became even more frequent as budget cuts further reduced work-­relief positions. Although Brown’s presence served as a check on the exclusion of blacks from the FWP, the decentralized nature of the WPA circumscribed 126

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his ability to control either the employment of black writers on the FWP or the project’s representations of race. Unlike Flanagan’s New York–­ based FTP, the FWP was markedly more national in scope. For example, in 1939, only one of every nine federally employed writers lived in New York (roughly five hundred of a total of forty-­five hundred).109 One reason why the FWP was less New York–­centric than the FTP was because it maintained looser professional restrictions. While the FTP hired only actors and actresses who had previous professional experience and maintained quotas for unionized actors and actresses, the FWP tended to employ published writers and journalists only in a few states, such as New York and Chicago. In other places, where there were few professional writers, the project hired a range of needy white-­collar workers, including clerks, librarians, and teachers.110 The FWP’s geographic and occupational diversity meant that Brown had to negotiate with many writers and local administrators who were loath to accept his inclusive and antiracist approach. Brown’s efforts to support projects begun by local black scholars and relief workers were more successful than his attempts to alter the writing of paternalistic federal employees. In 1936, at the height of the arts projects, 101 of the 6,604 individuals hired by the FWP were black.111 Brown provided such individuals, most of whom were concentrated in New York, Illinois, and Louisiana, with resources, infrastructure, and guidance to document black history. Federal writers in those and ten other states, including three all-­black units in Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia, at least began to write histories about the experiences of African Americans in their states.112 Brown encouraged such efforts, mentoring, among others, the director of the black unit in Virginia, Roscoe Lewis, whose all-­black staff collected three hundred interviews with ex-­slaves and incorporated them into a historical account of blacks in Virginia.113 Brown also proposed and began to collect information for DC-­based administrators—­ including himself—­ to write four books highlighting blacks’ endurance of, and resistance to, slavery, their efforts to forge a distinct folk culture, and the contributions of ordinary and extraordinary black folk to the nation’s development. He intended Go Down Moses, for example, to synthesize and popularize primary and secondary literature attacking the institution of slavery, including a map of the Underground Railroad and writings by slaves and white and black abolitionists. He viewed the book as a vehicle to raise race consciousness and refute the notion that blacks were happier during the antebellum period than during the 1930s. “If only one runaway, or one half of one per cent of one runaway,” he mockingly wrote, “reached every place he 127

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has listed, it still would do a great deal toward refuting the contentment of the Negro slave in that Arcadia, now gone alas with the wind.”114 Brown’s appointment and the creation of the Negro affairs division illustrated New Dealers’ cultural (if not institutional) attempts to undermine given assumptions regarding race. Despite such aspirations, the FWP failed to complete and distribute most of the work that Brown oversaw. Instead, when the House Appropriations Committee reorganized—­rather than abolishing—­the WPA in 1939, it substantially reformed Federal One in an attempt to preserve the program’s broader work-­relief effort. Thus, the Reorganization Act sent Flanagan back to the academy, canceled the FTP, dismissed Brown from the FWP, and dissolved the Negro affairs division he ran. Afterward, the FWP focused primarily on finishing and publishing the state guides rather than funding its more experimental programs. Indeed, 1939 marked a turning point in the FWP, which moved from emphasizing the nation’s pluralism to preparing the United States psychologically for entry into World War II.115 Federal writers ultimately published only five black histories.116 Similarly, just one piece that Brown wrote reached publication: a scathing chapter on black history in the Washington, DC, guide that described blacks’ contributions to the city while arguing that racism and segregation prevented (and continued to deter) them from playing a more substantial role in its development. Brown, who seven years later would serve on the staff that eventually produced the landmark study An American Dilemma, highlighted the same paradox that Gunnar Myrdal described in that work. The experiences of blacks in Washington, DC, illustrated the moral conflict between racial discrimination and the nation’s political creed of freedom and democracy.117 “In this border city,” Brown wrote, “southern in so many respects, there is a denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant. Social compulsion forces many who would naturally be on the side of civic fairness into hopelessness and indifference. Washington has made steps in the direction of justice, but many steps remain to be taken for the sake of the underprivileged and for the sake of a greater Washington.”118 Since so few records survived from the unpublished accounts, it is difficult to surmise why certain works were published and others ignored or destroyed. The historian George Rawick argued that the state six interviews with ex-­ editors in Mississippi submitted only twenty-­ slaves to federal writers in Washington, DC, and left five hundred others to rot in the Mississippi State Archive because the material was “ ‘too hot’ to handle.”119 The director of the Negro division of the FWP in New

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York, Roi Ottley, similarly posited that writing, such as his Negro in New York, remained unpublished because the “information contained in it was too startling for conservative taste.”120 In 1967, the writer James Baldwin elaborated on what might have made the book “too startling” to publish: its description of northern racial attitudes as “indistinguishable from those of the South.”121 Yet The Negro in New York might not have been published until 1967 for more mundane reasons—­although an anonymous reader’s report called it “one of the most significant of the publications of the project,” another report criticized the manuscript’s lack of originality. The work overemphasized secondary literature without citing its sources. Indeed, several unattributable passages closely resembled sections from James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930), his Autobiography of an Ex-­Colored Man (1912), and Sterling Brown’s Negro Poetry and Drama (1937).122 Revisions of controversial works focused on slavery and black experiences further suggest why certain works were published and others lost. Before submitting interviews with ex-­slaves to the national office, local editors in Jackson, Mississippi, selected and rewrote them to put a story of paternalism in the mouths of the ex-­slaves. They deleted descriptions of masters freeing slaves, of black religious practices, and of African Americans’ experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction.123 Similarly, when the FWP republished an abridged version of the Washington, DC, guide in 1942, four years after its initial publication, the editors deleted references to severe black repression, segregation, rebellion, and miscegenation.124 As the interviews with ex-­slaves and black studies research illustrate, some art administrators and writers within the FWP attempted to use their writing as a weapon to raise awareness about racial inequality within the nation. But, because of the editorial process, little of the controversial material thus produced emerged publicly. Unlike the highly visible plays produced by the FTP, few challenging works written by federal writers reached publication, much less popular audiences.125 Instead, local and federal administrators both purposely and unintentionally removed such radical fragments from popular view. With the exception of the manuscripts and oral testimonies that have subsequently been published or posted online, the rest of these works remain in the archives, where only the few with time and energy can gain access to the contentious messages they contain. Nevertheless, they illustrate the efforts of a cohort of government-­sponsored writers—­and the men and women they encountered—­to use art as a weapon.

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Photography, the Poor, and the People: Roy Stryker and the Historical Section While Brown tried to debunk racially based stereotypes, the director of the Historical Section, Roy Stryker, used photography to build cross-­class alliances. The images his staff collected endeavored to “introduce Americans to America” and to create a “pictorial encyclopedia of American agriculture.”126 The section’s efforts to capture the nation and self-­educate Americans resonated with Alsberg’s state guides. But Stryker was interested in using photography to forge alliances across class lines rather than across racial and ethnic boundaries. He hoped that the images in his collection would encourage middle-­class Americans to identify with the “lower third and their problems.”127 His approach to photography was both propagandistic and sociological. Photography could heighten viewers’ national consciousness by revealing how the other half lives.128 Unlike Flanagan, Alsberg, and Brown, who received extensive training in theater and writing before assuming their government positions, Stryker knew little about either the aesthetics or the mechanics of photography before becoming director of the Historical Section. As a child whose parents were farmers, ranchers, and devoted Populists in Montrose, Colorado, he had had little exposure to the arts but learned about social reform and systemic change from an early age. After graduating from high school, he spent the next decade attending the Colorado School of Mines, working on a cattle ranch, and serving in the infantry in World War I. In 1921, he married Alice Frasier, moved to New York, and began to study economics at Columbia University.129 While pursuing his doctorate, he discovered photography and began to explore how to use it to illustrate economic principles and inequality. His photographic approach grew out of relationships with two men Stryker encountered at Columbia University: his doctoral adviser, Rexford Guy Tugwell, who would become part of FDR’s brain trust, and the photographer and social critic Lewis Hine. Stryker first learned to use photographs to highlight class disparities as a graduate student in economics and a research assistant for Tugwell. In his American Economic Life (1925), Tugwell argued that America had become divided into three groups during the 1920s: 1 percent dominated the top, 86 percent floundered at the bottom, and a mere 13 percent inhabited the middle. With the help of Lewis Hine, who regularly brought him “armloads” of photographs, Stryker illustrated each of these groups to further Tugwell’s argument for redistributing wealth. Hine taught Stryker to combine im130

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ages emphasizing people’s dignity with captions explaining their actions and emotions.130 When Roosevelt tapped Tugwell to serve as the assistant secretary of agriculture, the former professor asked his protégé to join him in Washington, DC. Tugwell created the Resettlement Administration’s Historical Section to convince the public to support his radical, anticapitalist solutions to rural poverty, including “governmental planning, certain collectivist economic remedies, and community cooperation.”131 Recognizing that the public would be suspicious of his collectivist ideas, he hired Stryker to use photographs to explain the crisis of the rural poor and to argue for collective reforms. Photographs, he contended, could document the ways in which mechanization had furthered flooding, soil erosion, and migration, they could show the rural poor excluded by early New Deal reforms, and they could illustrate the need for relocation and rehabilitation. He urged Stryker to collect images that captured their subjects’ humanity and the similarities among people. According to Tugwell’s “charter,” photographs should convey that “those in distressed areas are the same as everybody else except they need a better chance.”132 Stryker trained his staff much as he had taught his students at Columbia University. Instead of discussing composition, he gave his photographers extensive reading lists about the regions where they would be working, their history, economics, anthropology, and sociology. He insisted that they learn about the land and the people they photographed both through reading and through personal encounters. He further developed elaborate shooting scripts to guide their work and corresponded with them regularly about what they saw and read.133 The photographer Ansel Adams once told Stryker that his staff was composed of “sociologists with cameras” rather than photographers.134 The charge was fair. Stryker was attracted to impassioned progressives who exhibited the analytic skills of sociologists. “Curiosity . . . a desire to know . . . the eye to see the significance around him,” explained Stryker. “That’s what I looked for. What did a man read? What interested him? What did he see about him? How sharp was his vision? How sharp was his mental vision as well as what he saw with his eyes? Those are the things you look for.”135 Although Stryker urged his staff to analyze wide-­ranging information, he also encouraged them to simplify the most important issues they encountered and to convey them in an emotionally resonant way. His sensitivity to the psychological forces that affect audiences led him to adopt a different approach to communication than either Hallie Flanagan or 131

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Sterling Brown used. Whereas the theater director relied on the enumeration of facts to persuade rational audiences to support New Deal reform and the Negro Affairs editor drew on alternative information to change the minds of readers regarding racial stereotypes, Stryker used symbols to influence audiences. His approach reflected new ways of thinking about propaganda that emerged during World War I. In the 1920s, social scientists and advertisers began to view the public as irrational: incapable of weighing information and coming to logical conclusions. They argued that propaganda was necessary to control rather than educate the public. Drawing on principles of social psychology, researchers attempted to bypass audiences’ critical faculties and instead target their subconscious emotions and popular imaginations. Photography, film, radio, and polls represented some of the most potent weapons for simplifying issues and shaping public opinion.136 Although Stryker and his staff viewed themselves as educating viewers rather than indoctrinating them, the Historical Section used photography and film to reframe observers’ perceptions about the rural poor and to garner support for New Deal reform. Its images ennobled the poor, presenting them as the embodiment of the best of the nation’s values and morals, as quintessential Americans, and as the “people.” The Historical Section’s photographers, of course, were not a monolithic group. Stryker’s staff came from a range of backgrounds, adopted a number of different approaches to photography, and employed various techniques and styles in documenting the nation. While many members of his staff had established themselves as photographers prior to joining the section, others had minimal photographic experience beforehand. Ben Shahn, for example, was primarily a social viewpoint painter who used photographs as building blocks for his paintings. John Vachon, an English literature student at Catholic University, knew little about photography when he began working for the section as an assistant messenger in 1936. But two years later, after seeking guidance from Stryker and his staff, he went on his first photographic assignment.137 Many of Stryker’s photographers enthusiastically embraced his sociological and propagandistic approach. Dorothea Lange, for example, viewed the camera as a “tool of research,” and she carefully recorded notes about the subjects she photographed.138 She also shared Stryker’s belief that documentation and propaganda were not antithetical. While committing herself to the “contemplation of things as they are”—­as the quotation on the door of her darkroom read—­she did not believe that she could capture the human condition without using her images to convey political messages.139 “Everything is propaganda for what you 132

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believe in,” she remarked. “I don’t see that it could be otherwise. The harder and more deeply you believe in anything the more in a sense you’re a propagandist.”140 Lange was so committed to Stryker’s goal of using photography to advocate for government reform that she agreed to work for him despite demotions based on budget cuts that moved her from full-­time status to a per diem basis and then to compensation for particular negatives.141 Unlike Lange, Walker Evans, another renowned photographer who briefly worked for the Historical Section, was markedly less attracted to Stryker’s approach. Rather than embracing photographs as weapons, Evans saw them as pure and disinterested records. In an interview with Leslie Katz in 1971, he described photography as an act “done instinctively” for a “very small personal audience.” Although he retrospectively admitted having adopted a “documentary style,” he explained that his photographs “had no use” and were more art than document.142 His images did not call viewers to action as Lange’s photographs did. Instead, he portrayed poor farmers in timeless poses that recognized their dignity, beauty, and humanity. He produced his most famous work during this period, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a series of photographs of Alabama sharecroppers commissioned by Fortune magazine during a short leave from the section. As the writer James Agee explained in the preface to that book, neither he nor Evans sought to use photography or writing to promote progress and change, and they harshly criticized journalists and government officials who did so.143 This pronounced antipathy to using images as propaganda put him at odds with Stryker. Indeed, the two had a tense relationship. Rather than carefully following Stryker’s shooting scripts and other photographic suggestions, Evans used government funds to pursue his own visual interests. “I did a whole lot of things on my own which I was determined to do,” he explained. “I mean I would ignore bureaucratic orders, administration orders. I wasn’t going to listen to—­I wasn’t going to serve anybody in this position except myself. So I just used it to go off freely and do exactly what came before my eye.”144 In 1937, shortly after he gave the Historical Section the 112 negatives from his trip to Alabama that he used in his famous book, Stryker fired him. Although he was one of the section’s most talented photographers, his inability to follow directions eventually cost him his government job. Despite differences among his staff members, Stryker used exhibitions to express the Historical Section’s political agenda. “How American People Live,” an exhibit organized and sponsored by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and shown in New York City’s Grand Central 133

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Palace (next to Grand Central Terminal) at the week-­long First International Exposition in the spring of 1938, illustrated the section’s approach. It used photographs to promote certain types of social change while reinforcing other kinds of social hierarchies. “How American People Live” evoked a well-­ rounded view of the American experience through its title and public relations. One report maintained that it would represent a “faithful pictorial review of all phases of American Life.”145 Another boasted that the exhibit would “offer one of the most comprehensive studies in actual graphic illustration ever to be represented to the public.”146 Records of the show itself, however, suggest that it was not nearly so inclusive. The exhibit left out many Americans, most notably industrial laborers, northeasterners, urban dwellers, and immigrant groups. “How American People Live” could more aptly but less pithily be titled “How Poor, White, Rural American People Live.”147 Despite its absences, the exhibit encouraged viewers to identify with those portrayed and to imagine them as just, humble, and dignified. The display’s curators, the Historical Section photographers Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein, selected photographs for the exhibit that tightly framed their subjects to emphasize the commonalities between their struggles and those of their viewers. A number of the portraits in the exhibit included only fragments of an outside world: a log from a shack in the background, the frame of a wooden chair, or a portrait on the wall. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, the best-­known photograph displayed in “How American People Live,” aptly illustrates the exhibit’s use of decontextualization to connect observers with photographic subjects. In this well-­known portrait taken on a rainy day in March 1936 in Nipomo, California, of thirty-­two-­year-­old Florence Owens Thompson and her children, a pensive woman shoulders the weight of two children while cradling a sleeping infant in her arms. The image draws on Christian iconography, with the mother and child resembling Mary and Jesus framed by two cherubs. The flap of the tent behind them serves as an artistic backdrop; it does not identify the woman’s location. Lee and Rothstein did not select any of the earlier images in the series that showed more of Thompson’s surroundings, including her teenage daughter, whose presence would have revealed the young age at which she had had her first child and, thus, might have raised questions about her worthiness to receive public assistance. Migrant Mother also excludes Thompson’s four other children, her partner, Jim Hill, and any reference to her Cherokee origins. Instead, the transcendent image, which had already begun to acquire iconic stature through circulation in con134

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Fig. 4.2

F irst International Photographic Exhibit, New York City, May 1938. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­026345-­D, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item /fsa2000007770/PP.

temporary periodicals prior to the “How American People Live” exhibit, encouraged white middle-­class viewers to identify with an anonymous pea picker’s difficulties and resilience.148 Stryker probably assigned Rothstein and Lee in curating “How American People Live” because they shared his desire to universalize experiences of poverty. He had personally trained Rothstein to edit, crop, and design photographic displays.149 As a student at Columbia University, the Jewish boy from the Bronx had helped Stryker compile photographs for Tugwell’s American Economic Life. Beginning in his adolescence, Rothstein had viewed photography as a hobby and aspired to become a physician. When the Depression made medical school unaffordable, however, the young man eagerly joined his mentor in Washington, DC. There, he learned to create images that personalized the environmental and financial crises of the Depression. In describing an image he recorded of 135

Fig. 4.3

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother: “Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-­Two. Nipomo, California,” February or March 1936. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­DIG-­fsa-­8b29516, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8b29516/?co=fsa.

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a farmer and a boy in front of a house in the middle of a dust storm, for example, he explained photography’s ability to connect people from disparate backgrounds. “This photograph,” he recalled, “had a great deal of influence on people in the East, for example, who had no contact and no sense of identity with this poor farmer walking across the dusty soil on his farm in Oklahoma—­it gave him a sense of identity. And it helped put a lot of these soil-­conservation practices in, and provide legislation for soil conservation to remedy these conditions.”150 Like Rothstein, Lee also sought to connect middle-­class urban viewers with the rural poor.151 After growing up in Ottawa, Illinois, and studying chemical engineering at Lehigh University, Lee studied art in San Francisco, Woodstock, and New York City. In 1935, he began photographing, and Stryker hired him the following year. Working in the field, Lee and his second wife, Jean, were struck by the connections that emerged between them and their photographic subjects. “We lived so much with the people in those days,” Jean Lee recollected, “that we not only identified with them, but they identified with us.” She then described an old farmer who walked five miles to town on a Saturday, leaving his one mule to rest. When she told him what they were doing, she recalled, “he reached in his pocket and pulled out a nickel, and gave it to me, and said, ‘Well I can’t do much, but I think this is valuable, and I want to help you out.’ ”152 Through photography, Lee hoped to replicate the connections he and his wife had forged in the field with rural people. “The idea,” he explained, “is to show New York to Texans and Texas to New York.”153 Although very little of New York appeared in “How American People Live,” Lee believed that universalizing images of the rural poor would heighten awareness of national concerns. In its effort to connect the urban middle class with the rural poor, the exhibit downplayed racial differences. Despite its concentration on the South, which was, at the time, one-­quarter black, “How American People Live” contained few images of African Americans. Indeed, only about ten of the eighty-­odd photographs in the exhibit portrayed blacks or Mexicans. This statistic is particularly revealing because one-­tenth of the Historical Section’s collection consisted of predominantly noncondescending images of blacks, including ones taken by the exhibit’s curators.154 For example, Lee had completed a photographic series on the all-­black town of Gee’s Bend one year before organizing the section exhibit, and Rothstein would spend the spring of 1941 working with the writer Richard Wright, the sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, and another section photographer, Edwin Rosskam, to capture 1,470 photographs that

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document the social stratification, class differentiation, and daily life of African Americans living in Chicago’s South Side.155 Stryker’s relationship to racial representation was more ambiguous. Unlike Alsberg, who had a conception of how best to represent the nation, Stryker did not explicitly seek to incorporate racial and ethnic minorities even as he set out to create what he called a “portrait of contemporary America.” The detailed but terse shooting scripts and plans he distributed to his photographers tended to ask for the generic “work, people and personalities.”156 Only occasionally did he include race-­specific instructions, such as when, at W. T. Couch’s urging, he asked Rothstein to capture images of “Baseball games and race relations, [and] Recreation facilities for negroes” or when he suggested to Marjorie Collins that she document “Fishing in tidal basin (Negro and white).”157 Nevertheless, his photographers often chose to portray African Americans and race relations. For example, he never specified the subject when in 1942 he sent twenty-­one-­year-­old Esther Bubley on a six-­week, cross-­country Greyhound bus trip with the following shooting script: “Waiting rm, ticket seller, on the bus, Portraits of employees of bus co., passengers, etc.”158 Yet the photographer also made a point of documenting the segregation she encountered on her trip, including a black soldier boarding a bus in Louisville, Kentucky, whose uniform was juxtaposed with a “White Waiting Room” sign.159 Stryker similarly resisted hiring Gordon Parks, the FSA’s only black photographer, because of the discrimination he assumed Parks would face in Washington, DC, as well as concerns regarding the financial impact of integrating the Historical Section on already precarious congressional funding.160 But he did eventually accept Parks as a Rosenwald Fund intern, and Parks testified in his autobiography and an interview that the section’s director served as an important mentor. As Parks recalls, Stryker encouraged him to experience the capital and recognize its segregated nature before picking up his camera. After a frustrating afternoon facing racial exclusion at a local restaurant, movie theater, and department store, Parks returned to Stryker, who encouraged him to use his camera as a weapon against such discrimination.161 Stryker further encouraged Parks to talk to a government-­employed cleaning woman named Mrs. Ella Watson whom Parks later spent a month photographing at home, church, and work, including a famous Grant Wood–­esque image of Watson standing in front of an American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. Despite his role in collecting what amounted to a significant collection of images that, unlike most stereotypes of the day, tended to rep138

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resent blacks in realistic and ennobling ways, Stryker rarely explicitly sent his photographers to document race. He also routinely overlooked such images for exhibitions and publications. According to the historian Nicholas Natanson, he tended to see black material as less usable than white. With the exception of a few exhibits that specifically focused on African Americans, like “FSA Aids the Negro Farmer,” he only occasionally disbursed images of minorities.162 Yet his mentorship of Parks suggests that he was not unconcerned about racial disparities. He appears, however, to have allowed political considerations regarding perceptions of the FSA to override other priorities. Although no formal records remain to explain the virtual exclusion of African Americans from “How American People Live,” the interest of Historical Section photographers in black life and racial discrimination suggests that the omission was deliberate.163 By illustrating the people whom New Deal reforms aided as primarily white, the exhibit might have made such programs (including the FSA) more palatable to white, middle-­class viewers, including members of Congress. But it did so at the cost of reinforcing racist assumptions regarding the color of the “deserving poor.” Like many representations of gender during the 1930s, “How American People Live” also avoided images of women that suggested their autonomy.164 The exhibit’s curators either visually or textually identified twenty-­three of twenty-­six of the portraits of men as laborers and thirteen of fifteen of the portraits of the women as mothers, wives, and widows. Depicting women as caretakers during the 1930s represented a clearly ideological choice since 25 percent of all workers in the marketplace at that time were women.165 Such a representation also differed from the photographs of snuff-­dipping black women, cowgirls, and lonely working girls taken by female section photographers such as Marion Post Wolcott and Esther Bubley.166 “How American People Live” reassured male viewers that, even if they could not support their families at the moment, gender-­based stereotypes would ultimately prevail. The exhibit’s exclusions were problematic in their representations of American life and culture. But responses to the exhibit by professional artists, curators, and reviewers suggest that Stryker, Rothstein, and Lee knew how to shape an exhibit that would foster a sense of understanding between the rural poor and the nation. A journalist who confessed that he rarely attended exhibits waxed poetic imagining future generations responding to the pictures by saying: “Those were the faces of our ancestors who overcame their difficulties with heroic determination and forced themselves upward into the sun and into the golden air so that 139

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Fig. 4.4

 arion Post Wolcott’s photograph of “Negro woman dipping snuff while watching M them make sorghum syrup at Cane Mill, on Wes Chris’ property near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina, . . . September 28, 1939.” Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­DIG-­fsa-­8c30337, http://www.loc .gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item/fsa2000032554/PP.

we might live in a world of beauty and justice.”167 The photographer Edward Steichen called the images “some of the most remarkable human documents that were ever rendered in pictures.”168 Popular audiences, like professional ones, also saw “How American People Live” as connecting them with the rural poor. According to the roughly five hundred viewers who responded to the exhibit with comments written on index cards, many observers experienced a new sense of solidarity with those portrayed. A few of the audience members used the Progressive reformer Jacob Riis’s language to indicate their interest 140

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in the display and their desire to respond to the needs of the newly visible poor. As one observer put it: “It’s high time we Americans knew how the other half (the exploited negro and white) live.” “Without a doubt,” Jack Rome from the Bronx reflected after viewing the show, “these pictures are the most human, forceful, and interesting pictures I have seen of the South. Money spent on these pictures is well worth while. Let the Public see what is happening away from their front yard. Surely the public is interested in other humans in the U.S.”169 Although responses to the exhibit varied, Rome’s compassionate tone was typical. “On the whole,” Stryker recalled, “the comments [on the show] were sympathetic, understanding and even to the point of being distressed

Fig. 4.5

Untitled Marion Post Wolcott photograph, taken in Ashland, MT, 1935–­1942. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection LC-­USF34–­ 052133-­E, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item/fsa2000039568/PP.

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Fig. 4.6

Esther Bubley’s photograph of “Washington, D.C. Girl in the doorway of her room at a boardinghouse.” The young woman in the foreground is the photographer’s sister. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USW3–­ 038328-­E, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item/owi2001036087/PP.

about these conditions.” “Why can’t we do something,” they asked.170 The progressive weekly magazine Survey Graphic confirmed Stryker’s recollection: nine of ten of the comment slips demanded some form of action in response to the images displayed. The proliferation of images portraying the bottom third made viewers aware that the poor inhabited the same social community as the rest of the nation; however, agreement on what form of action should be taken to incorporate those people fully socially and economically was rare. The solutions viewers demanded—­from birth control, to ending immigration, to supporting FDR’s reforms—­illustrate the ambiguous messages the exhibit conveyed and suggest that observers spanned the political spectrum.171 Such vari142

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ety among observers differed from what John Houseman identified as the relative political homogeneity of those who viewed the FTP’s Living Newspapers, most of whom were on the Left and attended theater to cement their political views.172 Thus, New Deal photography appears to have engaged both those who were reform minded and those who stood farther to the right. By presenting the poor as the people and ennobling them, the photographers, editors, and curators of “How American People Live” attempted to shape a cultural milieu receptive to providing for the nation’s welfare. They did so by encouraging New Yorkers to identify with their rural, poor counterparts. The exhibit facilitated such associations precisely because it avoided challenging race-­and gender-­based differences. Promoting images of poor, rural, white male breadwinners and white female caretakers implied that welfare reforms would reach those who were in need without destabilizing traditional hierarchies. In this way, the exhibit’s curators encouraged a populist broadening of the imagined community while simultaneously strengthening two of the major divisions that plagued the welfare state throughout the twentieth century: race and gender. Like the WTP and the FTP, Stryker’s Historical Section censored itself in order to safeguard itself institutionally. Stryker also permitted—­and at times even encouraged—­his employees to explore racial differences. Yet he rarely exhibited or distributed the work thus produced. Instead, he consigned it to the files, leaving it for scholars and cultural enthusiasts eventually to recover. These radical fragments, like the unpublished black histories and the unperformed federal plays, reveal both the ways in which controversial material emerged under federal auspices and the parameters restricting the distribution of artwork that too fundamentally challenged the status quo. The success of the Historical Section in balancing federal mandates and its own social agenda illustrates how polemical art can emerge despite federal sponsorship. Although the photographic division produced and distributed certain highly polemical images, such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, it largely managed to avoid both the internal and the external censorship of the WTP and the FTP. Economics played a role in the section’s ability to convey social messages without becoming mired in political controversy. Like the Treasury Department, Stryker’s group hired artists on the basis of the merit of their work rather than their financial need. With only eight to fourteen photographers on it, Stryker’s budget was markedly smaller than the relief-­based art projects. In addition, the political messages inherent in images were harder 143

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to interpret than those conveyed through theater and writing. Photographs are pliable sources, available for multiple readings; by cropping images and contextualizing them, contemporaries shaped their various meanings.173 Furthermore, because most viewers encountered photographs individually rather than in collective, like-­minded groups, New Deal photographs did not attract the type of attention that federal plays did. Thus, the genre of photography itself made polemical images seem less controversial. Leadership styles also allowed New Deal photography to survive budget cuts while still producing and distributing controversial images. Stryker was a savvy bureaucrat, and his willingness to compromise on the Historical Section’s agenda and to shift it to adapt to changing political pressures largely explains the institution’s longevity. He shifted the section from documenting rural poverty under the experimental Resettlement Administration in 1935, to portraying the work and leisure patterns in American small towns and cities under the more conservative FSA in 1937, to celebrating the nation’s abundance in 1939, to documenting and explaining the war effort under the Office of War Information in 1942.174 While some photographers, like Lange, disapproved of his shifting goals, he nonetheless managed for eight years to find new enthusiastic photographers, like Marion Post, to embrace his evolving visions. Only in October 1943 did he leave the government, taking with him a number of his staff, including Gordon Parks, John Collier, John Vachon, Russell Lee, and Esther Bubley, to document the technological and social effect of oil on society for the Standard Oil Company. They hoped to find more editorial freedom and more reliable compensation in the private sector than they had encountered in a wartime government agency.

Conclusion New Dealers such as Flanagan, Alberg, Brown, and Stryker chose a controversial approach to government-­funded art. Working with artists and intellectuals on the Left who joined Federal One as part of the Popular Front, this cohort of art administrators briefly used art as a weapon to counter injustice and to promote New Deal ideology. Flanagan’s Living Newspapers explored the history and arguments surrounding some of the New Deal’s more contentious areas: housing, power, agricultural reforms, and labor policies. Stryker’s photographers initially universalized the plight of the rural poor, encouraging government aid for share­ 144

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croppers, tenants, and migrant workers, and then celebrated middle-­ class America, providing a visual rationale for the creation of a safety net for this segment of society. While the FTP and the Historical Section most overtly supported FDR’s political agenda, Alsberg’s federal writers also contributed to that effort. The FWP’s ethnically inclusive representation of the nation validated and reflected the new political coalition that formed in the 1930s. The project’s pluralistic descriptions of the nation broadened its imagined community just as the New Deal encouraged people to identify (and support) one another more generally. But government-­employed actors, photographers, and writers sometimes moved beyond New Deal ideology to counter broader instances of injustice, particularly in terms of race. Throughout the New Deal, relief programs remained segregated and largely excluded African Americans. Hesitant to alienate southern Democrats, FDR refused to back antilynching legislation. Yet the New Deal cultural workers were willing to take a stance against racial discrimination. Stryker’s photographers documented racial segregation, Flanagan’s playwrights created a Living Newspaper that outlined the origins of such inequality, and Brown pressed state editors to highlight racial tensions in state guides. Work created by the art projects that fought injustices beyond the frame of the New Deal rarely reached the public. The Historical Section painted Americans as white and rural in its exhibits, Flanagan carefully censored federal plays after the Ethiopia incident, and few of the black studies Brown oversaw reached publication. Instead, the FTP, the FWP, and the Historical Section helped promote New Deal ideology by portraying an ethnically inclusive nation that romanticized the poor, celebrated the working class, and built bridges between worse-­off and better-­off Americans. Despite the limits of this approach, the publicly funded art that Flanagan, Alsberg, Brown, and Stryker deployed did seek to raise consciousness, encourage debate, and build political consensus around a liberal agenda. It was precisely this effort that led many conservatives to attack New Deal art.

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Art as Experience On March 17, 1941, at the dedication of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, President Roosevelt argued that, “a few generations ago,” most Americans thought of art as a foreign import that had little to do with their daily lives but that they might occasionally see “in a guarded room on holidays or Sundays.” But in contrast to that art as grandeur approach, he continued, Americans had learned in the past few years “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 which is art.” He continued: “Knowing this they know also that art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another country, but part of the present life of all the living and creating peoples—­all you make and build.”1 The president’s speech highlighted the distance art had traveled since the turn of the century from art as grandeur to art as an experience open to all. Except for Charles Moore and the Commission of Fine Arts, few people continued to identify art solely with classical architecture and statues created by professionally trained European sculptors and displayed in spaces that inspired a feeling of reverence. Instead, art in the 1930s had become more democratic, class accessible, and expressive of working-­and middle-­ Americans. The New Deal was anomalous in terms of its broad definition of what constituted art and its respect for the ability of the American public to create and enjoy it. Despite the creation of National Art Week, beginning in 1941, market concerns never became a driving force for the New Deal art projects. Instead, those projects maintained 146

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an educational philosophy that was largely built on production. More than something to be owned or admired from afar, art had become a creative process, something that all Americans could make. But such an approach was short-­lived. Following World War II, when New York City became the capital of the art world, the notion that art was a commodity replaced the idea that it was an experience in which everyone could engage.2 FDR was far from the first cultural enthusiast to focus on art as a creative process rather than a finished product. Indeed, his statement that “it is the act of making . . . which is art” reflected an approach to art adopted by a third cohort of New Dealers, including Charles Seeger, Holger Cahill, Daniel Defenbacher, Thomas Parker, Constance Rourke, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Morton Royse, Robert Binkley, and Luther Evans. These art administrators concentrated on artistic activity. For them, art did not consist of beautiful objects created by artist-­geniuses, nor was it limited to the production of discrete works of art intended to educate, persuade, or uplift audiences. Instead, it was an activity in which all people—­including working-­and middle-­class men, women, and children, immigrants, blacks, Native Americans, and those who had no access to formal culture—­engaged daily. Such creative acts resulted in works of art that were not necessarily finished or “fine” but rather could be heard in lunch conversations, lullabies sung to babies, and tall tales told to friends. Vernacular expressions could easily be dismissed as mundane, but this group of art administrators instead recognized them as constituent of a meaningful national culture. They encouraged people, regardless of their formal training, to create novel works of art and to recognize the originality in what they made. They hoped to use folklore, songs, and art to counter standardization and homogenization and to develop a “usable past”—­a native tradition in American art—­that would encourage Americans to value self-­expression above material growth.3 One of the chief advocates of this approach was the philosopher, educator, and Progressive reformer John Dewey. In Art as Experience (1934), he argued that, like education, art was an action and a process rather than an object. “The product of art—­temple, painting, statue, poem—­is not the work of art,” he explained. “The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties.” He contended that the creative process occurred when ordinary people interacted with their environment to produce something tangible and then enjoyed the product of their labor. By alienating laborers from the works they created, industrialization had made such experiences rare. 147

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Dewey sought to recombine art and the everyday by popularizing creative experiences. He contended that the process of making art could make people’s lives more meaningful and allow them to understand their neighbors more readily.4 Many New Dealers were drawn to Dewey’s notion of art as experience. A number of them, including Harry Hopkins, Henry Morgenthau, Eleanor Roosevelt, Holger Cahill, Henry Alsberg, Morton Royse, Audrey McMahon, Frances Pollak, Sidney Robertson, and Katherine Kellock, had studied under Dewey or been exposed to his ideas while working in settlement houses or training as social workers before moving into government positions. Others sought to integrate art and life by collecting the material goods that laborers created and enjoyed daily.5 Constance Rourke, a literary critic and the director of the Index of American Design (sponsored by the Federal Art Project [FAP]), along with other New Deal art administrators such as Holger Cahill, Charles Seeger, Alan Lomax, Benjamin Botkin, and Henry Alsberg used government funds to preserve folklore, art, and songs. This cohort did not turn to the vernacular to preserve dead remnants before they disappeared. As Botkin, the director of the folklore unit of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), explained: “Collecting folklore should not be like collecting living butterflies who, removed from their environment, become dead illustrations of a classified system.”6 Instead, the idea was to record creative expressions that resulted from interactions among diverse people in a living and continually changing culture. Folk expressions, according to this cohort, also had a profound effect both on those who collected them and on those who created them. Collecting folklore could provide participants with a socially meaningful role.7 But it could also empower those who created it by illustrating the value of their ideas. “Each time I listen,” the federal writer Hyde Parnow explained, “I know I’m watching a more or less submerged person coming to the top.” Folklore and songs made the “inarticulate articulate” and “let the people speak in their own voice and tell their own story.”8 By illustrating the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, they showed how they had endured hard times and revealed where they had turned to find strength and meaning.9 Such expressions provided both inspiration and guidance for people struggling to make ends meet during the Great Depression. New Dealers’ turn toward the art of common people reflected a larger trend within 1930s culture. Influenced by cultural anthropologists from Franz Boas to Margaret Mead, many people began to consider culture as part of daily life rather than viewing it from the perspective of the poet 148

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and literary critic Matthew Arnold as “the best that has been thought and said.”10 In Patterns of Culture (1934), the most influential anthropological study of the interwar period, Ruth Benedict coined the term that helped define this moment: patterns of culture.11 By patterns of culture, she meant the traits and behaviors that shape a society’s institutions, values, and ideologies. She sought to understand how people learned such norms and what led them either to conform to or deviate from them.12 Other scholars and cultural enthusiasts applied Benedict’s approach to the United States and sought to derive fundamental values from the experiences of women, African Americans, immigrants, and the poor.13 By uncovering what made people’s lives meaningful in the past, this group hoped to identify a usable past that would help Americans forge new and purposeful ways of living. Given the broader cultural turn toward the vernacular during the 1930s, it is not surprising that New Deal art administrators embraced the approach. Holger Cahill, the FAP director, championed the broadest effort to promote popular ownership of the arts by creating community art centers across the country and the Index of American Design, which documented folk art. But other New Deal art projects also shared this approach. The Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration used creative experiences to build community among recently resettled homesteaders. It encouraged community singing, dancing, pageants, and craft exhibits. Similarly, the art administrators who ran Federal One shifted their aesthetic approach from using art as a weapon to the less controversial focus on promoting popular participation in the arts in an effort to counter budget cuts, growing anti-­Communist sentiment, and the 1939 decentralization of Federal One. Beginning in 1937, the Federal Music Project (FMP) increasingly collected folk music and hired unemployed musicians to teach music to Americans rather than paying them to play for the nation.14 At the same time, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) turned its energy away from producing large, imaginative, and controversial plays like One-­Third of a Nation and The Cradle Will Rock and instead concentrated on performing pageants written and acted by community members (with some professional guidance). Similarly, the FWP closed its creative writing unit and instead concentrated on educational projects that engaged lay people, such as the state guides, as well as those that captured Americans’ experiences from the bottom up, including interviews with the nation’s working class, immigrants, and ex-­slaves. More than art as enrichment and art as a weapon, the projects that encouraged public ownership of the arts outlasted the other New Deal 149

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art projects. Local administrators and private philanthropists in several cities managed to maintain the FAP’s community art centers even after Congress ended Federal One in 1943.15 The South Side Community Art Center, for example, still offers classes in the same space that the FAP converted for use in 1940: a Chicago landmarked, Georgian Revival–­ style residence at 3831 South Michigan Avenue that Eleanor Roosevelt helped open in a ceremony in May 1941. In addition, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Art in Oklahoma City developed out of New Deal community art centers.16 While some New Deal art, such as murals, plays, and state guides, outlasted the 1930s, few of these works transcended their time as did the efforts to engage communities in creative endeavors. Such movements continue to grow, with federally funded centers devoted to the collection and popularization of folk life housed both in the Smithsonian and in the Library of Congress. What explains long-­term public buy-­in to the collection of folk art and lay people’s artistic endeavors? Why did locally based efforts to celebrate the vernacular escape the opposition that art as a weapon faced?

“Welding . . . the People” with Music: Charles Seeger, Margaret Valiant, and the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration A journal that the opera singer Margaret Valiant kept from January through June 1936 provides insight into the New Dealers’ use of folk art and encouragement of lay participation in creative activities. Before joining the Special Skills Division, which used the arts to unify diverse homesteaders brought together by the Resettlement Administration in experimental and collective agricultural communities, Valiant immersed herself in both classical and folk music. Born in Como, Mississippi, in 1901 and raised by relatives after the death of her mother two years later, Valiant was exposed first to classical culture—­including theater and opera—­in San Antonio, Texas, and then to folk culture in the rural church she attended while living with family on a small farm in Plum Point, Mississippi. She began to study piano while attending high school in Memphis, Tennessee. With the help of scholarships and financial aid, she was able to study voice and piano at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and then in the early 1920s train as an opera singer in Paris. When she was in her mid-­twenties, however, a bout of pleurisy—­an inflammation of the membrane surrounding the lungs—­aborted her operatic career. Although she continued to perform 150

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professionally, she now switched from opera to popular and folk music, singing in the chorus of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Three Musketeers and also in international concerts of American folk songs and spirituals.17 In 1931, when Valiant first met Charles Seeger, he did not share her interest in folk music. The musical courses he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1912 until 1919, for example, focused primarily on the “technical aspects of western fine art music.” He dismissed popular music as lowbrow and only briefly concerned himself with folk music, describing it as a vanishing art form.18 Even in 1933, one year after marrying the modernist composer and folk song arranger Ruth Crawford, he continued to demean folk music. When he, Crawford, and some friends and former students, including Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Marc Blitzstein, and Earl Robinson, created the Composers’ Collective to raise class consciousness, they composed formal pieces for choruses to perform with musical accompaniment—­not folk songs for striking laborers to belt out. “We thought,” Seeger recalled, “we might be able to make things that were ‘Good Music,’ capital G, capital M, songs which the common people would sing to the revolutionary words.” By 1935, however, influenced by the Popular Front and by interactions with several renowned singers, artists, and musicologists—­including the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, the Kentucky ballad singer and union organizer Aunt Molly Jackson, and the folklorists John and Alan Lomax—­Seeger had come to recognize folk music as a valid creation by ordinary people for their own enjoyment.19 By the time Valiant joined the Special Skills Division in January 1936, Seeger had developed a deep commitment to folk music and to popular participation in music. During a two-­week training session in Washington, DC, Valiant became well versed in Seeger’s approach. “The first thing for you to do,” Seeger instructed his staff, “is to find out what music the people can make. Then put that to the uses for which you’re sent to the community—­to make the people in that community get along with each other instead of fighting.” Seeger urged them not to impose their own musical preferences on members of the experimental communities. “[Don’t] be the publicity spreader of good ideas and good doing and all that sort of thing,” he insisted. Instead, he advised them to encourage “the vernacular: folk, popular, or mixed, [or] whatever it was.” “[And] for God’s sake,” he exclaimed, “don’t give them a songbook, don’t teach [them] songs you like, but find out what songs they like to sing, and get them to sing them.”20 Seeger believed that popular musical experiences, such as organized dances, community sings, pageants, and performing groups, would begin the process of “welding . . . 151

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the people into more independent, capable and democratic action.”21 When Valiant left for Cherry Lake Farms, an experimental agricultural community near Madison, Florida, created by the Resettlement Administration, she largely shared her boss’s approach. She sought to use the homesteaders’ music, as she recalled, “to restore a sense of confidence in the people at that time who were very frightened by changes that they did not anticipate.”22 When Valiant arrived at her first commission, she found homestead mothers and teachers alike clamoring for free access to a landmark of middle-­class culture: piano lessons for their children. Heeding Seeger’s call to develop the music that the homesteaders enjoyed, she set up group piano lessons and even recruited some of the better adult players to teach for modest stipends.23 By working through the understaffed school system and providing music lessons for children, she was able to engage a number of children in musical experiences. Mature homesteaders, however, were far more wary of Valiant. Few adults attended her events. Some community members—­caught in re­ ligious warfare between a Baptist priest and a Protestant preacher—­dis­ approved of nonreligious entertainment.24 Others opposed performing, much less writing, plays that were not what they viewed as the best that has been thought and said. Still others objected to combining music with theater. Four months into her stay in Cherry Lake Farms, Valiant tried a new strategy to attract the homesteaders: she organized a hobby and craft exhibition. On the Friday before the show, she and one homesteader took the local school bus house to house collecting entries for the exhibit. “Many people,” Valiant recorded in her diary, “said they had nothing to exhibit.” Still, she and her assistant persisted. “With the belief that psychologically the effect of exhibiting would increase the self-­confidence and community spirit of the homesteaders,” she wrote, “we made a point of trying to discover something in each place, even if it were only, as in one place, an ingenious door prop made of a Sears-­Roebuck catalogue.” The pair gathered 232 items, including snake skins, stuffed fish, canned goods, flower arrangements, quilts, a fifty-­year-­old baby dress, and a baby bed made from “an orange crate without a saw.”25 According to Valiant, the exhibit was a success and heralded a turning point in the community’s evolution. Turnout was high, with people coming not only from Cherry Lake Farms but also from surrounding towns. Some even crossed state lines to attend. The exhibit’s impact on Cherry Lake Farms was also significant. One staff member, who had harshly criticized Valiant for pursuing a terrible idea, apologized to her 152

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at the end of the evening. “This is the most important thing that ever happened to the Community,” he insisted. “I’ve been here eighteen months and this is the first time I’ve seen these people happy.” “A year ago,” confirmed a World War I veteran, “these people were hungry and hopeless; now they’re singing and laughing and dancing.”26 After the weekend-­long opening, which ended with a barn dance championing an award-­winning fiddler, both children and adults demanded more creative experiences. Homesteaders in Cherry Lake Farms engaged in amateur nights, auctions, pageants, concerts, mother-­ daughter banquets, and music-­ memory contests. People from other towns flocked to Cherry Lake Farms’ cultural events. Valiant’s programs encouraged homesteaders to draw on their creative resources and to work together to improve their collective lot. A week after the hobby and craft exhibition, the Cherry Lake homesteaders organized a “box social,” including dramatic skits, ghost tales, Hungarian dances, fiddling, and an auction, to raise money for new uniforms for the town’s baseball team. The event drew large crowds, including county politicians, and raised $54. The following week, Valiant wrote Seeger a letter revealing pride in her own accomplishments. “If it comes within the scope of a Staff Representative to make a challenging declaration,” she asserted, “this one would like to go on record as saying: community is awake!”27 Valiant’s success in Cherry Lake’s Farms was exceptional. She fulfilled Seeger’s ambitions by using folk culture—­especially music, dance, theater, and art—­to bring homesteaders together into model communities. Given homesteaders’ social, economic, educational, and religious differences as well as persistent economic tensions, it certainly was a “challenging declaration” and an impressive feat to have united such a motley crew. But Valiant’s leadership skills were rare among her peers. The rest of Seeger’s staff failed to integrate into local communities or to celebrate the culture that lay people enjoyed. “My other nine specialists,” Seeger recalled, “scarcely made a ripple in the situation. They simply couldn’t do what they were supposed to do. They were supposed to get out and learn how to sing the songs that the people sang in the community, and they didn’t do it. There was one man who gave a recital of Italian opera arias, in spite of the rule against such things.”28 When, in 1937, the Resettlement Administration (RA) became the Farm Security Administration (FSA), Seeger was unable to maintain the Spe­cial Skills Division. After Congress turned against Roosevelt in the 1936 election, competition heightened among relief agencies for government funds. Roy Stryker, the director of the Historical Section of the RA, managed to maintain his photographic unit under the newly formed FSA by 153

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shifting its focus from publicizing rural poverty to illustrating small-­town America. Stryker’s ability to change illustrated both his forceful leadership and the flexibility of the medium he used. Unlike reformer artists working in the Special Skills Division, who were embedded in local communities, Stryker’s photographers were constantly on the move. They could adapt to his changing shooting scripts while continuing to photograph what interested them. Moreover, Stryker could sift through the images his staff produced and select among them. Thus, he carefully determined the access of media outlets to specific official images and also shaped how the public, including Congress, would view the work produced. The Special Skills Division, in contrast, was not as successful at reformulating and promoting itself. Seeger’s emphasis on using art to build community came into conflict with many of his artist reformers’ individual approaches as well as with the homesteaders’ emphasis on art as leisure. Because the activities of the Special Skills Division occurred on the local level and were not generally recorded and shown to a general public, it was also harder to illustrate their effectiveness. Given such circumstances, it is unsurprising that the Special Skills Division was not able to survive the transition from the RA to the FSA.29 The Special Skills Division’s closure did not mark the end of New Deal­ ers’ efforts to elevate the vernacular and to popularize participation in the arts. Instead, both Seeger and Valiant moved into new government positions where they continued working toward that end.30 Seeger became the assistant director of the FMP and the vice chair of the Joint Committee on Folk Arts of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Valiant continued to work with resettled communities and migrant camps as an itinerant musical representative until 1939, when she became director of the National Youth Administration’s music program. In addition, new government agencies opened that fostered folk art and democratized creative experiences.

The Great Unifier: Holger Cahill and the Community Art Center Movement Of all the New Deal art projects, Holger Cahill’s FAP created the most opportunities for integrating creative experiences into daily life. Cahill’s commitment to democratizing art grew, in part, from his own lack of exposure to traditional cultural experiences as a youth. Born in 1887 in Iceland near the Arctic Circle, Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarson—­who later took the name Edgar Holger Cahill—­moved to Canada with his parents 154

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when he was two years old and then to North Dakota four years later.31 Unable either to afford to buy land to farm or to pursue the musical career he desired, Cahill’s father, a day laborer named Bjorn Bjarnarson, grew depressed. He drank, abused his wife, and, after the death of an infant child, eventually deserted his family. Ill and unable to support her ten-­year-­old son and his younger sister, Anna, Vigdis Bjarnadottir sent Cahill to live on a nearby farm owned by an Icelandic family. The family, however, treated him more as an indentured servant than a foster child and forced him to work in the fields during the planting and harvesting seasons rather than attend school. In 1902, at fifteen, he ran away. Over the next five years, he searched in vain for his mother and sister, temporarily moved in with sympathetic families who asked to adopt him, and then left after about a year’s stay. As a young man, he pursued a number of unusual jobs that he later described in his fiction. Between 1908 and 1913, he drove cattle in Nebraska, shoveled on a boat traveling through Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, sold insurance, and washed dishes.32 Curiosity and a ride on a freight train eventually brought him, at twenty-­six, to New York, where, even though he had not completed high school, he began to study and to develop friendships with leading intellectuals and artists through his roommate, the painter John Sloan, and his work as a publicist for the Society of Independent Artists. During this period, Cahill attended classes at New York University, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research. He also experimented with journalism and eventually turned to art publicity, criticism, collecting, and curating. Cahill was drawn to folk art. His aesthetic approach was primarily shaped by three men: John Dewey, the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, and the librarian and museum administrator John Cotton Dana. Dewey and Veblen, whom Cahill encountered while studying at Columbia and the New School, respectively, provided the aspiring art critic with a historical narrative to explain folk art’s demise. Dewey contended that industrialization had alienated art from labor and artists from daily life.33 In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argued that industrialization encouraged conspicuous consumption and vicarious leisure not to “enhance the fullness of life” but rather “to illustrate the pecuniary repute of the master.”34 Applying this theory to the building of museums during the Gilded Age, to which he referred as “gazing palaces” and “mausoleums of curious,” Dana criticized how they turned art into sacred objects to be respectfully admired from a distance rather than used daily. His own work as director of Newark’s museum sought to reintegrate art and society.35 155

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From 1922 until 1929, Cahill served as assistant director to Dana at the Newark Museum, where he witnessed the librarian’s extensive efforts to revitalize American art. Dana sought to turn libraries from “mere warehouse[s] of old ideas where spiders spin their webs over musty tomes, and the festive cockroach dines on the classics undisturbed,” into stimulators of civic society. Between 1889 and his death in 1929, Dana reformed the libraries he ran in Denver, Colorado, Springfield, Massachusetts, and Newark, New Jersey, by keeping them open for long hours, making their shelves accessible to browsers, and stocking them with everything from maps and reformers’ pamphlets to specialized collections for doctors, business professionals, and children.36 Cultural education played a vital role in his efforts. As Cahill explained, Dana “felt that the services of the Museum should be as readily available and as indispensable to the community as the services of the Public Library.”37 Thus, he expanded Newark’s library into a museum that displayed immigrant and industrial art, offered evening classes for immigrants, and loaned exhibits to schools, churches, and various branches of the library/museum throughout the city.38 Dana’s approach offered Cahill a concrete method for returning art to daily life, one that would particularly influence the community art centers he later built. Working with Dana was, indeed, the closest that Cahill had come to running an institution prior to his government service. In fact, when Jacob Baker, the director of the WPA’s white-­collar programs, invited him to Washington, DC, on a muggy afternoon in the summer of 1935, Cahill apparently assumed that he wanted an art critic’s evaluation of the government’s cultural effort thus far and offered a harsh critique.39 When Baker asked him to run the FAP, he demurred. His friends, however, pressed him to take the job. “An invitation from the Government to a job like this is tantamount to an order,” proclaimed Francis Henry Taylor, then the director of the Worcester Museum of Art. The abstract painter and activist Stuart Davis warned Cahill that the academic painter Jonas Lie, who chaired the National Academy of Art and the Painting Committee and was also a friend of President Roosevelt’s, would otherwise take the position. Cahill knew of Davis’s opposition to Lie, who had repeatedly attacked artists on the Left, war refugees, and abstract art.40 He eventually agreed to accept the new position, which he held for longer than any of the other art administrators Hopkins initially recruited. Indeed, from 1939 through 1943, he ran the entire Federal One. As a public servant, Cahill sought to reverse the divisions between art and daily life identified by Dewey, Veblen, and Dana. For Cahill, that divide had “catastrophic” consequences. It drained the joy out of everyday 156

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experiences and encouraged people to rely on experts’ aesthetic judgments rather than their own responses. The divorce between the fine and the practical arts left lay people looking to experts to tell them what art was good and what was not. It turned art into “spinach to the average man,” something that was healthy and that one ought to consume but not something that one wanted to devour. “A gradual loss of the arts may not seem very important,” Cahill eloquently explained, “. . . but over a long period the impoverishment of life becomes apparent. It is like a loss of vitamins from the diet. It is not that we feel hungry, but begin to suffer spiritual pellagras and neuroses. We lose our power to organize our environment. We lose our power to enjoy the world in its fullness. Something of the joy of living goes out of life.”41 If the absence of art in daily life signaled slow spiritual starvation, its presence could revivify people, making their lives beautiful and meaningful. Art served as a “celebrant of life” and the “great recorder of the highest reaches of civilization.” Rather than viewing art as a weapon and encouraging people to use it to fight injustice, Cahill viewed the creative process as a “unifying force at the spiritual level.” “[It is],” he explained, “the very opposite of compulsion or regimentation. It wins us by the persuasion of the love of beauty, the kind of love that Dante says ‘moves the sun and the other stars.’ ”42 He saw public ownership of the arts, in particular, as a means to establish “order, design, and harmony” in the visual environment and “encouraged people to look for these things [art] in their everyday environment, to demand them if they were not present, and to work for their realization.”43 Participating in creative experiences further led communities to recognize the beauty and power in what they already possessed and in the world around them. Instead of looking to art experts or advertisers to tell them what was or was not attractive, art education empowered individuals to judge for themselves the quality of a work of art as well as the grace of being. “In art,” wrote Cahill, “a people looks upon its own life, and in a spirit of joyful affirmation repeats the great sentence of Genesis: ‘Behold it is very good.’ ”44 Cahill attempted to use publicly funded art projects to restore the type of joy and meaning to Americans’ daily lives that he believed they lacked. He relied especially on two programs: the Index of American Design and the community art centers. The index celebrated the practical works of art Americans had already created during their daily lives through artistic renderings documenting decorative art from the colonial period through the Gilded Age. Under the auspices of the literary critic Constance Rourke, it sought to provide artists and designers with 157

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a usable past and the building blocks for a national culture that they could employ in their own creative endeavors. Cahill aspired to circulate it widely, displaying parts of it in traveling exhibits, and publishing the complete collection in a series of books organized thematically by carvings, ceramics, costumes, and other forms of folk art. Ultimately, it was displayed in a few public art shows and successfully deposited in the National Gallery of Art, where, unlike much New Deal art, it was preserved. However, it was neither widely shown nor duplicated. Thus, only thirty-­eight hundred people consulted it between 1945 and 1958.45 In contrast, popular interest in the national chain of art centers that the FAP sponsored, which attracted fifteen million participants between 1935 and 1940, illustrates Americans’ curiosity about the experiential dimensions of art.46 More than looking at illustrations in books or artworks on gallery walls, participants in art centers engaged in creative experiences that, as Cahill argued, reintegrated art into daily life. One of Cahill’s assistants, Daniel S. Defenbacher, who, as a WPA state supervisor of North Carolina’s art projects, created the first three government-­ funded art centers in 1935, developed a lecture he gave to local committees and national associations to rally support for building art centers throughout the country. In it he argued that art centers could show the “average man” that art does not belong on a pedestal removed from daily life and should not be available only to elites for their “enjoyment and guidance.” Instead, he insisted that art is a living process capable of “influenc[ing] . . . the development of civilization,” including every­ thing from people’s dress and behavior to the environment. “Art in action,” as he called it, could further affect a wide range of individuals differently. “The professional,” he explained, “can work to raise the level of our artistry in objects; . . . the consumer can strive to make his environment harmonious and beautiful as well as functional; . . . and most men can get personal pleasure at least from conducting their lives with some degree of esthetic sensitivity.”47 Cahill considered children to be the most important group to benefit from creative experiences.48 Building on the Progressive notion that children naturally possess imaginative ideas, an urge toward beauty, and a desire to express themselves without inhibitions, he sought to guide, guard, and develop their inherent creativity beyond the first stages of life. He advised art teachers to avoid “casts, carefully arranged still-­lives of fruits and flowers, and other studio appurtenance” and, instead, to use small classes to persuade students to develop and to pursue their own interests.49 His goal was neither to turn such children into artists nor to teach them to appreciate art. It was, rather, as he put it, “to re158

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lease the creative impulse which must be used if the child is to develop normally.”50 He believed that fostering creativity could help children become self-­confident adolescents and adults capable of making independent decisions, appreciative of beauty, and able to find true enjoyment through the arts. According to Cahill, most adults, unlike children, had already lost their creative intuition and with it their self-­confidence. Industrialization and mechanization turned people into “cogs in an immense industrial organism” and left them isolated from one another.51 Unable to enjoy the fruit of their labor, many people lost their creative instincts. Engaging in creative acts, however, permitted an individual “to preserve his identity, to feel himself an individual with a personality distinct and unique.”52 Art activities integrated into daily life produced, according to Cahill, a “common emotional experience” among participants and satisfied “the craft impulse” within individuals.53 Unlike a liberal arts education, Cahill suggested that art, Cahill suggested, offered the “right emotional conditioning” to harmonize one’s thoughts and feelings, to make “man’s imaginative and creative nature and the external world . . . flow into each other.” “It is only in the degree that this mediation is successful,” he continued, “that a true democracy is possible. . . . It is the artists’ business to make the group aware of its unity, its community.”54 The notion that creating art would restore uninhibited instincts to a modern society that had otherwise lost its identity also had a racial component to it. In “WPA/FAP and Negro Art,” a lecture written by the Cahill aide Thomas C. Parker and delivered across the nation, racial stereotypes were reinforced by the insistence that industrialization erased the “authentic folk traditions” of minorities in the United States even more than it did those of whites. Repeating racial assumptions regarding the “instinctive” and “natural” artistry of blacks and immigrants, Parker urged the federal government to invest in creative experiences for this population before such instincts—­and a key component of American art—­were permanently lost.55 Although such a statement illustrates Parker’s recognition of the significance of black art to the nation’s cultural development, it also pigeonholes the nature of its contribution without examining the obstacles that shaped black access to formal training as well as the experiences of those who overcame such impediments. His romanticization of black culture led Parker to prioritize aesthetic developments over civic ones. Rather than challenging racial discrimination, for example, he praised the creation of racially segregated art centers.56 He described the separate facilities as a means “to give freer and fuller encouragement to [African Americans’] latent talent.”57 He 159

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Fig. 5.1  Federal Art Project photograph of a black boy with hammer, New York. Negative

353, NY, box 1, RG 69-­AS, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

did not broach the issue of racially segregated facilities or of unequal pay for black artists and art teachers. Thus, a central contradiction plagued the government’s community art centers. With the exception of Harlem’s controversial center, where the staff and the students were racially integrated, the art centers attempted to expand creative opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities while simultaneously reinforcing race-­ based distinctions and hierarchies in the art world. Although the racial stance adopted by Cahill and his staff in Washington, DC, literally colored the art centers, their art classes nevertheless exposed a wide array of people to aesthetic creation and appreciation.

Cultural Enthusiasts and Social Service Professionals Respond Local leaders were also drawn to the idea of popular participation. By 1941, civic organizers and cultural enthusiasts in twenty-­ one states, guided and inspired by Cahill, Defenbacher, and Parker, had built 103 art 160

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centers offering classes to adults and children.58 Sometimes, the national administrators approached local people with relevant culture experience asking them to run such programs. Other times, the impetus for creating art programs came from individuals and organizations that looked to the federal government to provide funding for projects they had endeavored for years to implement. Either way, support for creating most of the community art centers was local. To create a center, civic leaders selected an advisory committee and then either raised the necessary $2,500 funding or negotiated to have at least that amount dedicated to the art center annually from local taxes. The committee would then acquire—­either by renting or through donation—­a space, preferably downtown, that could accommodate a gallery, studios, and workshops. Once they had located a space, committee members would hire a teacher who qualified for relief. The FAP then shared responsibilities with locally based civic leaders and organizations. It paid artist-­teachers’ salaries and sent exhibits to the centers every two to three weeks. In the meantime, local communities organized the centers and raised money to pay for the space and utilities.59 By building on personal relationships with wealthy individuals, local administrators convinced people and civic institutions to donate considerable time, energy, and money toward their community’s art center. Some people lent their million-­dollar collections to government-­ sponsored galleries in working-­ class areas where, according to Nan Sheets, a painter and printmaker, the doors “just had an ordinary lock” and there was neither “protection, no[r] guards.”60 Other people and institutions—­including those with no prior record of contributing to the arts—­donated money toward local community art centers. Gifts, Parker recalled, ranged from “penny donations made by schoolchildren in Salem, Oregon and Spokane, Washington to the outright appropriation of large sums of money.” Substantial aid included a private gift of $225,000 to renovate a church for use as a community center in Greensboro, $18,000 that the people of Sioux City raised in cash and kind to establish an art center, and $12,700 of state funds given to the Utah State Institute of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. According to Cahill, contributions for art centers amounted to $750,000 beyond the government’s allocation.61 Local civic and philanthropic leaders concentrated on the art programs’ social and civic functions. Black civic leaders, for example, saw equal access to leisure activities as a civil rights issue. From 1935 to 1937, the Negro Arts Committee of the Federal Arts Council lobbied the federal government to establish an art center in Harlem.62 Funding came 161

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through, establishing the enormously popular, well-­publicized, and racially integrated Harlem Community Art Center on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Still, the Negro Arts Committee continued to inveigh against racial segregation and discrimination in government funding of the arts. In a 1939 petition, it protested the prohibition against black music teachers working outside Harlem, the exclusion of blacks from the Federal Dance Project, and the failure of the FTP in New York to produce plays written by African Americans.63 The perceived psychological effect of participation in the arts drove people—­white and black, rich and poor, rural and urban—­to demand creative opportunities.64 Physicians, psychiatrists, teachers, and social workers were particularly enthusiastic about art activities’ impact on the poor, blind, sick, psychologically unstable, or just plain shy. The superintendent of Oregon’s State School for the Blind, Walter R. Dry, commended the Winston-­Salem Art Center for providing pleasurable and meaningful experiences for his students. “To the child with impaired vision who is denied many forms of creative expression,” Dry wrote, “each new opportunity for creative work brings new freedom from his handicap, places him more nearly on a par with other boys and girls and gives added possibilities for happy use of leisure time.”65 Social workers and community leaders argued that art classes kept underprivileged youths off the streets and provided them with a productive outlet so that they would not become antisocial, juvenile delinquents, or gang members. The painter and sculptor Irving J. Marantz, who himself grew up poor in New York, described art as a “great therapy, which can in many cases turn them [disadvantaged youths] into useful social beings, often into sound craftsmen, and even sometimes into distinguished artists.”66 “In the art class,” explained a supervisor of government-­employed art teachers, “the aggressive child finds a safety valve for his pent-­up emotions.”67 On May 24, 1936, in a lecture on women’s role in art given to the Women’s Democratic Club, Cahill recounted how artistic experiences had rehabilitated a “problem” boy. The FAP had, he claimed, transformed “John,” a pistol-­toting, fatherless thug who nearly attacked his school’s superintendent over a disagreement, into a fledgling artist and a member of a team of muralists. With “creative work, financial security, and hope for the future,” Cahill reported, “John” no longer resisted “discipline and instruction” from his superiors. Art experiences not only provided him with emotional outlets but also encouraged him to adopt socially acceptable behaviors.68 The journalist Anita Brenner called accounts of “pariah” children who realized their talents through the art 162

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centers “miracle” or “Cinderella” stories. In researching an article about the art centers in New York for the New York Times Magazine, she often encountered such tales.69 Psychologists worked together with federally employed art teachers to use art to understand “the fantasies and the unconscious life” of their patients and to determine the most appropriate psychotherapeutic methods for helping them.70 Building on experiments conducted in 1934 by Dr. Lauretta Bender, a senior child psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, six art teachers worked with patients throughout the hospital’s psychiatric division to help those who resisted verbal communication express themselves through the visual arts. “Frequently,” one art supervisor explained, “the child utilizes art activity to vent aggressive impulses in the form of paintings of fights, explosions, shootings, stabbings, gang warfare, etc. This symbolical aggression has been found very useful as a substitute for actual acts of violence by the child, constituting a sort of ‘blowing off of steam.’ ”71 Dr. Frank J. Curran further argued that, by identifying their “repressed and suppressed tendencies,” art can help patients adjust themselves to society’s demands.72 The program at Belle­ vue was so successful that the FAP and the hospital jointly sponsored an exhibit about the project called “Art and Psychopathology.” According to the sculptor and director of the Harlem Community Art Center Gwendolyn Bennett, when it was on display in 1938, the exhibit “drew to the Center . . . many eminent psychologists and psychiatrists.”73

Participants Respond Most attendees applauded the community art centers for helping them build meaningful lives based not simply on advancement and materialism but rather on an appreciation of manual labor and beauty. The numbers of people who attended openings, classes, and exhibits at the community centers give an initial sense of their widespread appeal. Fifteen hundred people went to the Phoenix Art Center’s launch, and four thousand people endured temperatures hovering around ten degrees below zero in order to be present at the debut of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on January 4, 1940.74 Classes and exhibitions at art centers also drew crowds. With limited budgets, students often worked on the floors or on the walls rather than at desks. They relied on newspaper and brown wrapping paper for their canvasses, used cheap watercolors or crayons for art supplies, and turned to one another for models.75 In the greater New York area, twenty thousand children and five thousand 163

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Fig. 5.2  Federal Art Project photograph: “The Community Art Center in Oklahoma City Is a

Popular Place on Sat Mornings for School Children,” Oklahoma City, OK. Box 1, RG 69-­AS, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

adults regularly attended events.76 In Spokane, Washington, six teachers taught one thousand students.77 And 41,322 people, including visitors from more than forty towns in the state, attended the community art center in Salem, Oregon, over the course of nine months.78 The Harlem Center saw even higher numbers, with 70,592 attending its activities over sixteen months, 4,000 attending monthly, and visitors—­including Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Robeson, and Albert Einstein—­ coming from throughout the United States, England, Scotland, the British West Indies, China, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Palestine, and Germany.79 Numbers, however, give only a limited sense of how community art centers shaped the lives and perspectives of individuals. For a wide array of lay people, the art centers provided access to a world beyond material acquisitions. The director of Spokane’s Junior League, Charlotte 164

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H. Upton, justified local enthusiasm for the city’s art center because it satisfied the inner demands of townspeople. “Here at last,” she asserted, “was a chance that many of us had actively longed for and many others unconsciously desired—­an outlet for jaded nerves, an opportunity for enrichment.”80 Artistic experiences brought pleasure as well as cultural inclusion to individuals who had previously had few opportunities to engage in the arts. A farmer in Massachusetts who had never before seen an oil painting “became so excited by a picture in an exhibition” that he soon returned with all his friends.81 Similarly, a grocery clerk was so moved by his experiences at the Queensboro Art Center and the Gallery at Fifty-­seventh Street in Manhattan that he wrote his first letter to the president, arguing against their forthcoming closure. “Whether I sell or buy bread,” Harry Kronenberg insisted, “I firmly believe that we do not live by bread alone. . . . [I]f you could see the degree of concern that affects people of every age and description, from ten years to fifty, at the thought of losing their Art Center, you would feel certain that this work is worth while.”82 Lay people were drawn to the art centers because they developed participants’ visual senses, professional opportunities, and general self-­ confidence. A teacher in New York City recalled that they provided unusual opportunities to those who were otherwise accustomed to limiting their own development. “The ideas of reaching for higher education,” he explained, “were unthinkable to them [the working-­class students he taught] but all my group finally had a good chance to go as far as they could in learning. Some of them are now fine teachers. Most of them went into the various practical arts as frame makers, color grinders, taxidermists, [and] window decorators.”83 The art centers not only provided the poor and the culturally underserved with professional training in art and design; they also gave them the self-­confidence to value their creations and to use them toward socially responsible ends. “In each person at work in the Center,” wrote Gwendolyn Bennett, “there has grown a new selflessness and dignity in the performance of the smallest task.”84 Art classes at the community centers further enriched participants’ lives by teaching them to recognize the beauty in events they previously dismissed or ignored. In 1965, the abstract artist and art teacher Opal Fleckenstein recalled the profound influence that her teacher, the painter Guy Anderson, had had on her when she taught at and took classes with him at the Spokane Art Center. She remembered one rainy day when she and her classmates had been complaining about the weather until Anderson began to talk about the fog in a way that altered their perspective on it. “He said,” she continued, “ ‘I particularly like the 165

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fog because it encloses some things and excludes others. It has a very intimate feeling about it, and it’s beautiful. You should really enjoy the fog.’ And he went on for several minutes discussing what he enjoyed about the fog, and requested us to paint it and then I realized I hadn’t really looked at fog. . . . So in many ways the Art Center enlarged our horizons.”85 Teachers too saw their perspectives expanded by working at community art centers. “I had never thought of being a teacher,” one former art teacher recalled, “until the project gave me the chance.”86 The painter Lawrence A. Jones commented that teaching poor children in New Orleans made him aware of his role in society. “This new connection,” he explained, “gave me a vivid realization of my social responsibility toward the underprivileged.”87 Bennett identified a similar sentiment among her staff. “A new understanding of the value and meaning of art teaching in the cultural scheme of things,” she wrote, “has been engraved on the consciousness of every person associated with the Center. We who are part of the Harlem Community Art Center feel the way the editor-­in-­chief of a well-­known Paris newspaper did when he wrote in our guest book: ‘One goes many places, seeing many things but being little impressed; but here, indeed, one sees a true expression of a New World.’ With real conviction we add, a new and better world!”88

Controversies Emerge Not everyone agreed that the community art centers heralded “a new and better world.” Some artist-­teachers resented the constraints that community members imposed on their creativity, while lay people often objected to the politics and lifestyles of the art centers’ employees. Meanwhile, art administrators in Washington, DC, urged their artists, as Cahill’s assistant Daniel Defenbacher put it, not to “allow their personal convictions to become too public” to prevent art centers from becoming “marked by factionalism rather than by a broad unbiased interest.”89 Cahill, furthermore, assured communities that they could return artists on loan to their centers if they did not “harmonize . . . [their] work with that of the resident staff.”90 Conflicts and controversies regarding the community art centers became particularly shrill in 1938 and 1939 when national art administrators sent artists—­fifty from New York City and six from Chicago—­to teach for three-­month stints in community art centers in the South and

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the Great Plains states. Community members and art administrators in Oklahoma City and Spokane objected to the left-­wing and bohemian practices of their visiting artists. In Oklahoma City, the art administrator threatened to send home a young artist who attended a Communist camp in Arkansas on his vacation and subsequently tried to organize the city’s artists.91 In other places, such as Salt Lake City and Phoenix, opposition arose not to leftist ideology but instead to displays of nudes and of modernist works. Many communities also discriminated on the basis of race and ethnicity, rejecting Jewish and black applicants. Such discrimination was particularly evident with artists from New York and Chicago who were “loaned” to art centers in places that did not have financially needy artists of their own. One state official in Greensboro, North Carolina, reported that a black artist from New York found it “impossible to adjust himself to the manners and customs of the Southern Negro.” Local art administrators in Raleigh dismissed another black artist because of her “unsympathetic spirit toward the South and her unwillingness to mingle with the proper people in the Negro community.” In the eyes of many local residents, the reorganization of the arts projects and the cancellation in 1939 of the artist-­loan program salvaged the community art centers from “outside” influence and, instead, concentrated power in the hands of civic and cultural leaders, who could maintain art centers only by building alliances with local elites. But, even after the decentralization of the FAP, tensions continued between community members and the art centers’ permanent staff. In Sioux City and the South Side of Chicago, local philanthropists who continued to support their communities’ art centers objected to the leftist leanings and sympathy for labor strikes articulated by their centers’ art teachers.92 Clashes between regional and national administrators also weakened art centers. Washington State’s director, R. Bruce Inverarity, sparred with Cahill over the expansion of the art project in his state. While Cahill urged Inverarity to build a strong popular base (and means for financial support) in his largest center, the one in Spokane, the state director sought to expand his program to public schools and to independent galleries. Inverarity’s emphasis on geographic extension made it difficult to foster strong relationships with potential local philanthropists.93 In addition, his inability to maintain a center director further weakened such relationships. The first head of Spokane’s art center, Carl Morris, a former art teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago whom Defenbacher had chosen, alienated community members by dismissing folk arts and crafts and violating the city’s social and racial norms (he lived with a

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Jewish woman, Hilda Deutsch, before marrying her). Rapid turnover then worsened the situation. The center went through four visiting artists in three months and then four directors in four years. By 1941, only 8 percent of those who had financially supported the center in 1938 were willing to contribute to it. Within a context of rapid geographic expansion and quick turnover, Inverarity was unable to build a strong network of local patrons. Thus, when Congress stopped funding the art projects, Spokane’s art center, which had initially met with broad popular approval, closed its doors.94

Folk Culture Meets the War More than anything else, America’s entry into World War II dealt a blow to Cahill’s effort to forge public ownership of the arts. In some communities, that moment marked the literal end of their centers. In 1942, Nan Sheets, the director of Oklahoma City’s art center, received a notice announcing the immediate closure of her program. “The war was on,” she recalled, “the men were needed, and jobs had opened up and there was no further use for the WPA.”95 In other communities, the war also signified the beginning of the end. “Pearl Harbor,” the artist Opal Fleckenstein recollected, “marked the end of a certain kind of enthusiasm that we had had for our work and people began to plan that since they knew that the Center would close, they would have to be doing other things within a very short time.”96 World War II affected work opportunities and leisure patterns. Job growth decreased working people’s free time and created a number of new, overtly patriotic activities for leisure time.97 During the Depression, many people participated in community art centers to counter alienation and to search for a more meaningful life. In contrast, the war provided multiple opportunities to engage in the national effort by fighting, planting Victory gardens, buying and selling national bonds, and volunteering with the Red Cross. Compared to such activities, the arts were viewed by many people as superfluous. Entry into the war redirected government funds from domestic to foreign affairs, substantially reducing allocations for both relief and the arts. Financial support rapidly declined for the art projects, particularly for those programs that could not readily be turned toward propagandistic ends. In response, many local work-­relief administrators attempted to refocus their projects, including the art centers, on the war effort. The community art centers in Minneapolis, for example, began to empha168

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size defense over general art education. Participants in art classes made ashtrays and curtains for military bases. Similarly, exhibitions entitled, for example, “America Builds for Defense,” “Halls of Montezuma,” “Can America Be Bombed?” and “Strategic Elements of Naval Warfare” replaced such earlier ones as “Art in Action” and “Fundamentals of Art.”98 Despite the war, some cultural enthusiasts continued to defend government efforts to popularize the arts. The Utah State Institute of Fine Arts, for example, argued that federal funding of the arts was even more pressing during times of war. In a report it issued, it agitated for more art and culture, saying that those things “alone differentiate man from beast.”99 Where art flourished, humanity rather than insanity dwelt. Similarly, the supervisor of the Mississippi Art Project, Leon Koury, insisted that creative experiences provided a constructive release and a relief from the threat of war. “Art is, and can be for all,” he announced during a radio talk in January 1941, “the neutral plane to which the mind can turn as relief from the harsh but inevitable business at hand. For on this plane you will find no hysteria or emotional turbulence, but rather a calm concentration of mental and physical forces in the pursuit of art and craft activities.” Arts and crafts, he went on, occupied people, allowed them to preserve their identity and to maintain their morale.100 “The art center,” Cahill similarly argued, “affirms day after day, and hour after hour, faith in humanity. It constantly affirms the importance of living creatively.”101 In defense of continued government funding of the arts in the face of war, Cahill argued that creative experiences both hindered fascism and defended the American way. “The power that will draw the people together in the end,” he wrote, “will not be the power of bayonets or high explosives. It will be this conception of the unity and attraction of culture.”102 He insisted that Great Britain’s policy toward the arts illustrated just how useful art is in war. “In a time like the present,” he noted, “when the meaning of our history, the meaning of our people’s experience assumes the greatest importance for us, we look to the arts to create the symbols to express those meanings, to intensify our consciousness of the heritage of free men.”103 Quoting Leo Tolstoy, he contended that art’s influence is so powerful that it “should cause violence to be set aside.”104 Musicians, artists, and writers who joined the Citizens’ Committee for Government Art Projects in January 1942 endorsed Cahill’s argument. The committee requested funds in addition to those granted them for work relief to use art to promote military and civilian recreation, stimulation, and morale. It wrote: “We are defending our culture 169

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and our way of life. We earnestly urge the establishment of the program here outlined as a strong pillar in that defense.”105 Relatively few politicians, civic leaders, and lay people, however, worked to ensure that creative experiences would remain accessible to diverse publics after the United States entered World War II. For example, citizens did not besiege their political representatives with letters calling for the restoration of government-­funded art. But their apathy should not be interpreted as a sign of opposition to public art. Indeed, the popularity of the community art centers prior to their closing illustrates ongoing public interest especially in participating in creative experiences. Some local administrators and private philanthropists remained sufficiently committed to Cahill’s vision to keep centers open. In some cases, their maintenance entailed transferring art materials or art teachers from one institution to another. In others, however, it involved the incorporation of art centers, such as the one in Minneapolis, into more established art museums, like the Walker Art Center. The continuation of art centers often illustrated the strength and determination of individual leaders as well as their connections with and ability to maintain the local power structure and cultural institutions. When funding ended for Tulsa’s art center, its director, the Harvard-­and Sorbonne-­trained artist Maurice De Vinna, shuttered the operation. He left Tulsa until 1953, first as an army draftee, and then as one of the “Monuments Men” who worked to preserve Europe’s cultural heritage. In contrast, the municipal art center that the painter and printmaker Nan Sheets ran in Oklahoma City was one of the few New Deal institutions to survive World War II without merging with another institution, and it remains active to this day.106 Sheets capitalized on personal connections to maintain the art center even without federal support. She and her husband, a prominent physician, had relatively deep roots in Oklahoma City, where they had lived since 1916. Drawing on the generosity of her board of advisers, the volunteerism of local Junior League members, and her own frugality, Sheets managed to keep the center open. She remained in the municipal building that she had occupied rent free while receiving government funds. “I had enough supplies in my cabinets,” she told an interviewer in 1964, “to last me, I would say, five or six years, and even today I have envelopes in the store room that we still use.” She raised money from private donors, sold memberships, and organized fund-­raisers (such as a Beaux Arts ball that raised $10,000). The center’s continuing viability owed much to her ability to mobilize a private network of friends and colleagues to support her vision.107 While local leadership at times rejected art and artists that 170

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challenged communal norms either aesthetically or personally, it also increased chances that private support would continue after public financing ended. The integration of art administrators into schools, universities, and museums after the arts projects dissolved further ensured the endurance of art as experience. According to the art historian Francis V. O’Connor, 75 percent of those who participated in the government program in New York State supported themselves by teaching afterward, with 38 per­cent of those instructors teaching in colleges or universities.108 Art teachers carried the progressive approach toward art education that they had learned in the New Deal art programs from work relief into the education sector. Despite the resistance from local communities that art administrators met, art as experience was, in many senses, the most successful and enduring of the approaches to public art that the New Dealers imagined. Its sustainability initially resulted from its reliance on local funding, administrators, artists, and participants. Although art produced under the scrutiny of local boards rarely challenged accepted norms within the community—­and caused problems when it did so—­its power lay in encouraging creativity. Teaching people to view their own lives, stories, and words as artistic expressions was part social work and part artistic training. It provided a framework for turning citizens into artists and for endowing human actions and creations with beauty and meaning.

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Art as Subversion Each approach toward government-­ funded art—­ art as grandeur, art as enrichment, art as a weapon, and art as experience—­provoked opposition. Some people criticized New Deal art for censoring artists’ work and lifestyles. Others accused the government of funding substandard art that was stylistically unappealing and either trite or propagandistic. Still others opposed the government’s use of tax dollars to support artists whose political leanings, life choices, and artwork undermined what they perceived to be the nation’s values and codes of decency. By 1938, such arguments had snowballed from relatively quiet complaints into a movement determined to dismantle the new relationship between art and the state. While attendance at New Deal–­sponsored plays, concerts, and community art centers remained high as long as public funding persisted, the political activism and controversial works of art created by a relatively small cohort of government-­sponsored artists and intellectuals managed to erode popular support for federal patronage. Even more significant than such incidents for the denouement of New Deal art was the growth in the late 1930s of a conservative coalition opposed to New Deal liberalism, the rise of anti-­ Communist attacks on New Deal policies, and the decentralization of Federal One. Such forces brought together an alliance of strange bedfellows: Republican and southern Democratic congressmen; local officials and policemen; mainstream journalists; veteran and patriotic groups; academic, anti-­Stalinist, and anti-­Communist artists and intellectuals; and even socialite debutantes. This coalition 172

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rejected the idea that government-­sponsored art productively engaged citizens. Instead, it deemed market competition as essential for the creation of good art while viewing government subsidies as leading to art that was inherently bad. It furthermore considered New Deal art as subversive of so-­called traditional American values, accusing it of promoting left-­wing, antireligious, and sexually and racially charged propaganda. While some New Deal art was, indeed, controversial, most of it was not. Nevertheless, attacks on the politics behind government-­ supported art—­as well as the economy’s recovery and the nation’s turn toward World War II—­eventually returned art to a private affair. Such trends helped obscure the legacy of New Deal Art until its recovery beginning in the mid-­1960s.

Opposition in the Early Years, 1934–­37 Early opponents of New Deal art saw it as neither advancing a cultural renaissance nor providing vehicles for enrichment, education, and participation. Instead, they viewed it as evidence of the administration’s waste, mismanagement, and extravagance. Beginning in 1934, critics attacked the art projects for paying the unemployed to boondoggle. The term became popular when anti–­New Dealers discovered that a relief official was teaching 150 people to make woven belts and linoleum prints, called boondoggles.1 The belts were named, perhaps apocryphally, after the leather straps that the American woodsman Daniel Boone used to tie his rifle to his head to keep his gunpowder dry when swimming.2 New Deal detractors did not believe that engaging the un-­and under­ employed in recreational activities and teaching them how to make practical art would turn them into better citizens. Instead, they viewed such endeavors as wasteful. As a Washington Post editorial proclaimed, the New Deal art projects “carry boondoggling to its utmost extremities.”3 Critics also accused the arts projects of engaging in political racketeering and intimidation, creating unnecessary bureaucracy, and wasting resources. Opponents insisted that New Dealers distributed relief work as party favors, politically intimidated workers, forced them to join the Workers’ Alliance and other leftist organizations, extracted money from them for political purposes, such as the Spanish Civil War, and fed them New Deal propaganda. They argued that government funding of the arts had not advanced civilization or built a more abundant life. Instead, it had promoted waste, graft, bribery, and extravagance. Such detractors conflated issues. From a good-­government perspective, 173

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they were right to watch carefully the president’s allocation of roughly $27 million for work-­relief jobs and to be wary of partisanship and misappropriation. Yet they consolidated those issues with their opposition to the New Deal’s incorporation of cultural workers into its programs as well as their hostility toward leftist politics and government-­funded art more broadly. Critics’ challenges to the administration began shortly after the president’s aid program began. On November 13, 1935, the Republican National Committee issued a fourteen-­page pamphlet entitled “Roosevelt the Waster” that flayed the FDR for squandering taxpayers money on “ ‘utterly ridiculous and fantastic’ ” projects rather than the “ ‘useful’ ” ones he had promised. Among the dozens of examples cited were funds allocated for “tap-­dancing, eurhythmic dances, making dolls, counting chickens, leaf raking, [and] circuses.”4 The pamphlet particularly emphasized the extravagance of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and the Federal Art Project (FAP). It reported that the FTP lavishly funded “Left-­ Wing Propagandists,” including the playwrights Albert Maltz, John Howard, George Sklar, and Virgil Geddes, all of whom were “ ‘unsuccessful in making their way in the normal self-­sustaining theater.’ ” Similarly, it accused the FAP of wasting public funds on criminals by decorating the interiors of penitentiaries.5 Journalists and concerned citizens used the press to mock both the conception and the implementation of the relief-­based art projects. During the 1930s, publishers and editorial staffs of most major newspapers maintained a critical stance toward the New Deal.6 Some of the most vicious attacks came from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror. In the fall of 1935, the paper called artists on relief “hobohemian chiselers” and “ingrates ready to bite the hand that feeds them.”7 Incensed by these criticisms, forty-­seven members of New York City’s Artists’ and Writers’ Unions demonstrated outside the Mirror’s offices. The police promptly arrested them.8 Outside New York, papers took a more tongue-­in-­cheek approach. Harold M. Finley, a writer at the deeply conservative Los Angeles Times, imagined a discussion between two scholars of Rooseveltiana in the year 3000 as they pored over “yellowed newspapers, clippings, official bulletins, [and] old volumes” to understand why “the government of Roose­ velt taught tap dancing while millions clamored for useful work.”9 Meanwhile, the Chicago Daily Tribune, another staunchly right-­wing paper, published an unsigned letter in which an older man asked the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to develop new forms of boondoggling

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that, unlike tap dancing, might be appropriate for a man his age. He too sought to “earn some of the government’s ready money.”10 The Tribune also mocked the arts in its general coverage. One article described fifty black musicians and singers carrying banjos and organs into a hall on the third floor of 3800 South Rhodes Avenue in Chicago, where, in exchange for work-­relief wages ranging from $84 to $94 a month, they spent their mornings sitting, talking, and playing checkers.11 Another piece reported that Federal One hired “amateurs, stage struck youths, office workers and even plumbers . . . as professional performers.”12 To counter such accusations, the WPA director, Harry Hopkins, initiated an internal investigatory division, known as the Complaint Bureau. Investigators, known as the “W-­Men,” scrutinized accusations of “kickback” wages, “political skullduggery,” and rackets—­such as “roving dice games”—­that deprived work-­relief employees of their wages.13 New Dealers hoped that the Complaint Bureau would discredit false accusations and, thus, help recast the WPA as efficient and effective. A similar investigative team hired by the WPA’s precursor, the Civil Works Administration, had found justification for roughly one-­third of the complaints registered (240 of 730).14 In the Complaint Bureau’s eight years of operation, the “W-­Men” verified just under half the complaints it received (8,811 of 17,352), submitted one-­quarter of those complaints (2,215) to the attorney general, and “dismissed, demoted, reprimanded, or suspended” approximately 0.1 percent of those on its rolls (4,496 of roughly 3.5 million people).15 Hopkins further countered charges of mismanagement and negative publicity by reorganizing the WPA. In December 1935, he moved $7 mil­ lion—­roughly one-­quarter of the $27 million allocated to the arts—­to the WPA’s blue-­collar programs and also threatened to fire officials who permitted loafing.16 Such changes warned art administrators to keep close watch over their staff. They also weakened the art projects, which would now run out of money by May 1936, if not sooner. Substantial budget cuts and internal reviews, however, did not moderate accusations against the New Deal art projects. Thus, some local administrators—­especially those in cities with reputations for leftist activism such as New York and Los Angeles—­instituted their own measures to dismiss radicals and aspiring artists who lacked the proper credentials and experience to qualify for work relief. In the winter of 1936, New York’s Federal One administrator, V. F. Ridder, instituted loyalty oaths, paid armed guards to monitor demonstrations, and employed spies to identify, fire, and blacklist between twenty and forty thousand agitators

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and shirkers on the relief rolls.17 By that spring, seven hundred cases of mismanagement and fraud were under investigation in New York, and the number of complaints was growing exponentially.18 When Lieutenant Colonel Brehon Somervell, an army corps engineer whose daughter was attending the Art Students’ League, replaced Ridder in the summer of 1936, he praised his predecessor’s record and pledged to continue to investigate the relief rolls and to remove those who either did not have prior artistic experience or did not qualify for relief.19 In practice, Somervell magnified Ridder’s efforts to clean the rolls of dissidents. Despite Hopkins’s orders not to employ armed guards, to spy on workers, or to blacklist those who organized, he used WPA funds to hire twelve thousand investigators to monitor the needs and affiliations of relief workers. He further ordered the project to reduce its staff by 18.6 percent (from 10,321 to 8,395), targeting both artists who legitimately violated the projects’ policies—­by not filing relief papers or failing to report their working hours—­and political activists and homosexuals whose political and personal commitments merely challenged the status quo.20 Somervell was not alone in his actions. Layoffs across the nation had left jobless 1 million relief workers, almost one-­ third of the 3.5 million laborers initially employed by the WPA.21 Despite such reductions, Republican and southern Democratic congressmen remained skeptical of the efforts of New Deal administrators to engage in self-­policing. On March 10, 1936, ten days before the president requested an additional $1.5 million to continue his work-­relief programs, Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, the former secretary of labor James J. Davis, introduced a resolution for the Senate Expenditures Committee to investigate work relief for evidence of fraud and graft.22 Accusations abounded that New Dealers had “Tammanyized” and made a “political football” out of relief: truck operators and workers in New York were allegedly splitting graft;23 politicians in West Virginia and Missouri were accused of using work-­relief jobs to ensure their reelection; and, in Illinois, workers supposedly “learned that if they spent their earnings in certain saloons and gambling houses, they could loaf on the job with impunity.”24 Republicans were particularly concerned that New Dealers had assigned work relief to supervisors on the basis of their party affiliation. Keen to see such political engineering exposed during an election year, they demanded a congressional investigation before agreeing to the president’s request for increased allocations.25 New Dealers recognized the need for reform. Hopkins ordered the dismissal of any work-­relief employee who solicited campaign funds.26 But he made a point of highlighting the fact that WPA employees were 176

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free to do as they wished outside working hours, including labor organizing. Furthermore, despite the actions of local administrators like Somervell, he insisted that the relief agency did not “keep black lists or lists of persons whom foremen or guards or labor spies describe as ‘Reds’ or ‘agitators.’ ”27 Hopkins and his peers advocated a different type of inquiry than southern Democrats and Republicans sought. New Dealers insisted that professionals should study the problems, carefully weighing the evidence of fraud and mismanagement before publicizing their findings. For example, not wanting to draw attention to unsubstantiated claims, and hoping that private, internal investigations would protect the WPA from false testimony and bad publicity, Hopkins himself investigated charges made by Indiana’s Democratic senator Frederick Van Nuys that WPA supervisors coerced their employees to vote for the “homely, fist-­ catching farmer” M. Clifford Townsend, a Democratic candidate in the 1936 primary of the Indiana governor’s race. The charges were particularly significant because of the bitterness of the primary. He concluded that WPA officials had not improperly influenced their employees.28 In the short term, monitoring by WPA and local officials succeeded in lessening complaints about the art projects’ extravagance and uselessness. They did little, however, to quell accusations of political racketeering. In an effort to undermine the Democratic Party as the November 1936 elections approached, Republicans accused the arts projects of using relief funds and jobs to buy votes and propagate the New Deal.29 In Pennsylvania, former governor Gifford Pinchot described the WPA as having “degraded into a Democratic pie counter” and accused officials of denying work relief to men who did not register as Democrats.30 Republican National Committee chairman Henry P. Fletcher further accused WPA radio programs, posters, films, and photographs of promoting New Deal ideology.31 Of course, elements of these charges were accurate. Although art administrators did not use relief jobs to buy votes, Hallie Flanagan’s FTP and Roy Stryker’s Historical Section did explicitly convey the New Deal’s goals. But, beyond such political commitments, the arts projects and the artists working on them were particularly vulnerable. Of all the relief projects, it was easiest to attack government-­funded art, which from the start appeared to be less essential and more of a luxury than other work-­relief projects. The outcry that developed around two photographs recorded by photographer Arthur Rothstein in May 1936 illustrates the growing animosity toward New Deal art. The images of a drought-­stricken steer’s skull on two different backgrounds—­parched earth and green grass—­clearly 177

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showed that the photographer had moved the skull from a lush setting to a dry one to create a more persuasive picture. Republicans argued that Rothstein’s repositioning proved that government photographers were propagandists using their cameras to make conditions look worse than they were and to support controversial legislation. The photographer, who insisted that he “had not taken the picture with the idea of it being used as a symbol of the drought,” countered that an Associated Press editor had misconstrued the photograph through his captions. Still, Rothstein recalled the ensuing scandal as harmful to his reputation. “Cartoonists,” he remembered, “drew pictures of me wandering all over the United States with a skull planting it here and planting it there. . . . This thing snowballed to the point where there were columns written about it, stories in Time magazine and [the conservative critic] Westbrook Pegler wrote a funny little satirical piece.”32 The development of mass communication, coupled with its growing connections with advertisements and politics, heightened sensitivity regarding propaganda’s potential uses and power.33 Just as governments—­ both fascist and democratic—­were increasingly experimenting with propaganda, there was a growing public concern about such images and their potential political and moral implications. Many Americans associated the term propaganda and the practice of propaganda with fascism, the Soviet Union, and the still-­controversial entry of the United States into World War I. They were particularly distrustful of government-­ funded messages since the Hoover administration had been reluctant to answer basic questions about the Depression, such as the numbers of people who were jobless and hungry. Although in the 1930s Americans sought reliable information and expected that eyewitnesses would represent the experiences of the working class and unemployed in emotionally compelling ways, they rejected obviously altered documentation.34 Thus, anti–­New Dealers used Rothstein’s images to argue that the Resettlement Administration was “a center for false propaganda and by inference, that [the Resettlement Administration] itself and the whole New Deal were fakes.”35 Condemnation of the FTP for promoting New Deal ideology was similarly biting. In March 1936, New York Republican congressman Robert L. Bacon attacked the project’s highly successful second Living Newspaper, Triple A Plowed Under. He accused the avant-­garde documentary of propagating New Deal reform and sullying the reputations of those congressmen who opposed one of the first key New Deal programs: the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). The AAA sought to address agricultural overproduction of staple crops by encouraging farmers to reduce 178

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and even destroy them and, instead, diversify their farming. Most controversially, particularly during a time of want, it mandated the slaughtering of six million piglets. The play Triple A Plowed Under developed as a commentary on the Supreme Court’s recent determination that the AAA was unconstitutional. This ruling echoed the Court’s stance on other early New Deal legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act. The play sought to explain the current agricultural crisis by historicizing the plight of farmers and migrant workers in the context of World War I, the Depression, the drought, and early New Deal reforms.36 It documented the Court’s overturning of the AAA and concluded with a somewhat vague call to action typical of Living Newspapers: farmers and laborers agreeing that they needed work rather than charity. Written a year before President Roosevelt’s Court-­packing effort, the play did not address FDR’s unsuccessful introduction of a judiciary reorganization bill that would attempt to supplement the number of justices on the Court with additional justices, ones who were favorable to the New Deal. Nevertheless, Congressman Bacon found the play’s political messages disturbing. “I submit earnestly for the judgment of the harassed taxpayers of the United States,” he declared, “that this is neither relief nor drama, but pure and unadulterated politics.”37 Some publicly employed actors agreed with Bacon’s assessment of Triple A. Several cast members initially refused to perform the play after reading the script.38 At least one actor in the group testified that he left the FTP rather than perform a show he considered propagandistic.39 Others remained on the project but worked collectively to combat its promotion of leftist ideology by forming the Federal Theatre Veterans’ League. The league criticized the government for not shutting down Triple A as it had the first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia. League members further sought, unsuccessfully, to replace the FTP director, Hallie Flanagan, and halt production of the type of experimental, politically engaged plays that she encouraged.40 Some writers also criticized the leftist commitments of the FWP. In New York, where most of the government-­employed writers and intellectuals identified with the Left, conservative writers created the Federal Writers’ Association to monitor leftist activity. In February 1936, the chair of the association, William O. Lucas, sent a report to Henry Alsberg, the head of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), insisting that the Writers’ Union dominated the project. Using the press to publicize his findings, Lucas attested that the union blacklisted editors who refused to accept poor copy, mailed “outspoken Communist propaganda” to the homes of 179

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nonunion workers, and “adopt[ed] the professed attitude that it is there to protect the jobs of the unfit, the unruly and the shiftless.”41 Having organized about three-­quarters of Manhattan’s federal writers, the Writers’ Union did play a prominent role in an office that was, indeed, chaotic, with drinking, absenteeism, picketing, and sit-­down strikes regularly occurring.42 At least initially, government officials took few steps to limit leftist activity in the New York City Writers’ Project. Internal fighting among leaders in New York revealed both their political orientation and their willingness to use antiradical sentiment to undermine one another. For example, the assistant director, the Pulitzer Prize winner Samuel D. McCoy, sought to frame the state director, Orrick Johns, a one-­legged poet who was a drinker, a womanizer, and the former editor of the New Masses. In February 1936, McCoy planted a gun and a series of Communist pamphlets in Johns’s desk before calling the police. However, Johns found the items shortly before the police arrived, and McCoy, rather than Johns, was eventually fired for “obstructive insubordination and incompetence.” Illustrating their solidarity with Johns, Alsberg and his WPA superiors refused to let McCoy appeal his case. Nevertheless, Johns’s days directing the New York office of the FWP were limited. In October, he openly supported a twenty-­ six-­ hour sit-­ in hunger strike by thirty-­five federal writers in his office. In addition, his drinking and absenteeism had increased as his job became more complex. Alsberg finally asked him to resign after he spent six weeks in the hospital recovering from a brawl with a red-­headed sailor whose temper he had set off by refusing to hire him as a relief worker and then sleeping with his girlfriend.43 Such incidents helped delegitimize the broader arts projects. In the spring of 1936, Pennsylvania senator James J. Davis raised the specter of Federal One on the floor of the Senate. Davis supported federal patronage of the arts when it related to uncontroversial art. On April 27, 1936, he entered into the Congressional Record an editorial published in his parents’ hometown of Sharon, Pennsylvania. The piece praised the Federal Music Project (FMP) for creating concerts that were “top notch in every way” and endorsed the arts projects for democratizing fine art and improving the quality of life in Sharon.44 Davis did not, however, want to see the government fund contentious art. A week before his endorsement of the FMP, he accused the FTP of Communist alliances. Drawing on unverified claims made in letters written by a leader of the Federal Theatre Veterans’ League and a member of Actors’ Equity, he charged the FTP of hiring nonprofessionals and Communists, distrib-

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uting Communist propaganda, and using its pulpit to promote leftist ideology. He further argued that Flanagan’s writing proved her to be a Communist. He demanded that the administration either apologize to the taxpayers for its negligence in not having properly investigated her or explain “the use of relief money intended to feed the hungry for such alien purposes.”45 Despite Davis’s vehemence, the Democratic-­ controlled Senate neither launched a full-­scale investigation of the New Deal art projects nor removed Flanagan from her position. Evidence that leftist activity did, indeed, thrive at least in certain parts of Federal One emerged in the winter of 1936. Anticipating that the economy would revive and restore jobs to the nation, Roosevelt and Congress agreed that the WPA should pare its rolls. Some artists and intellectuals, aware that they would be the first to be hurt by government reductions and the last to benefit by an upswing in the economy, began to organize in response and swung into action when, in late November, Brehon Somervell, New York’s Federal One administrator, announced staffing cuts.46 On December 1, the Artists’ Union—­a national organization that lobbied first for the creation of Federal One and then for its maintenance—­assembled 400 of its members in New York City to resist such reductions. About 225 protestors managed to occupy Federal One’s offices on the eighth floor of 5 East Thirty-­ninth Street.47 Police initially barred food and water from being taken to the strikers, but a bloody confrontation ensued when they forcibly removed the protestors from the building. “This is how it worked in a typical case,” reported the critic Theodore Draper, who would go on to become a leading journalist and historian of American communism. “Five cops had an artist on the floor. He struggled as they pulled him slowly towards the elevator. Finally he caught hold of the leg of a desk with one hand. One cop swung heavily at the extended wrist. Again they dragged him down the hall. Ten feet or so farther, he caught hold of a pipe near the wall and again clung fast. A cop came up from behind and swung a hay-­maker with his club. The wonder was he didn’t pass out. They had no trouble with him after that.”48 In the end, 6 women fainted, 12 artists were hospitalized, including one who had a fractured skull, and 219 were taken to prison in eleven patrol wagons. A week and a half later, former Republican congressman Vito Marcantonio, the only overt Communist sympathizer in the House, who had lost his seat in the recent Democratic landslide of 1936, unsuccessfully defended the convicted artists. They were found guilty of disorderly conduct and given suspended sentences. Their actions, however, appeared at least temporarily to have stayed reductions.

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Hopkins reassured artists that no needy individuals would be dropped six artists who temporarily lost from the rolls.49 Indeed, the ninety-­ their positions because of their activism were reinstated shortly thereafter. And employment on Federal One increased 1.1 percent between January and June 1937 while the average WPA enrollment decreased 11.9 percent.50 The New Deal art administrators were divided in terms of their attitudes toward the labor activism of government-­sponsored art workers. Flanagan articulated her support for the strikers, reaffirming employees’ right to strike for “life, liberty and happiness.”51 Cahill, who was friends with many artists on the Left, went even further, working behind the scenes to aid the art activists.52 In contrast, many other art administrators discouraged the political activism of their relief workers and warned of its potential consequences for themselves as well as for the program as a whole. As we have already seen, the Treasury Department’s art administrators sought to distance their commissioned artists from controversial figures and events. In addition, the national director of the community art centers, D. S. Defenbacher, warned artists teaching in local community centers to temper their politics to “protect the unbiased position of the Art Center.”53 Acting more forcefully, the director of the FMP, Nikolai Sokoloff, sought to discourage labor unionizing. Indeed, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians tried to expel Sokoloff because of his “attitude on the strike” after he opposed the union’s demand that musicians receive the prevailing wage (as opposed to a relief wage) if admission were charged at the concerts where they were playing.54 Perhaps most aggressive in his opposition to the political activism of art-­relief workers, however, was the director of the FWP, Henry Alsberg. He responded to the sit-­in strikes, in which 170 of his New York staff participated, by firing staff and threatening to shut down the office. He hoped that dismissing 500 relief workers in New York might save the jobs of his other 4,000 employees across the nation.55 Although the New York Writers’ Project continued to operate, Alsberg was right to have feared the political consequences of the controversy his staff—­and the other art workers in New York—­had stirred. When the first state guide went to press in 1937, it became clear that the storm developing over Federal One would not stop after hitting New York. The Massachusetts state guide, in particular, provoked complaints by state and municipal officials about the politics of the FWP. Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People met a “hornets’ nest” of criticism

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because it devoted forty-­one lines to describing the Sacco and Vanzetti case and only nine to the Boston Tea Party.56 Although the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. told the Massachusetts Globe that he thought the writers’ projects had “done as well as they could expect” in describing the “complex situation” of the Sacco and Vanzetti incident in a “brief statement,” high-­ranking Massachusetts officials disagreed.57 Massachusetts’s Democratic governor, Charles F. Hurley, regretted having “inadvertently” endorsed the guide in an introduction before he read the book, and the former Democratic governor Joseph B. Ely called for it to be burned. “Rhetorically [speaking],” Ely insisted, “they ought to take the books to Boston common, pile them in a heap, set a match and have a bonfire.”58 Hurley and Ely objected both to the guide’s bias toward labor and its criticisms of the state’s courts, police, and legal system. “The passage which seems to rankle most around the Common,” Hurley maintained, “pictures National Guardsmen firing ruthlessly into cheering crowds during the Boston police strike.”59 A few days later, in an address before the American Legion, Hurley denounced those who “had deliberately tried to besmirch the name of Massachusetts.” “If they don’t like America,” he further announced, assuming that the “defamers” were foreigners, “they should go back where they came from.”60 Controversial creations such as the Massachusetts state guide and notorious and radical behavior by government-­funded artists and administrators eroded popular support for federal patronage of the arts. In the context of what would amount to catastrophic efforts to cut federal spending in order to balance the budget, Roosevelt and Congress agreed in April 1937 to reduce the WPA by 25 percent, and Federal One’s employees were unable to avoid dismissals.61 On June 22, 1937, the government issued roughly eleven thousand pink slips to government-­ employed artists—­many of whom qualified for relief. Despite massive ins, picketings, protests, including suicide threats, hunger strikes, sit-­ agitation propaganda, and the open support of Hallie Flanagan, who described the protesters as “striking for life, liberty, and happiness,” roughly one-­quarter of Federal One’s staff lost their jobs.62 The following spring, after Congress realized that the economy had not rebounded and endorsed a 52 percent increase in WPA employment, Federal One saw less than a 6 percent increase in personnel.63 Controversy and activism had left the art projects markedly more vulnerable to budget cuts than other forms of work relief. And the support for labor organizing that some art administrators provided further fomented anti–­New Deal sentiment.

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Art as Grandeur Advocates Reemerge: Opposition to Government-­Sponsored Art as Mediocre and Regimented While government-­sanctioned controversy mobilized some people to oppose federal patronage of the arts, others united to counter those efforts and make the New Deal art projects permanent. Between 1935 and 1938, advocates of government funding of the arts established three sets of hearings and introduced ten bills on the floor of Congress in an effort to turn the New Deal cultural effort into a permanent art bureau or department.64 Growing support by some culture enthusiasts to create long-­term federal support for needy artists galvanized others, particularly academic artists who continued to embrace an art as grandeur aesthetic. Neither the then eighty-­year-­old Charles Moore nor the members of the Commission of Fine Arts participated in the hearings surrounding the establishment of a permanent government art project. But many of the arguments made by those who contested the bills resonated with the types of positions that cohort had embraced. The Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture’s Ed Bruce also did not testify, but he too opposed New York congressman Dr. William I. Sirovich’s efforts to establish a permanent fine arts bureau. Instead, he supported the establishment of a permanent Treasury’s section and viewed the Smithsonian’s art gallery as providing an appropriate type of national arts institution, as opposed to a relief-­based project.65 Collectively, the art as subversion cohort opposed linking government patronage with artists’ need and extending Federal One beyond the immediate economic crisis of the Depression. They feared that joining patronage to poverty would put union leaders at the helm of the art world, regiment the arts, stifle creativity, and promote subversive ideas and styles. To contest government funding of the arts, this group testified in congressional hearings, issued joint statements, formed associations, and engaged in public debates. The Fine Arts Federation of New York was at the forefront of art institutions countering the permanent creation of federal patronage based on need. The federation formed in February 1938 as a merger of seventeen fine art societies, including the National Academy of Design, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, and the Brooklyn chapter of the American Institute of Architects, to contest four bills introduced in Congress to create long-­term federal patronage.66 It objected to the permanent nature of the art programs the bills funded and to their empowerment of labor unions rather than the market (or even the state) to regulate 184

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them. The federation director, A. F. Brinckerhoff, who called the movement to make federal patronage permanent “a disservice to the cause of art in America,” assumed that it would undermine artistic individuality by standardizing art, reinforcing “mediocre standards,” facilitating regimentation, and encouraging appointments based on politics rather than aesthetics. Brinckerhoff further insisted that federal patronage would “sterilize the soil in which art grows and reduce art to the level of either mass employment or political patronage.”67 He argued that government funding might protect union members but that it would hamper free inquiry, individuality, and searches for self-­expression. The federation endorsed his stance in a statement released in February 1938. “As a permanent set-­up rather than as emergency relief,” it reported, “the proposal introduces a certain totalitarian concept of Federal functions incompatible with the free enterprise which has heretofore been the particular genius of our democracy.”68 While Brinckerhoff and the Fine Arts Federation of New York feared the impact of relief-­based government funding on artists’ freedom, another outspoken opponent, the famed orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch, protested the aesthetic effect of such sponsorship. “How can you expect,” he asked, “that a group of professionals who need not even face a civil-­service examination, much less an artistic examination on their respective instruments, can become proper torch bearers for the American people in art?”69 At the MacDowell Club and the National Arts Conference, Damrosch further argued that tying relief to federal patronage would constrain rather than liberate inspiration. “Art is something so sacred and should be so free,” he declared, “that I would fight to the death to preserve that freedom and prevent it being made a vehicle for a huge relief burden.” “Relief of the indigent must go on,” he continued, “but there should be no compromise between art and relief. Any bureau that is established should minister to the finest and holiest there is.”70 Like other art as grandeur advocates, Damrosch and Brinckerhoff feared that permanently linking art funding with relief would promote mediocrity. Instead, like Moore, they believed that creative developments depended on the uneven contributions of a small body of outstanding artists and intellectuals. Unlike Cahill, Flanagan, and Rourke, who insisted that art would flourish only when diverse Americans recognized it as a social necessity, this group viewed artists as geniuses and solitary figures. “Acting is a luxury at best,” the socialite and debutante Kate Oglesby explained in a statement that Democratic congressman Clifton A. Woodrum read into the Congressional Record, “and should be an avocation for all except the few whom the gods have chosen. The 185

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world is overstocked with mediocre art. If the government plans to subsidize the theater let it give support to the best in the theater.”71 Some art as grandeur advocates even went further to argue that true artists preferred poverty to government funding—­and control. “Subsidization,” explained Democratic congressman Robert G. Allen of Pennsylvania, “is the inevitable forerunner of regimentation and control. When a government through its bounty invades the field of literature, authors will not write what they feel or think, or what the Muse within them may inspire. Their work invariably will be composed to tickle the fancy of some appointed bureaucrat. Those who bestow the bounty will sit in the judgment seat. Real artists would prefer the chains of poverty to this sycophancy.”72 Indeed, some art as grandeur advocates argued that, rather than impeding creative expression, poverty itself facilitated it. Allen contended that renowned writers such as Edward Gibbon and Isaac Disraeli—­the only son of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli—­ attributed their best work to the experience of want. He further suggested that other writers such as Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Samuel Johnson produced their most important works when they were impoverished, as if to imply a causal relationship between the two.73 Oglesby similarly argued that true artists would overcome poverty to perform. “If they belong in the theater,” she insisted, “the artists among them will band together and, having a bed and a biscuit, they will somehow manage to bring forth something of interest and value to the theater through the real artist urge. They will beg, borrow, or steal a stage and a setting, and with ‘a chair, a table, and a passion’ they will find their audience.”74 The renowned writer Booth Tarkington used his own experiences in the arts to defend the notion that the government should not artificially encourage those with mediocre talents to remain in the creative realm. In a letter written to Congressman Louis Ludlow of Indiana, he attested; “Lack of opportunity has never stultified the creative achievement of any sturdy genius but on the contrary has, almost without exception, enhanced it.” Using his own failed effort to become a painter as an example, Tarkington ignored structural impediments to argue that most people who could not make a living in their chosen field just were not good at it. The market, he contended, inevitably valued high-­quality artwork and professionally redirected those who did not belong in the arts. He was grateful that no government art project existed when he was young. If it had, he argued, he might have received public funding and never been “whipped into becoming a writer.” He also criticized government funding of the arts on political grounds. “Art and politics,” 186

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he wrote, “do not mix, and you cannot put art under political government without putting it into politics. Somebody’s cousin gets to make the murals in the courthouse.”75 By organizing and testifying against federal patronage of the arts, this cohort of artists, intellectuals, and cultural enthusiasts helped undermine the New Deal cultural effort and prevent it from becoming long-­ term public policy. In the summer of 1938, the only bill advocating the creation of a permanent fine arts bureau to come to a vote—­House Joint Resolution 671—­was “laughed out of existence.”76 Despite the support of many artists and intellectuals on the Left, criticisms by leading figures in the cultural world helped convince politicians that permanent federal patronage would aid unqualified artists, provide mediocre work, and encourage behavior that deviated from gendered norms. “Why I’d resign my seat in Congress tomorrow,” declared Republican congressman Dewey Short from Missouri, “if I thought I could be appointed to be the supervisor of the dance, or teach all the sweet young things the plastic arts.” Assuming a graceful pose as a ballerina on tiptoe with one arm curved overhead, Short exclaimed: “Men love the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ of Beethoven, the minuets of Mozart, the scherzo of Chopin, but they can’t enjoy them on empty stomachs!” Waltzing and whirling around the room in a performance that reinforced heteronormative assumptions regarding male dancers, he continued: “So now we teach toe-­dancing to restore prosperity!” The resolution was unsurprisingly defeated by a vote of 195–­35. Congressman Sirovich, who had devoted a good portion of the previous three years to hearings to create a fine arts bureau, was apparently so flustered by Short’s display that he voted both for and against the resolution.77

1938: The Turning Point In contrast to earlier condemnation of New Deal art, shifts in the political landscape in 1938 made accusations more frequent, more virulent, and more nationally centered. Prior to the 1938 congressional election, conservatives had been in the minority in Congress since 1933. According to the historian James T. Patterson, in early 1937 there were only 110 conservatives in the House (25.3 percent of the total membership) and 28 in the Senate (29.2 percent). Realignment, however, began to occur in 1937 in response to the president’s abortive attempt at court reform, the proliferation of strikes, and the recession, which strengthened the Right and weakened support for the New Deal.78 The deficit 187

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was growing, nearly 12 million people were unemployed, 1.7 million were on direct relief, and 3 million were on the WPA.79 At the same time, the economy was not improving, and the crisis of the Depression appeared to be worsening. In addition to continuing financial troubles, Roosevelt’s court-­packing plan alienated many western progressives and moderate Democrats who feared the president’s quest for power. Such fear also unified Republicans and encouraged conservatives across party lines to work together.80 While Roosevelt had won the presidential reelection by a landslide in 1936, congressional elections two years later reflected the growth of a conservative coalition opposed to New Deal liberalism. In the greatest midyear turnover since 1894, Republicans gained eighty-­one seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate. This new conservative coalition consisted of two factions: old-­guard obstructionists and moderate “new” conservatives, many of whom were southern Democrats.81 Although a number of these politicians resented the president’s efforts to purge the party of conservatives, few were willing to vote against him in an election year. After the congressional elections, however, discontented southern Democrats who did not expect Roosevelt to run again increasingly allied themselves with Republicans to restrict federal spending and to halt liberal legislation, including the relief projects.82 Democratic senator Morris Sheppard of Texas exemplified this new trend. In early November 1938, the Senate Campaign Expenditure Committee, which Sheppard chaired and southern Democrats dominated, charged that politicians had used relief jobs to gain votes. It reported that relief workers in several states, but especially in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Kentucky, had contributed to the political campaigns of New Dealers and been coerced into voting along party lines.83 Within this altered political landscape, arguments against government funding of the arts gained strength. Southern Democrats increasingly joined Republicans in their calls for a congressional investigation and for decentralizing and limiting federal spending for work relief. Like Republicans, southern Democrats had insisted on accountability since the beginning of the work-­ relief program.84 By 1938, however, they mimicked the arguments of boondoggling and political racketeering that Republicans had previously wielded against the New Deal cultural effort. North Carolina senator Josiah W. Bailey, for example, accused the government art programs of excessive spending and political campaigning when lobbying to decentralize funding for the relief projects. Bailey drew on the FTP’s Living Newspaper One-­Third of a Nation to show that work relief was both wasteful and politically charged. He argued that 188

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the government had squandered precious resources by paying the playwright Arthur Arent while he spent months reading books, magazines, and government sources preparing to write the script. Even worse, he insisted that the resulting play was sheer propaganda.85 Bailey used act 2, scene 4, of the play to prove his point. There, the loudspeaker and a member of the audience travel back in time to witness the Senate pass the Wagner-­Steagall Housing Bill on February 24, 1937. As originally proposed, the bill would have provided $1 billion to states to create safe, sanitary, and affordable housing for the working class. According to the loudspeaker, the debate over allocations for this bill revealed why Congress had failed to make affordable and decent housing available for more than a few lucky people. Arent quoted several senators from the Congressional Record to explain their stances until the vice president banged his gavel on the table and announced that the bill had passed with an appropriation of $26 million, roughly one-­ quarter of the amount initially requested.86 Bailey criticized One-­Third of a Nation for making the US Congress look like the Soviet Parliament, where bills passed by fiat, not vote. He further censured the work for publicizing senators’ positions in the guise of art. “The time may come,” he jested, “when we [politicians] shall rank in the memory of men with Oedipus Tyrannus or King Lear.” In the meantime, he argued, senators can ensure their own immortality by funding the arts. Finally, he insisted that the scene illustrated “what is going on in this Government by way of taking money from the taxpayers in the name of helpless people, and then employing it in setting people down to read newspapers and books, and then write a play like that.”87 The three Democratic senators portrayed negatively in the scene— ­C. O. Andrews of Florida, Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, and Millard E. Tydings of Maryland—­similarly criticized One-­Third of a Nation and objected to federal funds promoting the New Deal. An editorial in the Washington Post expressed their discontent as follows: “A publicly financed theater is not free to indulge in criticism of public servants, even less to malign them unjustly and possibly weaken the political support upon which they depend as officeholders.”88 If political realignment escalated arguments against public art, two congressional hearings—­those of Martin Dies’s Un-­American Activities Committee in 1938 and Clifton A. Woodrum’s Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration in 1939—­raised criticisms of the arts projects from the murmurs of a few disgruntled individuals to the shouts of congressmen, artists, writers, journalists, and lay publics. By 189

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not requiring evidence beyond accusations, both committees succeeded in doing what Hopkins had hoped to avoid through private, professional, and internal WPA investigations: they portrayed Federal One as a morass of mismanagement and leftist ideology.

Martin Dies’s Anti-­Communist Attack Like many of his southern Democratic peers, Martin Dies of Texas initially supported the New Deal out of party loyalty and economic necessity. He valued its focus on relief and rural electrification, but, during Roosevelt’s second term, he and his cohort opposed the New Deal’s increasingly liberal tone. They objected to its sympathy for sit-­down strikes and court packing as well as its attempt during the 1938 elections to purge the party of southern Democrats like themselves. The growing power of Dies and his peers led the House to approve, by a margin of more than 150 votes, his Resolution 282. On May 26, 1938, Congress endorsed the creation of a seven-­person committee under Dies’s leadership that would investigate so-­called un-­American activities in the United States, including communism, Nazism, and fascism.89 This was the genesis of what would soon come to be known as the House Un-­ American Activities Committee. Dies’s committee focused more on communism and the New Deal than Nazism or fascism. It scrutinized alliances among the Communist Party and liberal New Deal, nongovernment institutions—­such as the Workers’ Alliance and the CIO—­and the courts. Although the arts projects represented only one of the many government programs that Dies investigated, the cost and controversy surrounding Federal One made the topic particularly controversial. In Trojan Horse, a popular tract arguing that Communists had infiltrated the Workers’ Alliance, the government, and the courts, Dies called the New Deal’s work-­relief effort “the greatest financial boon which ever came to the Communists in the United States.”90 Leftist artists and foreigners had, he claimed, penetrated the WPA, turning the art projects into “front organizations,” and using them to advance subversive ideas and lifestyles, including sexual and racial freedom, equality, and opposition to personal property. The drama involved in the testimonies of artists and intellectuals further made the arts projects more vulnerable to Dies’s committee than other work-­relief programs. The methods Dies used to prove engagement in un-­American activities were highly questionable at best and have earned the scorn of many 190

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historians. He accused witnesses on the basis of unauthenticated testi­ monials and affiliations and associations among left-­leaning organizations and individuals.91 He charged people and institutions before they testified, prevented witnesses from presenting information that might counter his arguments, and led people to unsubstantiated conclusions by “dodging issues, avoiding facts, overemphasis, underemphasis, and sometimes by downright misrepresentation.”92 He defended such unverified accusations by asserting that he did not seek to legislate against activities he considered un-­American, which would have required proof beyond mere allegations. Instead, he claimed that he wanted to draw public attention to them. “Exposure in a democracy of subversive activities,” he insisted, “is the most effective weapon that we have in our possession. . . . [W]hen the light of day is brought upon [such activities] we can trust public sentiment in this country to do the rest.”93 Exposure rather than evidence was, indeed, Dies’s approach for galvanizing opposition to Federal One. At 6:30 on a Monday evening nearly one month before the first witness testified against Federal One, a particularly vitriolic member of Dies’s committee, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, denounced the FTP as “shameful and insidious” on his WQXR radio program. Without waiting until after the investigation to draw conclusions, Thomas insisted that Flanagan was a Communist. Furthermore, he claimed that the FTP produced “communistic plays” and employed theatrically inexperienced “radicals” who distributed Communist propaganda on government property while receiving WPA pay.94 The following day, the New York Times reported that Thomas called the project a “hotbed for communists” and “one more link in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine.”95 Despite such accusations, neither Thomas nor Dies wanted to hear from the director of the FTP, whom they had labeled a Communist. In fact, they did not want to hear from any of the New Deal art administrators and only eventually allowed two of them—­Hallie Flanagan and Henry Alsberg—­to testify several months after they asked to do so. Alsberg’s testimony contained multiple concessions to the committee. He described his personal disillusionment with communism when he was imprisoned in Russia as a relief worker, articulated his support for Dies’s committee, outlined his efforts to stamp out labor unrest in New York’s FWP, insisted that (unlike Flanagan’s FTP) the writers’ project was not “going to muckrake the Congress of the US,” and promised that the project would not publish controversial work, especially not writing that “present[ed] class warfare or some idea along social or economic lines.”96 191

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In contrast, Flanagan’s testimony was marked by constant interruptions and leading questions. Furthermore, she was dismissed before having an opportunity to make a closing comment, and the committee rejected the 357-­page brief that she submitted in defense of the FTP.97 Flanagan’s brief was both descriptive and defensive. It outlined the diverse audiences the FTP entertained and the types of plays it produced (including reviews of them by recognized critics). It also offered point-­ by-­point refutations of statements made by witnesses, including numerous sworn affidavits and letters challenging the testimony that Dies’s committee had heard.98 The Viennese-­born actress Sallie Saunders’s testimony at Dies’s hearings illustrates the committee’s use of half truths as well as racial and gendered beliefs to reinforce the assumption that market-­driven art was preferable to that which was government funded. On August 20, 1938, Saunders testified that Virgil Van Cleve, a black relief worker on the FTP, obtained her name and number from a petition she had signed objecting to a $1,000 pay cut in the FTP and subsequently called her to ask for a date. She reported the incident to her supervisor, Harold Hecht, who chastised her. “Sallie, I’m surprised at you,” Saunders recalled Hecht having said. “He has just as much right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as you have.” The secretary of the Workers’ Alliance, Trudy Goodrich, similarly reprimanded Saunders. Saunders testified: “[Good­ rich said she] felt very sorry that I felt that way about it because she personally encouraged Negro attention on all occasions and went out with them or with any Negro who asked her to.” Shortly after this incident, Saunders arranged to be transferred out of the New York Theatre Project, at which point she told the story to her personal friend Democratic senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi and then in testimony during the Dies hearings.99 Dies’s committee never investigated the validity of Saunders’s claim, but Flanagan did. Her brief included several conflicting letters and sworn affidavits that contested Saunders’s account. She included all of them in her appendix, without drawing any conclusions about their relative validity. In sworn testimony, Van Cleve himself maintained that no such incident occurred.100 In a second document, an FTP stage manager relayed a conversation that he had had with Saunders in which she described the “colored race” as “inferior” and “savage.” In the same conversation, she allegedly also called Lincoln a “fool” and declared: “If this country will persist in acknowledging the colored race as an equal I shall be willing to give up my American citizenship.”101 A third document from an FTP administrator whom Saunders had approached after 192

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the incident relayed his version of what had happened. He claimed to have told her that he could not control what happened outside the work environment and allowed her to leave the project when she asked to do so.102 Finally, in what may be the most interesting document, Benjamin Levine, an FTP staff member, claimed that Van Cleve had told him that “in the course of a conversation [with Saunders], during recess time [from rehearsal], he had unintentionally put his hand on her shoulder, with no intent to disrespect or insult.” Levine relayed the story to his supervisor and made the following announcement to the cast: “While I want a friendly spirit to prevail between the members of the Company, regardless of creed or color, I do not want any disrespect shown by the members toward one another, by immoral or offensive remarks or deeds.”103 Since Dies’s committee did not include Flanagan’s brief in its testimony or distribute it to Congress, few people knew how to counter Saunders’s account.104 Thus, when congressmen repeated Saunders’s testimony on the floor of both the House and the Senate, they ignored the story’s context. Rather than challenging the account, they used it to illustrate how New Deal art had promoted everything from communism to the clearly un-­American activity of miscegenation. Democratic senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina insisted that, by funding the FTP, the government encouraged interracial relationships, making it politically incorrect to refute the sexual advances of someone from another race. “Do you think,” Reynolds rhetorically asked, “the American taxpayers would approve of our financing Trudy [Goodrich] in her pursuit of happiness with whatever men of whatever color she might choose, under whatever condition and in whichever gutter might please her?”105 Attacks on federal patronage by Dies’s committee might have done substantially less damage to the arts projects had they not resonated with popular sentiment. But they did. Extensive and continuous exposure to the hearings on the radio and in daily newspapers accounted, in part, for public approval of the investigations. From August until September, when roughly twenty witnesses from the FTP and the FWP testified, the New York Times devoted more than five hundred inches of space to the topic, and larger metropolitan dailies dedicated even more space to the subject.106 The Dies’s hearings received considerable popular support. A 1938 Gallup poll determined that nearly three-­ quarters of the Americans who had heard of the committee supported its continuation.107 Despite opposition from the president and critics, especially those writing for The Nation and the New Republic, popular support for the hearings led congressmen to increase its funding from 193

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$25,000 in 1938 to $100,000 in 1939.108 Exposure alone, however, did not explain the committee’s popularity. In a study of four large psychology classes at George Washington University, the psychologist Steuart Henderson Britt and the sociologist Selden C. Menefee found that Dies’s attacks cemented animosity toward relatively unknown or already disliked people and groups, such as the American League for Peace and Democracy, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the labor leader Harry Bridges.109 As the Sallie Saunders’s incident further illustrated, Dies also attracted supporters by playing on popular anxieties regarding sex, race, and politics.

Clifton Woodrum and the Libertarian Critique Hearings conducted in the spring of 1939 by Virginia congressman Clifton A. Woodrum built on Dies’s political condemnation of New Deal art by highlighting its financial excess. Conservative congressmen and mainstream journalists had, as we have seen, accused the New Deal cultural projects of wasting precious resources from their inception. After the congressional realignment of 1938, however, demands escalated for a congressional, rather than an institutional or internal, investigation of the WPA’s financial mismanagement and political activity. Woodrum wanted the Appropriations Committee, which he chaired, to study the WPA and tie future support to a divorce between politics and relief. The southern Democrat was part of a block of congressmen, including Dies, who believed that the government could best solve the contemporary crisis and restore the economy by shifting federal spending from relief to economic development. Although Woodrum promised the president a deficiency appropriation when work-­relief funds ran out in February 1939, he insisted on a “thoroughgoing committee inquiry” that would, as he put it, “go into every phase of WPA, how the money was spent and spread and the truth of charges of politics in relief.” He also demanded a purge of those on work relief.110 Pressure for a congressional investigation mounted in March 1939. In an effort to increase relief appropriations and to avoid scrutiny of the WPA, Speaker of the House John H. Bankhead and Majority Leader Sam Rayburn replaced Woodrum with the eighty-­year-­old Colorado Democratic congressman and New Deal supporter Edward Thomas Taylor. But Taylor’s age prevented him from actively leading the committee. Upset by Woodrum’s ouster, Georgia Democratic congressman Edward

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Eugene Cox also called for the Appropriations Committee to investigate the WPA.111 Woodrum used the New Deal art projects to gather support for Cox’s resolution, to illustrate the extent of corruption in the work-­relief programs, and to argue that investigation and reform were essential. In a radio address over the Columbia Broadcast System, Woodrum called for an end to “emotion and dramatic appeals” for relief and, instead, for a reliance on the facts. He suggested that the success of the FTP’s Swing Mikado, as indicated by its transfer from Chicago to Broadway, showed that government spending unfairly disadvantaged private enterprise. He further argued that the WPA’s allocation of $250,000 to the building and staffing of an edifice for the New York World’s Fair illustrated the “silly and illogical purpose[s]” to which Congress was allocating precious taxpayers’ resources.112 On March 28, 1939, in a 352–­27 vote, the House of Representatives approved a “thorough investigation” of the WPA by the Appropriations Committee. Some Democrats, such as Rayburn, favored the inquiry because it would, they claimed, illustrate the New Deal’s successes. Others, particularly those from the South, saw the investigation as a way to control an administration that had frustrated them with its sympathy for sit-­down strikes, its court-­packing attempt, and its efforts to purge them from the party. Meanwhile, Republicans insisted that the investigation was neither partisan nor hostile to work relief but rather necessary to confront the WPA’s maladministration.113 The eighty-­two-­year-­ old chairman of the Rules Committee, Adolph Joachim Sabath, was the only opponent to speak on the floor. He insisted that the Appropriations Committee was already investigating the WPA. Creating and funding a subcommittee would only “promote unfair publicity” and “help to defeat the $150 million appropriation the President had requested.”114 Most congressmen, however, disagreed. Their votes turned an informal inquiry by a friend of the administration into an anti–­New Deal inquisition. Woodrum’s hearings regarding fraud, mismanagement, and extravagance in the WPA began on March 11, 1939. Whereas Dies’s committee had relied exclusively on voluntary witnesses, Woodrum’s committee hired investigators to research complaints by members of Congress, organizations, and individuals. In addition, it also heard from subpoenaed and volunteer witnesses, who ranged from WPA employees to governors, mayors, and a representative of the National Conference of Catholic Charities.115 This time, no arts administrators were allowed to testify.

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Not surprisingly, Flanagan’s extensive report describing the activities of the FTP and countering criticisms of it, which the Dies Committee refused to consider, never made it into the records of the Woodrum Committee either. Most of the voluntary witnesses the Woodrum Committee heard praised the operations and contributions of the New Deal relief effort. In contrast, the majority of the paid investigators and subpoenaed witnesses sharply rebuked the endeavor and especially condemned the arts projects. They argued that Federal One was improperly supervised, hired people who were not needy, created works of questionable public utility, purchased excessive equipment, and overspent on rent for theaters. The art projects’ abuses included five of seven of the accusations leveled generally against the WPA. The seeming concentration of problems in the arts projects suggested that the New Deal cultural effort exemplified the worst of work relief’s failures.116 Woodrum’s committee targeted the same groups that bore the fiercest attacks by Dies’s committee: the New York Writer’s Project and the New York Theatre Project. Paid investigators and former relief workers testified that they included few experienced actors, actresses, and writers; that they maintained people who neither needed relief nor qualified as professionals; and that they denied work relief to those who had been certified as professionals through union membership and years of experience writing books and news and magazine articles. “If you want my honest opinion,” offered a former managing editor of the New York Writers’ Project, “there were a lot of fish peddlers and dish washers who were sent to us by the Emergency Relief Bureau of the City of NY.” He testified that only about 80 percent of New York’s federal writers had had previous experience in the field.117 In Cincinnati and Cleveland, the numbers were even worse: paid investigators found that 95 percent of the seventy-­three actors on the FTP payroll had no prior experience in the legitimate (live) theater.118 Investigators furthermore cited instances of out-­and-­out fraud and stealing.119 One of the most damning attacks by Woodrum’s committee was on the musical revue Sing for Your Supper, which a critic mockingly renamed “bark for your food.”120 In the tradition of the song-­and-­dance routines that had become staples both on Broadway and in Hollywood films, Sing for Your Supper combined satirical sketches of current events with popular entertainment. The work poked fun at the FTP (those actors and actresses on stage who were actually singing for their supper), the politicians who contested and supported the program, and the contemporary scene more generally. Despite its jesting, Sing for Your Supper defended 196

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and celebrated working-­class culture. Its finale, “Ballad for Uncle Sam,” pleads for Americans of all racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds and from various occupations to join—­literally, to march—­together to make the American Dream based on liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness a reality. Its performance by the black actor, singer, and political activist Paul Robeson on November 5, 1939, shortly after Congress shut down the FTP, only heightened the work’s social commentary. In the cantata, the chorus continually asks the narrator, Robeson in this case, to identify himself: “What’s your name, Buddy? Where you goin’? Who are you?” He refuses to answer. Instead, he insists that he is the “everybody who’s nobody” and lists a range of occupations he performs, racial and ethnic backgrounds he comes from, and religious beliefs he espouses. It is not until the very last line that he straightforwardly identifies himself, associating the diversity he described with the nation itself. “Who are you?” the chorus asks in the penultimate line. “America!” Robeson resoundingly declares, “America!”121 After Sing for Your Supper closed, Norman Corwin, a radio writer, renamed the song “Ballad for Americans” and arranged to have Robeson’s rendition of it broadcast on CBS. The network was subsequently deluged by fan mail calling “Ballad for Americans,” as sung by Robeson, the “voice of America.” The song went on to become the “unofficial anthem of the radical left” as well as a popular hit, reaching the top of the music charts in 1940.122 Given the content of “Ballad for Americans,” it is not surprising that Sing for Your Supper met with sharp condemnation from Woodrum and his committee. What actually offended such critics, however, is somewhat less obvious. The commissioned investigator H. Ralph Burton—­ who testified that Sing for your Supper was the only FTP play he had seen—­criticized the work for its sexual innuendos, profanity, and interracial dancing.123 Although Sallie Saunders did not testify at Woodrum’s hearings, she and Van Cleve were in the cast of Sing for Your Supper when the alleged “incident” between them occurred. Woodrum, on the other hand, attacked the play for failing to enrich the nation in the Arnoldian sense of conveying the best that has been thought and said. “If there is a line or passage in it that contributes to cultural or educational benefit or uplift of America,” he asserted, “I will eat the whole manuscript.” One might wonder whether he put paper to mouth in 1940 when Republicans selected “Ballad for Americans” as the theme song for their national convention.124 Most of the Woodrum Committee’s criticisms of Sing for Your Supper, however, concentrated on maladministration. Opponents highlighted 197

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how long the FTP had rehearsed the play. Witnesses testified that the typical rehearsal period for musical reviews and comedies in the 1930s lasted five weeks, yet Sing for Your Supper did not open for nine months.125 In addition to the costs that accrued from renting a theater and paying salaries (including vacations) for cast members, musicians, and staff, witnesses testified that supervisors spent excessively on the production. The producer of Tobacco Road reported that the Adelphi’s rental fee of $2,333.33 per month was “preposterously high.”126 Witnesses claimed that the directors hired too much staff and wasted their time.127 The play’s electrician explained that scenes that would normally require three hours to prepare took between thirty-­four and forty hours. Meanwhile, the lighting producer, Abe Feder, used so much equipment that the stage became “actually hot.” Feder’s purchases for the play included seven more miles of lighting cables than the average musical employed, fifteen hundred amperes more than the theater could hold, as well as four high-­ intensity spotlights that cost $1,000 per lamp. According to the play’s electrician: “More than three [such lights] would have burned each panel.” “In all my years of experience,” he attested, “I have never seen anything like that before. I have been around theaters all my life and I know it was just waste, that is all.”128 On the other hand, as the composer Ned Lehac recalled: “Here was a full-­fledged musical production with some 150 people in the cast and management, 45 excellent musicians in the orchestra, scenery and lighting by two men who became the most sought after by theatrical producers, and the price of admission for this show was 85 cents in the orchestra and 55 cents in the balcony. No wonder the Delphi Theatre was filled each night.”129 Just as the mainstream press publicized the findings of the Dies Committee, it also popularized the Woodrum Committee’s findings concerning the arts projects’ waste, graft, and extravagance. Regardless of the politics, this type of story always sells papers. Published tales of fraud and mismanagement both within the art projects and across the government’s entire relief effort aided the Appropriations Subcommittee’s efforts to undermine the relief projects. “The huge sums spent on Federal Theatre projects,” the Washington Post’s editorial staff asserted, “provide an outstanding illustration of the almost criminal waste that has characterized certain aspects of the WPA’s operations. . . . [W]ith millions of idle able-­bodied workers in need of aid it ought to be evident that this Nation cannot afford to finance costly theatrical rehearsals at the taxpayers’ expense. . . . Nor can the Treasury afford to pay self-­styled writers, or even first rate writers, to produce books for which there is no popular demand, under the specious pretense that this is construc198

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tive unemployment relief.”130 The Chicago Daily Tribune similarly editorialized: “The WPA directors wanted persons who couldn’t act for plays which couldn’t be produced for rehearsals which never ended in theaters which otherwise would have been dark. Likewise . . . , the Writers’ project preferred communists who couldn’t write to writers who could.”131 Accusations (even specious ones) of waste, graft, and extravagance on the arts projects did not bode well for an institution committed to providing work relief for the unemployed. Artists and intellectuals on the Left and New Dealers sought to undermine the criticisms emerging in the nation’s papers. They highlighted the investigation’s shortcomings and defended the efficiency and legitimacy of New Deal art. “The Right to Work is not Subversive” declared an open letter from the Workers’ Alliance of Greater New York, while twelve hundred members of trade unions attending the week-­long “National Right to Work Congress” voted to set up a committee to investigate Woodrum’s committee.132 Meanwhile, Flanagan attacked the committee’s methodology, reporting that its investigators researched complaints only for two weeks before the hearings began. She also criticized the committee for prohibiting New Dealers, including herself, from testifying or responding to accusations made against them and the organizations they ran.133 Indeed, Congress canceled the FTP in the midst of Woodrum’s investigation without giving Flanagan an opportunity to respond to accusations against her and her program. A few congressmen contested Woodrum’s hearings. Sabath accused the committee of “unfairly discredit[ing], by insinuation, the entire WPA program through the use of a few examples which even in themselves are not more than mistaken judgment.”134 Vito Marcantonio, who had in 1938 returned to Congress as the nominee of both the American Labor Party and the Republican Party, hotly challenged the investigation’s exclusion of New Deal administrators from the roster of witnesses. “What good will a hearing do,” he asked indignantly, “after Congress has killed these projects and thrown these fine people into the streets?”135 In his dissent from the hearing’s majority, Congressman Clarence Cannon rebuked its procedures and findings. He accused his fellow congressmen of accepting testimony without challenging witnesses who criticized the WPA and cross-­examining only those who supported it. “Look through the readings for yourself,” he wrote, “and in all the 2,600 pages you cannot find one question that challenges a criticism of the WPA or one question that approves a comment of the WPA.”136 In the summer of 1939, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to abolish all the New Deal art projects and especially the FTP, 199

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congressmen, lay people, art administrators, and artists and intellectuals on the Left rallied to its defense. On July 10, approximately seventy-­ seven WPA workers, slightly more than 3 percent of the total 2.4 million government relief employees, did not report for work. Lay people wrote letters to their local newspapers.137 And members of the House and the Senate struggled unsuccessfully to pass amendments to restore the FTP and to return funds to the arts.138 The House Appropriations Committee compromised with supporters of work relief to reorganize rather than abolish the program. Instituted in the midst of both WPA investigations and a growing concern regarding the international crisis, the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act aborted the FTP and substantially altered the rest of Federal One. The Reorganization Act, as it was known, structurally and financially decentralized the arts projects, limited artists’ tenure on work relief to eighteen consecutive months, instituted loyalty oaths denying work-­relief positions to artists with leftist affiliations, and fired a number of controversial administrators.139 Despite legislation reducing federal funding of the arts by one-­ quarter, local support at least initially remained widespread. According to Florence Kerr, an assistant WPA administrator, just a little more than two months after the Relief Appropriations Act went into effect the WPA had received applications from across the country to continue arts programs with local funding. As she told the New York Times: “Any doubts which may have existed as to the importance and popularity of these projects is now dissipated. . . . [L]ocal bodies within each State already have come forward with sufficient support to continue these projects at approximately 90 per cent of their former levels. As a result, the shift from Federal to local sponsorship is being made in most instances without perceptible interruption to routine or operations.”140 But a clear interruption came from a shift in leadership. Harry Hopkins, who resigned from the WPA to become secretary of commerce at the end of 1938, was replaced by the army colonel Francis Harrington, whose military and engineering background temporarily quieted conservative criticism but raised the concerns of New Dealers.141 Hallie Flanagan lost her job with the closure of the FTP. She returned to Vassar, where, in addition to continuing to run the experimental theater she had founded there, she wrote Arena, a history of the FTP, and continued to advocate for a nationally funded federation of theaters.142 Other leading administrators, including Henry Alsberg, Ed Bruce, Sterling Brown, Nikolai Sokoloff, and Luther Evans, resigned shortly thereafter. Holger Cahill, one of the few arts administrators who stayed on with the arts projects, went on to direct all of Federal One from 1939 until its fund200

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ing disappeared in 1943. His ability to remain a key player in the New Deal arts projects probably related to his political discretion. He never testified before either the Dies or the Woodrum Committees and rarely commented publicly on controversial matters on the local level. Focusing primarily on the community art centers and the Index of American Design, he concentrated on socially acceptable vernacular forms of American art and culture rather than engaging in contentious issues. His silence in an increasingly hostile environment is striking, particularly in contrast to the outspokenness of some of his peers, especially Flanagan. While his reserve might have preserved his job as well as those of the art workers he oversaw and the programs they ran, it had profound consequences for artists on the Left, particularly in the context of FDR’s authorization of the Hatch Act shortly after the conclusion of the Wood­ rum hearings. Motivated by concern regarding politicians assigning relief work as patronage, mandating political contributions, and demanding votes for jobs, Democratic senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico had been lobbying to enact legislation to stop political activity by government employees since the Work Relief and Public Works Appropriation Act of 1938. Hatch succeeded in inhibiting the political activities of government employees through section 9(a) of the Hatch Act (1939), which prevented government employees—­ including relief workers—­ from engaging in “political management or in political campaigns.” According to the historian Jason Scott Smith, FDR did not veto the bill, despite recommendations by his advisers Thomas Corcoran and Ben Cohen that he claim the bill was insufficiently comprehensive. Instead, he embraced it as a tool to ensure good government, promising federal employees “that they still had the right to attend political meetings, make voluntary campaign contributions to political parties and candidates, and express their political opinions and preferences, so long as it was not part of a formal campaign.”143 Despite such reassurances, the Hatch Act—­in the aftermath of the Dies and Woodrum hearings as well as the institutional reorganization—­had a chilling effect on the New Deal cultural programs.

On the Local Level: The Growing Vigilance of Anti-­Red Civic Groups Capitalizing on the New Deal’s decentralization after the Reorganization Act, local officials, like New York’s Lieutenant Colonel Brehon B. Somervell, engaged in wide-­scale purges. They did just what the presi201

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dent promised would not be done: rid the arts projects of those associated with or supportive of subversive organizations and attempt to erase the at times provocative art they created. Local officials demanded that relief workers sign loyalty oaths and file affidavits confirming that they were neither Communists nor Nazis and that they did not support the overthrow of the government. WPA officials quickly dismissed those who refused to testify to their so-­called allegiance to the country or to renounce their connections to the Left. And local officials did not stop there. Instead, they double-­checked confessions against police files and other records to assure their honesty. Those who either refused to sign oaths or falsely did so lost their jobs.144 Local administrators used both artists’ work and their politics as grounds for dismissal. On July 3, 1940, Somervell fired the federal artist Thomas Corwin and his supervisor, Robert Godsoe. Although nationally based art administrators reviewed Corwin’s work positively, requesting its display in a showcase of government art, Somervell denounced it as ideological. The mural in question illustrated a measuring device in a way that made it resemble the Soviet emblem of the hammer and sickle. Corwin was also one of twenty people who refused to endorse affidavits renouncing connections with Communists and Nazis, although he insisted that he was actually anti-­Communist and had worked for the War Department from 1926 to 1936.145 His refusal to sign alone warranted his immediate dismissal from the FAP. Local administrators were not the only ones to censor artists and their work. Lay people also expressed their opposition. Although community leaders had always criticized controversial public art, dissenters in the early years of the New Deal rarely organized in formal protest. The Dies and Woodrum hearings, however, encouraged veterans’ groups, concerned citizens, and right-­leaning civic associations to identify and publicize radicalism and waste in New Deal art. The hearings convinced them that they would find allies in the administration. The Reorganization Act further empowered such groups by increasing the authority of local administrators such as Somervell, who could use loyalty oaths and other policies to deny public funding to people with controversial affiliations and beliefs. An incident in New York just three days after the Corwin scandal showed how anti-­Communist patriotic and civic groups took advantage of the new situation to insist not only on growing government scrutiny of public art but also on the political convictions of those creating it. Two federally employed artists, who received more than $6,000

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in salary for their work, had spent three years painting four murals to decorate the Floyd Bennett Municipal Airport. When they installed their work in July 1940, conservative groups immediately decried it as Communist propaganda and swung into action. The Women’s International Aeronautic Association, the Flatbush Chamber of Commerce and Floyd Bennett Post, the American Legion, and the navy fliers all began letter-­ writing campaigns to Dock Commissioner John McKenzie. Protesting groups resented the mural because it replaced a life-­size portrait they had donated of the airport’s namesake, the pilot who in 1926 flew the first plane over the North Pole. Critics also objected to the murals’ alleged leftist content. In a scene portraying the birth of aviation, the muralists supposedly created a likeness of Joseph Stalin, two figures resembling Loyalist fighters in Spain, a replica of a Soviet airplane, persons “strangely UnAmerican in expression and garb [who s]tand with upraised fists clenched [in] the Communist salute,” and, most offensive, particularly to the navy fliers, a US navy aircraft hangar decorated with a red star representing, it was claimed, the Soviet army.146 On July 8, Somervell ordered WPA workers to rip three of the four murals from the wall, bring them to a project workshop, and burn them in a “pot-­bellied stove.”147 In addition, he dismissed one of the painters, the fifty-­nine-­year-­old August Henkel, who would go on to file a suit for defamation of character against Somervell. Henkel “readily admitted that he had been Communist candidate for Queens for Congress and for the State Assembly, . . . [but] insisted that he had put no propaganda in the paintings.” Indeed, he explained each controversial image except for the red star, which he said “slipped by” when he was working with six assistants. He claimed that what his critics called a portrait of Stalin was actually a representation of Franz Reichelt, a pioneering parachute jumper who died jumping from the Eiffel Tower. He included the radical aviator Jimmy Collins because the former died testing a navy bomber and Joseph Rosmarin because he was working at Bennett Field at the time and was “generally respected.” His portrait of FDR was intended to convey him as “a champion of the forces of democracy against the aggressors.”148 But, because Henkel lost his work-­relief status on the basis of his refusal to sign the mandatory affidavit attesting to his political alliances, his defense of the mural was largely irrelevant.149 Since he violated a local policy, Somervell could fire him without consulting the national office, which presumably would have at least endeavored to protect his job. Loyalty oaths, like the one that lost Henkel his position, made it

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increasingly difficult for artists on the Left to find relief work and for government-­sponsored artists of any persuasion to produce even marginally political art. The Chicago Daily Tribune columnist Eleanor Jewett praised Somer­ vell’s destruction of the Floyd Bennett murals and called for further demolition of New Deal murals, which she called “trash.” She accused the art projects of creating mediocre works, wasting federal money, and, worst of all, sheltering “imported art saboteurs,” by which she meant modernists, leftists, and foreign-­born artists. “To have a new American art,” she insisted, “we must take art out of politics and out of government protection. . . . We need American paintings; American sculpture—­ not tenth-­rate foreign propaganda. We the people, should have our say. It is our schools, our buildings into which the government art is going. Why should not that art be American—­and constructive American?”150 Although many artists actively resisted such xenophobic attacks, they nevertheless found themselves countering increasingly mobilized government suppression. Some artists and intellectuals, like the art administrators, denied their commitment to the Left. Others criticized conservative attacks on Federal One. An affiliate of the CIO, the United American Artists, for example, called the destruction of the murals “part of a smearing campaign of falsehood and innuendo being developed for the purpose of wrecking the art project” and undermining the unions.151 Similarly, Henkel charged Somervell of raising a “ ‘red scare’ in order to attack the WPA art project and undermine public confidence in it.” He further equated the burning of murals with the Nazis’ burning of books and moved to sue Somervell for his dismissal.152 Somervell, however, met such attacks by mobilizing the Police Department and the FBI to investigate one thousand New York relief workers and authenticate their loyalty oaths. He gave the head of New York’s art project “instructions to guard against the production of anything in which the main idea is social content, rather than artistic value, and to eliminate anything that may savor of propaganda, and to see that the project devotes itself to art and not politics.”153 A little over a month after he began his investigations, Somervell had suspended 208 relief workers, including many of those who held the relatively few positions for artists and white-­collar workers.154 In the fall of 1940, Congress moved what had previously been a local effort to the national stage. The content of murals created by artists working for the New Deal such as Corwin and Henkel had always been subject to government scrutiny for traces of radicalism. But what changed that fall was a national effort not only to target government-­ 204

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sponsored art but also to attack the politics of those creating such work. Thus, Congress passed legislation similar to what had previously existed only in New York. The new law forced all WPA employees to sign affidavits attesting that they were neither Communists nor Nazis. From that point on, congressionally sanctioned investigation of artists’ personal politics became a regular occurrence.155 The entry of the United States into World War II further heightened attacks on leftist artists and intellectuals and skepticism among them about the benefits of government patronage. Opal Fleckenstein, an abstract artist and art center teacher, recalled losing confidence in the art project’s ability to foster, rather than to squelch, ingenuity after an incident with a government official. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Fleckenstein and a friend went out to sketch near the Monroe Street Bridge, which stretched across the Spokane River. An official confiscated her sketchbook and papers and threatened to arrest her after observing the two half circles she had sketched to illustrate the bridge. When she consulted her adviser at the art center, he scolded her for sketching classified material and said that she would have to “explain” herself to the FBI. “This did show,” Fleckenstein observed, “the disintegration of the Art Center, and, of course, I never was happy making a sketch after that.”156 By the early 1940s, artists and intellectuals were not nearly as sure as they had been during the mid-­1930s that publicly funded art could restore faith in the American Dream or fight inequality, injustice, and fascism. The mobilization of an alliance opposed to government funding of the arts, combined with the arts projects’ layoffs, censorship, and surveillance, weakened the commitment of artists and intellectuals like Fleckenstein both to federal patronage of the arts and to overtly political art. Disillusionment with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union following the Nazi-­Soviet Pact in 1939 also reduced the ability—­and desire—­of many artists and intellectuals on the Left to fight for the establishment of permanent federal patronage of the arts. Increasingly, artists and intellectuals embraced a position articulated by anti-­Stalinist critics such as Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, and Harold Rosenberg. They argued that artists needed to remain alienated from, rather than integrated into, society in order to counter generally accepted ideas.157 Such critics further delegitimized the type of representational art that predominated during the New Deal. Harold Rosenberg, for example, argued that a return to studio art and a movement toward abstract expressionism was essential to preserve the aesthetic and political freedoms of 205

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artists. Clement Greenberg, in contrast, argued that the same move was vital for social change. In his influential essay “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” he explained that abstract art was better able to analyze the causes of contemporary problems than representational works, which could only describe the “effect” of social change.158 Greenberg was markedly less interested in making the arts accessible to diverse audiences than the culture enthusiasts who ran the arts projects. Indeed, he dismissed the type of representational work that characterized New Deal art as “pre­ digested” and “accessible to the bored masses without sufficient leisure to learn how to read high art.”159 Instead, he argued that artists should use abstraction to remain politically relevant and critical within the context of an increasingly conservative era.

Conclusion During the 1930s and early 1940s, idealistic artists, intellectuals, and critics capitalized on the experimentation of the New Deal to forge a new relationship between art and the state. Tensions, however, emerged between the creative community and lay publics. Many artists, especially those on the Left, wanted permanent government support for their work without restrictions imposed on either their lives or their artwork. While some citizens eagerly embraced new opportunities to create and appreciate art, others were scandalized by the messages such work conveyed and the political commitments of those who created it. The combination of a few highly controversial works of art with street activism of artists on the Left and the political realignment of 1938 galvanized a coalition to undermine the New Deal art projects. As the Nazi-­ Soviet Pact in 1939 disbanded the Left and the nation turned toward war, the radical moment for re-­creating the relationship between art and the state passed.

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Conclusion: A New Deal for the Arts? A period of disillusionment with government funding of the arts followed the death of the New Deal art projects. Few critics focused on the monetary issues they had raised, such as graft, mismanagement, bribery, and waste. Instead, they concentrated on two complaints that continue to undermine government support for the arts today: radicalism and mediocrity. Rather than arguing that federal patronage democratized art, they insisted that it promoted controversial ideologies and produced merely kitsch. Thus, they contended, market forces rather than government subsidies should drive art. The storm that encircled one of the last and most expensive murals sponsored by the Section of Fine Arts, Anton Refregier’s The History of California, illustrates efforts—­even after the art projects’ cessation—­to cast New Deal iconography as Red. In 1940, the Moscow-­born artist Refregier, who had been naturalized a decade earlier, beat out eighty-­one other contestants to win a $26,000 section commission to decorate the lobby of the Rincon Annex Post Office in San Francisco. Over the next eight years, he painted twenty-­ nine panels to illustrate California’s history. The narrative he visually recounted began with Native Americans and illustrated their earlier contact with British and Spanish discoverers and settlers. He portrayed westward migration, California statehood, the Gold Rush, migration, and the building of the railroad. He also depicted a few controversial events and issues, such as slavery, the Mooney Case, 207

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Fig. C.1  “The Waterfront,” a detail from Anton Refregier’s mural History of San Francisco at

Rincon Annex Post Office, located near the Embarcadero at 101 Spear Street, San Francisco, California. Photograph by Carole M. Highsmith. LC-­DIG-­highsm-­20866, Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/highsm/item/2013630294 /resource. The detail reflects events surrounding the San Francisco dock strike of 1934 near Coit Tower. In this image, an operator demands bribes for jobs for longshoremen, labor organizer Harry Bridges speaks to dock workers, and an interracial group of longshoremen commemorates two of their peers killed by police while protesting on the picket line on Bloody Sunday, July 5, 1934. The headline of the newspaper on the bottom right ironically indicates that the “Strike [Was] Won,” although it was lost. A similar strike by longshoremen in 1948, however, was won.

vigilante activity, the anti-­Chinese Sand Lot riots, the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and contemporary labor demonstrations near Coit Tower. He concluded his visual tale by focusing on the UN conference in San Francisco. He portrayed the four freedoms, the fall of Germany, and the birth of the United Nations. In 1948, when Refregier had completed the work, San Francisco’s art commission praised him for his endeavor.1 Civic groups, veterans’ organizations, and patriotic and fraternal societies, however, were markedly less enthusiastic about Refregier’s murals. Beginning in 1947, the Chamber of Congress, the Native Sons of Americanism, and the American Legion, among many other conservative groups, condemned his work.2 Critics contended that the murals were “artistically offensive.” Rather than uplifting, inspiring, or even realistic portraits, they showed people who were distorted and depressing—­with 208

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“dwarf[ed]” heads, “hideous faces,” and “not a smile or contentment or encouragement.” Such work also was controversial because it incorporated California’s contentious past. One commentator insisted that the murals were “loaded with left-­wing tendencies designed to promote racial and class hatred.”3 Conservative groups attacked one panel after the other until the mural was a virtual tapestry of “thick censoring muslin” that was lifted only after Refregier revised the various panels, acceding to requests from the Treasury’s art administrators in Washington, DC.4 In the summer of 1949, opponents of Rincon’s murals complained not only to journalists but also to their political representatives. When a California veteran carped about a New Deal mural to Richard M. Nixon, the then member of the House responded sympathetically. Nixon wrote that he agreed that the government had allowed “some very objectionable art of a subversive nature” to decorate the walls of federal buildings. He was, however, skeptical that anything could be done within the current political environment. “As [sic] such time as we may have a change in the administration and in the majority in Congress,” he wrote, “I believe a Committee of Congress should make a thorough investigation of this type of art in Government buildings with a view to obtaining removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.”5 By 1953, the type of administrative change that Nixon alluded to in his letter had occurred. With Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, Nixon as vice president, and a Republican Congress in place, the administration was markedly more receptive both to the demands of local conservative groups and to their efforts to erase remnants of the New Deal. Capitalizing on the political moment, Michigan’s Republican congressman George Dondero appointed a subcommittee of the Public Works Committee he chaired to consider the removal of Refregier’s work. Meanwhile, Nixon’s fellow California congressman Hubert Scudder introduced House Joint Resolution 211 ordering the administrator of general services to remove the work. During Dondero’s hearings, Congressman Donald L. Jackson submitted Refregier’s records from the House Un-­American Activities Committee, the permanent body that emerged in 1941 as a successor to Dies’s committee when the congressman lost a bid for the Senate. Jackson reported that the artist had been connected to “groups and periodicals cited by the Attorney General as being Communist or Communist fronts” from 1933 until 1950.6 After listening to heated testimony from both sides, including substantial support for the murals by art preservationists and church and labor groups, the subcommittee concluded that the commissioner of public buildings should 209

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determine the matter. He refused to remove the works, and the City of San Francisco declared them a landmark in 1979.7 Refregier’s mural survived the ordeal; however, the debate surrounding its destruction illustrated the ongoing vulnerability of New Deal art. Rather than seeking to expose citizens to the practice and appreciation of art, a critical mass of politicians, local officials, and lay people came to see New Deal art as subversive within the cultural milieu of the Cold War. They were more concerned with the need to protect citizens from Communist propaganda than with a desire to expose them to contemporary art. Of course, diehards persisted. Immediately after Congress cut the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in July 1939, Flanagan submitted a bill for a government department of art “to be financed by the yearly proceeds from existing Federal tax levied on amusements,” such as movies and theater.8 Despite budget cuts and growing political attacks on the arts projects, Flanagan was part of a dwindling optimistic cohort of art enthusiasts who believed that government funding of the arts was now inevitable. According to the New York–­based author Grace Overmyer, the New Deal art projects had “so altered the course of art activity in the U.S. that there can be no complete turning around.”9 The muralist George Biddle, who had first written to FDR about the potential of a murals project, agreed. In 1942, he lobbied unsuccessfully for the creation of a bureau of fine arts meant to include aspects of both the Treasury’s section and Federal One.10 The following year, he helped establish an army war unit, in which he also served, that commissioned artists, including several former Treasury Department muralists, to document the war without censoring either their subject matter or their aesthetic style. The $125,000 art program, however, was short-­lived; Congress cut it a few months after its implementation.11 Despite their campaigns, advocates of public funding of the arts found relatively little broad-­based support in the aftermath of the New Deal. By 1951, when Biddle was one year into a four-­year appointment to Truman’s Commission of Fine Arts (CFA)—­his former nemesis—­even he had grown jaded. In a report the president requested exploring the possibility of creating a national arts bureau to oversee and expand the government’s ongoing cultural efforts, he offered a mixed assessment of the New Deal art projects. While praising them for obtaining many “fine murals by outstanding artists,” discovering “young talent,” covering substantial geographic territory, and limiting expenses, he also criticized the programs for being “oppressed . . . with the American compul-

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sive drive to correct, improve, whittle down, expunge and censor.” As a result, he concluded: “The New Deal never got the very best out of its greatest artists.” He then attested that the CFA “unanimously agreed” that artists should look to the private sector rather than government for support, which, it warned, would promote “centralized, bureaucratic control” that “would be stifling.”12 Of course, during times of plenty like the postwar period, culture is better able to compete fairly with other industries. However, economic hardship can, as we have seen, deplete the ability of individuals and corporations to make such investments. Cognizant of the difficulties of treating the arts like any other market-­ driven industry even as he feared bureaucratization, Biddle continued to advocate for some publicly funded art. He wanted government to play a role in the arts through the creation of an office for cultural exchange in the National Gallery of Art, an expanded role for the national collection of fine arts, an arts education and music program, and better government oversight of the State Department’s cultural exchanges and of art in public buildings. But Holger Cahill was highly skeptical. He understood how many people disagreed with Biddle’s support for public patronage. Other critics disapproved of an arts bureau based on relief and feared the negative political consequences of bureaucratizing the arts.13 Attacks against New Deal art and government funding of the arts more generally—­even by former advocates—­legitimated the art world’s disregard for 1930s art, which was painted as a brief interlude between modernism and abstract expressionism. Art historians such as John Baur and Sam Hunter suggested that the New Deal hindered creative expression, forcing artists to integrate into society rather than defending their right to stand outside it. New Deal art, in other words, reinforced a middlebrow aesthetic rather than challenging it.14 Such value judgments are clearly subjective given the recent radical revival of New Deal art as a commodity, as seen in high valuations of government-­funded prints, lithographs, and easel paintings of the period (although they are actually government property and should not be sold). Between criticisms of its politics and creativity, it is not surprising to learn that much New Deal art either disappeared or fell victim to neglect and disrepair. According to a Time magazine report, a truck operating on official orders in the spring of 1944 picked up “bales and bales” of New Deal canvases from a US government warehouse in Flushing, New York, drove them to Manhattan, sold some for $3.00–­$5.00 each, and then dumped the rest so that the warehouses could be used for other war-­related purposes.15 In another account, the paintings were sold for

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scraps: $0.04 per pound. A plumbing contractor who purchased them for insulation found the smell from the oil paint so disagreeable that he sold them to a bric-­a-­brac shop where artists including Jackson Pollock reclaimed their work.16 According to a third urban legend regarding the fate of New Deal art, Colonel Brehon B. Somervell—­who had aggressively pursued art workers on the Left in the late 1930s and early 1940s—­“dumped hundreds of the art works in an incinerator” after Federal One closed and before he went on to build the Pentagon and supply American troops during World War II.17 Even those records that made it to the Library of Congress would have deteriorated as a result of lack of interest and the wear of time were it not for the intervention of a new generation of scholars and cultural enthusiasts. Most remnants of Federal One deposited in the Library of Congress were stored unprocessed in the Silicosis Center, a small, windowless room at the end of a labyrinth affectionately known as the Buzzard’s Nest. In 1980, while researching in the Buzzard’s Nest, Ann Banks discovered oral histories with women and men across the country from a range of occupational and ethnic backgrounds that federal writers recorded for a number of mostly never published anthologies: more than 150,000 pages of crumbling typescript.18 John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown had discovered the records of the FTP, including play scripts and set and costume designs, in a similar state of disrepair just a few years earlier.19 The remnants of the arts projects deposited in state archives and libraries suffered a similar fate. Like Banks and her researcher, who scoured local institutions for additional oral histories, George Rawick and his team found what amounted to twenty-­one several-­hundred-­page volumes of manuscripts of oral histories with former slaves that were never sent to Washington, DC, despite multiple pleas from federal writers in the capital.20 The recovery efforts of Rawick, Banks, O’Connor, Brown, and countless other researchers and activists facilitated a restoration of many of the New Deal cultural products. Such efforts have become magnified in the age of the Internet. The Library of Congress’s American Memory makes many of the documents that once languished in the Buzzard’s Nest instantly available online.21 Other nonprofits with an Internet presence map the physical infrastructure of the New Deal as well as much of the artwork associated with it and work to restore both.22 Beyond preserving remnants of the past, the arts projects also provide a potential blueprint for future government funding of the arts. They il-

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lustrate a range of aesthetic approaches and offer hints regarding which might find the broadest backing among artists and lay people. At the same time, they warn of the potential controversies publicly funded art might solicit. In many respects, the four approaches toward art that New Dealers articulated—­art as grandeur, art as enrichment, art as a weapon, and art as experience—­still describe the landscape of public art today. So too does the view of art as subversion held by many New Deal opponents. Such echoes illustrate the ongoing relevance of the golden age of public funding of the arts for contemporary struggles. Since 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has revived one of the primary justifications for government funding of the arts driving the New Deal’s cultural endeavor: the notion that art works. On the seventy-­fifth anniversary of the first federal government art program, the Public Works of Art Project, the historian and former director of the National Museum of American History Roger Kennedy published When Art Worked. He argued that New Deal art worked by critically shaping local communities, economies, and American culture as a whole. From the onset of his appointment in 2009 as NEA chair, Rocco Landesman adopted a slightly revised form of Kennedy’s phrase—­“art works”—­as his motto.23 He used this expression to draw attention to the works of art artists create, the cultural work that art performs, and art’s economic consequences. With a clear nod to New Deal rhetoric, he explained that “art jobs are real jobs” and that “art jobs are just as good as construction” ones.24 Landesman’s assertions drew on the language championed by artists and intellectuals during the 1930s, especially those on the Left: artists are workers who, like other people, need jobs to subsist. Art enthusiasts previously revived this argument in the mid-­1970s when, under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, state and city administrators dedicated a fraction of federal funds from the Department of Labor to provide work experiences for unemployed artists.25 Landesman, his successor, Joan Shigekawa, the NEA, and the NEA’s advocacy group, Americans for the Arts, have strategically focused more on the economic impact of government funding of the arts (what artists can give to society) than on the financial needs of struggling artists (what society can give to artists). They argue that American artists, who number roughly two million and constitute 1.4 percent of the nation’s workforce, serve as engines of growth.26 By driving attendance at cultural affairs, they stimulate tourism, transportation, shopping, and restaurant patronage. According to a 2012 NEA report, despite the current recession, the art industry generated $135 billion in economic activity,

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created $22 billion in revenue, and supported more than four million full-­time jobs.27 Such arguments justify government investment in the arts on financial as opposed to cultural or spiritual grounds. The notion that art works clearly differs from that adopted by the NEA’s previous chair, President George W. Bush’s appointee Dana Gioia. Gioia garnered substantial support for his agency from conservative congressmen and corporations by making mainstream noncontroversial art and integrating it into public culture. He promoted established works, such as William Shakespeare’s plays and the writings of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, rather than advancing emerging and, at times, controversial art.28 He also rewarded diverse publics, shrewdly directing grants to every congressional district and even sending twenty-­ four opera companies to thirty-­nine military bases from 2002 to 2005.29 In many respects, Gioia’s motto—­“bring the best of American culture, the best of arts and arts education to all Americans”30—­and his emphasis on art that unites rather than divides Americans resembled the Arnoldian approach adopted by both the CFA and the Treasury’s section. But the Treasury’s art administrators explicitly sought to provide work for living American artists and to expand the pool of artists selected for government commissions beyond those who attended certain select schools and were members of elite professional organizations. In contrast, Gioia largely advanced the works of dead or already well-­ established artists and writers. For instance, most of the authors promoted by his Big Read, which offers grants to cities’ cultural institutions to promote communities reading a single book, were dead.31 Gioia’s conservative approach emerged out of his efforts to get the nation, including politicians, to reconsider their attitudes toward government funding of the arts particularly in the aftermath of the NEA’s widespread embrace of the controversial art as a weapon approach during the late 1980s. At that time, the NEA funded avant-­garde artists, many of whom used their work to promote multiculturalism, raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic and homelessness, and counter misogyny and homophobia. Unsurprisingly, the messages conveyed through such work angered and upset many viewers, who assumed that publicly funded art would represent mainstream ideas or, at the very least, not subvert the traditions and values that they believed lay at the core of the nation’s identity. Such critics rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a few highly controversial works of public art, including Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography, drew attention to the type of art that taxpayers’ dollars were funding. Ironically,

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Mapplethorpe’s work was displayed in a gallery called the Washington Project for the Arts, otherwise known by its acronym: WPA.32 The conflict between art as a weapon and art as subversion came to a head in 1994 when Republicans took control of the House and Congress moved to end federal patronage of the arts. Although the effort to stop all government funding of the arts ultimately failed, Congress dramatically reduced the NEA’s budget in 1996 (from $162.5 to $99.5 million), voted to end all funding in two years, and insisted that the organization support institutions rather than individuals.33 The similarities between Congress’s attack on New Deal art and its assault on the NEA show the dangers that overtly political art poses to government support for the arts. They also illustrate the tendency for conservative critics to use attacks on government funding of the arts to undermine wider liberal agendas. More recent criticisms of public funding of the arts tend to portray art less as subversive than as profligate. Since the Great Recession, Republicans have targeted funding of the arts as an easy and obvious expense to cut as they endeavor to balance the budget. Disregarding its piddling size relative to the amount by which they wish to reduce the budget, and further ignoring the “art works” campaign, many Republicans maintain that public funding of the arts represents an important symbol of waste. In responding to the receipt by the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) of $50 million as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill, Republican representative Jack Kinston of Georgia explained: “If it created jobs, you’d have 435 members of Congress saying, ‘Let’s put in more money to the N.E.A.’ ” He continued, however: “The only shovel-­ready aspect of it is that they need a shovel to clean up some of the bull they believe in over there.”34 Campaigning by Republicans resulted in a 13 percent reduction in the NEA’s budget (from $168 million in 2010 to $146 million in 2012).35 The Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney endorsed an even more extreme position when, in October 2012, he suggested increasing military spending while ending government subsidies for PBS, the NEH, and the NEA. Despite President Obama’s electoral success, the Republican-­Democratic divide over government funding of the arts remains. The sequester in the spring of 2013 reduced the budgets of the NEA and the NEH by 5 percent, or $7 million each. When Obama attempted to counter this by proposing an art budget for fiscal year 2014 increasing art spending by 10 percent to $155 million, the House Appropriations Committee proposed reducing it 49 percent to $75 million, a level not seen since 1974.36 Such efforts, however, were unsuccessful. And the NEA was ultimately allocated $146 million

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for the year, restoring the automatic sequester cuts put into effect the previous year. Community-­based art and art education has fared no better than overtly political art in the context of such attacks on public funding of the arts. Frequent high-­stakes state-­mandated testing as a result of the Leave No Child Behind Act has further diminished available funds and time for arts education. According to a March 2006 report by the Center on Education Policy, 22 percent of school districts reported reducing art and music programs in elementary school to emphasize English and math.37 Arts funding for the disabled and for teacher training has been nearly halved since 2011 (falling from $40 to $26 million).38 Despite such cuts, broad-­based community art projects remain one of the most promising areas for government funding. The NEA’s Our Town, begun under Landesman, exemplifies a government-­ financed, community-­based program. It helps communities plan and develop local art districts, encouraging artists to invest in particular places and those places to invest in their artists.39 Modest government investments in not-­ for-­ profit, community-­ based arts programs through the Federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve Act represent an even more promising—­albeit underfinanced—­possibility for future public funding of the arts. Such spending expands the reach of preexisting not-­ for-­ profit art institutions that are committed to serving diverse communities, such as the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, Newark’s City without Walls, the Sitar Arts Center in Washington, DC, and the Music National Service.40 The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, for example, commissions artists—­ including street and graffiti artists as well as muralists—­to collaborate with a wide range of community members, such as local businesses, religious institutions, schoolchildren, the homeless, those with mental illnesses and drug addictions, and prisoners, to create public murals that respond to the needs and desires of particular neighborhoods.41 Whether public funding of the arts subsidizes overtly political art that functions as a weapon or community-­based programs, it remains highly contentious. Although more than seventy-­five years have passed between the founding of the various New Deal art programs and now, people continue to disagree about what constitutes public art and to whom it should cater. Questions raised during the 1930s remain today: How much autonomy should artists have in creating public art? What are artists’ responsibilities to local communities, their funders, art administrators, themselves, and society as a whole? Should public art promote political engagement and social responsibility or grandeur 216

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and enrichment? Artists still want funding that will enable them to express themselves freely and often wish to use their work to express ideas that deviate from and/or criticize popular perceptions and norms. Taxpayers, like all patrons, often resist funding work that challenges their preconceived notions. And Republicans today largely view government funding of the arts as a waste of money. Within the context of such competing obligations and agendas—­not to mention our current economic crisis—­the institution of a new Works Progress Administration–­style arts program is highly improbable. Nevertheless, cultural enthusiasts would be wise to draw on New Deal memories and lessons as they advocate for a New New Deal. In doing so, they should be mindful of the exclusions inherent in art as grandeur, which tends to promote the work of a limited pool of artists—­often those who need public support the least. They should think carefully about the lack of consensus surrounding what type of art might enrich the public and the extent to which this includes controversial art. Perhaps most significantly, art activists should be wary of the political dangers inherent in using art as a weapon, recognizing that conservatives will use such work—­and more broadly the notion that art is subversive—­to criticize the broader political agenda of the administration facilitating its creation. And they should encourage investment in community-­based art that provides work opportunities for artists and creative experiences for diverse citizens, culturally incorporating those who are young and vulnerable while remaining sensitive to the tastes of local audiences. To maintain, much less increase, government funding of the arts, more needs to be done than highlighting art’s ability to create jobs and stimulate local and regional economies. Government funding remains minimal today because culture is expected to compete with other industries. This works during affluent periods, when corporations are willing to support the arts, but it is much more challenging during times of need. Thus, a market framework alone is insufficient. Instead, we need to engage in a broader conversation about why the arts and humanities matter. Art activists should investigate and publicize their findings about how and why art works on a social and cultural level—­as well as an economic one. For example, how do creative experiences enhance learning, encourage student retention, deter youth violence, reduce crime, reintegrate veterans and former prisoners into civil society, and retrain workers to function better in a global economy? In the summer of 1939, the postmaster of Pleasant Hill, Missouri, thanked the Treasury Department for installing a mural in his town’s post office. “In behalf of the many smaller cities, wholly without objects 217

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of art, as ours was,” he wrote, “may I beseech you and the Treasury to give them some art, more of it, whenever you find it possible to do so. How can a finished citizen be made in an artless town?”42 Pleasant Hill’s request illustrated two key notions regarding the relationship between art and the state that briefly held precedence during the 1930s: first, that the federal government should fund and distribute art, and, sec­ond, that artwork could make Americans better citizens. Although both these Depression-­era assumptions were short-­lived, the New Deal art projects remind us that art can highlight civic rights and responsibilities. Publicly funded art will always stir controversy—­upsetting artists and lay publics alike. Nevertheless, it provides opportunities not only to stimulate the economy and create jobs but also to make us more thoughtful, satisfied, and engaged citizens.

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Acknowledgments I am enormously grateful to the many people who have contributed to this project. Alan Brinkley generously mentored me and gently guided this project from its earliest conception. His insightful comments and probing questions helped me articulate my arguments more clearly and profoundly strengthened this work. Also in the project’s initial stages, Alice Kessler-­ Harris was a sympathetic listener, a critical reader, and a practical strategist. Casey Blake asked important questions regarding my central focus. Eric Foner offered concrete and detailed feedback on my writing and astute comments regarding publishers. Elizabeth Hutchinson reminded me that I needed to distinguish my arguments more clearly from others, and Betsy Blackmar provided smart insights during the earliest and most uncertain days of this project. For their provocative questions and thoughtful feedback on this manuscript, I want to thank Jackson Lears, Linda Gordon, Dan Horowitz, and Sarah Igo. I am fortunate to have generous friends whose comments and support over the years have helped this project—­ and me—­in innumerable ways. David Greenberg and Warren Bass challenged me to tighten my prose and clarify my arguments throughout. Rebecca Kobrin offered moral support, practical advice, and new theoretical approaches. Ariela Dubler, Doug Goldstein, and Ilyon Woo read a chapter that no longer exists, in part, because of their constructive criticisms. For their moral support, each in her own way, I want to thank Leona Goldshaw, Deborah Stein, Ruth Watson, Rachel Kadish, Sigal Barsade, and Venice Fuller. 219

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Over the past several years, I have found a warm and supportive environment at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. I am grateful for the friendship and support of my colleagues at Stockton’s Historical and American Studies Programs, especially Michelle McDonald. My collaboration on a Living Newspaper class with Stockton’s theater professor, Pamela Hendrick, and a photographic exhibit with Stockton’s professor of photography, Wendel White, gave creative and new energy and direction to this project. I have also been privileged to work with an extraordinary crew of talented and dedicated research assistants at Stockton. Special thanks are due to Nicholas Leonetti, Jesse Kraft, Cristen Pizzimenti, Nicole Pietrowicz, Jackson Hoover, and Richard Bierig. A number of people provided me with personal and institutional support in the various places where I lived while working on this project prior to arriving at Stockton. At the University of Pennsylvania, Kathy Peiss invited me to be a visiting student, and Nathaniel Persily offered me library privileges as his research assistant. At Harvard University, Lizabeth Cohen welcomed me into her energetic and engaging dissertation workshop. Mary Ballou’s Women and Gender Workshop at Radcliffe College provided a warm and supportive environment to strategize about the writing process. And Linda Kerber encouraged me to ask questions that I still need to answer. I want to thank the reference librarians at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stockton College, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, and George Mason University Library’s Special Collection and Archive for answering my various questions. Jocelyn Wilk performed valuable legwork for me in the Columbia University Archives. Joe Schwartz and Eugene Morris helped me find needles in the haystacks of sources available in the National Archives in Washington, DC. I owe a special thanks to Columbia University’s Bob Scott for building my invaluable database. I am grateful to the institutions and individuals that supported me throughout this endeavor. The American Association of University Women, the Dolores Liebmann Fund, Research and Professional Development grants from Stockton College, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend provided me with time to research, think, and write. At the University of Chicago Press, first Robert Devens and then Timothy Mennel provided me with thoughtful comments and suggestions as well as encouragement and patience, for which I am most grateful. My anonymous readers further sharpened this manuscript with

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their challenging questions and insightful observations. Joseph Brown helped clean up the prose. Finally, my extended family has offered me endless moral support throughout this process, and I thank them all. Special thanks are due to Leora Eisenstadt, Mike Uram, Lydia Musher, Morris Weiss, and the late Hadassah Musher and Selma Goldman, who heard much about this project but did not survive to see it in print. In addition to their regular encouragement, my nuclear family helped this project in more tangible ways. Sarah and Matt Brenner graciously housed and fed me while I worked in the archives in Washington, DC. Abe and Dara Musher-­ Eizenman showed me how public art works in France and listened to the project as it evolved. Katie and Zolman Eisenstadt helped on the domestic front so that I could travel to the archives. Katie’s encouragement and practical strategies for finishing were especially crucial. My parents, Ruth and David Musher, taught me by example how to integrate art into daily life. This work is dedicated to my mom. I am indebted to her for listening to me talk or read my work in the middle of the day, for offering her own perspective on the arts in America, and, most of all, for understanding how much time and energy is involved in a large-­scale creative endeavor. My daughters, Elena, Ariella, and Rachel Musher Eisenstadt, have regularly distracted me from this project, enriching my life with their creative energies and imaginative spirits. Finally, I owe my greatest debt to my husband, Daniel Eisenstadt, who, despite his own hectic schedule, has listened, challenged, and offered alternative interpretations. More pragmatically, he has bought printer cartridges, shopped for groceries, given me the time and space I needed to complete this project, and pushed me to finish it.

221

Notes The following abbreviations have been used throughout the notes: AAA = Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC CDT = Chicago Daily Tribune FDR Library = Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY LOC = Library of Congress, Washington, DC NAB I = National Archives Building I, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC NAB II = National Archives Building II, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD NYT = New York Times ProQuest = ProQuest Historical Newspapers (http://www .proquest.com) Records of the CFA = Records of the Commission of Fine Arts RG = Record Group WP = Washington Post I ntrod u ction

1.

2.

3.

Eleanor Roosevelt, “Responsibilities for the Arts,” 1933, 2, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, box 3028, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Hyde Park, NY. Congress appropriated the funds through Public Resolution no. 11, 74th Cong., Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935. See Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theater (1940; reprint, New York: Arno, 1980), 44. Harry Hopkins, Inventory: An Appraisal of Results of the WPA, 73–­85, Monthly Bulletins [1936–­37], subser. II, Administrative

223

N o t e s t o pa g e s 2 – 3

4.

5.

6.

7.

224

Files, ser. 2, FTP, box 9, Hallie Flanagan Papers, the Billy Rose Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City; Florence Loeb Kellogg, “Art Becomes Public Works,” Survey Graphic 23, no. 6 ( June 1934): 279, http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/34279.htm. Note that Hopkins’s figures reflect only government funding of Federal One and do not include federal patronage through the Treasury Department or the Historical Sec­ tion of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information. It is difficult to calculate the total number of participants in New Deal arts projects because of the wide array of gov­ ernment art organizations at the time and the continual movement of artists and intellectuals off and on individual projects and from one to the other. At a maximum, the government hired an additional eight hundred art workers during this period. It is also difficult to calculate how much money was spent on this endeavor. The $27 million does not include local contributions toward projects or the cost of hiring artists. Since WPA and Treasury Department funds almost exclusively paid laborers for their work, local communities contributed roughly $1.00 for every $4.00 the WPA spent. Hopkins, Inventory, 8. Some of the key organizations contributing to this effort include the Roose­ velt Institute (New York), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum (Hyde Park, NY), the Living New Deal Project (Berkeley, CA), the National New Deal Preservation Association (Santa Fe, NM), the Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University (Chicago), and the Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Museum (Worcester, MA). New Deal exhibits reflecting this effort include “1934: A New Deal for Artists” (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009), along with the accompanying book by Roger G. Kennedy, When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art, and Democracy (New York: Rizzoli, 2009); “Posters for the People” (traveling exhibit spon­ sored by Design for Social Impact, Philadelphia, 2009), along with the accompanying book by Ennis Carter, Posters for the People: Art of the WPA (Philadelphia: Quirk, 2008); and “Action, and Action Now: FDR’s First 100 Days” (traveling exhibit sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roose­ velt Institute, 2008). M. Christine Dwyer, Reinvesting in Arts Education and Arts (Washington, DC: President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, 2011); Arts and Economic Prosperity IV: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audiences (Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts, 2012), http://www.artsusa.org/pdf/information_services/research/services /economic_impact/aepiv/AEP4_NationalSummaryReport.pdf. Joseph Solman, “The Easel Division of the WPA/FAP,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, ed. Francis V. O’Connor (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 130. Saul Bellow to Jerre Gerlando Mangione, October 1, 1969, in Jerre Gerlando

N o t e s t o pa g e s 3 – 7

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–­1943 (New York: Avon, 1972), 95. Robert Cronbach, “The New Deal Sculpture Projects,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 140. Quoted in Hallie Flanagan, “Florida Wheel,” Federal Theatre Magazine, March 1938, 1, in Speeches and Publications, vol. 2, 1937, ser. IV, Articles and Speeches, subser. 2, FTP, box 24, Flanagan Papers. Milton Meltzer, Violins and Shovels: The WPA Arts Projects (New York: Dela­ corte, 1976), 76–­78; Jacob Kainen, “The Graphic Art Division of the WPA FAP,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 155–­76. Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne, “The American Abstract Artists and the WPA Federal Art Project,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 223–­41. Ann Banks, First-­Person America (New York: Knopf, 1980), 218. Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–­1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 157, 166; Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 77–­85; Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Phila­ delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 50–­53. Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), chap. 5. Jane de Hart Mathews, “Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy,” Journal of American History 62 (September 1975): 330. Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 157. See O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects; Francis V. O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973); Vir­ ginia M. Mecklenburg, The Public as Patron: A History of the Treasury Department Mural Program (College Park: University of Maryland, Department of Art, 1979); Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Belisario R. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (Lon­ don: Associated University Presses, 1983); Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Banks, First-­Person America; Meltzer, Violins and Shovels; Jane de Hart Mathews, The Federal Theater, 1935–­39: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1967); John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown, Free, Adult, and Uncensored: The Living History of the FTP (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1978); Mangione, The Dream and the Deal; Monty Noam

225

N o t e s t o pa g e s 7 – 1 1

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Penkower, The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); and George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972–­79). Kathryn Flyyn and Richard Polese, The New Deal: A 75th Anniversary Celebration (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2008); Kennedy, When Art Worked; David Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2009); Carter, Posters for the People; Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker, 2008); Virginia Tuttle Clayton, Elizabeth Stillinger, and Erika Lee Doss, eds., Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002); Jennifer McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933–­1943 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009); Heather Becker, Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive-­and WPA-­Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904–­1943 (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2002). Karal Ann Marling, Wall-­to-­Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 20; Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 11; Mor­ ris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009), xv. James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Phila­ delphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 47–­67. Other works expressing a similar perspective include Harris, Federal Art and National Culture; Chris­ tine Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithson­ ian Institution Press, 1991); and Charles Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 4–­20. Other works that expand this paradigm include Hemingway, Artists on the Left; Langa, Radical Art; Laura Hapke, Labor’s Canvas: American Working-­Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Hirsch, Portrait of America; and Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal. Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 3.

C hapter one

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226

Audrey McMahon, “May the Artist Live?” Parnassus 5, no. 5 (Octo­ ber 1933): 1.

N o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 – 1 5

2.

Mildred Constantine, interview by Harlan Phillips, October 15, 1965, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-­history-­interview -­mildred-­constantine-­13282. Constantine was McMahon’s assistant. 3. McMahon, “May the Artist Live?” 1; McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 176. According to McKinzie’s reading of the 1930 census, there were fifty-­ seven thousand artists and art teachers in the United States. 4. McMahon, “May the Artist Live?” 1, 4. 5. Langa, Radical Art, 23–­24. 6. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 4. 7. Audrey McMahon, “The Trend of Government in Art,” Parnassus 8, no. 1 ( January 1936): 6. 8. Chet La More, “The Artists’ Union of America,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 237. 9. Quoted in Joseph Freeman, “The Battle for Art,” New Masses, February 25, 1936, 11. 10. Sinclair Lewis, “The American Fear of Literature,” Nobel Prize Lecture, December 12, 1930, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature /laureates/1930/lewis-­lecture.html. 11. I. A. Hirschman, “The Musician and the Depression,” The Nation 137 (No­ vember 15, 1933): 565. 12. William Francis McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969), 19. For specifics regard­ ing private efforts to aid musicians, see Olin Downes, “Helping the Un­ employed: The Work of the Musicians’ Emergency Aid and the Musicians’ Symphony Orchestra,” NYT, October 30, 1932, X6, ProQuest (99835080). 13. Suzanne La Follette, “The Artist and the Depression,” The Nation 137 (September 6, 1933): 265. Note that La Follette was a distant cousin of the Progressive Wisconsin senator Bob La Follette. 14. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 5. 15. Alice Kessler Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chaps. 3–­4; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 289–­306; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: Norton, 2005), chaps. 2–­3. 16. George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 20. 17. Harry Hopkins, “Address on Federal Relief Delivered at a WPA Luncheon,” September 19, 1936, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Federal Relief Agency Pa­ pers, box 9, FDR Library, http://web.mit.edu/21h.102/www/Primary%20 source%20collections/The%20New%20Deal/Hopkins,%20Speech%20 on%20federal%20relief.htm.

227

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18. Harry Hopkins, “Address of Harry L. Hopkins, WPA Administrator, to the Conference of State Directors of the Women’s and Professional Projects,” May 4, 1936, 10, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Federal Relief Agency Papers, box 26, FERA-­WPA Transcripts and Records of Conferences, 1936–­38, FDR Library. 19. J. C. Furnas, Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the Nineteen Thirties: An Informal Social History of the United States, 1929–­1941 (New York: Putnam, 1977), 401. 20. Hopkins, “Address on Federal Relief” (September 19, 1936). 21. Quoted in McDonald, Federal Relief Administration, 36. 22. Quoted in Meltzer, Violins and Shovels, 19. 23. Quoted in Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 4. 24. Kennedy, When Art Worked, 41–­45; Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–­1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88–­98. 25. Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 1 (March 1935): 3, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 26. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 13–­14. 27. Charles Moore, “The Soul of a City,” November 28, 1922, 7, Speech, Article, and Book File, Charles Moore Papers, box 12, LOC. 28. Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–­1935 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), preface and introduction. 29. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration, 359; McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 5. 30. George Biddle to FDR, New York, May 9, 1933, Selected Documents from the Papers of President FDR concerning the Federal Arts Program, microfilmed at the FDR Library, June 1965, AAA. 31. Francine Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression and the Threat of Fascism: The New York Artists’ Union and Its Magazine, Art Front (1934–­ 1937)” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1991), 78, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York. 32. Quoted in ibid., 6. 33. Quoted in ibid., 112. 34. Charles Moore to FDR, July 28, 1933, 7, reel 3621, George Biddle Papers, AAA. 35. On the Rockefeller incident and Diego Rivera’s work in the United States, see Anthony Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 54, 115–­17; and Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 159–­74. 36. Rockefeller had also asked Matisse and Picasso to submit sketches, but they had refused. Irene Herner de Larrea, Diego Rivera’s Mural at the Rockefeller

228

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Center, trans. Ana María Reiss de Mejía, Kathryn Kovacik Talicska, and Irene Herner de Larrea (1986; reprint, Mexico City: Edicupes S.A. de C.V., 1990), 41. 37. “John D., Jr. Halts Fresco: Rivera, Famed Painter, Paid for Uncompleted Work in R.C.A. Building and Ousted from Job,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1933, ProQuest (163070456). 38. Ibid. 39. Quoted in “Row on Rivera Art Still in Deadlock,” NYT, May 11, 1933, Pro­ Quest (100675001). 40. Beniamino Benvenuto Bufano, “For the Present We Are Busy,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 110. 41. “Comrade Rivera Causes Red Row,” NYT, May 15, 1933, ProQuest (100676624). 42. “Art Row Pressed by Rivera Friends,” NYT, May 18, 1933, Books-­Art section, ProQuest (100661226). 43. “Rivera Defended by Artists’ Group,” NYT, May 16, 1933, ProQuest (100704188). 44. “A Plea for Rivera Sent to Rockefeller,” NYT, May 28, 1933, ProQuest (100680928). 45. Moore to FDR, July 28, 1933, quoted in “Biddle Diary,” 7–­8, Transcripts of Diaries, April 23, 1933–­November 6, 1938, reel 3621, Biddle Papers, AAA. 46. Francis V. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1969), 18. 47. George Biddle, “Biddle Diary,” July 28, 1933, 9. 48. Graham Barnfield, “Federal Arts Policy and Political Legitimation,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Shaping of American Political Culture (5 vols.), ed. Nancy Beck Young, William D. Pederson, and Byron W. Daynes (Ar­ monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001–­4), 1:49. 49. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts, 56; Edward Bruce to Leon Kroll, April 24, 1934, reel 83, Edward Bruce Papers, AAA. 50. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991); Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 84. 51. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration, 86. 52. Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression,” 100; Lincoln Rothschild, “Artists’ Organizations of the Depression Decade,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 201. 53. Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression,” 178. 54. Gerald Monroe, “Artists on the Barricade: The Militant Artists’ Union Treats with the New Deal,” Archives of American Art Journal 18 (1978): 20–­23. For specific examples of artists’ political activism, see Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression,” 100. 55. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–­1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), chap. 10.

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56. William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–­1940 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 125–­26. 57. US Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates: July 1, 1900 to July 1 1999” (2000), http://www.census.gov/popest/data/national/totals /pre-­1980/tables/popclockest.txt; US Census Bureau, “Annual Estimates of the Population for the United States, Regions, States, and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011” (2011), http://www.census.gov/popest/data /historical/2010s/vintage_2011/index.html. 58. John Maynard Keynes, Keynes’s Lectures, 1932–­35: Notes of a Representative Student: A Synthesis of Lecture Notes Taken by Students at Keynes’s Lectures in the 1930s Leading Up to the Publication of the General Theory, ed. Thomas K. Rymes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. government economic policy, http://proxy.library.upenn .edu:2390/EBchecked/topic/240167/government-­economic-­policy. 59. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration, 2. 60. Quoted in Osgood Nichols, “A New Federal Department for Culture Is Argued on Capitol Hill,” WP, April 28, 1935, B4 ProQuest (150672745). Compton wrote in response to a form letter that New York congressman William I. Sirovich sent to seven hundred leading scientists, painters, sculp­ tors, architects, writers, and educators. Sirovich’s letter elicited responses to the resolution to create a department of science, art, and literature that he had submitted to the House on March 18, 1935. 61. Hopkins, “Address of Harry L. Hopkins” (May 4, 1936). 62. Gerald M. Monroe, “The Artists’ Union of New York,” Art Journal 32, no. 1 (Autumn, 1972), 18–­19. 63. Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression,” 5; “For a Permanent Art Project,” Art Front 2, no. 3 (February 1936): 3. 64. Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers during the Great Depression,” Archives of American Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1974): 9. 65. “For a Permanent Art Project,” 3, quoted in Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers,” 7. 66. Mathews, “Arts and the People,” 316. 67. Quoted in Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 2 (March 1934): 1, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 68. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; reprint, New York: Perigree, 1980), 325. 69. For more on Dewey’s aesthetic approach, see Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture, chap. 1. 70. Susan Currell, The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in the Great Depression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 13. 71. See, e.g., Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 509–­10. 72. J. F. Steiner, “Recreation and Leisure Time Activities,” in Recent Social Trends

230

N o t e s t o pa g e s 2 7 – 2 9

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

in the US: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1933), 1:956, 957. Walker Art Center, MN Brochure, ca. 1940–­46, ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frame 185, Holger Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Reports183632. John Huseby, “Time Off: A Visual Essay on America’s Leisure Time and Its Cultural Possibilities,” Life, n.d., ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frame 195, Ca­hill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Reports 183632. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial 64 (April 11, 1918): 339. Joan Shelley Rubin, Constance Rourke and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 74–­78. Constance Rourke, “Index of American Design,” ser. 3.9, reel 1107, frame 1115, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Articles-­and-­Reports183645. Botkin, e.g., called artistic activity “one road to social participation.” See Hyde Parnow, B. A. Botkin, Aunt Molly Jackson, Victor Campbell, Alan Lomax, and Earl Robinson, “Folk­ lore and Folksay,” in Fighting Words, ed. Donald Ogden Stewart (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 11. Louis Lozowick, “Status of the Artist in the U.S.S.R.,” in Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 162–­65. Margaret Bourke-­White, “An Artist’s Experience in the Soviet Union,” in ibid., 85–­86. Of course, not all artists, writers, and intellectuals held the Soviet Union in such high esteem. Henry Alsberg, the director of the FWP, rejected com­ munism in the late 1920s when he was blacklisted from liberal publications for having published letters written by Russian prisoners. Similarly, a few years later, in 1937, a group of New York intellectuals, led by Philip Rahv and William Phillips, broke with the Communist Party after learning about Stalin’s purges and reversed the political position of the Partisan Review, the journal they edited, which was founded as a vehicle for the Party and then became an organ of Party opposition. There is substantial debate in the literature regarding the extent of creative freedom in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Scholars initially viewed the Soviet government and the Communist Party as controlling the arts by censoring them and imposing socialist realism on them. But, beginning in the 1980s, researchers argued that Communist art was not monolithic. Stalin did not rigidly control the arts, and the American Communist Party did not impose Soviet directives on the United States. Focusing on the experiences and creative expressions of rank-­and-­file Communists and fel­ low travelers more than Communist Party dictates, such scholars contend

231

N o t e s t o pa g e s 3 0 – 3 4

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

that Communist art remained free of political constraints even after Stalin’s ascent. According to such research, Communist art in the early 1930s, prior to the Popular Front, was marked by experimentation and openness to modernism. Lawrence H. Schwartz, Marxism and Culture (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1980), 26; Heming­ way, Artists on the Left, 25. David A. Siqueiro, “The Mexican Experience in Art,” in Baigell and Wil­ liams, eds., Artists against War and Fascism, 208–­12. See Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, 3–­10. Otto D. Tolischus, “Nine Muses Regimented to Serve Nazi Kultur,” New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1937, SM4, ProQuest (102130378). “Art in Nazi Germany,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists against War and Fascism, 169, 168 (quote). Grace Overmyer, Government and the Arts (New York: Norton, 1939), 215. George Biddle, “Artists’ Boycott of Berlin Olympics Art Exhibition,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists against War and Fascism, 90–­91. Paul Manship, “Why Established Artists Should Oppose War and Fascism,” in ibid., 89. Lewis Mumford, “Opening,” in ibid., 64. Donald Ogden Stewart, introduction to Stewart, ed., Fighting Words, 140, 167. Stuart Davis, “Why an Artists’ Congress?” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists against War and Fascism, 67.

C hapter two

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6.

232

“Hoover Declares Capital Is Symbol of U.S.,” WP, April 26, 1929, 1, Pro­ Quest (149947960). “Beautifying the Capital,” WP, April 26, 1929, 6, ProQuest (149966240). Ibid. “Hoover Declares Capital Is Symbol of U.S.,” 1. Ibid., 1–­2. Charles Moore, “Washington—­City of Splendor,” Current History 32, no. 2 (May 1930): 249–­56; “For a Glorious City,” WP, April 28, 1929, S1, Pro­ Quest (149944045); Charles Moore, “Washington as a Center of Culture,” n.d., General Records, Records of the CFA, Charles Moore Collection, box 1, RG 66, NAB I; Charles Moore, “Washington: A City of Ideals,” n.d., Gen­ eral Records, Records of the CFA, Moore Collection, box 4, RG 66, NAB I; Charles Moore, “Washington as a National Work of Art,” n.d., Several Ar­ ticles and Speeches by Charles Moore, General Records, Records of the CFA, Moore Collection, box 1, RG 66, NAB I. Richard N. Elliott, “Congress and the Nation’s Capital,” in Development of the United States Capital: Addresses Delivered in the Auditorium of the United States Chamber of Commerce Building, Washington, DC at Meetings Held to Discuss the Development of the National Capital, April 25–­26, 1929, 71st Cong.,

N o t e s t o pa g e s 3 5 – 3 8

1st sess., H. Doc. 35 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1930), 32–­33; Charles H. Whitaker, “Building for the Glory of Washing­ ton,” NYT, March 6, 1927, SM6, ProQuest (103983290). 7. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1865), ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 48. 8. Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 10, 29, 30. 9. In private correspondence, public writing, and speeches, the Treasury Department’s art administrators do not appear to have referred directly to Matthew Arnold’s aesthetic approach. 10. William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 79; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 2010), 172 (quote). 11. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 78 (quote), 297–­98. 12. Wanda M. Corn, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 8. 13. Sally Kress Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur: Charles Moore and the Federal Triangle (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists; Corn, Women Building History, 8. 14. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 2, 285 (quote). 15. “ ‘Classicism or Realism?’: That’s the Question in Paintings for New Postoffice Building,” WP, March 23, 1934, 4, Project Files, Post Office De­ partment, Painting, Etc.; Commission of Fine Arts, Records Relating Primar­ ily to Projects, Project Files, box 147, RG 66, NAB I. 16. The art historians Wanda Corn and Barbara Melosh have aptly analyzed the extent to which such imagery was constrained by, contributed to, and occasionally contested male narratives of work, play, and history. See Corn, Women Building History; and Melosh, Engendering Culture. 17. Evidence of the persistence of a neoclassical style through New Deal archi­ tecture can be seen by perusing the Living New Deal map. See Living New Deal, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/map. 18. This can also be seen through the Living New Deal map. 19. Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur; Sue Kohler and Pamela Scott, eds., Designing the Nation’s Capital: The 1901 Plan for Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: US Commission of Fine Arts, 2006); and Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L’Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission (1977; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 20. Edward Bruce to Frederick Delano, November 10, 1933, quoted in George Biddle, Diary, 16, Biddle Papers, AAA. 21. Lee, Painting on the Left, 161, 165–­67, 182.

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N o t e s t o pa g e s 3 9 – 4 4

22. Corn, Women Building History, 1. 23. Charles Moore, “The Fine Arts in the Life of Today” (speech delivered at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, January 14, 1931), 8, Article: “The Gov­ ernment and the Practicing Architect,” General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collection, box 5, RG 66, NAB I. 24. Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (1979), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 25. Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur, xvii. 26. Others in the cohort included Glenn Brown, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and John Russell Pope. 27. Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur, 16. 28. Ibid., 3–­21. 29. Alan Lessoff, “Washington Insider: The Early Career of Charles Moore,” Washington History 6, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1994/95): 71. 30. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 3. 31. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 161. 32. Ibid., 171. 33. Charles Moore, “Public Utility Structures in Relation to Municipal, State, or Federal Art Commission,” January 1930, 5, Several Articles and Speeches by Charles Moore, General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collec­ tion, box 1, RG 66, NAB I. 34. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 1. 35. Charles Moore, “The Satisfaction of Life,” February 23, 1931, 14–­15, Speech, Article, and Book File, Moore Papers, box 12, LOC. 36. Charles Moore, “The Arts of Humanism,” January 15, 1930, 9, Article: “The Government and the Practicing Architect,” General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collection, box 5, RG 66, NAB I. 37. Quoted in “Charles Moore, Now 82, Rounds Out Notable Career as a City Planner,” Kansas City Times, November 10, 1937, Speeches and Articles by Charles Moore, General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collec­ tion, box 1, RG 66, NAB I. 38. Gutheim and Lee, Worthy of the Nation, 128–­29. 39. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 5–­7. 40. Charles Moore, “Fine Arts Offer Brilliant Leadership in Education,” University of Iowa News Bulletin 5, no. 3 (March 1930): 7, Speech, Article, and Book File, Moore Papers, box 12, LOC. 41. Charles Moore, “Standards of Taste,” American Magazine of Art 21, no. 7 ( July 1930): 366, Speech, Article, and Book File, Moore Papers, box 13, LOC. 42. Moore, “The Arts of Humanism,” 129 (see also 127). 43. Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur, 16. 44. Charles Moore, Washington: Past and Present (New York: Century, 1929), 275. 45. “The Fine Arts Commission,” NYT, January 16, 1912, ProQuest (104263368).

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46. “More Beauty for City,” WP, June 20, 1915, R7, ProQuest (145369579). 47. Quoted in “The Control of Civic Art,” NYT, November 16, 1925, 18, Pro­ Quest (145369579). 48. “Honor Charles Moore for Service to Art,” NYT, March 3, 1924, 36, Pro­ Quest (103441636). 49. “Scope of National Commission Fine Arts Explained,” letter to the editor, WP, February 21, 1926, ES2, ProQuest (149645971). 50. Moore to C. L. Borie, January 31, 1935, Justice Department Building—­ Murals General, Project Files, Commission of Fine Arts, box 87, RG 66, NAB I. 51. Moore, Washington: Past and Present, 245. 52. “National Capital Planning,” WP, February 21, 1926, ES1, ProQuest (149754534). 53. Commission of Fine Arts, “The Twenty-­five [sic] Anniversary of the Estab­ lishment of the National Commission of Fine Arts,” General Files, Commis­ sion of Fine Arts—­Twenty-­fifth Anniversary; New York City, May 23, 1935, 11, Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 14, RG 66, NAB I. 54. Otto Wilson, “Washington’s Big Building Program,” American Review of Reviews 74, no. 5 (November 1926): 497; William Harlan Hale, “The Grandeur That Is Washington,” Harper’s 168 (April 1934): 562; Whitaker, “Building for the Glory of Washington,” 6. 55. Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur, 65. 56. Hale, “The Grandeur That Is Washington,” 528, 566–­67. 57. Quoted in Robert Talley, “City’s ‘Roman Temples’ Make Modernists Smile,” WP, November 25, 1934, F1, ProQuest (150484376). 58. Quoted in ibid. 59. Note that the CFA was not actually authorized to hire artists, only to rec­ ommend them. 60. Maxine Davis, “A New American Art” (condensed from Coronet), Readers’ Digest 37 (October 1940): 107; George Biddle to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, May 9, 1933, FDR Papers, AAA. 61. Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur, 17. 62. Corn, Women Building History, 5, 9–­11. 63. Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–­1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 201–­4. 64. Corn, Women Building History, 9, 188. 65. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 82–­84. 66. Quoted in Barnfield, “Federal Arts Policy and Political Legitimation,” 49. 67. Moore to William A. Delano, March 8, 1935, General Files, Murals for Public Buildings; Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 51, RG 66, NAB I.

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68. Egerton Swartwout to H. P. Caemmerer, May 13, 1935, General Files, Murals for Public Buildings; Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 51, RG 66, NAB I. 69. Lee Lawrie to Moore, September 7, 1935, in H. P. Caemmerer, “Meeting Minutes,” September 13, 1935, Charles Moore: Copies of the Minutes of the Commission, February 23, 1935–­July 17, 1936, General Records, Re­ cords of the CFA, Moore Collection, box 6, RG 66, NAB I. 70. Lawrie to Moore, January 11, 1936, Project Files, Commission of Fine Arts, box 87, RG 66, NAB I. 71. Moore, “The Arts of Humanism,” 128. 72. Moore, “Washington as a National Work of Art,” 7. 73. Moore, “The Arts of Humanism,” 127. 74. Moore, speech delivered in Savannah, GA, 1932, 10–­11, General Records, Records of the CFA, Moore Collection, box 6, RG 66, NAB I. 75. Charles Moore, “The Selection of Artists to Execute Public Works,” n.d., 8, Charles Moore, General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collec­ tion, box 4, RG 66, NAB I. 76. Charles Moore, “The Artist and His Job,” speech delivered April 19, 1922, 7, Article: “The Government and the Practicing Architect,” General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collection, box 5, RG 66, NAB I. 77. Moore, speech delivered in Savannah, GA, 1932, 10. 78. Moore, “The Soul of a City,” 8. 79. Charles McKim to Bernard R. Green, New York, April 18, 1904, in Charles Moore, “The Government and the Practicing Architect,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, March 1928, 4, General Records, Commis­ sion of Fine Arts, Moore Collection, box 5, RG 66, NAB I. 80. Moore, “The Arts of Humanism,” 9. 81. Charles Moore, “Address,” speech delivered at the Mayflower Hotel, Wash­ ington, DC, February 18, 1937, Folder: Dinner in His Honor at Mayflower (1937), General Records, Commission of Fine Arts, Moore Collection, box 4, RG 66, NAB I. 82. Gutheim and Lee, Worthy of the Nation, 229. 83. The Commission recommended Robert Woods Bliss, Duncan Phillips, Lammot Belin, and George B. McClellan. Membership Appt. of Successor to Charles Moore, General Records, General Files, Commission of Fine Arts, box 19, RG 66, NAB I. FDR rejected them all. 84. H. P. Caemmerer, “The Future of Classical Art in the United States” (draft), 250, Commission of Fine Arts, Papers of Hans Paul Caemmerer, Books Materials—­State Capitols and Dissertation, box 5, RG 66, NAB I. The finalized text appeared as H. Paul Caemmerer, “The Influence of Classical Art on the Architecture of the United States” (Ph.D. diss., American Univer­ sity, 1938). 85. Fiske Kimball to H. P. Caemmerer, Fairmount, Philadelphia, June 22, 1937,

236

N o t e s t o pa g e s 5 4 – 6 0

General Files, Classical Art; Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 13, RG 66, NAB I. 86. Caemmerer, “The Future of Classical Art,” 1. 87. Federal Writers’ Project, Washington, D.C.: A Guide to the Nation’s Capital (1942; reprint with added references and index, St. Clair Shores, MI: Schol­ arly Press, 1976), 67. 88. Alfred Kastner and Chloethiel Woodard, “Social Function of the Architect,” n.d., 8, Transcript of Hearings, 1933–­41, vol. 14, RG 328, NAB I. 89. H. P. Caemmerer to Louis Ayrea, June 8, 1937, Classical Art; Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 13, RG 66, NAB I. 90. Herbert Godwin to Caemmerer, July 26, 1937, Classical Art; Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 13, RG 66, NAB I. 91. Quoted in “Senate Fight over Shrine Bill Forecast,” WP, June 11, 1938, XI, ProQuest (151021718). 92. Quoted in “Clarke Gives Inside Data,” WP, May 20, 1938, 4, ProQuest (151061778). 93. Ibid. 94. “Jefferson Site Approved,” NYT, April 7, 1938, 15, ProQuest (102649852); “Roosevelt’s Aide Asked in Art Row,” NYT, April 9, 1938, 19, ProQuest (102652729). 95. Quoted in “Fresh Start on Jefferson Plan Sought,” WP, April 7, 1938, 7, ProQuest (151062782). 96. Quoted in “Roosevelt’s Aide Asked in Art Row,” 19. 97. F. A. Whiting Jr., “Jefferson Memorial Chronology,” WP, May 20, 1938, X9, ProQuest Historical (151085634). The article was originally published in the Magazine of Art ( June 1938). Excerpts were published in the Washington Post. 98. Quoted in “Fresh Start on Jefferson Plan Sought,” 7. 99. Quoted in Whiting, “Jefferson Memorial Chronology,” X9. 100. “Fresh Start on Jefferson Plan Sought,” 1. 101. Edward Alden Jewell, “Toward New Horizons,” NYT, April 17, 1938, 147, ProQuest (102585401); “Clarke Gives Inside Data,” XI. 102. Jewell, “Toward New Horizons,” 147. 103. “Senate Fight over Shrine Bill Forecast,” X1. 104. Jewell, “Toward New Horizons,” 147. 105. Fiske Kimball, “Memorial Dispute,” letter to the editor, NYT, April 17, 1938, 61, ProQuest (102658939). 106. “Jefferson Memorial Chronology”; “Clarke Gives Inside Data,” XI. 107. Quoted in “Roosevelt’s Aide Asked in Art Row,” 19. 108. Quoted in “Senate Group Votes $500,000 to Shrine Plan,” WP, June 12, 1938, M5, ProQuest (151084629). 109. Jewell, “Toward New Horizons,” 147. 110. Quoted in “Senate Fight over Shrine Bill Forecast,” X1.

237

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111. “The Jefferson Memorial,” NYT, April 12, 1938, 22, ProQuest (102672048). The Washington Post reprinted the Times editorial four days later: “The Jef­ ferson Memorial,” WP, April 16, 1938, 6, ProQuest (151037514). 112. “A Pantheon for Jefferson?” NYT, March 28, 1939, 22, ProQuest (103015517). 113. Kimball, “Memorial Dispute,” 61. 114. Carl Feiss, “Civic Art in the American City—­Today and Tomorrow,” in “The Public Discussion of Public Architecture,” Architectural Record 82, no. 2 (August 1937): 54. 115. Joseph Hudnut, “Classical Architecture Not Essential,” in ibid., 54. 116. William Lescaze, “America’s Outgrowing Imitation Greek Architecture,” in ibid., 56, 57. C hapter three

1.

Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 154. 2. Aldous Huxley, “The Problem of Faith,” Harper’s 166 ( January 1933): 211. 3. “Text of the Inaugural Address: President for Vigorous Action,” NYT, March 5, 1933, 1, ProQuest (100751918). See also Huxley, “The Problem of Faith,” 212, 215–­16. For notes on the crafting of Roosevelt’s first Inaugu­ ral Address, see Halford Ryan, ed., The Inaugural Addresses of 20th-­Century American Presidents (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), chap. 8; and Davis W. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 4. “Roosevelt Address to Church Group,” NYT, December 7, 1933, 2, ProQuest (100804086). 5. “Church and Government,” NYT, December 10, 1933, E4, ProQuest (100788094). 6. Arthur Krock, “More Abundant Life: President’s Final Goal,” NYT, Janu­ ary 7, 1934, E1, ProQuest (101104556). 7. Olin Dows, interview by Harlan Phillips, October 31, 1963, 6, reel 3418, AAA. 8. George Biddle, “Edited Transcripts of Diaries, 1933–­1941,” 2–­16, reel 3621, Biddle Papers, AAA; Lenore Clark, Forbes Watson: Independent Revolutionary (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 111. 9. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 46; Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression,” 5; Lee, Painting on the Left, 131–­34. 10. Quoted in George Biddle, “Mural Painting in America,” American Magazine of Art 27 ( July 1934): 371. 11. “Bruce’s Speech at Municipal Art Gallery Opening,” Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 2 (March 1934): 1, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA.

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12. For example, as we saw in chapter 2, the artists who decorated the National Archives and the Supreme Court received $634,000 for their endeavors. Davis, “A New American Art,” 107. 13. Forbes Watson, “Report on Section of Fine Arts,” December 1942, 4, Forbes Watson Papers, 1900–­1950, reel D 48, AAA; [Forbes Watson], Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 8 (February 1936): 13, PWAP and Trea­ sury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 14. Bruce to Margaret Anderson, November 14, 1933, Bruce Papers, reel 82, AAA; Dows interview, 12. 15. “Unemployed Arts,” Fortune 15 (May 1937): 168; Dows interview, 70. 16. Edward Bruce, “Art and Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly 156 (August 1935): 149–­52. 17. Edward Bruce, “Public Works of Art Project,” Congressional Record, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1934, 78, pt. 1:767. 18. Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 39. 19. Quoted in “Reports on Statements by Procurement Division Officers at the Hearings Before the Committee on Patents House of Representatives,” Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 3 (May–­June 1935): 6, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 20. For more on regionalism, see Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–­1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), xii. I counter Dorman’s contention that the New Deal marked the denouement of regionalism. Instead, in many respects it institutionalized regionalism, while World War II and the rise of anticommunism caused its decline. 21. Baigell, The American Scene, 55–­58; Matthew Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 91–­94. 22. Note that, despite rhetoric suggesting that regionalists celebrated a con­ sensual image of the nation, such painters did represent class and racial conflict in their works—­and at times received substantial criticism from local communities for doing so. See, e.g., Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986); Karal Ann Marling, Tom Benton and His Drawings: A Biographical Essay and a Collection of His Sketches, Studies, and Mural Cartoons (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985); and Erika Lee Doss, Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 23. Lewis Rubenstein, “Fresco Painting Today,” American Scholar 4, no. 4 (1935), reprinted in Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 9 (May 1936): 10–­11, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 24. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 57; “Large National Buildings,” Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 1 (March 1935): 5, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA.

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N o t e s t o pa g e s 6 8 – 7 4

25. “Morgenthau at Opening,” Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 12 (September 1936–­February 1937): 6, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 26. McKinzie, New Deal for Artists, 5. 27. Biddle painted his wife and son as the mother and child in Society Freed through Justice. “F. J. Biddle Is Put in Worker Mural,” NYT, February 21, 1936, 19, ProQuest (101846461). 28. Sheldon M. Novick, “Holmes, Oliver Wendell,” American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/11/11-­00423.html. 29. Biddle claimed that his use of contemporaries as models for his mural was inconsequential. “There is no special significance to be read into using my friends for models,” he attested. “This is commonly done by artists. When I find a friend whose face seems to fit into some picture I have in mind, I ask him to pose for me. . . . That’s a much more practical plan than trying to find a professional model to fit every character.” The government-­ commissioned muralists who painted the Coit Tower in San Francisco simi­ larly incorporated fellow artists, assistants, lovers, and friends into their works. Despite Biddle’s disclaimer, his inclusion of leading New Dealers and public intellectuals has more overtly political implications than he implies. “Biddle Paints Self Running Sweatshop Sewing Machine,” WP, May 14, 1936, x17, ProQuest (150810587). 30. The initial inscription at the bottom of the mural—­“The Sweatshop and Tenement of Yesterday Can Be the Life Planned with Justice of Tomorrow”—­was taken from this quotation. At the request of the solici­ tor general, Biddle later changed the word planned to ordered. Biddle wrote the following of the change: “Such is the evocation of terror sounded by this frugal word [ planned ]. I was all too happy to accept this emendation.” George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 280–­81. 31. Ibid., 267. 32. After five months in Washington, DC, Watson wrote the following to a journalist friend regarding his political conversion: “I came to Washing­ ton with a Republican background . . . and am entirely won over to the New Deal both on account of the brilliant, indefatigable workers I have met here, and on account of the spirit in which they are working. . . . This is certainly the time when all of us who want to accomplish something toward benefiting our art and our artists have our greatest opportunity.” Watson to Frances Wayne, June 4, 1934, box 105, RG 121, NAB I, quoted in Clark, Forbes Watson, 122. 33. Dows interview, 3. 34. Bruce to L. W. Roberts, November 13, 1933, 6, Bruce Personal Correspon­ dence, Bruce Papers, reel 83, AAA. Bruce was not alone in volunteering his time and energy. The six hundred cultural enthusiasts who served on the sixteen regional committees of the Treasury’s art programs also offered

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their services without accepting financial compensation. According to Burt Brown, the regional director in Portland, Oregon, volunteers spent two to four hours daily, five days a week, visiting studios and evaluating both art in progress and completed works. “I wish,” he attested, “[that] Congress could see the joy it [the Treasury’s art program] has brought to the lives of those struggling people who are accustomed to address us as ‘Santa Claus’ when we appear in their studios.” Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 1 (February 1934): 3–­4, reel NDA 3, AAA; Edward Bruce, “Implications of PWAP,” American Magazine of Art 27 (February 1934): 113. 35. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art, 101. 36. Olin Dows, “Edward Bruce: An Appraisal,” Magazine of Art 30 ( Janu­ ary 1937): 6. 37. Davis, “A New American Art,” 109. 38. The Treasury’s Section of Fine Arts also ended that same year. 39. Olin Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program: A Memoir,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 16; Dows, “Edward Bruce: An Ap­ praisal”; Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art, 31–­37. 40. Anton Refrieger, interview by Joseph Trovato, November 5, 1964, Wood­ stock, NY, Research Collections, Oral History Interviews, AAA, http://www .aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/refreg64.htm. 41. For more information on the relationship between Gertrude and Leo Stein, see Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: Put­ nam’s, 1996). 42. Leo Stein, introduction to Bruce special exhibit brochure, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, April 26–­May 22, 1932, Bruce Papers, reel 82, AAA. 43. Leo Stein, The A-­B-­C of Aesthetics (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), 181. 44. Clark, Forbes Watson, 2, 42. 45. Forbes Watson, “Introductory Pamphlet,” The Arts, n.d., 1, reel D48, AAA. 46. Forbes Watson, “The Innocent Bystander,” American Magazine of Art 28, no. 6 ( June 1935): 371. 47. “Art News of the Week,” New York World, January 27, 1924, quoted in Clark, Forbes Watson, 78. 48. Clark, Forbes Watson, 78–­79. 49. Forbes Watson, “Gallery Explorations,” Parnassus 4, no. 7 (December 1932): 3. 50. Clark, Forbes Watson, 90–­91. 51. Forbes Watson, “Steady Job,” American Magazine of Art 27 (April 34): 168. 52. Forbes Watson, “Social Consciousness Returns to Art,” n.d., 8, Watson Papers, reel D47, AAA. 53. Forbes Watson, forward to Art for Bonds, n.d., reproduced in Erica Beckh Rubenstein, “Tax Payers’ Murals” (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1944), 25. 54. Quoted in Clark, Forbes Watson, 110. 55. Dows interview, 28. 56. Kristy Raine, “Edward Beatty Rowan (1898–­1946),” in When Tillage Begins: The Stone City Art Colony and School (Cedar Rapids, IA: Mount Mercy College,

241

N o t e s t o pa g e s 8 0 – 8 4

Busse Library, October 2003), http://projects.mtmercy.edu/stonecity/artists /rowan.html. 57. Edward Rowan, “Will Plumber’s Wages Turn the Trick?” American Magazine of Art 27 (February 1934): 80. 58. Raine, “Edward Beatty Rowan.” 59. Note that Wood did not write Revolt alone; rather, he composed it with assistance from Frank Luther Mott, the director of the School of Journal­ ism at the University of Iowa. See N. Elizabeth Schlatter, “Wood, Grant,” American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org /articles/17/17-­00943.html. 60. Grant Wood, Revolt against the City (Iowa City, IA: Clio, 1935), 39. 61. The rough estimate of 5,000 is based on adding together the number of artists commissioned by PWAP (3,750), Treasury Relief Art Project (356), and the sections (850) at their height. Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program,” 16; McDonald, Federal Relief Administration, 370; Park and Mar­ kowitz, Democratic Vistas, 8. 62. Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, 287. 63. George Biddle to Edward Bruce, January 4, 1936, 1, Bruce Papers, reel 82, AAA. 64. Quoted in “Extracts from Letters from Artists,” n.d., 1, Forbes Watson no. 6, box 2, RG 121, NAB II. 65. [Forbes Watson], “We Hear from Kansas,” Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 2 (March 1934): 7–­8, reel NDA 3, AAA. 66. Quoted in “Extracts from Letters from Artists,” 4. 67. Quoted in ibid., 3. 68. Edward Bruce to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 20, 1940, Selected Documents from the Papers of President FDR concerning the Federal Arts Program, microfilmed at the FDR Library, June 1965, AAA. 69. Quoted in Kellogg, “Art Becomes Public Works,” 279. 70. Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, 287. 71. Bruce, “Implications of PWAP,” 1. 72. Bruce to Delano, November 10, 1933, Biddle Diary, 16, reel 3621, Biddle Papers, AAA. 73. Lee Lawrie to Charles Moore, September 7, 1935, in H. P. Caemmerer, “Meeting Minutes,” September 13, 1935, Charles Moore: Copies of the Minutes of the Commission, February 23, 1935–­July 17, 1936, General Records, Records of the CFA, Moore Collection, box 6, RG 66, NAB I. 74. Moore to Edward Rowan, September 18, 1935, in ibid. 75. Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, 287–­89 (quote 288). 76. Oskar J. W. Hansen to Ed Rowan, August 20, 1935, Murals for Public Build­ ings, Commission of Fine Arts, General Records, General Files, 1910–­54, box 51, RG 66, NAB I. 77. Earle Davis, “Benton’s Contribution to American Art,” in Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography (Law­

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rence: University Press of Kansas, 1969), 71; Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton, 134. 78. Henry Varnum Poor to Biddle, November 28, 1935, quoted in Biddle Diary, 34, reel 3621, Biddle papers, AAA. 79. Bruce to Biddle, December 3, 1935, reel 82, Bruce Papers, AAA. 80. Duncan Aikman, “Modern Art It Is, but Is It Appropriate?” NYT, August 2, 1936, SM16, SM10, ProQuest (101839173). 81. Baigell, The American Scene, 55. 82. Michael L. Smith, introduction to Emily Braun and Thomas Branchick, Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals (Williamstown, MA: Wil­ liams College Museum of Art, 1985), 9–­10; Emily Braun, “Thomas Hart Benton and Progressive Liberalism: An Interpretation of the New School Murals,” in ibid., 21, 30 n. 1; Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton, 136. 83. Matthew Baigell, Jewish Art in America: An Introduction (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), xxii. 84. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 84. 85. Langa, Radical Art, 4. 86. The total number of artists is an estimate based on Dows’s assertion that 3,750 artists were hired by PWAP. That number is divided by 7 (the number of months the program ran) and then multiplied by 2 (the number of months that passed before Rowan reported the number of women and minorities commissioned). Although this number may exaggerate the case, it is still accurate to say that the Treasury hired artists from a wide array of backgrounds. Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program,” 16; Edward Rowan, “About the Artists,” Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 1 (Febru­ ary 1934): 6, reel NDA 3, AAA. 87. The total number of Native Americans working for the Treasury is not available. According to Park and Markowitz, however, more than 10 per­ cent of the small commissions in every state went to Native Americans. See Park and Markowitz, Democratic Vistas, 8. 88. Masha Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower, San Francisco: Its History and Art (San Francisco: Volcano, 1983), 30. 89. For a more in-­depth analysis of Heil and the supervisory committee’s ap­ proach to integrating art and politics, see Lee, Painting on the Left, 134 and, more generally, chaps. 2 and 5. 90. Ibid., 95–­98. 91. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 92. 92. Lee, Painting on the Left, 143. 93. Jewett, Coit Tower, 46–­47. 94. “Art Commission Head Replied to Coit Tower Artists’ Complaint,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 1934, Region #15 #1, box 3, RG 121, NAB II. 95. Bruce to Heil, June 30, 1934, Forbes Watson—­Personal #1, box 3, RG 121, NAB II. 96. Dows interview, 63.

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97. Quoted in Jewett, Coit Tower, 53. 98. “Artists Fight to Prevent Changes in Coit Tower,” San Francisco News, July 7, 1934, 8, Region #15 #1, box 3, RG 121, NAB II. 99. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 96. 100. “Soviet Symbol Stirs Ire in San Francisco,” San Francisco News, July 4, 1934, NAB II. The work was also published in the Vallejo (CA) Chronicle, July 6, 1938; the San Jose (CA) Mercury Herald, July 7, 1934; the Berkeley (CA) Gazette, July 7, 1934; and the Stockton (CA) Independent, July 13, 1934. Region #15 #1, box 3, RG 121, NAB II. 101. Stuart Davis, “Some Chance!” Art Front 1, no. 7 (November 34): 4, 7. 102. Meyer Schapiro, “Public Use of Art,” Art Front 2, no. 10 (November 1936): 4–­5. 103. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 77, 156. 104. Ibid., 87. 105. There were, however, certain points of contention between the Treasury’s art administrators and regionalist painters. For example, the Treasury sought to distinguish itself from the chauvinistic, xenophobic, and anti-­ Semitic sentiments articulated by some midwestern regionalists. Region­ alists were also wary of government patronage of the arts because they viewed it as infringing on their freedom of expression. 106. Marling, Wall-­to-­Wall America, 211. For an excellent overview of the his­ torical themes covered by the Treasury’s murals, see Park and Markowitz, Democratic Vistas, chap. 3. 107. Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 337–­41, 339. 108. Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 224, 296–­97. 109. Jones completed murals for post offices in Granville, Ohio (1938); Johnson City, Tennessee (1939); and Rome, New York (1942). He also completed a mural for Cairo, Illinois (1942), but it was never installed. 110. Wendell Jones, “Article of Faith,” Magazine of Art 33 (October 1940): 559. 111. Jones to Post Master, Granville, Ohio, n.d., Granville P.O. (Ohio), box 83, RG 121, NAB II. 112. Quoted in “Mural Painting in Post Office Depicts First Religious Service in Granville,” Granville (OH) Times, November 10, 1938, Granville P.O. (Ohio), box 83, RG 121, NAB II. For the original work, see Henry B. Bushnell, History of Granville, Licking County, Ohio (Columbus, OH: Hann & Adair, 1889). 113. Wendell Jones, “Mural in Granville, Ohio,” n.d., Granville, P.O. (Ohio), box 83, RG 121, NAB II; Anthony J. Liska, “ ‘The First Pulpit in Granville’: The Story of the Village Age Post Office Mural,” Historical Times 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 2. 114. Jones to Post Master, Granville, Ohio, n.d., Granville P.O. (Ohio), box 83, RG 121, NAB II. Jones did, however, eventually respond to a request by

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Mrs. Mabel E. Hite to include her great-­great grandfather, the Welsh pio­ neer Theophilus Rees, pictured on the left-­hand corner with a raccoon-­skin hat in his hand. Mabel E. Hite to W. A. Ashbrook, Granville, Ohio, n.d., Granville, P.O. (Ohio), box 83, RG 121, NAB II. 115. The mural, which was restored in 1996, was one of four hundred in Chicago’s public schools, many of which were created by the WPA, to be recovered through the efforts of the Chicago Conservation Center Mural Preservation Project for the City of Chicago. Marcia Winn, “ ‘Dismal!’ So High School Murals Are Painted Out,” CDT, November 5, 1941, 7, Pro­ Quest (176737092); “Mother Goose Mural Leaves WPA Faces Red,” CDT, November 18, 1937, 11, ProQuest (181974970). On the restoration effort, see Becker, Art for the People, 131–­32. 116. Davis, “A New American Art,” 108. 117. Marling, Wall-­to-­Wall America, 211. 118. Geoffrey Norman, “The Development of American Mural Painting,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 52. 119. “Art and Economy,” WP, November 16, 1939, 13, ProQuest (151104542). 120. Mr. Murray to Treasury Department, n.d., reprinted in Section of Painting and Sculpture Bulletin, no. 1 (March 1935): 10, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 121. Mrs. Adda Gentry George to FDR, November 13, 1939, FDR Papers, AAA. 122. Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 1 (February 1934): 1–­2, PWAP and Treasury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. 123. Ibid. 124. Bruce to FDR, August 20, 1940, FDR Papers, AAA. 125. Public Works of Art Project Bulletin, no. 1 (February 1934): 4, PWAP and Trea­ sury Section Bulletins, 1934–­41, reel NDA 3, AAA. C hapter fo u r

1.

Michael Weiler, “President FDR’s Second Inaugural Address, 1937,” in Ryan, ed., The Inaugural Addresses of 20th-­Century American Presidents, 111. Accord­ ing to Weiler’s review of the presidential papers related to FDR’s Second In­ augural, the president himself wrote the famous line regarding “one-­third of a nation.” Donald Richberg wrote the initial draft of the speech; then Samuel Rosenman, Thomas Corcoran, and the president himself revised and rewrote it. See ibid.; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Second Inaugural Address,” Washington, DC, January 20, 1937, History Matters, http:// historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5105. 2. Flanagan, Arena, 183–­84. 3. Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4, 1 (see also 1–­12).

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4.

Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism during the Depression Years (New York: Midmarch Arts, 1999), 173; Langa, Radical Art, 8. 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc­ tion,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–­52. 6. Leah Bendavid-­val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US (Zurich: Stemmle, 1999); Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997). 7. Denning, The Cultural Front, 120–­21. 8. Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s, xvi. 9. Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression,” 26. 10. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 4. 11. Schwartz, Marxism and Culture, 26–­40; Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–­1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), chap. 4. 12. Denning, The Cultural Front, 78–­83; Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 84, 153–­ 88; Langa, Radical Art, 78–­120. 13. Hallie Flanagan testimony, December 6, 1938, in Investigation of Un-­ American Propaganda Activities in the U.S., 4 vols. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1938), 4, pt. 3:2850–­51. 14. Arthur Arent, One-­Third of a Nation, in Federal Theatre Plays: Prologue to Glory, One-­Third of a Nation, and Haiti, ed. Pierre de Rohan (New York: Ran­ dom House, 1938), 11–­14. 15. Pierre de Rohan, “First Federal Summer Theater: A Report,” Summer 1937, 25, Federal Theatre Magazine in Speeches and Publications, vol. 2, 1937, FTP, box 24, ser. IV, subser. 2 (24/IV/2), Federal Theatre Project, Flanagan Papers. 16. Arent, One-­Third of a Nation, 121. 17. “1/3rd of a Nation—­Flash News,” n.d., Materials for Injunction Granted and 1/3rd of a Nation, Living Newspaper Research, FTP, WPA, box 610, RG 69, NAB II; Flanagan, Arena, 216. 18. “Facts for Project Supervisors,” FTP NYC, n.d., 1/3rd of a Nation, Materials for Injunction Granted and 1/3rd of a Nation, Living Newspaper Research, FTP, WPA, box 610, RG 69, NAB II; Stuart Cosgrove, introduction to Liberty Deferred and Other Living Newspapers of the 1930s, ed. Lorraine Brown, Ta­ mara Liller, and Barbara Jones Smith (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1989), xvii. 19. Arent left the FTP when he received the fellowship. He intended to write an antiwar Living Newspaper. But, when he saw the conditions in Europe, he instead helped create an enlistment film in France. He later created docu­ mentaries for the war as a member of the US Office of War Information. For further information on Arent, see Arnold Goldman, “Life and Death of

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the Living Newspaper Unit,” Theatre Quarterly 111, no. 9 ( January–­March 1973): 72. 20. “Three Thirds of Critics,” One-­Third of a Nation, Conference Transcription, Materials for Injunction Granted and 1/3rd of a Nation, Living Newspaper Research, FTP, WPA, box 610, RG 69, NAB II. 21. Watts and Ralston quoted in ibid., 1–­2, 6. 22. Flanagan, Arena, 218. For an interesting study of how and why the Holly­ wood production of One-­Third of a Nation sentimentalized the FTP’s version of the play, see Laura Browder, Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), chap. 6. 23. Flanagan, Arena, 221. 24. Arent to Elmer Beck, January 27, 1938, Accumulation of Information, 1936–­39, Correspondence of the Living Newspaper Project, FTP, WPA, box 549, RG 69, NAB II. 25. Frederick Knight interview, in Backstage Interviews, N-­Prof., April 10, 1938, Radio Scripts of the NYC FTP, 1936–­39, FTP, WPA, box 385, RG 69, NAB II. 26. Annette T. Rubenstein, “The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An Historical Overview,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of US Communism, ed. Michael Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 248. 27. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the US (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 224–­25. 28. Flanagan, Arena, 7. 29. Flanagan frequently traveled to learn about theater. When she was at Har­ vard and then abroad on a Guggenheim scholarship, she left her son Jack in her parents’ care. By the time she accepted the position of FTP direc­ tor, she had remarried the Vassar College classics professor and widower Philip H. Davis, who cared for her son along with his three children from a previous marriage. For more biographic information on Flanagan, see her stepdaughter’s biography, Joanne Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theater (New York: Knopf, 1988); and Quinn, Furious Improvisation, 27–­48. 30. Hallie Flanagan, Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theatre (New York: Coward-­McCann, 1928), 13, 18, 146. 31. Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, Can You Hear Their Voices? A Play of Our Time (Poughkeepsie, NY: Experimental Theater of Vassar Col­ lege, 1931), 1, 90. 32. Mathews, The Federal Theater, 21. 33. Flanagan, Arena, 184. 34. Flanagan quoted in Hazel Huffman testimony, August 1938, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 1:784. Flanagan repeated the same statement in addressing an FTP summer workshop in 1937. Flanagan ad­ dress quoted in “First Federal Summer Theater: A Report,” in Federal Theater

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Magazine, ed. Pierre de Rohan, 4, Speeches and Publications, vol. 2, 1937, FTP (244/IV/2), Flanagan Papers. 35. Flanagan, Arena, 18, 112 (first quote), 28 (second quote). 36. Hallie Flanagan, “Congress Takes Stage,” NYT, August 20, 1939, Speeches and Publications on the FTP, Articles and Speeches, vol. 1 (25/IV/2), Flana­ gan Papers. 37. The FAP was also concentrated in New York in terms of staff (1,113 of 2,500 people) and funds ($16 of $35 million). But it was markedly smaller, and its community art centers engaged significantly more lay people than the FTP did. On the FTP, see Flanagan, Arena, 435. The dollar amount men­ tioned represents the costs through December 31, 1939. According to Fla­ nagan, the vast majority of this money went to labor costs. Only $4.2 mil­ lion nationally and $2.1 million in New York covered nonlabor expenses. In terms of the FAP, I have used McKinzie’s finding that 44.5 percent of all project artists in December 1937 were located in New York to determine my approximation of the size of the program. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 93; O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts, 56. 38. Quinn, Furious Improvisation, 111. 39. Mathews, The Federal Theater, 296. 40. Flanagan, Arena, 65. 41. Jacob Baker to Hallie Flanagan, January 18, 1936, Correspondence: The Liv­ ing Newspaper [1936, 42–­52], Conference with Eleanor Roosevelt at White House, re: Living Newspaper, Correspondence (7/I/2), Flanagan Papers. 42. Eleanor Roosevelt to Hallie Flanagan, “Phone Call Dictated by Memory,” January 21, 1936, Correspondence: The Living Newspaper [1936, 42–­52], Conference with ER, re: Living Newspaper, Correspondence (7/I/2), Flana­ gan Papers. 43. Aubrey Williams to Eleanor Roosevelt, January 23, 1936, Correspondence: The Living Newspaper [1936, 42–­52], Conference with ER, re: Living News­ paper, Correspondence, FTP (7/I/2), Flanagan Papers. Williams comments in this letter on what Baker learned while he was in New York. 44. Flanagan, Arena, 66–­67. For an example of press coverage of the event, see Stanley Burnshaw, “On Elmer Rice’s Resignation: Ethiopia Opening Planned for 1/23,” New Masses, February 4, 1936, 28–­29. 45. Quinn, Furious Improvisation, 69 46. Hallie Flanagan, “Talk to Regional Directors at Conference in Washington,” March 13–­14, 1936, 1, Speeches and Publications, vol. 1, 1935–­36, 24/IV/2, Articles and Speeches, Flanagan Papers. 47. Flanagan, Arena, 72. 48. There is some evidence to indicate that Liberty Deferred was not performed for aesthetic rather than political reasons. Play-­reading supervisor Ben Russak, who had a positive record of encouraging black writers and works that addressed racial problems, appears to have been dissatisfied with the

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script. Ben Russak to Emmet Lavery, January 11, 1939, Russak, Ben #1, box 181, RG 69, NAB II. For background on Russak, see Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Policy for Authentic Aesthetics: State Administrators and the Process of Racial Representation” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 2003), 4. 49. Cosgrove, introduction, xvii–­xxii. 50. Ibid., xiv. To read the play itself, see Mark Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938). 51. Flanagan, Arena, 202. 52. Mathews, The Federal Theater, 123. 53. For more information on the movie, see Tim Robbins, Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment (New York: Newmarket, 2000). 54. Denning, The Cultural Front, 295. 55. Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 190. 56. Ibid., 160. 57. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 99–­102. 58. Flanagan, Arena, 285. 59. Hallie Flanagan, “Theater and Geography: The Federal Theater Project’s Present and Future,” Magazine of Art 31, no. 8 (1938): 465, Speeches and Publications, vol. 2, 1937, Flanagan Papers. 60. See esp. E. P. Conkle, Prologue to Glory, in de Rohan, ed., Federal Theatre Plays: Prologue to Glory, One-­Third of a Nation, and Haiti, 1–­81. 61. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (1931; reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), preface and epilogue. 62. Fontaine and Black estimate that half a million or more adults and chil­ dren listened to Epic. In addition, 1.5 million schoolchildren in New York listened to the program. In 1937, the year that Epic first came out, 24.5 mil­ lion American households had radio sets. The national population in 1940 consisted of approximately 132 million people. Leo Fontaine and Ivan Black, “Data Re: ‘Epic of America,’” Epic of America (no. 2), General Correspondence of the Radio Division, 1936–­39, FTP, WPA, box 541, RG 69, NAB II. 63. Ibid. 64. Evan Roberts to Hallie Flanagan, “Report of Activities and Progress of the Radio Division of the Federal Theater, US, WPA,” January 28, 1938, Radio #2, National Office General Correspondence, 1935–­39, box 22, FTP, WPA, RG 69, NAB II. 65. See the documents in Epic of America #5, General Correspondence of the Radio Division, 1936–­39, FTP, WPA, box 541, RG 69, NAB II. 66. Department of Information, “Press Release, ‘Epic of America,’ ” January 5, 1938, NYC—­Radio—­Releases1937 (no. 1), Press Releases and Schedules of Broadcasts, 1936–­39, FTP, WPA, box 548, RG 69, NAB II.

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67. “American Legion,” in The Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), http://search.credoreference.com.ezproxy.stockton .edu:2048/content/entry/columency/american_legion/0. 68. Delphine Dale, “What the ‘Epic of America’ Has Taught Me about the Fu­ ture of America,” n.d., 1, 3–­4, Epic of America #2, General Correspondence of the Radio Division, 1936–­1939, FTP, WPA, box 541, RG 69, NAB II. 69. Leo Fontaine, “Postlogue,” in “Epic of America—­Script,” 2, The Epic of America, 5–­8, Radio Scripts of the NYC FTP, 1936–­39, FTP, WPA, box 387, RG 69, NAB II. 70. Quoted in ibid., 7–­8. 71. The FTP was the second largest (the Federal Music Project was the largest) and the most expensive of the relief efforts. Regarding the relative size of the various art projects, see the testimony of Lawrence S. Morris in Senate Committee on Education and Labor, A Bill to Provide for a Permanent Bureau of Fine Arts, S. 3296, March 1, 1938, 75 Cong., 3rd sess. vol. 20 (Washing­ ton, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1938), 156. Regarding relative expenditures, see Hopkins, Inventory, 73–­85. 72. Flanagan, Arena, 353, 361. 73. Ibid., 361. 74. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 56. 75. Alsberg did attempt to organize a literary magazine for works that federal writers created during their free time. American Stuff included a biting essay entitled “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” that Richard Wright wrote and later included in his autobiography Black Boy. Wright was among the ten federal writers whom the government briefly funded to write indepen­ dently. Other writers included Edward Dahlberg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sol Funaroff, Harry Kemp, Willard Maas, Claude McKay, Harry Roskolenko, Charlotte Wilder, and Anzia Yezierska. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 244–­45. 76. Hirsch, Portrait of America, chap. 2. 77. Some of the few contemporaneous publications that emerged from this endeavor include W. T. Couch, These Are Our Lives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939); and Benjamin Botkin, Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). 78. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 54–­56. 79. Henry G. Alsberg testimony, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 4, pt. 3:2888–­89. 80. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 56. 81. Henry G. Alsberg testimony, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 4, pt. 3:2902. 82. Henry G. Alsberg testimony, February 8, 1938, US Congress, House Com­ mittee on Patents, Department of Science, Art, and Literature, 75th Cong., 3rd sess. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1938), 136.

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83. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration, 729. 84. Jerrold Hirsch writes about Kittredge’s influence on Botkin and Lomax. The evidence for his influence on Alsberg is more circumstantial. But Alsberg presumably encountered him when studying in Harvard’s English Depart­ ment. Jerrold Hirsch, “Folklore in the Making: B. A. Botkin,” Journal of American Folklore 100, no. 3 ( January–­March 1987): 9. 85. Arthur Huff Fauset, introduction to Sterling A. Brown: A UMUM Tribute, ed. Black History Museum Committee (Philadelphia: Black History Museum Committee, 1976), 5. 86. For example, John P. Davis, the executive secretary of the Joint Commit­ tee on National Recovery, wrote Alsberg about such concerns and rec­ ommended a meeting with black scholars in the field similar to the one Alsberg held at Howard to assure the inclusion of African Americans in his project. Hirsch, Portrait of America, 29. 87. Reddick’s original idea had been to hire five hundred white-­collar blacks and to interview the entire ex-­slave population. FERA clearly fell short on those tasks. Norman Yetman, “The Background of the Slave Narrative Col­ lection,” American Quarterly 19 (1967): 542. 88. Charles Spurgeon Johnson, “A Proposal for a Regional (or National) Project under the Federal Writers’ Project (Utilizing Negro Personel),” LBS Archi­ val Products, 1989, to Replace Irreparably Deteriorated Original Written in 1930, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library, New York City. Note that the date on this document (1989) is inaccurate since the Federal Writers’ Project was created in 1935. Thus, I assume that Johnson wrote the piece in 1935 or 1936, before Alsberg hired Brown and developed the Negro Culture in America series. 89. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 2 (Fall 1937), in Richard Wright: A Reader, ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 43–­46. 90. Hurston wrote “Art and Such” for the FWP; however, it was not published until 1999. See Zora Neale Hurston, “Art and Such,” in Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project, ed. Pamela Bordelon (New York: Norton, 1999), 142. 91. See, e.g., Sterling A. Brown to Mr. Munson, “Description of the Writers’ Project Activity concerning the Negro,” January 9, 1940, Negro Studies, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 92. Jerre Mangione, “Sterling A. Brown and the Federal Writer’s Project,” in Black History Museum Committee, ed., Sterling A. Brown, 15. 93. “Supplementary Instructions #9-­E to the American Guide Manual Folklore Stories from Ex-­Slaves,” April 22, 1937, in Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives, Administrative Files: A Folk History of Slavery in the Unites States from Interviews with Former Slaves, October 25, 2004 (EBook #13857).

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Originally typewritten records prepared by the FWP, LOC project, WPA, Washington, DC, 1941, http://www.archive.org/stream/slavenarrativesa 13847gut/13847.txt. 94. Henry G. Alsberg to State Directors of the Writers’ Project, July 30, 1937, in Rawick, ed., The American Slave, 1:173–­74. 95. “Notes by an Editor on Dialect Usage in Accounts by Interviews with Ex-­Slaves,” June 20, 1937, in Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives, Administrative Files: A Folk History of Slavery in the Unites States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Oct. 25, 2004 (EBook #13857). Originally typewritten records prepared by the FWP, LOC project, WPA, Washington, DC, 1941, http://www.archive.org/stream/slavenarrativesa13847gut/13847 .txt. For evidence that Brown was the author of this document, see Alsberg to State Directors, June 20, 1937, in Rawick, ed., The American Slave, 1:174; Penkower, The Federal Writers’ Project, 144–­45; and Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (Westport, CT: Green­ wood, 1985), 73. 96. Ken Lawrence, introduction to Rawick, ed., The American Slave, suppl. ser. 1, 6, pt. 1:xcv. For more on the Slave Narrative Collection, see Sharon Ann Musher, “‘Contesting the Way the Almighty Wants It’: Crafting Memories of Ex-­Slaves in the Slave Narrative Collection,” American Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 1–­31. 97. Federal Writers’ Project, Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State (1938; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 30. 98. Hirsch, Portrait of America, 127. 99. No record of the actual memo is available in the public record. The Na­ tional Archives, however, has a collection of responses to Alsberg’s request. See “Letters on Negroes Employed,” Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 100. George Cronyn to Myrtle Miles, Birmingham, AL, November 5, 1936, General Letter File (Outgoing) by State, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 101. Henry Alsberg to Eudora Ramsey Richardson, VA, May 15, 1939, 4, General Letter File (Outgoing) by State, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertain­ ing to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 102. Although Brown’s letter is inaccessible, its content is evident in Montgom­ ery’s letter to Alsberg (see n. 103 below) and also through the work itself. 103. Mabel Montgomery to Alsberg, SC, May 4, 1937, Beaufort, SC File, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II; Mabel Montgom­ ery, “Original Beaufort Article,” n.d., 6–­7, ibid.

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104. Brown to Alsberg, n.d. (probably May 14, 1937), Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 105. Mabel Montgomery, Beaufort South Carolina Study—­Beaufort and the Sea Islands, prepared by Federal Writer’s Project, Works Progress Administration (Savannah, GA: Review Printing Co., 1938). 106. Ina Sizer Cassidy to Alsberg, NM, January 13, 1936, Reports and Miscella­ neous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 107. Bordelon, ed., Go Gator, 14–­17. 108. Myrtle Miles to Alsberg, January 9, 1936, Letters on Negroes Employed, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 109. Henry G. Alsberg testimony, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 4, pt. 3:2903. 110. Mathews, The Federal Theater, 302; Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 99–­100. 111. This is a rough estimate based on my count of the numbers of blacks em­ ployed in January 1936 according to documents in the folder “Letters on Negroes Employed.” I then added fifteen to that number to account for the all black units in Virginia since the letter from the Virginia Writers’ Project indicated that there were no blacks hired. According to Gary McDonogh, there were 106 blacks in the FWP in 1937. The project mostly employed blacks in New York, Illinois, and Louisiana. Texas had a black assistant edi­ tor, but his peers labeled him insolent for revising depictions of blacks. Jim Crow segregation led to the exclusion of blacks from certain states’ writers’ project, such as that in Georgia, and to the formation of separate racial units when blacks were hired in the South. See “Correspondence in Letters on Negroes Employed,” Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II; Pamela G. Bordelon, “The Federal Writers’ Project’s Mirror to America: The Florida Reflection” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1991), 134; and The Florida Negro: A Federal Writers’ Project Legacy, ed. Gary McDonough ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), xiv. 112. The full list of states with all-­black units is as follows: Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. 113. For the product of that effort, see Writer’s Project Virginia, The Negro in Virginia (New York: Hastings House, 1940). 114. Sterling Brown, Weekly Progress Report, April 20, 1940, Negro Studies, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 115. Hirsch, Portrait of America, 213–­14.

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116. In 1940, the FWP published Social and Economic Survey of Negroes in Little Rock, Arkansas (Little Rock, AK: Urban League, 1940); Cavalcade of the American Negro (Chicago: Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, 1940); Drums and Shadows (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940); The Negroes of Nebraska (Omaha, NE: Woodruff Printing Co., 1940); and Writer’s Project Virginia, The Negro in Virginia. Later project publications regarding African Americans include The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626–­ 1940, ed. Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby (New York: Praeger, 1967); McDonogoh, ed., The Florida Negro; and The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh, ed. Laurence A. Glasco (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). For records of other unpublished research projects on black Americans, see Ronnie Clayton, “FWP for Blacks in LA,” Louisiana History 19, no. 3 (1978): 327–­35. 117. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), 3. 118. Federal Writers’ Project, Washington: City and Capital, American Guide Series (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1937), 90. 119. George Rawick, general introduction to Rawick, ed., The American Slave, ser. 1, 6, pt. 1:xxvi. 120. Jean Blackwell Hutson, foreword to Ottley and Weatherby, eds., The Negro in New York, vii. 121. James Baldwin, preface to ibid., xv. 122. Brown to Newsom, “Manuscript of ‘Negroes of NY,’ ” April 11, 1940, and “Negroes of NY,” April 11, 1940, Reports and Miscellaneous Records Pertaining to Negro Studies, 1936–­40, Records of the Central Office, FWP, WPA, box 2, RG 69, NAB II. 123. Musher, “ ‘Contesting the Way the Almighty Wants It,’ ” 3. 124. Federal Writers’ Project, Washington: City and Capital, 70, 71, 82, as com­ pared to Federal Writers’ Project, Washington DC: A Guide to the Nation’s Capital, 51–­59. 125. One of the primary exceptions to this story was the Massachusetts state guide, discussed in chapter 6. The New Jersey state guide also stirred sub­ stantial controversy. 126. Roy Emerson Stryker, “The FSA Collection of Photographs,” in Roy Emer­ son Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935–­1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 9, 7. 127. “Oral History Interview with Roy Emerson Stryker, 1963–­1965,” AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-­history-­interview-­roy -­emerson-­stryker-­12480. 128. Here I refer to the treatise written and photographed by the social reformer Jacob Riis. See Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1971). 129. Henry Adams, “Stryker, Roy Emerson,” American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-­01422.html.

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130. Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic, 1996), 266–­68. 131. Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 74. 132. Roy Emerson Stryker, “The Story of a Great Photo-­Documentarian: A Re­ vealing Autobiography Delivered as the First Frederick W. Brehm Lecture,” PSA Journal 17, no. 4 (April 1951): 182, reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 133. Nancy Wood, “Portrait of Stryker,” in Stryker and Wood, This Proud Land, 13. 134. Stryker, “The FSA Collection of Photographs,” 8. 135. “Oral History Interview with Roy Emerson Stryker,” 5. 136. Ewen, PR! pt. 3. 137. “Omaha—­John Vachon,” an annotated portfolio from Documenting America, ed. Carl Fleischhaur and Beverly Brannan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection /fsa/docchap2.html. For more on Vachon, see John Vachon’s America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II, ed. Miles Orvell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). 138. Dorothea Lange and Paul Shuster Taylor, “1939 Forward,” in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1969), 15. 139. Quoted in Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 126. 140. Dorothea Lange, “The Making of a Documentary Photographer: An Inter­ view Conducted by Suzanne Riess” (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1968), 181. 141. On the causes of her final termination, see Sharon Ann Musher, “Herself Reflected: The Status and Self-­Identity of Three Female Photographers and Their Representation of Gender” (honor’s thesis, Department of History, University of Michigan, 1994), 45. 142. Leslie Katz, “An Interview with Walker Evans,” Art in America, March–­April 1971, reprinted in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 360, 362, 364. 143. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 7; Alan Brinkley, Culture and Politics in the Great Depression (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1999), 19–­20. 144. Walker Evans, interview by Paul Cummings, New York, October 13, 1971, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/evans71 .htm. 145. “Editor’s Check List of Special Features,” Grand Central Palace, New York, reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 146. “How American People Live,” reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 147. For data illustrating the diversity of the nation, see “Population of Regions by Sex, Race, Age, and Nativity, 1790–­1970,” in US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, pt. 1 (Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, 1975), ser. A, 172–­94.

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148. An extensive literature on Migrant Mother already exists. For more informa­ tion, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 53–­67; Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination; and Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth. 149. Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein caricature, reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 150. “Oral History Interview with Arthur Rothstein, 1964 May 25,” AAA, http:// www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-­history-­interview-­arthur -­rothstein-­13317. 151. Ben Shahn, Russell Lee caricature, reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 152. Russell and Jean Lee interview, by Richard K. Doud, June 2, 1964, Austin, TX, 2, 29–­30 (quote), reel 3697, AAA. 153. Russell Lee, U.S. Camera One (1941), quoted in an adaptation of “A New Deal for the Arts,” an exhibit that was on display from March 28, 1997, through January 11, 1998, in the Rotunda of the National Archives Build­ ing in Washington, DC, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/new_deal_for _the_arts/rediscovering_america1.html. 154. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 66. 155. “Tenant Farmers—­Arthur Rothstein,” an annotated portfolio from Fleisch­ haur and Brannan, eds., Documenting America, http://www.loc.gov/pictures /collection/fsa/docchap5.html; Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941–­ 1943, ed. Maren Stange (New York: New Press, 2003). 156. Roy Emerson Stryker, “1939 Suggestions for Shooting Script on Cattle Industry,” reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 157. Styrker to Rothstein, “Some General Things to Watch for during Summer Travels,” ca. 1939, and Stryker to Marjorie Collins, July 15, 1942, reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 158. Stryker to Bubley, “A Set of Photographs Covering a Bus Trip,” 1942, reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 159. Esther Bubley, “A Greyhound Bus Trip from Louisville, Kentucky, to Memphis, Tennessee, and the Terminals,” September 1943, Digital ID: fsa 8d33444, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-­OWI, 1935–­45, American Memory, Library of Congress. 160. “Ella Watson, U.S. Government Charwoman—­Gordon Parks,” an anno­ tated portfolio from Fleischhaur and Brannan, eds., Documenting America, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/docchap7.html. 161. Gordon Parks, Choice of Weapons (1965; reprint, St. Paul: Minnesota Histori­ cal Society Press, 1986), 221–­22, 227–­28, 230–­31. 162. Natanson, The Black Image, 61, 217. 163. Interestingly, Edward Steichen included most of the photographs of African Americans documented in “How American People Live” in his edited portrayal of the exhibit in the U.S. Camera Annual. Six of the forty-­one pho­

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tographs he selected represented African Americans, and he even chose two of those photographs to accompany the introduction he wrote to the pub­ lished display. He presumably had more latitude as an independent curator working for a photography magazine than government employees had. See Edward Steichen, “The F.S.A. Photographers,” in U.S. Camera Annual, 1939, ed. T. J. Maloney (New York: William Morrow, 1938): 43–66. 164. Barbara Melosh persuasively argues that both the FTP and the Treasury’s Section of Fine Arts employed images, such as comradely wives and rebel­ lious girls, to affirm women’s activist roles while simultaneously idealizing domesticity. Thus, public art and theater, as she put it, “cast women in revised roles but retained them as supporting players in male narratives of work and politics.” My brief investigation of representations of gender by the Historical Section suggests similarities. In contrast to official representa­ tions of gender, a number of women on the Left, whom Michael Denning labels “panther women of the needle trades,” did provide alternatives to a traditionally gendered iconography. See Melosh, Engendering Culture, 232; and Denning, The Cultural Front, 136–­51. 165. In 1940, the total labor force was 56.1 million, including 41.9 million men and 14.2 million women. “Labor Force and Its Components: 1900 to 1947,” in US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, ser. D 1–­10, 126; “Labor Force, by Age and Sex: 1890 to 1970,” in ibid., ser. D 29–­41, 131. 166. Musher, “Herself Reflected,” chaps. 3–­4. 167. Robert Disraeli, review of “The Farm Security Administration,” in Photo Notes (New York: Photo League, May 1940), http://newdeal.feri.org/pn /pn540.htm. 168. Steichen, “The F.S.A. Photographers,” 47. 169. Reviews of “How American People Live,” reel 6, Stryker Papers, AAA. 170. “Oral History Interview with Roy Emerson Stryker,” 18. 171. Hartley E. Howe, “You Have Seen Their Pictures,” Survey Graphic 29, no. 4 (April 1, 1940): 27, http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/40b11.htm. 172. John Houseman, Run-­Through: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 257. 173. Alan Trachtenberg, “From Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Fleischhaur and Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 45–­49. 174. Adams, “Stryker, Roy Emerson.” C hapter five

1.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Artists Receive a Bill of Rights,” Section of Fine Arts Special Bulletin, March 17, 1941, Selected Documents from the Papers of President FDR concerning the Federal Arts Program, microfilmed at the FDR Library, June 1965, AAA.

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2.

Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91. 3. The cultural historian Joan Saab argued that the Federal Art Project’s direc­ tor, Holger Cahill, promoted this approach, which she calls a “pedagogy of artistic production,” to suggest that “making art would make good citizens.” Saab, For the Millions, 10. For more on the notion of a usable past, see Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past.” 4. Dewey, Art as Experience, 214 (quote), 47, 325. 5. Rubin, Constance Rourke and American Culture, 74–­78. 6. Quoted in Jerrold Hirsch, “Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folklore: The New Deal Precedent,” in Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, ed. Burt Feintuch (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 59. 7. As we have seen, Botkin, e.g., called collecting folklore “one road to social participation.” See Parnow et al., “Folklore and Folksay,” 11. 8. Parnow et al., “Folklore and Folksay,” 8, 13. 9. Banks, First-­Person America, xxiv. 10. Susman, Culture as History, 154. 11. George W. Stocking Jr., The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 162. 12. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 46; Margaret Mead, introduction to Benedict, Patterns of Culture, xi. 13. See, e.g., Caroline Ware, The Cultural Approach to History (New York: Colum­ bia University Press, 1940); and Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–­1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 141. 14. Kenneth J. Bindas, All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), chap. 9. 15. Art centers continued beyond the New Deal in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Sioux City, Iowa; Greenville, North Carolina; Salem, Oregon; Mobile, Alabama; Roswell, New Mexico; St. Louis, Missouri; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Victoria Marie Grieve, “Art as New Deal Experience: Progres­ sive Aesthetics and the New Deal Federal Art Project” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2004), 215. 16. For a relatively recent account of the South Side Community Art Cen­ ter, see Margaret Goss Burroughs, “Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center: A Personal Reflection,” in Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal, ed. John Franklin White (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1987), 131–­44. 17. Janelle Warren-­Findley, introduction to Charles Seeger and Margaret Valiant, “Journal of a Field Representative,” Ethnomusicology 24, no. 2 (May 1980): 169–­178, 174.

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18. Richard A. Reuss, “Folk Music and Social Conscience: The Musical Odyssey of Charles Seeger,” Western Folklore 38, no. 4 (October 1979): 224. 19. Charles Seeger, interview by David K. Dunaway, in David K. Dunaway, “Charles Seeger and Carl Sands: The Composers’ Collective Years,” Ethnomusicology 24, no. 2 (May 1980): 162–­63 (quote), 166–­67. For a general discussion of this transition among composers on the Left, see Robbie Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon,” People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–­1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), chap. 2. 20. Seeger interview, 167–­68. 21. Charles Seeger, foreword to Charles Seeger and Margaret Valiant, “Journal of a Field Representative,” Ethnomusicology 24, no. 2 (May 1980): 178–­80, 179. 22. Margaret Valiant, interview by Cheryl T. Evans, October 25, 1979, 4, quoted in Warren-­Findley, introduction, 173. 23. Charles Seeger and Margaret Valiant, “Journal of a Field Representative,” Ethnomusicology 24, no. 2 (May 1980): 180–­210, 182 ( January 31, 1936). 24. James Crabtree, “A Homestead Album” (Crossville, TN: Cumberland County Playhouse, 1984), 52, Margaret Valiant Papers: Resettlement Administration, Folder 2b, Special Collections, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Oxford, MS. 25. Seeger and Valiant, “Journal of a Field Representative,” 193 (April 25, 1936). 26. Ibid., 194 (April 25, 1936). 27. Ibid., 196 (May 9, 1936). 28. Charles Seeger, “An American Musicologist” (University of California at Los Angeles, Oral History Program, 1972, typescript), 254, quoted in Seeger and Valiant, “Journal of a Field Representative,” 209 n. 6. 29. Warren-­Findley, introduction, 176. 30. Ibid., 175. 31. Cahill later claimed to have been born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1893. The artist and curator Wendy Jeffers, however, persuasively argues that he was actually born in 1887 and suggests that he presented himself as six years younger in order to compensate for his lack of formal schooling. Wendy Jeffers, “Holger Cahill and American Art,” Archives of American Art Jour­ nal 31, no. 4 (1991): 4–­5. 32. The primary sources for Cahill’s life between 1908 and 1913 are his oral accounts and his novels. Despite his claims, Jeffers offers a compelling argument that Cahill did not actually travel to China. Ibid., 4; Holger Ca­ hill, “The Reminiscences of Holger Cahill,” interview by Joan Pring, 1957, 1–­256, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York. 33. At Dewey’s eightieth birthday, Cahill acknowledged his debt. He argued that his program enacted Dewey’s experiential approach to art by creating

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a “sweeping renaissance of democratic interest in American art which runs through every economic level of our society from the richest to poorest.” Holger Cahill, “American Resources,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 35. 34. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), chap. 6, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/833/833-­h/833-­h.htm. 35. Quoted in Alix Sandra Schnee, “John Cotton Dana, Edgar Holger Cahill, and Dorothy C. Miller: Three Art Educators” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univer­ sity, 1987), 56. See also Kevin Mattson, “The Librarian as Secular Minister to Democracy: The Life and Ideas of John Cotton Dana,” Libraries and Culture 35, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 523. 36. Carl A. Hanson, “Dana’s Donkey,” Libraries and Culture 26, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 605. 37. Holger Cahill, “Conference on Community Art Centers,” August 27, 1938, ser. 3.7, reel NDA 15, frame 870, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/container/viewer/Reports183637. See also John Cotton Dana, American Art: How It Can Be Made to Flourish (Woodstock, VT: Elm Tree, 1929). 38. Mattson, “The Librarian as Secular Minister to Democracy,” 524. 39. For example, he argued that the government should be building art centers across the country instead of censoring art and granting commissions only to a select few. Holger Cahill, interview by J. Morse and P. Pollack, April 12–­ 15, 1960, 36, AAA. 40. Cahill, “Reminiscences,” 339–­40 (quote), 338; Cahill interview (Morse and Pollack), 36. 41. Holger Cahill, “Craft as Art,” New Hampshire talk, n.d., ser. 4.1, reel 5290, frames 1140–­41, 1143, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu /collections/container/viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic-­Crafts-­as-­Art-­emph-­New -­Hampshire-­Talk183898. 42. Ibid., frames 1131, 1144. 43. Holger Cahill, “History of Support of American Art,” ser. 4.1, reel 5290, frame 1083, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections /container/viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic-­History-­of-­Support-­of-­American -­Art-­emph183894. 44. Cahill, “Craft as Art,” 1131. 45. Lincoln Rothschild, “Index of American Design,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 195. For more information on the Index of American Design, see Clayton, Stillinger, and Doss, eds., Drawing on America’s Past. 46. Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 45. 47. Defenbacher, “Art in Action,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 183. 48. Holger Cahill, “Child Art,” 1938, ser. 4.1, reel 5290, frame 1357, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/-­emph -­render-­italic-­Child-­Art-­emph—­183910. 49. Holger Cahill, untitled document, n.d., ser. 3.12, reel NDA 15, frame 527, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer /Lectures-­and-­Essays183709.

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50. Holger Cahill, “Oregon, WPA Community Art Centers,” ser. 3.4, reel 5290, frame 432, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Oregon-­emph-­render-­italic-­WPA-­Community-­Art-­Centers-­emph 183573. 51. Thomas C. Parker, “Community Art Centers” (lecture presented to the general session of the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, New Orleans, May 4, 1937), ser. 4.2, reel 5291, frame 226, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/-­emph -­render-­italic-­Community-­Art-­Centers-­emph-­by-­Thomas-­C-­Parker—­183941. 52. Leon Koury (supervisor, Mississippi Art Project), “Art in the National Defense,” January 27, 1941, ser. 4.1, reel 5290, frame 1545, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/-­emph-­render -­italic-­Art-­in-­the-­National-­Defense-­emph-­Radio-­Talk183923. 53. Parker, “Community Art Centers,” frame 226. 54. Holger Cahill, “Use of Art in War,” January 15, 1942, Dartmouth College, ser. 4.1, reel 5291, frames 84–­85, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu /collections/container/viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic-­Use-­of-­Art-­in-­War-­emph -­Dartmouth-­College183928. 55. Thomas C. Parker, “WPA/FAP and Negro Art” (lecture presented at the general conference of the thirty-­eighth annual meeting of the American Teachers’ Association, Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, AL, July 29, 1938), ser. 3.1, reel 1105, frame 617, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu /collections/container/viewer/WPA-­FAP-­and-­Negro-­Art183364. 56. There were two exceptions to racially segregated art centers: one in Harlem, New York, and the other in St. Louis, Missouri. 57. Parker, “WPA/FAP and Negro Art,” frame 617. 58. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 143. 59. “Art for Our Sake,” Time, September 5, 1938, ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frames 314–­15, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Reports183635. Note that back issues of Time do not verify the publication of this article on the specified date. 60. Nan Sheets, interview by Richard K. Doud, June 4, 1964, Oklahoma City, OK, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts /sheets64.htm. 61. Thomas C. Parker, “Development of Community Art Centers,” Febru­ ary 1940, ser. 3.3, reel 1106, frame 205, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa .si.edu/collections/container/viewer/1939-­Changeover-­and-­After183415; Lectures and Essays, n.d., ser. 3.12, reel NDA 15, frame 526, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Lectures-­and -­Essays183709; Holger Cahill, “ ‘Independents’: Society of Indepen­ dent Artists,” n.d., ser. 4.1, reel 5290, frame 1108, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic -­Independents-­emph-­Society-­of-­Independent-­Artists183896. 62. Saab, For the Millions, 59.

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63. “The Negro and Federal Project No. 1,” Negro Theatre, 1939, #1, National Office General Correspondence, 1935–­39, FTP, WPA, box 16, RG 69, NAB II. 64. The cultural historian Jonathan Harris used the aspirations of psychologists and social workers to argue that social control and the reshaping of Ameri­ cans’ behavior lay at the heart of the New Deal art projects. Neither the national administrators who sought to provide creative experiences nor the lay people who eagerly participated in them, however, would have agreed with such an interpretation. The enthusiasm that lay people expressed to­ ward such opportunities, in particular, belies the notion that the art centers shaped citizens into something other than what they sought to be or to become. Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, chap. 3. 65. Quoted in “What the Art Center Means to Salem,” n.d., ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frame 331, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections /container/viewer/Reports183638. 66. Irving J. Marantz, “The Artist as a Social Worker,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 198. 67. “Radio Interview with Mary Hutchinson, Technical Supervisor of Painting and Drawing on the Art Teaching Staff of the WPA,” August 12, [1936–­39?], ser. 3.8, reel 1107, frame 777, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu /collections/container/viewer/Art-­Teaching183639. 68. Holger Cahill, “Women’s Role in Art,” May 24, 1936, ser. 4.1, reel 5920, frame 1206, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections /container/viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic-­Women-­s-­Role-­in-­Art-­emph-­Women -­s-­Democratic-­Club183902. 69. Anita Brenner, “The City Child Paints Life,” New York Times, December 19, 1937, 123 (ProQuest 102137276). 70. Ellen P. O’Bryan, “Art in Medicine,” Hygiene, May 1939, ser. 3.8, reel 1107, frame 742, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Art-­Teaching183639. 71. Alexander R. Stavenitz, “The Therapy of Art,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 202. 72. Frank J. Curran, “Art and the Problem Child,” n.d., ser. 3.8, reel 1107, frame 747, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Art-­Teaching183639. 73. Gwendolyn Bennett, “The Harlem Community Art Center,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 214. 74. Parker, “Development of Community Art Centers,” frame 208; John Frank­ lin White, “The Walker Art Center: A Crowning Achievement,” in White, ed., Art in Action, 21. 75. Brenner, “The City Child Paints Life,” 122. 76. Untitled document, n.d., 1939 ser. 3.3, reel 1105, frame 1212, Cahill Pa­ pers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Memoranda -­General-­and-­Program-­Descriptions183424.

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77. Charlotte H. Upton, “A W.P.A. Art Project Brings Water to the Desert,” n.d., ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frame 169, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu /collections/container/viewer/Reports183632. 78. “What the Art Center Means to Salem,” 331. 79. Bennett, “The Harlem Community Art Center,” 214. 80. Upton, untitled document, 169. 81. Thaddeus Clapp (state supervisor, Massachusetts FAP), “Art within Reach,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 206. 82. Harry Kronenberg to FDR, n.d., ser. 3.1, reel 1108, frame 941, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/WPA-­FPA-­Support -­of183366. 83. Quoted in O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts, 105. 84. Bennett, “The Harlem Community Art Center,” 214. 85. Opal Fleckenstein, interview by Dorothy Bestor, November 19–­20, 1965, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/flecke65 .htm. 86. Quoted in O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts, 105. 87. Lawrence A. Jones, “The New Orleans WPA/FAP,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 198. 88. Bennett, “The Harlem Community Art Center,” 215. 89. Defenbacher to Thomas C. Parker, February 2, 1939, ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frame 324, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Reports183638. 90. Quoted in Saab, For the Millions, 64. 91. The Oklahoma administrator, Nan Sheets, did not actually send the young man home. “You’re going back on the next train,” she remembered telling him, “unless I have an assurance from you that whatever you’ve done you’re through with and you’re not going to do any more. . . . I never had any more trouble with him but he didn’t like me.” Sheets interview. 92. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 143; Saab, For the Millions, 64. 93. Another example is Tennessee, where civic and artistic leaders sought to use government funding to support regional artists and art organizations rather than, as Cahill had wanted, to democratize creative experiences. Helen Ann Beckstrom Townsend, “Ideology and Government Participation in the Arts: The WPA FAP in TN” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1985), 160. 94. Sue Ann Kendall, “The Spokane Art Center,” in White, ed., Art in Action, 105–­9. 95. Sheets interview. 96. Fleckenstein interview. 97. Currell, The March of Spare Time, 186. 98. Susan Ray Euler, “Art for a Democracy: The WPA’s Art Education Programs in Minnesota” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1990), 274, 277, 298, 299, 302.

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99. Quoted in Dan E. Burke, “The Utah State Art Center,” in White, ed., Art in Action, 156. 100. Koury, “Art in the National Defense.” 101. Holger Cahill, “Role of Art in the Community,” People’s Art Center Asso­ ciation, May 5, 1941, ser. 4.1, reel 5291, frame 78, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic -­Role-­of-­Art-­in-­the-­Community-­emph-­People-­s-­Art-­Center-­Association 183926. 102. Holger Cahill, “U.S. Government Art Projects, 1945,” ser. 4.1, reel 5291, frame 128, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/-­emph-­render-­italic-­U-­S-­Government-­Art-­Projects-­emph 183930. 103. Cahill, “Use of Art in War.” 104. Cahill, “U.S. Government Art Projects, 1945,” 128. 105. “The Arts Unite,” NYT, January 11, 1942, X7, ProQuest (106243053). 106. Jayne Hazleton Campbell, “Oklahoma City Museum of Art,” in Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Soci­ ety, 2007), http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/o/ok029 .html. 107. Sheets interview. 108. These figures are based on surveys with two hundred former members of the FAP and the general files of more than eighteen hundred previous art workers. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts, 82. C hapter six

1.

New York Journal America, February 9, 1934, in Leuchtenberg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 123. 2. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 146. 3. “Culture or Camouflage?” WP, September 9, 1935, 6, ProQuest (150690305). 4. “Republicans Call President Waster,” NYT, November 13, 1935, 8, ProQuest (101310584). 5. “Republicans Flay Waste,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1935, 4, Pro­ Quest (163416869). 6. J. Richard Piper, Ideologies and Institutions: American Conservative and Liberal Governance (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 39. 7. Quoted in Davis, “Why an Artists’ Congress?” 8. Alfred Sinks, “The Artists Fight Hearst,” New Masses, October 8, 1935, 20. 9. Harold M. Finley, “Boondoggling,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1935, A4, ProQuest (164535345). 10. “An Open Faced Letter to the WPA,” CDT, November 23, 1935, 12, Pro­ Quest (181695015). 11. “50 of WPA’s Musicians Play Only Checkers,” CDT, December 21, 1935, 1, ProQuest (181731531).

264

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12. “Shake Up in WPA Drama,” CDT, December 21, 1935, 4, ProQuest (181731531). 13. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 138; “WPA Rackets War Pushed on 3 Fronts,” NYT, November 23, 1935, 2, ProQuest (101277878). 14. “WPA Sends Out Its Own Squad of US Sleuths,” CDT, October 23, 1935, 9, ProQuest (181680857). 15. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 138. 16. “Quarter of WPA Arts Aid Cut Off,” NYT, December 21, 1935, 1, ProQuest (101232496); “WPA to Reorganize Drastically,” NYT, December 29, 1935, 1, ProQuest (101253482). 17. “WPA Likely to Oust 100 Who Shun Oath,” NYT, January 9, 1936, Pro­ Quest (101996673); “WPA Pay to Go on as Men Hunt Jobs,” NYT, March 7, 1936, 5, ProQuest (101965208); “Ridder Will Drop 20,000 from WPA,” NYT, January 8, 1936, 7, ProQuest (101626061). 18. “New Charges Spur Inquiries by WPA,” NYT, May 22, 1936, 4, ProQuest (101863200). 19. “A New Administrator,” NYT, August 5, 1936, 18, ProQuest (101820240). 20. Audrey McMahon, “A General View of the WPA FAP in NYC and State,” in O’Connor, ed., New Deal Art Projects, 56; Theodore Draper, “Roosevelt and the WPA,” New Masses, December 22, 1936, 15. 21. “The 40,000 Lay Off Threat,” Art Front 2, no. 5 (April 1936): 3. 22. “WPA Inquiry Asked, Hinting Delay on Relief,” WP, March 10, 1936, 2, ProQuest (150772311). 23. “Hopkins Denies WPA Politics; 2 Inquires Set,” WP, April 3, 1936, X7, ProQuest (150826042); “Politics,” CDT, March 22, 1936, B8, ProQuest (181752758). 24. “The W.P.A. Scandals,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1936, A4, ProQuest (164542793). 25. For examples, see ibid.; and “Hopkins Denies WPA Politics,” X7. 26. “Politics.” 27. Hopkins to Mr. Eugene S. Leggett, December 1936, ser. 2, reel 5285, frame 1302, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Correspondence183200. 28. “White Haired Boy,” Time, July 10, 1939; “New Charges Spur Inquiries by WPA,” 4. 29. “Hearings on $1,500,000,000 for Relief to Start This Week,” WP, April 6, 1936, 1, ProQuest (150768176). 30. Quoted in “WPA Becomes a Leading Issue in the Campaign,” NYT, Octo­ ber 11, 1936, E3, ProQuest (101615700). 31. “Avers Democrats Use Federal Funds,” NYT, May 18, 1936, 2, ProQuest (101870037). 32. “Oral History Interview with Arthur Rothstein.” 33. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 239–­42.

265

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34. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Ox­ ford University Press, 1973), 22–­23. 35. Howe, “You Have Seen Their Pictures.” 36. Triple A Plowed Under, in Federal Theatre Plays: Triple A Plowed Under, Power, and Spirochete, ed. Pierre de Rohan (New York: De Capo Press, 1973), 1–­57. 37. “Play by WPA on Red Leader Brings Protests,” WP, March 15, 1936, 8, Pro­ Quest (150859796). 38. According to Flanagan, the actors’ opposition to performing Triple A re­ sulted from a fear that audiences would not enjoy it rather than a concern that the story was Communist or propagandistic. In the introduction to a publication of the play’s script, she recalled having convinced the rebel­ ling actors to try the play by arguing that people were attracted to factually based formats such as The March of Time. Hallie Flanagan, introduction to de Rohan, ed., Federal Theatre Plays: Triple A Plowed Under, Power, and Spirochete, ix. 39. William H. Humphrey testimony, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 1:829. 40. Adolph Pinkus to James J. Davis, n.d., quoted in James J. Davis, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1930, 84, pt. 3:5697–­98. 41. William O. Lucas to Henry Alsberg, n.d., quoted in “McCoy Is Dismissed in WPA Writer Row,” NYT, February 13, 1936, 21, ProQuest (101962703). 42. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, chap. 5. 43. Ibid., 164–­65, 83, 161 (quote), 164–­65. 44. “Relief Money Well Spent,” Sharon (PA) Herald, April 24, 1936, quoted in James J. Davis, Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 2nd sess., 1936, 80, pt. 6: 6165. 45. James J. Davis, Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 2nd sess., 1936, 80, pt. 6: 5697. 46. “WPA Drops 3,000; Many More to Go,” NYT, November 24, 1936, 13, Pro­ Quest (101675581). 47. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8. For information on the Artists’ Union, see Monroe, “The Artists’ Union of New York,” 17–­20; and Tyler, “Artists Respond to the Great Depression.” 48. Draper, “Roosevelt and the WPA,” 14. 49. “WPA Groups Agree to Non-­Strike Plan,” NYT, December 16, 1936, 23. 50. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8. 51. Hallie Flanagan, “Certain Human Rights,” speech to the American Theatre Council, New York, May 28, 1937, 1, Speeches and Publications, vol. 2, 1937, box 24, ser. IV, subser. 2 (24/IV/2), FTP, Hallie Flanagan Papers. 52. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 99. 53. Defenbacher to Thomas C. Parker, February 2, 1939, ser. 3.7, reel 1107, frame 324, Cahill Papers, AAA, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container /viewer/Reports183638.

266

N o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 2 – 1 8 5

54. “Mayor Takes Hand in WPA Music Row,” NYT, December 3, 1935, 32; “WPA Music Strike Settled by Mayor,” NYT, December 5, 1935, 30. 55. Henry G. Alsberg testimony, December 6, 1938, in Investigation of Un-­ American Propaganda Activities, 4, pt. 3:2902. 56. “Topics of the Times,” NYT, August 22, 1937, E8, ProQuest (107505397). 57. Notes from Massachusetts Globe, 20 August 1937, Comments, PI-­57, Records of Henry G. Alsberg, Sept 1935–­June 1939, Records of the Federal Writers’ Project, Records of the Central Office, WPA, box 1, RG 69, NAB II. 58. “WPA’s Book on Massachusetts Stirs State Ire,” CDT, August 20, 1937, 12, ProQuest (181934539). 59. “Topics of the Times,” E8. 60. Lauriston Bullard, “Fight on WPA Book Arouses Bay State,” NYT, August 29, 1937, 62, ProQuest (102236456). 61. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8. 62. Flanagan, “Certain Human Rights,” 1. 63. Monroe, “Artists on the Barricade,” 22. 64. The bills for publicly sponsored art include the Wagner Bill (S. 2642), the two Coffee Bills (H.R. 8239 and H.R. 9102), the Pepper Bill (S. 3296), the two Sirovich Bills (H.J. Res. 79 and 671), the Gasque Bill (HR 1521), the Moser Bill (HR 6705), the McGranary Bill (HR 8132), and the O’Connell Bill for Musicians (HR 6958). 65. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 184. 66. The bills were the first Sirovich Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 79), the Coffee Bill (H.R. 8239), the Pepper Bill (S. 3296), and the second Coffee Bill (H.R. 9102). Other institutions participating in the consortium opposed to such bills included the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the American Water Color Society, the Society of American Art­ ists, the Architectural League of New York, the National Sculpture Society, the New York Water Color Club, the National Society of Mural Painters, the Brooklyn Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the American group the Société des Architectes Diplômé par le Gouvernement, the Art Commission Associates, the New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the New York Chapter of the American Artists’ Pro­ fessional League, the American Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers, and the Westchester County Society of Architects. 67. Arthur F. Brinckerhoff testimony, February 7, 1938, House Committee on Patents, Department of Science, Art, and Literature, 72. 68. “Federal Bureau of Arts Opposed,” NYT, February 13, 1938, 43, ProQuest (102373862). 69. Walter Damrosch testimony, March 2, 1938, House Committee on Patents, Department of Science, Art, and Literature, 173. 70. “Damrosch Renews Attack on Art Bill,” NYT, April 11, 1938, 13, ProQuest (102654459).

267

N o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 6 – 1 9 0

71. Kate Oglesby, “The Great American Theater ‘On Its Way,’” quoted in Clifton A. Woodrum, “Extension of Remarks,” Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 13:2683. 72. Robert G. Allen, “Extension of Remarks: W.P.A. Writers’ Project—­Workers Alliance—­Shades of Burns, Carlyle, Thomas Chatterton, and Dr. Johnson,” Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 13:2827. 73. Ibid. 74. Kate Oglesby, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 13: 2683. 75. “Booth Tarkington’s Views on Proposed Fine Arts Bureau,” quoted in Louis Ludlow, “Extension of Remarks: Letter from Famous Author,” Congressional Record, 75th Cong., 3rd sess., 1938, 83, pt. 10:1648. 76. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 245. 77. Sidney Olson, “House Heckler ‘Given the Gate,’ ” WP, June 16, 1938, 1, ProQuest (151045288). 78. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism during the New Deal (Lexing­ ton: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), 324. 79. Richard B. Wigglesworth, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 4:3588. 80. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism, 126. 81. John W. Malsberger, From Obstruction to Moderation: The Transformation of Senate Conservatism (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 12. 82. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: Uni­ versity of North Carolina Press, 1994), 153. 83. Frank R. Kent, “The Great Game of Politics,” Wall Street Journal, Novem­ ber 9, 1938, 4, ProQuest (131847629). For an in-­depth analysis of contro­ versies surrounding the relationship between politics and relief in Ken­ tucky, see Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, chap. 6. 84. See, e.g., “Asks Senate WPA Inquiry,” NYT, March 10, 1936, 2. 85. Joseph W. Bailey, Congressional Record, 75th Cong., 3rd sess., 1938, 83, pt. 2:2304–­7. 86. Ibid., 2305. 87. Ibid., 2306. 88. “WPA’s Dramatic License,” WP, February 2, 1938, X8, ProQuest (151091701). 89. Gary Gerstle, America Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 159. 90. Martin Dies, Trojan Horse in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940), 298. See also Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-­Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 43. Note that Trojan Horse was actually written by Edward F. Sullivan, a prominent fellow traveler who became the FBI’s chief investigator before he was dismissed, in September 1938, for having spied for the anti-­Semitic Railway Audit and Inspection Co.

268

N o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 1 – 1 9 5

91. O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-­Americans, 56. 92. William Gellerman, Martin Dies (1944; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 14. 93. Martin Dies, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 7: 7570. 94. J. Parnell Thomas, Radio Address, September 12, 1938, 8, 2nd Dies, Records of the FTP, National Office General Correspondence, 1935–­39, WPA, box 6, RG 69, NAB II. 95. “Federal Theatre Held Un-­American,” NYT, September 13, 1938, 28, Pro­ Quest (102408403). 96. Henry G. Alsberg testimony, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 4, pt. 3:2906. 97. Hallie Flanagan testimony, December 6, 1938, in Investigation of Un-­ American Propaganda Activities, 4, pt. 3:2838–­85. 98. “Brief Containing Detailed Answers to Charges Made by Witnesses Who Appeared Before the Special Committee to Investigate Un-­American Activi­ ties House of Representatives,” 1938, FTP, WPA, box 6, RG 69. 99. Sallie Saunders testimony, August 20, 1938, in Investigation of Un-­American Propaganda Activities, 1:858. 100. Virgil Van Cleve to Harold Hecht, August 26, 1938, in “Brief Containing Detailed Answers to Charges,” exhibit 42, 3. 101. John Soby notarized statement, August 25, 1938, in ibid., exhibit 41. 102. Harold Hecht to George Kondolf, August 29, 1938, in ibid., exhibit 42, 1–­2. 103. Benjamin Levine to George Kondolf, September 2, 1938, in ibid., exhibit 42, 4. 104. According to Flanagan, Dies’s committee had promised her that it would distribute the brief in Congress. Flanagan, Arena, 346. 105. Robert Reynolds, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 8:8089. For other repetitions of the Saunders story in Congress, see also Clare Eugene Hoffman, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 7:7234–­35. 106. D. A. Saunders, “The Dies Committee: First Phase,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1939): 224. 107. Raymond P. Brandt, “The Dies Committee: An Appraisal,” Atlantic Monthly 165 (February 1940): 232. 108. Steuart Henderson Britt and Selden C. Menefee, “Did the Publicity of the Dies Committee in 1938 Influence Public Opinion?” Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 3 ( July 1939): 449. 109. Ibid., 456–­57. 110. Robert C. Albright, “WPA to Get Speedy Help; Investigation May Follow,” WP, December 30, 1938, X1, ProQuest (150959582). 111. “Battle Brews on Roosevelt’s WPA Demands,” WP, March 15, 1939, 2, Pro­ Quest (151218109).

269

N o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 5 – 1 9 8

112. Turner Catledge, “Inquiry into WPA Is Asked in House,” NYT, March 17, 1939, 1, ProQuest (102843765). 113. “House Votes Sweeping WPA Inquiry,” WP, March 28, 1939, 1, ProQuest (151198388). 114. Adolph Joachim Sabath, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 7:7223ff. See also “WPA Inquiry Wins Approval of Rules Group,” WP, March 23, 1939, 2, ProQuest (151198919); and “Investigating WPA,” NYT, March 24, 1939, 20, ProQuest (102934367). 115. Flanagan, Arena, 348. 116. The other two chief sources of abuse were the “improvement of private property at public expense . . . and padded sponsors’ contributions.” See Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration: Hearings Before the United States House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee Acting under House Resolution 130, 76th Cong., 3rd sess., pt. 4 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1940), 4 (May 15, 1940). 117. Oscar Karl Goll, in ibid., 240 (April 20, 1939). 118. George J. Shillito, in ibid., 641–­42 (May 11, 1939). 119. H. Ralph Burton, in ibid., 1069–­71 ( June 5, 1939). 120. Robert Reynolds, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 8:3956. 121. Earl Robinson (music), John LaTouche (words), “Ballad for Americans,” http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/b/balladforamericans.shtml. 122. Flanagan, Arena, 364. For more on Sing for Your Supper, see Denning, The Cultural Front, 115; O’Connor and Brown, Free, Adult, and Uncensored, 185–­ 93; and Ned Lehac, “The Story of Sing for Your Supper,” in Musical Theatre in America, ed. Glenn Loney (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984). 123. H. Ralph Burton, in Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration, 191 (May 1, 1939). 124. Flanagan, Arena, 366. 125. Investigators claimed that Sing for Your Supper rehearsed from July 1, 1938, until April 24, 1939. According to Flanagan’s brief, practice for the play was not scheduled to begin until November. Flanagan did, however, report that unassigned actors from the actors’ pool had been temporarily assigned to the play to try out skits and songs for Sing for your Supper, which was unlike any other production the FTP had previously performed. “Brief Containing Detailed Answers to Charges,” 93. On the average length of time to perfor­ mance, see H. Ralph Burton, in Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration, 1081 (May 1, 1939). 126. Sam H. Grisman quoted in H. Ralph Burton, in Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration, 1034 (May 1, 1939). 127. See, e.g., Charles St. Bernard Dinsmore Walton, in ibid., 1083 ( June 6, 1939). 128. Mathew Bernard Kelley quoted in H. Ralph Burton, in ibid., 1071–­72 ( June 6, 1939).

270

N o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 8 – 2 0 3

129. Ned Lehac interview, “A Story of Sing for Your Supper,” New Paltz, NY, June, 1977, side 2, p. 19, Research Center for the Federal Theatre Project, Spe­ cial Collection, George Mason University, Special Collections and Archives. 130. “WPA and the Arts,” WP, May 3, 1939, 8, ProQuest (101771084). 131. “Culture in Bloom,” CDT, May 6, 1939, 12, ProQuest (175299836). 132. Workers’ Alliance of Greater New York (Washington, DC: Workers Alli­ ance of America [1935–­75], Tamiment Library, New York University, New York; “WPA Workers Rally Protests Economy Move,” WP, June 5, 1939, 3, ProQuest (151141405). 133. Flanagan, Arena, 346–­48. 134. Adolph Joachim Sabath, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 7:7224. 135. Vito Marcantonio, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, 84, pt. 7:7232. 136. Clarence Cannon, “Additional View,” in Investigation and Study of the Works Progress Administration, 10 (May 15, 1940). 137. Mr. William Hassett to F. C. Harrington, “Report on Work Stoppages, 1939,” July 11, 1939, reel 4, Selected Documents from the Papers of Presi­ dent FDR concerning the Federal Arts Program, microfilmed at the FDR Library, June 1965, AAA. 138. Flanagan, Arena, 354. 139. After the Woodrum Hearings, e.g., Alsberg, Sokoloff, Evans, Bruce, Brown, and Flanagan either left or were fired from the WPA. 140. “WPA Art Projects Inspire Local Aid,” NYT, September 10, 1939, 9, Pro­ Quest (103058842). 141. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 197. 142. Quinn, Furious Improvisation, 282. 143. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 186. 144. For examples, see “Inquiry to Expose WPA Reds Ordered,” NYT, July 12, 1940, 17, ProQuest (105269972); and “100 Reds Ousted,” NYT, August 29, 1940, 21, ProQuest (105424184). 145. “WPA Ousts Artists as Red,” NYT, July 3, 1940, 14, ProQuest (105245534); “WPA Murals under Fire as a Study in Red,” CDT, July 7, 1940, 1, ProQuest (176374056). 146. “WPA Murals under Fire as a Study in Red,” 1; “Red Propaganda in WPA Murals at Floyd Bennett Field Charged,” NYT, July 7, 1940, 4, ProQuest (105259651). 147. Gerald M. Monroe, “Mural Burning by the New York City WPA,” Archives of American Art Journal 16, no. 3 (1976): 11. 148. “Painter of Murals to Sue Somervell,” NYT, July 10, 1940, 21, ProQuest (105188929). 149. “Painting Removed as Unpatriotic,” CDT, July 9, 1940, 6, ProQuest (176358007).

271

N o t e s t o pa g e s 2 0 4 – 2 1 1

150. Eleanor Jewett, “Art Projects of WPA Hit as Propaganda,” CDT, August 4, 1940, E4, ProQuest (176479950). 151. Quoted in “ ‘Red’ Airfield Murals Torn Down: WPA Dismisses Their Cre­ ator,” NYT, July 9, 1940, 1, ProQuest (105230821). 152. “Painter of Murals to Sue Somervell.” 153. “Inquiry to Expose WPA Reds Ordered,” 17. 154. “100 Reds Ousted.” 155. Monroe, “Mural Burning.” 156. Fleckenstein interview. 157. See, e.g., “A Statement by the Editors,” Partisan Review 9 ( January/Febru­ ary 1942): 2; Clement Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–­49. 158. On Clement Greenberg, see Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s, chap. 13. On Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, see Annette Cox, Art as Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-­Garde and Society, Studies in the Fine Arts, Avant-­Garde, no. 26 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982). 159. Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” 39. C oncl u sion

1.

Aline B. Louchheim, “The Case of a Criticized Mural,” NYT, May 10, 1953, X13, ProQuest (112851278). 2. Lee, Painting on the Left, 217–­22. 3. Louchheim, “The Case of a Criticized Mural,” X13. 4. Lee, Painting on the Left, 219. 5. Richard M. Nixon to Charles E. Plan, July 18, 1949, Hudson Walker Papers, AAA, quoted in Jane de Hart Mathews, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81, no. 4 (October 1976): 765. 6. Quoted in Louchheim, “The Case of a Criticized Mural,” X13. 7. Mathews, “Art and Politics,” 768. 8. Hallie Flanagan, “Proposal,” July 1939, Selected Documents from the Papers of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt concerning the Federal Arts Program, microfilmed at the FDR Library, June 1965, AAA. 9. Overmyer, Government and the Arts, 37. 10. Gary O. Larson, The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts, 1943–­1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 19. 11. Brian Lanker and Nicole Newnham, They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of World War II (New York: TV Books, 2000), 2–­7. 12. George Biddle, The Yes and No of Contemporary Art: An Artist’s Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 68, 72, http:// archive.org/stream/yesandnoofcontem006055mbp/yesandnoofcontem 006055mbp_djvu.txt; Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 47. 13. Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 20–­21, 66.

272

N o t e s t o pa g e s 2 1 1 – 2 1 4

14. Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s, xvi. Platt’s work counters this thesis, but, for examples of art historians who defend it, see John Baur, Revolution and Tradition in Modern American Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951); Sam Hunter, Modern American Painting (New York: Dell, 1959); John Wilmerding, American Art (New York: Penguin, 1976); and Milton Brown, American Art to 1900 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979). 15. “Art: Cut-­Rate Culture,” Time, March 6, 1944, http://www.time.com/time /subscriber/printout/0,8816,774866,00.html. 16. Nick Taylor, American-­Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA When FDR Put the Nation to Work (New York: Bantam, 2008), 528. 17. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 219; Wolf Von Eckardt, “Public Hap­ piness at Plumbers’ Wages: Cityscape That Old Post Office Art Cityscape,” WP, April 15, 1972, Arts section, ProQuest (148283584). 18. Banks, First-­Person America, xiv; Ann Banks, “Making It through Hard Times,” Atlantic Monthly 246, no. 1 (1980): 40–­57; Kay Bartlett, “Researcher Compiles Book of Great Depression,” Sarasota Herald Tribune, February 8, 1981, 10F, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19810208 &id=tfIcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3GcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6413,4050513. 19. O’Connor and Brown, Free, Adult, and Uncensored, viii. 20. Rawick, ed., The American Slave; Musher, “ ‘Contesting the Way the Al­ mighty Wants It,’ ” 1–­5. 21. For examples, see the following Library of Congress sites: “Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-­and-­White Negatives,” http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa; “The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935–­1939,” http://memory.loc.gov /ammem/fedtp/fthome.html; and “American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–­1940,” http://memory.loc.gov /ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html. 22. For examples, see Living New Deal Project, http://livingnewdeal.berkeley. edu; New Deal Art Registry, http://www.newdealartregistry.org; Posters for the People. http://www.postersforthepeople.com; and the National New Deal Preservation Association, http://www.newdeallegacy.org. 23. Even the title of the NEA’s blog is “Art Works.” See http://artworks.arts.gov. 24. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Mr. Broadway Storms Capitol Hill,” NYT, April 7, 2010, ProQuest (1474447388). 25. Steven C. Dubin, Bureaucratizing: Public Funds and the Cultural Worker (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 26. National Endowment for the Arts, “Executive Summary,” in Artists in the Workforce, 1990–­2005, Research Report no. 48 (Washington, DC, May 2008), http://www.nea.gov/research/ArtistsInWorkforce.pdf. 27. Arts and Economic Prosperity IV, 2. 28. Bruce Weber, “Poet Brokers Truce in Culture Wars,” NYT, September 7, 2004, E1, E5, ProQuest (92806145).

273

N o t e s t o pa g e s 2 1 4 – 2 1 8

29. Karen Campbell, “Shakespeare Is Coming Your Way,” Christian Science Monitor, April 19, 2005, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0419/p11s02 -­legn.html. 30. Jacqueline Trescott, “The NEA, Celebrating Its Fitness at 40,” WP, May 19, 2006, C04, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-­dyn/content/article/2006 /05/18/AR2006051802218.html. 31. More recent books featured by the Big Read contain a more diverse com­ bination of writers from the past and the present. For examples, see the “Books and Guides” section at http://www.neabigread.org/books.php. 32. See Joseph Wesley Zeigler, Arts in Crisis: The NEA for the Arts vs. America (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1994), chap. 5. 33. Exceptions were made for a few artists, including writers and jazz musi­ cians. The NEA 1965–­2000: A Brief Chronology of Federal Support for the Arts (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2000), 54. 34. Stolberg, “Mr. Broadway Storms Capitol Hill.” 35. National Endowment for the Arts, “National Endowment for the Arts Ap­ propriations History,” http://www.nea.gov/about/budget/Appropriations History.html. 36. Mike Boehm, “Obama’s Arts Budget Plan Goes Beyond Restoring ‘Sequester’ Cuts,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013 /apr/15/entertainment/la-­et-­cm-­obama-­federal-­arts-­budget-­plan-­would -­override-­sequester-­cuts-­20130412; US House of Representatives, Commit­ tee on Appropriations, “Appropriations Committee Releases Fiscal Year 2014 Interior and Environment Bill,” July 22, 2013, http://appropriations .house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=343384. 37. Laura H. Chapman, “No Child Left Behind in Art,” Art Education Policy Review 106, no. 2 (November/December 2004): 3–­17, http://people.uncw .edu/caropresoe/EDN523/chapmannclb.pdf. 38. Boehm, “Obama’s Arts Budget,” n.p. 39. Barry Hessenius, “Exit Interview with Rocco Landesman,” December 20, 2012, Barry’s Blog, Western States Art Association, http://blog.westaf.org /2012/12/exit-­interview-­with-­rocco-­landesman.html. 40. Arlene Goldbard, “The Long, Hot Summer of Service: Community Artists on the Job,” July 2009, Community Arts Network, Reading Room, http:// wayback.archive-­it.org/2077/20100906204019/http://www.communityarts .net/readingroom/archivefiles/2009/07/the_long_hot_su_1.php. 41. City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2013, http://www.muralarts.org. 42. Basil V. Jones to Edward Rowan June 6, 1939, Selected Documents from the Papers of President FDR concerning the Federal Arts Program, microfilmed at the FDR Library, June 1965, AAA.

274

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act), 179 Abelman, Ida, 103 Academy of Arts and Letters, 49 Actors’ Equity, 115, 180–­81 Adams, Ansel, 131 Adams, James Truslow, 116–­17 Addams, Jane, 98 Advance American Art Commission, 21 AFL (American Federation of Labor), 25 African Americans: alteration of ex-­slave narratives and, 129; art as a weapon and, 145; community art centers and, 161–­62, 261n56; exclusion of from photographic exhibits, 134, 137, 139, 143, 145, 256–­ 57n163; exclusion of from relief programs, 122–­23, 126–­27, 145, 253n111; experiences of under slavery, 127–­28; FAP and, 159–­ 60, 160; federal employment of black scholars and, 122–­23, 251nn86–­87; FWP employment of, 119–­29, 253nn111–­12; in FWP’s American Guide Series, 122, 124–­26, 252n102; FWP’s failure to distribute work of, 128–­29; FWP’s Negro affairs division and, 124, 125, 128; FWP studies of, 121–­22, 127–­28;

limited opportunities in art projects for, 4; mural commemorating Marian Anderson’s concert and, 99; “natural” artistry of, 159; photographs of, 137–­39, 140; race-­conscious approaches of, 123–­24; rejected as visiting artists, 167; Resettlement Administration’s Historical Section and, 131; segregated art centers and, 159–­ 60; stereotypical renderings of, 124–­26, 252n102; in theater, 119; in Washington, DC, 128 Agee, James, 133 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). See AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act) AIA (American Institute of Archi­ tects), 33, 54–­55, 58, 184, 267n66. See also architecture Aikman, Duncan, 84 Allen, Robert G., 186 Alsberg, Henry: art as a weapon and, 108; artist strikes and, 182; background of, 109, 119–­ 21, 130, 191; blacklisting of, 231n80; employment of black professionals and, 122, 125, 126, 251n86; federal writers’ strike (New York, 1936) and, 121; firing of, 120; FWP infight­ ing and, 180; FWP’s caution

275

Index

Alsberg, Henry (cont.) with controversial topics and, 119–­20; government funding of controversial art and, 108; House Committee on Un-­ American Activities (Dies Committee) and, 191; influences on, 122, 148, 251n84; literary magazine and, 250n75; political accusations against FWP and, 179; political approach of, 120, 121; preservation of folk culture and, 28, 148; racial representation and, 125, 138; resignation of, 200 American Academy of Rome, 22 American Artists’ Congress, 28–­29, 30 American Artists’ Professional League, 267n66 American Civil Liberties Union, 194 American Dream, 63, 116–­17 American Federation of Arts, 60–­61 American Federation of Labor (AFL). See AFL (American Federation of Labor) American Federation of Musicians, 14, 182 American Institute of Architects (AIA). See AIA (American Institute of Architects) American League for Peace and Democracy, 194 American Legion, 117, 183, 203, 208 American Liberty League, 94 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 215, 216 Americans for the Arts, 213 American Society of Landscape Architects, 267n66 American Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers, 267n66 American Water Color Society, 267n66 American way of life, 63 Anderson, Guy, 165–­66 Anderson, Marian, 99 Andrews, C. O., 189 Anthony, Susan B., 98 anti-­Semitism, 86, 244n105 Architectural League of New York, 267n66 architecture, 37, 39–­40, 46, 48, 55, 60–­61. See also AIA (American Institute of Architects) Arent, Arthur, 105–­8, 114, 188–­89, 246–­47n19 Arnautoff, Victor, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93 Arnold, Matthew, and Arnoldian view of art, 35, 66, 149, 197, 214 276

art: abstract versus representational, 205–­6; as the act of making, 147–­48; art industry and, 213–­14, 217; as commodity, 146–­47, 211; democratization of, 26–­27; fine versus practical, 157; as inherently political, 101; moral function of, 26; as propaganda, 78; spiritual value of, 157. See also New Deal art projects; and other art entries and specific arts projects art as a function of government: acquisition of art in public buildings and, 18; ambivalence about, 2; art and politics and, 186; art as subversion and, 5, 172–­73; art education in schools and, 216; art flourishing when viewed as a social necessity and, 185; art institutions opposing, 184–­85, 267n66; artistic freedom and, 13, 185, 186; bills for publicly sponsored art and, 267n64, 267n66; budget allocations since 1990 and, 215–­16; bureaucratization of, 211; changes of administration and, 209; classical versus American Scene artists and, 67–­68; community response and, 10; conditions for art projects and artists and, 12–­13; controversial art and, 104; creation of a national aesthetics and, 6; cultural democracy and, 26–­27; declining private patronage and, 31; delinking arts patronage from artists’ poverty and, 184–­85; demographic as well as aesthetic diversity and, 49–­50; disillusionment with, 207; dollar-­a-­year men and, 74; as double-­edged sword, 31; economic impact of government funding and, 213–­14, 217; Edward Bruce’s consortium on arts and, 64; under fascist governments, 30–­31; five approaches to, 5, 6, 8, 9–­10; in good and bad economic times, 211; good citizenship and, 218; government influence over leisure activities and, 27; lobbying for arts funding and, 1–­2, 5, 8, 18–­19, 64, 169–­70; as luxury rather than essential, 177; marketability of work and, 5; versus market forces, 207, 211, 217; nature of public art and, 216–­17; before the New Deal, 11–­12; New Deal art projects as blueprint for, 212–­13; New Deal as briefly open door and, 5; notion that art works and, 213,

Index

215, 217; opposition from Right and Left and, 6; passing of radical moment for, 206; polemical art emerging in spite of, 143; political freedom of expression and, 87–­88; post–­New Deal shift toward privatization and, 6–­7; preservation of standards of taste and, 51; versus private patronage, 75, 76–­78; proposed permanent art programs and, 184–­85, 187, 210, 267n64, 267n66; protests by artists and, 23–­24, 25; quality of artwork and, 7, 172–­73, 184–­87, 199, 207; radicalism and, 207; redistribution of cultural capital and, 23; skepticism about benefits of, 205; state’s role in shaping culture and, 12; as symbol of waste, 215, 217; taxation and, 210; threat of overtly political art and, 215; usable past and, 27–­28, 31, 67; US versus other countries’ art investment and, 28–­29. See also New Deal art projects; and other art entries and specific arts projects art as a weapon: art administrators and, 101, 109, 129, 144–­45; art as enrichment and, 103; versus art as subversion, 215; Can You Hear Their Voices? (play) and, 111; categories of art and, 5, 6, 8; Communist ideology and, 102; core themes of, 101; didactic approach and, 101; editorial curtailment of, 129; ex-­ slave narratives and, 129; government funding and, 108–­9; media most conducive to, 104–­5; National Endowment for the Arts and, 214; nature of public art and, 216–­17; origins of idea of, 102; photography and, 130–­33; political dangers inherent in, 217; Popular Front and, 103–­4; propaganda and, 104; racial discrimination and, 138, 145; radicalization of artists and, 102; short-­lived funding for, 104; specific legislation and, 107; theater and, 103, 104–­8, 111, 113, 116, 119; today’s public art landscape and, 213; Wagner-­Steagall Housing Act and, 107, 108 art as enrichment: American scene art and, 67–­68, 95–­96; approval of Treasury Department art projects and, 98–­99; art and politics and, 87; art as a weapon and, 103; versus art as grandeur, 62–­63, 65–­69, 76, 82–­84; artists’ gratitude for

New Deal art programs and, 81–­82; beauty and, 66–­67, 73; case for government funding and, 64–­65; categories of art and, 5, 6, 8, 9; depictions of progress and, 69, 71–­73; development of ideas of, 75–­76; lack of consensus around, 217; nation’s aesthetic and spiritual life and, 68; nature of public art and, 216–­17; sources of, 62; theater and, 103; today’s public art landscape and, 213 art as experience: versus art as commodity, 146–­47; versus art as grandeur, 146; to build community, 153–­54, 159; categories of art and, 5, 6, 8, 9; for children, 158–­59; creative process versus finished product and, 146–­48; John Dewey and, 259–­60n33; FAP and, 154; future invest­ ment in, 217; industrialization and dis­ tance from, 147–­48; longevity of, 149– 50, 258n15; making of good citizens and, 148, 258n3; as most successful New Deal approach to art, 171; native tradition in American art and, 147; New Dealers drawn to, 148; participants’ re­ sponse to art centers and, 163–­66; for people with disabilities, 162; in post–­ New Deal education sector, 171; psychological effects of, 162–­63, 262n64; spiritual value of art and, 157; today’s public art landscape and, 213; usable past and, 147; vernacular expressions and, 147, 154; in wartime, 169–­70. See also community art centers art as grandeur: American Federation of Arts symposium and, 60–­61; antirevolutionary approach to art and, 35; versus art as enrichment, 62–­63, 65–­69, 76, 82–­84; versus art as experience, 146; artists’ preference for poverty over government funding and, 186; beauty’s function in civil society and, 35; Beaux Arts movement and, 35; categories of art and, 5, 6, 8, 9; Chicago’s Great White City and, 38–­39; civic buildings as “palaces for the people” and, 36; cultural nationalism and, 35–­36; depictions of progress and, 69; as dominated by elite white men, 37–­38, 49; exclusions inherent in, 217; falling popularity of, 146; Gilded Age classical revival and, 34–­36; institutionalization of, 43–­56; Jefferson Memorial 277

Index

art as grandeur (cont.) and, 55–­62; legal authority and, 45; Charles Moore’s death as turning point in, 53; nature of public art and, 216–­17; neoclassical art and, 42–­43, 45–­46; New Deal aesthetics and, 38; persistence and decline of, 38, 54, 55–­62; quality of government-­funded art and, 185–­86; reemergence of advocates of, 184–­87; today’s public art landscape and, 213; value of art and, 64; Washington, DC, and, 33–­37, 45, 54 art as labor, 9 art as leisure, 153–­54 art as subversion: versus art as a weapon, 215; categories of art and, 5, 6, 9; in Cold War cultural milieu, 210; declining support for government funding and, 172–­73; delinking arts patronage from artists’ poverty and, 184–­85; proposed permanent art programs and, 184; right to work and, 199; today’s public art landscape and, 213 Art Commission Associates, 267n66 art education in schools, 216 Art Front (magazine), 23, 26 artists: alienation from versus integration into society and, 205, 211; appropriate work relief for, 16; communal versus personal advancement among, 75; compensation for entering competitions and, 51–­52, 83, 88; as cultural laborers, 31; diverse publics for, 78; freedom of in government art programs, 185, 186; indigence among, 11; leftist disillusionment among, 205, 206; number of in United States in 1930, 227n3; poverty and freedom of expression for, 186; poverty of as sign of poor quality work, 186; unemployment of during Great Depression, 13–­14; as workers, 12, 28, 213. See also New Deal art projects; and other art entries and specific arts projects Artists’ Committee of Action, 23 Artists’ Union, 18, 23–­26, 94, 174, 181 Arts, The (magazine), 77 Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, 15 Bacon, Robert L., 178, 179 Bailey, Josiah W., 188–­89 278

Baker, George Pierce, 110 Baker, Jacob, 16, 113, 156 Baldwin, James, 129 “Ballad for Americans” (song), 197 Bankhead, John H., 194 Banks, Ann, 212 Bard, Phil, 18 Barton, Clara, 98 Baur, John, 211 Beaux Arts movement, 35, 39, 56, 170 Beck, Elmer, 107–­8 Bellevue Hospital (New York), 163 Bellow, Saul, 3 Bender, Lauretta, 163 Benedict, Ruth, 149 Bennett, Edward, 39 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 165, 166 Benton, Thomas Hart, 80, 83–­84, 86, 151 Biddle, Francis, 68 Biddle, George: art as enrichment and, 6; background of, 68; Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and, 210–­11; controversial artists and, 22; documentation of World War II and, 210; as forefather of New Deal art projects, 18; frustrations with Treasury Department art programs and, 84, 86; gratitude for New Deal art programs and, 81–­82; industriousness of, 81; lobbying for New Deal art projects and, 18–­19; lobbying for permanent art programs and, 210, 211; possibility of federal patronage of the arts and, 64; on reconstruction of Washington, DC, 48–­49; resistance of to reforms, 50; Rivera-­Rockefeller scandal and, 21; Society Freed through Justice mural by, 68–­69, 69–­71, 71–­73, 81–­84, 85, 87, 240n27, 240nn29–­30 Big Read, 214, 274n31 Binkley, Robert, 147 Bjarnadottir, Vigdis, 155 Bjarnarson, Bjorn, 155 Black, Ivan, 249n62 Blitzstein, Marc, 114, 115, 151 Bloch, Lucienne, 30 Boas, Franz, 148–­49 Bogdanov, Alexander, 102 Boone, Daniel, 173 Botkin, Benjamin: art as a weapon and, 101; art as the act of making and, 147; FWP and, 121, 250n77; influences on, 122,

Index

251n84; preservation of folk culture and, 28, 148; on value of art activities, 231n77 Bourke-­White, Margaret, 28–­29 Boylan, John J., 56, 57, 59 Brandeis, Louis, 72, 240n30 Brenner, Anita, 162–­63 Bridges, Harry, 194, 208 Brinckerhoff, A. F., 185 Britt, Steuart Henderson, 193–­94 Brooks, Van Wyck, 27, 95–­96 Brown, Burt, 240–­41n34 Brown, Glenn, 34 Brown, Lorraine, 212 Brown, Sterling: An American Dilemma (Myrdal) and, 128; art as a weapon and, 101, 108; background of, 109, 122, 130; communication approach of, 131–­32; as FWP editor, 121, 123, 124–­26, 252n102; FWP employment of black writers and, 126–­27; FWP’s caution with controversial topics and, 119–­20; FWP’s failure to distribute work overseen by, 128, 145; FWP’s Negro affairs division and, 124, 125, 128; FWP studies of African Americans and, 121–­22; government funding of controversial art and, 108; history of slavery and, 127–­28; plagiarism of work of, 129; race-­conscious approaches and, 123–­24, 145; rendering of dialect and, 124; resignation of, 200; Slave Narrative Collection and, 124 Bruce, Edward: on alteration of original mural designs, 93; on art and beauty, 66; art as enrichment and, 6, 65; on artists’ gratitude, 81–­82; background and career of, 73, 74–­75; balance of spiritual and material concerns in art and, 74–­75; George Biddle’s politics and, 84; CFA and, 53, 57; classical art and, 38, 82; communal versus personal in­ terests of artists and, 75; consortium on artists’ contributions and, 64–­65; on government funding of the arts, 26; illness and death of, 75, 79; influences on, 75–­76; leader selection by, 88; personality of, 78; proposed permanent art programs and, 184; on reconstruction of Washington, DC, 48; resignation of, 200; Treasury Department art programs and, 22, 74, 80, 240–­41n34

Bubley, Esther, 138, 139, 142, 144 Bufano, Benjamino Benvenuto, 21 Burnham, Daniel, 39 Burns, Robert, 186 Burton, H. Ralph, 197 Bush, George W., 214 Bushnell, Henry, 96 Byrd, Harry F., 189 Caemmerer, H. P., 38, 50, 54, 55 Cahill, Holger: aid to art activists from, 182; art and daily life and, 156–­57, 158–­59; art as experience and, 6; art as the act of making and, 147; on art flourishing when viewed as social necessity, 185; art funding in wartime and, 169; back­ ground of, 154–­55, 259nn31–­32; children and art and, 158–­59, 162; clashes between arts administrators and, 167, 263n93; community art centers and, 149, 156, 157, 160–­61, 166, 260n39; John Cotton Dana and, 156; Federal One and, 156, 200–­201; Index of American Design and, 157–­58; influences on, 148, 155, 259–­60n33; original name of, 154; pedagogy of artistic production and, 258n3; on permanent arts funding, 211; political discretion of, 201; preservation of folk culture and, 28, 148; recruited to head FAP, 156; on spiritual value of art, 157 California Industrial Scenes (mural by John Langley Howard), 91–­92, 92–­93 Cannon, Clarence, 199 Can You Hear Their Voices? (play by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford), 110, 111 Carlyle, Thomas, 186 Carnegie Foundation, 79 Cassatt, Mary, 68 Cayton, Horace, 137–­38 censorship: versus aesthetic reasons for not performing plays, 248–­49n48; alteration of ex-­slave narratives and, 129; art as a weapon and, 104; blacklisting and, 231n80; editing of mural inscriptions and, 240n30; fear of, 31; FTP’s Living Newspapers and, 113; FWP’s American Guide Series and, 183; government funding as protection from, 87–­88; mural projects and, 20–­21, 22, 93–­94, 279

Index

censorship (cont.) 98, 202–­3, 207–­10; in Nazi Germany, 21, 30; protests against, 25, 86–­94; by public versus private funders, 31–­32; selection of artists for public art projects and, 143; in Soviet Union, 29, 231–­ 32n81; of theater, 113–­16, 145 Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University, 224n4 CFA (Commission of Fine Arts): acquisition of art in public buildings and, 18; advisory role and, 44–­45; Arnoldian approach of, 214; art and beauty and, 66; art as grandeur and, 36, 37–­38; artistic establishment and, 43–­44; George Biddle and, 83, 210–­11; controversial artists and, 22; costs associated with, 44; elitism of, 18; falling popularity of approach of, 146; international differentiation of, 44; Jefferson Memorial and, 57, 59, 60–­61; large payments by, 48–­49; leadership transition at, 53; legal authority of, 45; McMillan plan and, 45; merit-­based art projects and, 17; mixed assessment of New Deal art projects and, 210–­11; opposition of to New Deal art projects, 32; praise for work of, 44; preservation of standards of taste and, 51; proposed permanent art programs and, 184; reconstruction of Washington, DC, and, 45, 50–­51; refusal of need-­based art commissions and, 53; resistance of to reforms, 50; responses of to criticism, 55; selection of artists and, 48–­49, 50; turf war be­ tween Treasury Department art programs and, 82, 84 Chamber of Commerce, 208 Chambers, Whittaker, 110 Chase, Stuart, 72–­73 Cherry Lake Farms, 152–­53 Chicago Conservation Center Mural Preservation Project, 245n115 Christodora Settlement House, 15 CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), 25, 190, 204 Citizens’ Committee for Government Art Projects, 169–­70 City Beautiful movement, 9, 41–­42, 47, 49, 61

280

City Life (mural by Victor Arnautoff ), 89, 92 City without Walls (Newark), 216 Civilian Conservation Corps, 8 Civil Works Administration, 175 Clarke, Gilmore D., 57–­58, 59 class: Composers’ Collective and, 151; how the other half lives and, 140–­41; photography and, 130, 134–­35, 137, 140–­41, 143; regionalism versus social realism and, 239n22 Cochran, Thomas Childs, 118 Cohen, Ben, 201 Coit Tower (San Francisco), 88, 89–­92, 90, 92–­94, 208, 208, 240n29 College Art Association, 14 Collier, John, 144 Collins, Jimmy, 203 Collins, Marjorie, 138 Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Chicago), 38–­40, 49 Commission of Fine Arts (CFA). See CFA (Commission of Fine Arts) Communist Party: artistic freedom in government art projects and, 94; arts groups founded by, 102; blacklisting and, 231n80; control of versus openness to arts and, 231–­32n81; Federal One and, 22; Nazi-­Soviet nonaggression pact and, 205, 206; playwrights and, 114; Popular Front and, 103; Diego Rivera and, 19; social realists and, 86 community art centers, 160, 164; access to leisure as civil rights issue and, 161–­62; art in daily life and, 156–­59; Holger Cahill’s political discretion and, 201; call for expansion of, 260n39; children in, 158–­59, 162–­63; controversies over, 166–­68; funding of since 2006, 216; future investment in, 217; local support for, 160–­62; longevity of, 149–­50, 258n15; number of participants in, 158; participants’ response to, 163–­66; psychological benefits of, 162–­63; racial segregation in, 159–­60, 261n56; relative size of program and, 248n37; romanticization of black culture and, 159–­60; social control and, 262n64; teachers’ politics and, 182; during and after World War II, 168–­71. See also art as experience; FAP (Federal Art Project)

Index

Composers’ Collective, 151 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, 213 Compton, Arthur, 25, 230n60 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). See CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) Copland, Aaron, 151 Corcoran, Thomas, 201 Corn, Wanda, 38, 233n16 Corwin, Norman, 197 Corwin, Thomas, 202 Costigan-­Wagner Act, 114 Couch, W. T. (William), 121, 138, 250n77 Cowell, Henry, 151 Cox, Edward Eugene, 194–­95 Cradle Will Rock, The (play and film), 114–­ 15, 117 Craven, Thomas, 86 Crawford, Ruth, 151 Cronbach, Robert, 3 Cronyn, George, 122, 125 cultural nationalism and national culture: American aesthetic and, 17–­18, 23, 76, 77–­78, 80; American scene art and, 67–­68; anti-­immigrant sentiment and, 117–­18; art as grandeur and, 35–­36; beauty and transformation of values and, 66; categories of art and, 9; chauvinism in, 86; Epic of America (book and radio show) and, 116–­18; midwestern regionalism as social construct and, 86; regionalism versus social realism and, 67, 86–­87, 239n20, 239n22; regionalist consciousness and, 17, 80; usable past and, 95–­96, 157–­58 Curran, Frank J., 163 Curry, John Steuart, 80, 86 Curtis, James, 7–­8 Czechoslovakia, public funding of the arts in, 29 Dahlberg, Edward, 250n75 Dale, Delphine, 117 Damrosch, Walter, 185 Dana, John Cotton, 26, 155, 156 Dartmouth College, 30 Davis, Big Boy, 122 Davis, James J., 176, 180–­81 Davis, John P., 251n86

Davis, Maxine, 98 Davis, Philip H., 247n29 Davis, Stuart, 3, 94, 156 Defenbacher, Daniel, 147, 158, 160–­61, 166, 167, 182 Delano, Frederic, 38, 44 Delano, William A., 50 Denmark, public funding of the arts in, 28, 29 Denning, Michael, 8, 257n164 Detroit Institute of Art, 19 Detroit Museum, 30 Deutsch, Hilda, 168 De Vinna, Maurice, 170 Dewey, John, 7, 26, 35, 147–­48, 155, 259–­60n33 Dickstein, Morris, 7 Dies, Martin, 6, 190. See also House Committee on Un-­American Activities (Dies Committee) Disraeli, Isaac, 186 Donahey, Vie, 59 Dondero, George, 209 Dorman, Robert L., 239n20 Dornbush, Adrian, 79 Douglass, Frederick, 123 Dows, Olin, 22, 65, 73–­74, 79 Drake, St. Clair, 137–­38 Draper, Theodore, 181 Dry, Walter R., 162 DuBois, W. E. B., 35 Early, Steve, 113 École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­Arts, 49 Edelman, Murray, 101 Edward M. Kennedy Serve Act, 216 Einstein, Albert, 164 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 209 elections of 1936, 188 elections of 1938, 187–­90, 194 Elizabethan Poor Law, 15 Ellison, Ralph, 3 Ely, Joseph B., 183 Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, 200 Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group, 64 Epic of America (book and radio show), 116–­ 18, 249n62 Ethiopia (play), 113–­14, 145, 179 Evans, Luther, 147, 200

281

Index

Evans, Walker, 133 Evergood, Phillip, 94 Experimental Workshop (New York), 30 Fairmount Parkway (Philadelphia), 61 FAP (Federal Art Project): African Americans and, 159–­60; “Art and Psychopathology” exhibit and, 163; art as a weapon and as enrichment and, 103; art as experience and, 154; Holger Cahill as head of, 156, 260n39; cancelation of artist loan program and, 167; clashes between arts administrators and, 167–­ 68, 263n93; community funding of programs of, 161; concentration of in New York City, 248n37; decentralization of, 167; Federal One and, 9, 24; impact of, 3; Index of American Design and, 148, 149; US versus other countries’ art investment and, 28; as wasteful, 174. See also community art centers Farm Security Administration (FSA). See FSA (Farm Security Administration) Historical Section Feder, Abe, 198 Federal Art Project (FAP). See FAP (Federal Art Project) Federal Arts Council, 161–­62 Federal Dance Project, 162 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). See FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) Federal Music Project. See FMP (Federal Music Project) Federal One: from art as a weapon to art as experience, 149; challenged on Senate floor, 180; complaints against, 176; components of, 9; creation of, 21, 24; creative people on the Left and, 102–­3; critics of attacks on, 204; decentralization of, 149, 172, 199–­200; defunding of, 200–­201; economic policy and, 25; end of, 150; goals of, 24; hiring of art administrators for, 112; House Committee on Un-­American Activities (Dies Committee) investigation of, 190, 191; ideology shaping, 24; layoffs and, 181–­82, 183; leadership of, 156, 200–­ 201; leftist activity in, 181–­82; level of government investment and, 1, 24, 29, 223–­24n3; lobbying for arts funding 282

during Great Recession and, 18; loyalty oaths and monitoring of workers in, 175; Popular Front and, 144; press attacks on, 175; reclamation of artworks and writings from, 212; reformation of, 128; Woodrum Committee investigation and, 196; WPA and, 18, 24 Federal Reserve Building (Washington, DC), 53 Federal Screenwriters’ Guild, 107 Federal Theater Project (FTP). See FTP (Federal Theater Project) Federal Theatre Magazine, 116 Federal Theatre Veterans’ League, 179, 180–­81 Federal Triangle (Washington, DC): aerial view of, 47; construction of halted, 53; costs associated with, 45; creation of, 34; criticism of, 48; lighting in buildings of, 55; post office in, 37, 83; traffic problems and, 54 Federal Writers’ Association, 179 Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). See FWP (Federal Writers’ Project) Feiss, Carl, 61 FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration), 123, 251n87 Fine Arts Federation of New York, 184–­85 Finley, Harold M., 174 First Pulpit in Granville (mural by Wendell Jones), 96–­97, 97 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 214 Flanagan, Hallie: Arthur Arent and, 104–­5; art as a weapon and, 6, 101, 108, 144; on art flourishing when viewed as social necessity, 185; background of, 109–­10, 130, 247n29; British versus Soviet theater and, 110; Can You Hear Their Voices? (play) and, 110, 111; censorship and, 114, 115, 145; communication approach of, 131–­32; conveyance of New Deal’s goals by, 177; effort to replace, 179; Eleanor Roosevelt and, 112; Experimental Theatre at Vassar College and, 107, 110–­11; FDR’s Second Inaugural and, 101; after FTP, 200, 210; FTP and, 3, 109–­19, 128, 248n37; government funding of controversial art and, 108, 114; as Guggenheim scholar, 110, 247n29; history of FTP by, 200; House Committee on Un-­American Activities

Index

(Dies Committee) and, 191–­93, 269n104; on labor strikes, 182, 183; outspokenness of, 201; political accusations against, 181; political approach of, 120, 121, 122; on propaganda, 104; range of plays produced by, 9; Triple A Plowed Under (play) and, 266n38; US versus other countries’ art investment and, 28; on vital theater, 118; Woodrum Committee and, 195, 199, 270n125. See also FTP (Federal Theater Project) Flatbush Chamber of Commerce, 203 Fleckenstein, Opal, 165–­66, 168, 205 Fletcher, Henry P., 177 Floyd Bennett Municipal Airport murals, 202–­4 FMP (Federal Music Project): art as experience and, 149; Federal One and, 9, 24; labor unions and, 182; praise for, 180; relative size of, 250n71; Charles Seeger at, 154 folk expressions, 148–­54, 155–­56 Fontaine, Leo, 117, 118, 249n62 Force, Juliana, 17, 77 Ford, Edsel, 19 France, public funding of the arts in, 29 Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Museum, 224n4 Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 224n4 Frary, J. T., 59 Frasier, Alice, 130 Freeman, Joseph, 19 FSA (Farm Security Administration) His­ torical Section: focus of photography projects of, 144; “How American People Live” exhibit of, 133–­35, 136–­37, 139–­ 43, 256–­57n163; racial representation in photography and, 139; Resettlement Administration and, 153 FTP (Federal Theater Project): accusations against, 180–­81, 188–­89; aesthetic versus political reasons for not performing plays and, 248–­49n48; Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and, 179; art as a weapon and, 103, 104–­8, 113, 116; art as enrichment and, 103; artists on the Left and, 112–­13; censorship and, 113–­16; closure of, 118–­19, 199–­200, 210; controversial art and government funding and, 109; costs of production

and, 198; failure to produce plays by black playwrights and, 162; FDR’s Second Inaugural and, 101; Federal One and, 9, 24; finances of, 248n37; firings at, 116; Hallie Flanagan and, 3, 109–­19, 248n37; House Committee on Un-­ American Activities (Dies Committee) investigation of, 191–­93; impact of, 3; from large plays to community productions, 149; Living Newspapers of, 9, 108, 110, 113–­15, 143–­45, 178–­79, 188–­ 89; as New York–­centric, 112–­13, 118, 127; professional restrictions in, 127; promotion of New Deal ideology and, 145, 178–­79; published history of, 200; quality of government-­funded theater and, 185–­86; range of plays produced by, 112; recovery of records from, 212; relative size of, 250n71; retraining of unemployed directors and, 107; Sing for Your Supper and, 196–­98, 270n125; Swing Mikado’s success and, 195; as wasteful, 174; Woodrum Committee investigation and, 195–­98, 199–­200, 270n125 Funaroff, Sol, 250n75 FWP (Federal Writers’ Project): all-­black units of, 127, 253nn111–­12; alteration of ex-­slave narratives and, 129; American Guide Series and, 120, 122, 124–­26, 128–­30, 145, 149, 182–­83, 252n102, 254n125; archives of, 129; artist strikes and, 182; caution of, 119; complaints about publications of, 182–­ 83; from creative writing unit to educational projects engaging lay people, 149; cultural development and, 3; diverse range of projects and, 119; employment discrimination and, 126–­27; employment of blacks by, 119–­29, 251n86, 253nn111–­12; failure to distribute black staff’s work and, 128–­29, 145; Federal One and, 9, 24; folklore unit of, 148; geographic and occupational diversity in, 126–­27; House Committee on Un-­ American Activities (Dies Committee) investigation of, 191, 193; inclusive rep­resentation and, 145; infighting in, 180; integration and, 119–­29; interviews and oral histories and, 120–­21, 124, 127, 149, 212, 250n77; leftist writers in, 179–­80; Negro affairs division of, 124, 283

Index

FWP (Federal Writers’ Project) (cont.) 125, 128; 1939 turning point in, 128; objections to depictions of diversity by, 120; promotion of New Deal ideology and, 145; radical artists and, 119–­29; recovery of works from, 212; rendering of dialect and, 124; Slave Narrative Collection of, 124; vernacular literature and, 122; Washington, DC, reconstruction and, 54 Gallery at Fifty-­seventh Street (Manhattan), 165 Geddes, Virgil, 174 gender: American scene art and, 95; art as grandeur and, 49; art influenced by male narratives and, 233n16; depictions of women in public art and theater and, 257n164; House Committee on Un-­ American Activities (Dies Committee) and, 192–­93, 194; means-­tested relief and, 14; neoclassical art and, 42–­43; photographic depictions of women and, 7–­8, 134–­35, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 257n164; photography maintaining divisions of, 143; women in the labor force and, 257n165 George, Adda Gentry, 99 Germany, 24, 28–­30, 103, 205–­6 Gibbon, Edward, 186 Gibboney, Stuart, 59 Gioia, Dana, 214 Godsoe, Robert, 202 Goldman, Emma, 121 Goodrich, Trudy, 192–­93 Granville, Ohio, post office, mural, 96–­97, 97 Great Britain, public funding of the arts in, 29 Great Depression: agricultural overproduction during, 178–­79; disappearance of art market and, 13; Herbert Hoover’s reticence about, 178; inspiration of folk expressions during, 148; leisure as calamity during, 26–­27; neoclassical revival as controversial during, 45–­47; 1938 as turning point and, 187–­88; as problem of faith, 63–­64, 95 Great Recession, 1, 2, 7, 224n4 Greenberg, Clement, 6, 205–­6 Greenwood, Grace, 30 284

Greenwood, Marion, 30 Grinnell College, 110 Gropper, William, 94 Haile Selassie, 113 Hale, Harlan, 46, 47–­48 Hansen, Oskar J. W., 83 Harlem Community Art Center, 161–­62, 163–­64, 166 Harrington, Francis, 200 Harris, Jonathan, 7, 262n64 Harrison, Pat, 192 Harts, William, 45 Hatch, Carl, and Hatch Act, 201 Hearst, William Randolph, 93, 174 Hecht, Harold, 192 Heil, Walter, 88, 93 Hemingway, Andrew, 86, 94 Hemingway, Ernest, 214 Henkel, August, 203, 204 Herder, Johann, 28 Hill, Abram, 114 Hill, Jim, 134 Hine, Lewis, 130–­31 Hirsch, Jerrold, 251n84 Hirschman, I. A., 14 Hiss, Alger, 110 Historical Section. See FSA (Farm Security Administration) Historical Section; Resettlement Administration Historical Section History of California (mural by Anton Refregier), 207–­10 Hite, Mabel E., 244–­45n114 Hitler, Adolf, 30 Hobart, Lewis, 93 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 72 homophobia, 86, 176, 187 Hoover, Herbert, 26–­27, 33–­34, 178 Hoover Dam, 83 Hopkins, Harry: artists and cultural laborers and, 31; background of, 110; Complaint Bureau of WPA and, 175; John Dewey’s influence and, 148; Federal One staffing cuts and, 182; Hallie Flanagan and, 111–­12; on government funding of the arts, 25, 26; hiring of art administrators by, 111–­12; investigations of WPA and, 177, 190; level of arts funding and, 223–­ 24n3; monitoring of relief workers and, 176; pre-­Depression work of, 14–­15;

Index

promise regarding censorship and, 112, 113; reorganization of WPA and, 175; workers’ political activities and, 176–­77; work relief and, 15–­16, 24 House Committee on Un-­American Activities (Dies Committee), 104, 189–­ 94, 201–­2, 269n104 Houseman, John, 115, 143 House Un-­American Activities Committee (successor to Dies Committee), 209–­10 “How American People Live” (photographic exhibition), 133–­35, 135–­36, 137–­43, 140–­42, 256n163 Howard, John (playwright), 174 Howard, John Langley (muralist), 91–­92, 92–­93 Hudnut, Joseph, 61 Hunter, Sam, 211 Hurley, Charles F., 183 Hurston, Zora Neale, 122, 123, 126 Huseby, John, 27 Huxley, Aldous, 63, 95 Ickes, Harold, 16 immigration and immigrants, 86–­87, 159. See also xenophobia Index of American Design, 148, 157–­58, 201 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 115 Internet, preservation of New Deal artworks and writings and, 212, 273nn21–­22 Inverarity, R. Bruce, 167–­68 Italy, public funding of the arts in, 28, 29 Jackson, Aunt Molly, 151 Jackson, Donald L., 209 James, Harleau, 44 Jeffers, Wendy, 259nn31–­32 Jefferson, Thomas, 55 Jefferson Memorial, 37, 53, 55–­62, 56 Jewell, Edward Alden, 58 Jewett, Eleanor, 204 John Reed Club, 21, 102 Johns, Orrick, 180 Johnson, Charles, 123 Johnson, James Weldon, 129 Johnson, Samuel, 186 Jones, Joe, 94 Jones, Lawrence A., 166 Jones, Wendell, 96–­97, 97, 244–­45n114

Justice Department building, George Biddle mural in, 68–­69, 69–­71, 81–­84, 85 Katz, Leslie, 133 Keller, Kent, 58 Kellock, Katherine, 101, 148 Kemp, Harry, 250n75 Kennedy, Roger, 213 Kent, Rockwell, 21 Kerr, Florence, 110, 200 Keynes, John Maynard, 24 Kimball, Fiske, 54 King, William H., 59 Kinston, Jack, 215 Kittredge, George Lyman, 122, 251n84 Koury, Leon, 169 Krock, Arthur, 64 Kronenberg, Harry, 165 labor unions and labor unrest: antirevolutionary approach to art and, 35; art administrators’ support for, 182, 183; “Bloody Thursday” (San Francisco) and, 94; The Cradle Will Rock (play) and, 114–­ 15; FDR administration’s support for, 195; federal writers’ strike (New York, 1936) and, 121; Memorial Day Massacre and, 114; Pacific Maritime Strike and, 90, 92, 94, 208; union regulation of art programs and, 184–­85 La Follette, Suzanne, 14, 21 Landesman, Rocco, 213, 216 Langa, Helen, 86–­87 Lange, Dorothea, 7–­8, 134–­35, 136, 144, 255n141 Lawrie, Lee, 50–­51, 83 Lee, Anthony, 38 Lee, Jean, 137 Lee, Russell, 134–­35, 137, 144 Lehac, Ned, 198 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 34, 37, 40, 50–­51, 53, 59, 61 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 20–­21, 22 Lescaze, William, 47, 61 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Evans), 133 Levine, Benjamin, 193 Levine, Lawrence, 7 Lewis, Sinclair, 14 Library, The (mural by Bernard Zakheim), 90, 92 Library of Congress, 151–­52, 212 285

Index

Lie, Jonas, 82, 156 Lincoln Memorial, 55–­57 Little Gallery (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), 79 Lomax, Alan, 28, 121, 147, 151 Lomax, John, 121–­22, 124, 148, 151, 251n84 Losey, Joseph, 114 Lozowick, Louis, 28–­29 Lucas, William O., 179–­80 Lucy Flower Girls’ School (Chicago), 98, 245n115 Ludlow, Louis, 186 lynching and antilynching legislation, 114, 145 Maas, Willard, 250n75 Macdonald, Dwight, 6, 205 MacLeish, Archibald, 7, 101 Maltz, Albert, 174 Man at the Crossroads of Life (mural by Diego Rivera), 19–­21, 20 Mangione, Jerre, 18 Manship, Paul, 30–­31 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 214–­15 Marantz, Irving J., 162 Marcantonio, Vito, 181, 199 Marling, Karal Ann, 7 Martin, Chlotilde R., 125 Marx, Karl, 21 Mathews, Jane de Hart, 26 Matisse, Henri, 228–­29n36 McCoy, Samuel D., 180 McDonogh, Gary, 253n111 McGee, John, 110 McKay, Claude, 250n75 McKenzie, John, 203 McKim, Charles, 34, 52, 58 McMahon, Audrey, 11–­12, 14–­15, 23, 77, 148 McMillan, James, 34, 40, 41 McMillan Commission, 36, 42, 53 McMillan plan, 45 Mead, Margaret, 148–­49 Melosh, Barbara, 233n16, 257n164 Memorial Day Massacre, 114 Mencken, H. L., 21 Menefee, Selden, 194 Mexico, 18–­19, 29–­30, 83–­84 Migrant Mother (photograph by Dorothea Lange), 7, 8, 134–­35, 136, 143 Miles, Myrtle, 125, 126 Millman, Edward, 98

286

Mississippi Art Project, 169 Missouri State Capitol, 84 Montgomery, Mabel, 125–­26, 252n102 Moore, Charles: animosity between New Dealers and, 62; art as grandeur and, 6, 34, 37–­43; artistic establishment and, 43–­44; background of, 40–­41; George Biddle’s mural and, 83; on CFA’s advisory role, 44–­45; on Chicago’s Great White City, 39; City Beautiful movement and, 41–­42; on competitions for commissions, 51–­52, 58; control of artists’ work and, 50–­52; controversial artists and, 22; falling popularity of approach of, 146; home-­grown art and, 79; international recognition of, 44; Jefferson Memorial and, 56; lobbying for New Deal art projects and, 18–­19; merit-­based art projects and, 17, 77; neoclassical art and, 42–­43; noble social values and, 63; opposition of to New Deal art projects, 32; proposed permanent art programs and, 184; quality of artwork and, 185; reconstruction of Washington, DC, and, 40, 50–­51; refusal of need-­based art commissions and, 52–­ 53; retirement and death of, 53, 55, 57; selection of designs by, 49; skepticism of regarding lay audiences, 52; transatlantic exchanges and, 42; Treasury Department art programs and, 82 Morgenthau, Elinor, 79 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 17, 68, 148 Morris, Carl, 167–­68 Mott, Frank Luther, 242n59 Mumford, Lewis, 7, 21, 31 murals: aesthetic control over muralists and, 83–­84; alteration of original designs and, 84, 93; civic unity and, 67; destruction and attempted destruction of, 21, 93–­94, 98, 203–­4; European-­ trained muralists and, 38; in Mexico, 29–­30; models for, 240n29; New Deal iconography as Red and, 207–­10, 208; Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and, 216; political purges of muralists and, 202–­3, 204–­5; from primitivism to civilization in, 36; propaganda in, 18, 19, 93; in public schools, 98–­99, 245n115; realist expressions in, 37; worries about

Index

quality of, 50. See also specific murals and mural sites Murphy, J. Francis, 74 Museum of Art (Oklahoma City), 150 Museum of Modern Art (New York City), 21, 77 Music National Service, 216 Mussolini, Benito, 113 Myrdal, Gunnar, 128 Natanson, Nicholas, 139 National Academy of Design, 49, 184 National Archives Building, 53, 239n12 National Art Week, 146 National Capital Park Commission, 45 National Competitions Committee, 58 national culture. See cultural nationalism and national culture National Endowment for the Arts, 213–­16, 274n33 National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, 7 National Endowment for the Humanities, 215 National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 53, 146, 158, 211 National Industrial Recovery Act, 179 National Labor Relations Act (1935), 114 National New Deal Preservation Association, 224n4 National Sculpture Society, 267n66 National Society of Mural Painters, 22, 267n66 National World War II Memorial, 61 National Youth Administration, 154 Native Americans, 87, 95, 243n87 Native Sons of Americanism, 208 NEA. See National Endowment for the Arts Neel, Alice, 2 Negro in New York (Ottley), 128–­29 neoclassicism, 42–­43, 45–­47, 54–­55, 60–­62, 67–­69 Netherlands, public funding of the arts in, 28, 29 New Deal: church and state and, 63–­64; coining of term, 72–­73; Communist Party opposition to, 94; conservative coalition opposing, 172–­73; decentralization of, 201; increasingly liberal tone of, 190; infrastructure projects and, 16;

institutionalization of regionalism and, 239n20; means-­tested direct versus work relief and, 14–­16; murals as propaganda for, 18; New New Deal and, 217; relief agencies’ competition for funds and, 153; shortcomings of, 8; visual culture as integral to, 100–­101 New Deal art projects: accusations against, 196, 270n116; amount of money allocated to, 175; art and politics and, 78, 80; from art as a weapon to art as experience in, 149; art as experience as most successful approach and, 171; art of as commodity, 211; biting hand that feeds them, 31; blueprint for future public art funding and, 212–­13; as chaotic, 8; classical versus American scene artists and, 37–­38, 62; community response to, 10; conditions and ideas driving, 13; conflict between old and new administrators and, 32, 36–­37; continuation of with local funding, 200; cultural development and, 3; deficit spending and, 24–­25; demise of after New Deal, 5; democratization of the arts and, 4, 8–­9; dismissal of radicals and unqualified workers in, 175–­ 76; diversity and, 8; early opposition to, 173–­83; efficiency and legitimacy of, 199; elections of 1938 as turning point for, 187–­90; experimentation in, 101–­2; failure to preserve art from, 158; falling support for during World War II, 169–­70; fate of artworks from, 211–­12; fear of censorship in, 31; fraud and graft alleged in, 176; funding reductions and, 103, 114, 181, 183; Great Recession and nostalgia for, 7; Hatch Act’s chilling effect on, 201; hope and, 7; House Committee on Un-­American Activities (Dies Committee) investigation of, 190–­91; impact of, 2–­3; as inappropriately political, 173–­74, 176–­77; interlude between modernism and abstract expressionism and, 211; labor unions’ involvement in, 184–­85; level of funding for, 1, 223–­ 24n3; libertarian critique of, 194–­201; limited legacy of, 5; lobbying for, 18–­19, 184; loyalty oaths and political purges in, 201–­2, 204–­5; market concerns and, 146; means-­tested versus merit-­based,

287

Index

New Deal art projects (cont.) 9, 17, 143; middlebrow aesthetic and, 211; mixed assessments of, 7–­8, 210–­11; national heritage and, 27–­28; 1939 congressional attempt to eliminate, 199–­200; number of participants in, 223–­24n3; operating principles of, 16–­17; opposition from Right and Left and, 7–­8; payment mechanisms and, 223–­24n3; permanent arts funding and, 210; political and creative restrictions in, 5; political corruption alleged in, 201, 207; political racketeering alleged in, 173, 175, 177, 188; Popular Front and, 103; press attacks on, 174–­75; promotion of New Deal ideology and, 145; racial discrimination in, 4, 162, 261n56; reasons for opposition to, 172; reclamation of artworks and writings from, 212; recovery of art in 1960s and, 173; Red iconography in, 207–­10, 208; relative size of, 250n71; representational art in, 205–­6; scholarship on, 7–­8, 9; selection of artists for public art projects and, 62; social control and, 262n64; stand against racial segregation and, 145; support for FDR’s political agenda and, 145; today’s art-­funding struggles and, 213; unionization and, 8; varying responses to workers’ activism and, 181–­82; vernacular turn and, 149; vision of public art of, 32; as wasteful boondoggles, 173–­ 75, 188–­89, 194–­95, 197–­99, 202, 207; wholesome activity and, 27, 231n77. See also art entries and specific projects New Orleans community art center, 166 New York Theatre Project, 192, 196 New York Water Color Club, 267n66 New York World’s Fair, 195 New York Writers’ Project, 182, 196 Niles, David, 114 Nixon, Richard M., 209 Norton, Charles Eliot, 40, 42 Obama, Barack, 215 O’Connor, Francis V., 171 O’Connor, John, 212 Office of War Information, 9 Oglesby, Kate, 185–­86 O’Keefe, Georgia, 17

288

Oklahoma City community art center, 164, 167, 168, 170–­71, 263n91 Olmstead, Frederick Law, Jr., 34 One-­Third of a Nation (play by Arthur Arent), 105–­8, 106, 188–­89, 247n22 Orozco, José Clemente, 30 Ottley, Roi, 129 Overmyer, Grace, 30, 210 Owens, Florence, 8, 134–­35 Paramount Pictures, 107 Parker, Thomas, 147, 159–­61 Parks, Gordon, 138, 139, 144 Parnassus, 77 Parnow, Hyde, 148 Partisan Review (journal), 231n80 Parton, Arthur, 74 Patterson, James T., 187 PBS, 215 Pegler, Westbrook, 178 Pepper Bill, 267n64 Perkins, Frances, 72, 98 Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 216 philanthropy, 19, 25–­26, 75, 77 Phillips, William, 231n80 Phoenix Art Center, 163, 167 photography: to create connections between people, 135, 137; exhibitions of, 133–­35, 135; as flexible medium, 154; “How American People Live” exhibit and, 133–­35, 136–­37, 139–­43, 256–­ 57n163; as impetus to action, 142–­43; photographic depictions of women and, 7–­8, 134–­35, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 257n164; photographs as pliable sources and, 144; polemical images seeming less controversial and, 143–­44; propaganda and, 132–­33, 177–­78; racial representations in, 137–­39; Rexford Tugwell’s vision for, 131; Roy Stryker’s approach to, 130–­32 Picasso, Pablo, 228–­29n36 Pinchot, Gifford, 177 Pins and Needles (play), 115–­16 Pleasant Hill, Missouri, post office, 217–­18 Poe, Edgar Allan, 186 Pollak, Frances, 148 Pollock, Jackson, 3, 212 Poor, Henry Varnum, 84 Pope, John Russell, 6, 34, 53, 55–­60

Index

Popular Front: art as a weapon and, 103–­ 4; Composers’ Collective and, 151; conditions driving New Deal cultural turn and, 13; end of, 103; exclusion of Trotskyites from, 29; Federal One and, 22, 144; formation of, 94, 103 Post, Langdon, 107 Post, Marion. See Wolcott, Marion Post Progressivism, 9, 41–­42 propaganda: art as, 78; art as a weapon and, 104; control versus education and, 132; documentation and, 132; as education, 104; fascism and, 178; mass communications and, 178; media used for, 132; in murals, 18, 19, 78; photography and, 130, 132–­33, 177–­78 protests: art as a weapon and, 102; against censorship, 25, 86–­94; over congressional attempt to abolish New Deal art projects, 199–­200; depicted in murals, 91, 92; federal writers and, 179–­80; for funding for artists, 23–­24; over press attacks on New Deal art projects, 174; over staffing cuts in arts projects, 181, 183. See also labor unions and labor unrest public funding of the arts. See art as a function of government Public Works Administration (PWA). See PWA (Public Works Administration) Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). See PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) PWA (Public Works Administration), 16 PWAP (Public Works of Art Project): aesthetics and, 16–­17, 18; art and politics for, 88; artists’ gratitude for, 81; creation of, 21; diversity of artists funded by, 18; number of artists commissioned and, 242n61; opposition to, 32; regionalism versus social realism and, 90; regionalist art programs and, 79; seventy-­fifth anniversary celebration of, 213; Washington, DC, projects and, 37 Queensboro Art Center (New York City), 165 race and racism: American scene art and, 95; art as a weapon and, 138, 145; censorship of theater and, 113; CFA’s

selection of artists and, 48; community art centers and, 159–­60, 161–­62, 261n56; Federal Dance Project and, 162; FTP and, 162; House Committee on Un-­ American Activities (Dies Committee) and, 192–­93, 194; means-­tested relief and, 14; neoclassical art and, 42–­43; photography maintaining divisions of, 143; racial representation in photography and, 137–­39; regionalism versus social realism and, 239n22; rejection of visiting artists and, 167 Rahv, Philip, 231n80 Railway Audit and Inspection Co., 268n90 Ralston, Walter, 107 Randolph, Edmond, 68 Rawick, George, 128, 212 Rayburn, Sam, 194, 195 RCA Building, 19–­21, 228–­29n36 Red Cross, 15 Reddick, Lawrence, 123, 251n87 Rees, Theophilus, 244–­45n114 Refregier, Anton, 30, 75, 207–­10, 208 Reichelt, Franz, 203 Reorganization Act, 128, 201 Republic Steel, 114 Resettlement Administration Historical Section: African Americans excluded from photography exhibits and, 134, 137, 139, 143, 145, 256–­57n163; censorship and, 143; FSA and, 153–­54; merit hiring and, 143; photographers’ interest in black life and racial discrimination and, 137–­39; photographers working in, 132–­33, 134; photographic depictions of women and, 134–­35, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 257n164; promotion of New Deal ideology and, 145; propaganda and, 178; relative size of, 143; resistance to integration of, 138; shifting goals of, 144; Roy Stryker appointed head of, 130; training of photographers and, 131; uses of photography and film by, 132, 133–­34 Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division, 149, 150, 151–­54 Reynolds, Robert, 193 Rice, Elmer, 113, 114, 115 Ridder, V. F., 175–­76 Riis, Jacob, 140–­41

289

Index

Rincon Annex Post Office (San Francisco), 207–­10, 208 Rivera, Diego, 19–­21, 20, 30, 68, 84, 88. See also Rivera-­Rockefeller scandal Rivera-­Rockefeller scandal, 13, 19–­22, 31, 50, 88 Robbins, Tim, 115 Robert, Laurence W., Jr., 22, 64 Robertson, Sidney, 148 Robeson, Paul, 164, 197 Robinson, Earl, 151 Rockefeller, Abby, 19 Rockefeller, Nelson. See Rivera-­Rockefeller scandal Rockefeller Center, 20, 21 Rome, Jack, 141 Romney, Mitt, 215 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1, 112, 113, 150, 164 Roosevelt, Franklin D., and FDR administration: on abundant life, 64–­65, 100; antilynching legislation and, 145; on art as an experience, 146–­47; censorship of FTP play and, 113; Communist Party opposition to, 94; controversial artists and, 22; Court-­packing effort of, 179, 187–­88, 190, 195; Depression as spiritual problem and, 63–­64; John Dewey’s influence and, 148; elections of 1936 and, 188; First Hundred Days of, 18–­19; funding cuts to WPA and, 181, 183; Hatch Act and, 201; Jefferson Memorial and, 58, 59; labor strikes and, 195; leftward shift of, 24; New Deal art projects’ support for agenda of, 145; as New York governor, 14–­15; 1938 congressional realignment and, 187–­88; rejection of art as grandeur and, 55; Second Inaugural Address of, 100–­101, 245n1; Rexford Tugwell and, 131 Roosevelt, Theodore, 59, 60 Roosevelt Institute, 224n4 Root, Elihu, 51 Rosenberg, Harold, 6, 205 Rosenwald Fund, 138 Roskolenko, Harry, 250n75 Rosmarin, Joseph, 203 Rothstein, Arthur, 134–­35, 137–­38, 177–­78 Rourke, Constance, 6, 27–­28, 147–­48, 157–­ 58, 185 Rowan, Edward, 65, 73, 78–­80, 83, 87, 95, 243n86 290

Royal Academy (London), 44 Royse, Morton, 101, 121, 147, 148 Rubenstein, Annette, 108 Rubenstein, Lewis, 67 Russak, Ben, 248–­49n48 Russian Workers’ Theatre, 110 Saab, Joan, 258n3 Sabath, Adolph Joachim, 195, 199 Sacco and Vanzetti case, 183 Saint-­Gaudens, Augustus, 34 Salem, Oregon, community arts center, 161 Salt Lake City community arts center, 167 San Francisco Art Commission, 93 Saunders, Sallie, 192–­93, 194, 197 Schapiro, Meyer, 6, 94 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Sr., 183 Scottsboro case, 113 Seeger, Charles, 28, 101, 147, 148, 151–­54 Senate Park Commission. See McMillan Commission Shahn, Ben, 2, 30, 132 Shakespeare, William, 3, 214 Sheets, Nan, 161, 168, 170–­71, 263n91 Sheppard, Morris, 188 Shigekawa, Joan, 213 Shipstead-­Luce Act (1930), 45 Shonnard, Eugenie, 30 Short, Dewey, 187 Silvera, John, 114 Sing for Your Supper (play), 196–­98, 270n125 Sioux City, Iowa, community arts center, 161, 167 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 30 Sirovich, William I., 184, 187, 230n60 Sitar Arts Center (Washington, DC), 216 Sklar, George, 174 Slave Narrative Collection, 120–­21, 123–­24, 127–­29, 149, 212, 251n87 Sloan, John, 155 Smith, Jason Scott, 201 Smithsonian, 150, 184 Social Security, 8 Société des Architectes Diplômés par le Gourvernement, 44, 267n66 Society Freed through Justice (mural by George Biddle), 68–­69, 69–­71, 71–­73, 84, 87, 240n27 Society of American Artists, 267n66 Society of Beaux Arts Architects, 184 Society of Independent Artists, 155

Index

Sokoloff, Nikolai, 182, 200 Solman, Joseph, 3 Somervell, Brehon, 176–­77, 181, 201–­4, 212 South Side Community Art Center (Chicago), 4, 150, 167 Soviet Union, 28–­29, 103, 110, 205–­6, 231–­32nn80–­81 Spokane Art Center, 161, 164–­68 Stalin, Joseph, and Stalinism, 29, 121, 203, 205, 231–­32nn80–­81 Standard Oil Company, 144 Stanton, Olive, 115 State Department, 211 Steichen, Edward, 140, 256–­57n163 Stein, Gertrude, 68 Stein, Harold, 26 Stein, Leo, 75–­76 Steiner, J. F., 27 Sterne, Maurice, 74 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 31 Stone, Harlan, 93 Stone City Art Colony, 79 Stryker, Roy: art as a weapon and, 101, 108–­ 9, 144–­45; background of, 109, 130; conveyance of New Deal’s goals by, 177; Walker Evans and, 133; exhibitions and, 133–­34; under FSA, 153–­54; government funding of controversial art and, 108–­9; influences on, 130–­31; merit hiring and, 143; Gordon Parks and, 138; photographic approach of, 130–­33; photographic exhibitions and, 139, 143; photography to build cross-­class alliances and, 130; from public to private employ, 144; racial representation and, 138–­39, 143; on responses to “How American People Live” exhibit, 141–­42; as savvy bureaucrat, 144; selection of photographs by, 154; shooting scripts for photographers and, 138; training of staff by, 131 Sullivan, Edward F., 268n90 Supreme Court building, 76, 179, 239n12 Swartwout, Egerton, 50 Sweden, 24, 29 Tamiris, Helen, 105 Tarkington, Booth, 186–­87 taxation, 75, 210 Taylor, Edward Thomas, 194 Taylor, Henry, 156

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), 14–­15 Tennessee Valley Authority, 8 Theatre Collective, 102 Thomas, J. Parnell, 191 Thompson, Florence Owens. See Owens, Florence Tolstoy, Leo, 169 Tompkins, Sally Kress, 46 Townsend, M. Clifford, 177 Treasury Department art programs: academic artists and, 82–­84, 86; aesthetic control over muralists and, 83–­84; American scene art and, 67, 80, 95, 97, 99; Arnoldian approach of, 214; art administrators’ backgrounds and, 109; art and politics for, 73, 88, 103; art bulletin of, 68; artists’ frustrations with, 83–­84, 86; artists’ gratitude for, 80–­82, 94; audiences’ responses to, 97–­99; beauty and, 66, 73; community gratitude for, 217–­18; competitions for commissions and, 65, 80–­81, 83; controversial art and government funding and, 109; controversial figures and events and, 182; demographics of artists employed by, 87, 243nn86–­87; FDR’s speech about abundance and, 100; goals of, 65; Jefferson Memorial and, 58; leaders of, 65, 73–­74, 79–­80; level of arts funding and, 29; merit-­based art projects and, 9, 22; monitoring of politics and taste of artists and, 65; number of artists employed by, 81, 87, 242n61, 243nn86–­87; as palliative to revolution, 94; Progressive-­ style reform liberalism in art programs of, 22–­23; proposed permanent art programs and, 184; public approval of, 98–­99; regionalism and, 80–­81, 86–­87, 90, 92–­93, 95, 102–­3, 244n105; relief emphasis of art programs of, 50; resistance to changes in art programs of, 50; Section of Fine Arts and, 16, 58, 79, 87, 98, 207, 257n164; Section of Painting and Sculpture and, 16, 29, 50, 53, 68, 82, 84, 87, 94–­95, 184; selection of artists and, 17–­18, 23, 49–­50, 51; social change strategy of, 104; turf war between CFA and, 82, 84; unwillingness to apply for commissions from, 102; vision of, 116; voluntary monetary 291

Index

Treasury Department art programs (cont.) contributions to, 99; voluntary service to, 74, 240–­41n34. See also specific projects of Triple A Plowed Under (play), 114–­15, 178–­ 79, 266nn36–­38 Trojan Horse (tract by Edward F. Sullivan), 190, 268n90 Truman, Harry, 211 Tugwell, Rexford, 22–­23, 130–­31, 135 Tulsa, Oklahoma, art center, 170 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 116 Tydings, Millard E., 189 Unemployed Artists Group, 17, 23 United American Artists, 23, 204 University of Virginia, 56 Upton, Charlotte H., 164–­65 urban planning, 39–­40, 42, 46–­48, 54–­55 usable past, 27–­28, 31, 67, 96, 147, 149, 158 Utah State Institute of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City), 161, 169 Vachon, John, 132, 144 Valiant, Margaret, 150–­54 Van Cleve, Virgil, 192–­93, 197 Van Nuys, Frederick, 177 Vasconcelos, José, 29 Vassar College, 107, 110–­11 Veblen, Thorstein, 26, 155 Vico, Giambattista, 28 Wagner Act. See National Labor Relations Act (1935) Wagner Steagall Housing Act, 107, 108, 189 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), 27, 150, 163, 170 Wallace, Henry, 22–­23 Washington, Booker T., 125 Washington, DC, reconstruction: aerial views of city and, 46, 47; art as grandeur and, 33–­35, 36–­37, 45; cost of, 46, 48–­49; evaluation of, 55; government’s faith in classical values and, 53; key figures in, 40; Pierre Charles L’Enfant and, 50–­51, 59, 61; neoclassicism versus American aesthetic and, 46–­48 Washington Mall, 53 Washington Project for the Arts, 215 Washington Society of Fine Arts, 53 Watson, Ella, 138 292

Watson, Forbes, 65, 68, 73, 76–­80, 93, 104, 240n32 Watson, Morris, 114 Watts, Richard, Jr., 107 Weber, Max (modernist painter), 13–­14 Weiler, Michael, 245n1 Welles, Orson, 114–­15 Westchester County Society of Architects, 267n66 Whitaker, Charles Harris, 48 White City (Chicago), 38–­39, 49 Whiting, Frederic Allen, 60 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 77 Whitney Museum, 17 Wight, Clifford, 93–­94 Wilder, Charlotte, 250n75 Williams, Aubrey, 16 Wilson, William H., 41–­42 Wilson, Woodrow, 44 Winston-­Salem Art Center, 162 Wolcott, Marion Post, 139, 140, 141, 144 Women’s International Aeronautic Association, 203 Wood, Grant, 79, 80, 86, 242n59 Woodrum, Clifton A., and Woodrum Committee hearings, 6, 185–­86, 189–­90, 194–­202, 270n125 Woodward, Ellen, 114 Workers’ Alliance, 190, 192, 199 Workers’ Dance League, 102 Workers’ Music League, 102 Work Projects Administration (WPA). See WPA (Work Projects Administration) Work Relief and Public Works Appropriation Act, 201 Works Progress Administration (WPA). See WPA (Works Progress Administration) World War II, 6–­7, 168–­70, 205–­6, 210 WPA (Work Projects Administration): loyalty oaths and political purges in, 202, 204–­5; murals in public schools and, 245n115; political corruption alleged in, 201; reorganization of, 200–­201; shutting down of radical discourse and, 8; World War II and end of, 168 WPA (Works Progress Administration): censorship of theater and, 113; Committee on Folk Arts and, 154; Complaint Bureau of, 175; creation of, 24; creative people on the Left and, 102–­3; Federal One and, 18; Harry Hopkins and, 15;

Index

as inappropriately political, 176–­77; internal and external investigations of, 189–­90, 194–­96, 198, 199–­200; layoffs in, 176; leadership changes at, 200; level of funding and, 1–­2, 24, 114, 181, 183, 200; local communities’ contributions to, 200, 223–­24n3; monitoring of relief workers in, 176; New York World’s Fair and, 195; number of people served by, 24; press attacks on, 174–­75; reorganization of, 128, 175, 199–­200, 201; scope of artistic production and, 2; shutting

down of radical discourse and, 8; staffing cuts and, 181–­82; wages in, 25 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 47, 59 Wright, Richard, 2, 123, 137–­38, 250n75 Writers’ Union, 23, 94, 174, 179–­80 xenophobia, 54, 86, 117–­18, 244n105 Yezierska, Anzia, 250n75 Zakheim, Bernard, 88, 90, 90, 92, 93–­94 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 151

293