Perhaps best known for its public works projects, the WPA also employed tens of thousands of actors, musicians, writers and artists through a jobs program collectively known as Federal One. "Hell, they’ve got to eat too,” said FDR's advisor Harry Hopkins, director of New Deal relief programs. Seven percent of the WPA budget would be dedicated to the arts. Lesser known are visual New Deal art programs under the Treasury Department. According to a 1936 government report, "The Treasury Department has erected, or is erecting, and has control of some 2,800 buildings" scattered over the United States. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first federal art program; the Section on Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Act funded artists to add murals and sculptures to public buildings. Preserving the New Deal’s complex, often overlooked and sometimes misunderstood art legacy is a challenge —one that the Living New Deal is preparing to meet.
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By Mary Okin, Ph.D.
From 1933 to 1943, federal art programs hired thousands of unemployed artists, resulting in an immense and widely dispersed New Deal art collection owned by the American people. The Living New Deal has launched a new initiative, Advocating for New Deal Art (ANDA). READ MORE |
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By Janneken Smucker, Ph.D
During the Roosevelt Administration, women made quilts with the support of New Deal jobs programs. The quilt became a symbol for how to lift one’s family out of poverty, piece by piece. READ MORE |
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Living New Deal Webinars
 “A New Deal for Quilts”
with Janneken Smucker
Thursday, February 29, 2024. 5pm-6pm PT
A New Deal for Quilts (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) explores the ways quilts became a powerful form of communication in government relief and public relations efforts and as expressions of quilt makers hopes for better times. Author Janneken Smucker, herself a 5th generation quilt maker, is professor of History at West Chester University in Philadelphia, specializing in digital and public history and material culture. FREE. REGISTER
 "Folk Music and the New Deal:
Collecting the Hidden Soundtracks of the Great Depression”
With Sheryl Kaskowitz and Catherine Hiebert Kerst
Tuesday, March 26, 2023, 5pm-6pm PT
Most people are familiar with the New Deal's legacy in the visual arts, but the soundtracks left by its folk music collecting activities have remained largely unknown. Through the Music Unit hidden within the Resettlement Administration and the WPA's California Folk Music Project, pioneering collector Sidney Robertson Cowell amassed hundreds of recordings, providing new insights into multicultural America.
Music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz is author of the forthcoming A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, (Pegasus Books, April 2024) the story of the Resettlement Administration's Music Unit, a little-known program that had a lasting impact on American culture. Catherine Hiebert Kerst, former archivist in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, is author of the forthcoming book, California Gold, Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project (UC Press, April 2024) about Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project (UC Press, April 2024) FREE. REGISTER
 “Ranger of the Lost Art”
with Doug Leen
Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 5pm-6pm PT
While a seasonal ranger at Grand Teton National Park, Doug Leen salvaged a New Deal-era park poster destined for the burn pile. It led him on a decades-long quest to find and preserve the original thirteen WPA park poster designs and spurred the creation of Ranger Doug Enterprises. Learn about Doug’s new book, Rediscovering the WPA Posters of Our National Parks. FREE. REGISTER
In-Person Events
 The Huntington
The Sargent Claude Johnson Exhibition
From the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights Movement
February 17-May 20, 2024
The California-based African-American artist Johnson served as unit supervisor of the WPA sculpture division. His powerful masks, portrait busts, lithographs and sculptures have become emblems of the Harlem Renaissance.
LOCATION: MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. The Huntington, huntington.org. 151 Oxford Rd, San Marino, CA
 International Quilt Museum
"A New Deal for Quilts”
Through April 20, 2024
A New Deal for Quilts shares how quiltmakers from around the U.S. coped with the hard times of the Great Depression and the federal government’s response to the downturn, using patchwork quilts and quilt making as emblems of American perseverance and frugality.
LOCATION: Gottsch Gallery, International Quilt Museum, 1523 N. 33rd St., Lincoln, NE
 Treasure Island Museum
"Treasure Island Swings Again"
Saturday, February 17, 2024, 7pm-10pm
Annual swing dance benefit celebrating the 85th anniversary of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition.
INFO & TICKETS
LOCATION: Treasure Island Museum, 1 Avenue of the Palms Administration Building, San Francisco, CA
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The Roosevelt Martini was testimony to the president's questionable mixology skills. FDR often enjoyed drinking more than one, which, at times, inspired him to burst into his college fight song. READ MORE
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 A Work of Art
Timberline Lodge, Oregon
By Gray Brechin
More than a mile above sea level, Timberline Lodge, east of Portland, embodies the New Deal’s aim to make life itself a work of art by wrapping visitors in it. READ MORE
Tell us about your favorite New Deal Site. Send us a first-person story of 100 (or so) words about your favorite New Deal site and why you chose it. Send your submissions to: [email protected]. Thanks!
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Some links may limit access for nonsubscribers. Please support local journalism, if you can.
The New Deal’s Legacy
FDR’s New Deal Transformed the Economy. Could Biden do the same?
(Featuring Living New Deal Associate Natalie MacDonald)
by Kai Ryssdal, Andie Corban and Maria Hollenhorst
Marketplace, January 24, 2023
The New Deal History of LA’s Freeways
The Arroyo Seco Parkway, formerly known as the Pasadena Freeway, is California’s first freeway, the oldest in the country. It was built with the help of federal New Deal agencies and funding, according to the Living New Deal, a research project and nonprofit based in California. LISTEN
By Kai Ryssdal and Andie Corban
Marketplace, January 19, 2024
Elon Musk’s War on the New Deal—and Democracy
The South African-born mogul is now trying to gut the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Board.
By Caroline Fredrickson
Washington Monthly, January 19, 2024
What the New Deal Teaches Us About the Current Rise of Fascism
“We are living in another time of testing,” says historian and author Heather Cox Richardson. “When our government tried to expand democracy to include people of color, there was a backlash from racists and businessmen who, in a sense, made an unholy alliance as early as 1937. We are still grappling with that alliance today."
By Ben Tumin
Teen Vogue, January 5, 2024
Franklin Roosevelt’s Case for American Military Aid for Ukraine
On Jan. 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address as the U.S. confronted a similar situation to the one it faces in 2024. In 1941, Great Britain was the American ally desperately trying to repel unprovoked aggression, in that case from Nazi Germany. Like Ukraine today, it confronted the real prospect that without further American military and economic assistance, the country would no longer be able to carry on its struggle.
By David B. Wooner
TIME, January 8, 2024
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“Art in America has always belonged to the people and has never been the property of an academy or a class. The great Treasury projects, through which our public buildings are being decorated, are an excellent example of the continuity of this tradition. The Federal Art Project of the WPA is a practical relief project, which also emphasizes the best tradition of the democratic spirit. The WPA artist, in rendering his own impression of things, speaks also for the spirit of his fellow countrymen everywhere. I think the WPA artist exemplifies with great force the essential place the arts have in a democratic society such as ours.”
— President Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 10, 1939
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