By Sheila D. Collins
Writing in the New York Times recently, art critic Holland Cotter lamented the fact that the current billionaire-dominated market system, “is shaping every aspect of art in the city; not just how artists live, but also what kind of art is made, and how art is presented in the media and in museums.” “Why,” he asks, “in one of the most ethnically diverse cities, does the art world continue to be a bastion of whiteness? Why are African-American curators and administrators, and especially directors, all but absent from our big museums? Why are there still so few black — and Latino, and Asian-American — critics and editors?”
It wasn’t always like this. During the 1930s under the New Deal, the arts were democratized, made accessible to ordinary people who lacked the means to buy paintings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or to attend Broadway shows at over $100 a ticket. The New Deal’s support for the arts is one of the most interesting and unique episodes in the history of American public policy.
The federal arts programs initiated in the 1930s were intended to alleviate the economic hardships of unemployed cultural workers, to popularize art among a much wider segment of the population, and to boost public morale during a time of deep stress and pessimism, or as New Deal artist Gutzon Borglum remarked, to “coax the soul of America back to life.”
The best known of all the programs that were enacted during the Depression was the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Art Project. It consisted of four distinct projects: a Federal Art Project, a Federal Writers’ Project, a Federal Theatre Project, and a Federal Music Project.
Paintings were given to government offices, while murals, sculptures, bas relief, and mosaics were seen on the walls of schools, libraries, post offices, hospitals, courthouses, and other public buildings. Over the course of its eight years, the WPA commissioned over five hundred murals for New York City’s public hospitals alone. Among the now well-known artists supported by these programs were painters such as Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Raphael and Moses Soyer, and the sculptor, Louise Nevelson.
The print workshops set up by the WPA prepared the ground for the flowering of the graphic arts in the United States, which until that time had been limited in both media and expression. Moreover, since prints were portable and cheap, they became a vehicle for broadening the public’s understanding and appreciation of the creative arts.
Some 100 community art centers, which included galleries, classrooms, and community workshops, were established in twenty-two states–but particularly where opportunities to experience and make art were scarce. Through this effort individuals who may never have seen a large painted scene or a piece of sculpture were given the opportunity to experience not only a finished work of art but to participate in the creative process. In the New York City area alone, an estimated 50,000 people participated in classes under the Federal Art Project auspices each week. According to Smithsonian author, David A. Taylor, “the effect was electric. It jump-started people beginning careers in art amid the devastation.”
The Federal Writers’ project provided employment and experience for editors, art critics, researchers, and historians, a number of whom later became famous for their novels and poetry, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, and Saul Bellow. They were put to work writing state and regional guidebooks that were to portray the social, economic, industrial, and historical background of the country. These guidebooks represented a vast treasury of Americana from the ground up, including facts and folklore, history and legend, and histories of the famous, the infamous, and the excluded. There were also seventeen-volumes of oral histories of the last people who had lived under slavery. An additional set of folklore and oral histories of 10,000 people from all regions, occupations, and ethnic groups were collected and are now held in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.
The Federal Theatre Project was the first and only attempt to create a national theatre in the United States, producing all genres of theater, including classical plays, circuses, puppet shows, musical comedies, vaudeville, dance performances, children’s theatre, and experimental plays. They were performed wherever people could gather—not only in theaters, but in parks, hospitals, convents, churches, schools, armories, circus tents, universities, and prisons. Touring companies brought theater to parts of the country where drama had been non-existent, and provided training and experience for thousands of aspiring actors, directors, stagehands, and playwrights, among them, Orson Wells, Eugene O’Neill, and Joseph Houseman.
The program emphasized preserving and promoting minority cultural forms. At a time of strict racial segregation with arts funding non-existent in African American communities, black theatre companies were established in many cities. Foreign language companies performed works in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish.
The Federal Theatre Project also brought controversial issues to the foreground, making it one of the most embattled of all the New Deal programs. Its “Living Newspaper” section produced plays about labor disputes, economic inequality, racism, and similar issues, which infuriated a growing chorus of conservative critics who succeeded in eliminating the program in 1939.
The Federal Music Project employed 15,000 instrumentalists, composers, vocalists, and teachers as well as providing financial assistance for existing orchestras and creating new ones in places that had never had an orchestra. Many other musical forms—opera, band concerts, choral music, jazz, and pop–were also performed. Most of the concerts were either free to the public or offered at very low cost, and free music classes were open to people of all ages and abilities.
In addition to the arts programs, the Farm Security Administration’s photography program oversaw the production of more than 80,000 photographs, as part of the effort to make the nation aware of the plight of displaced rural populations. These images–produced by photographers such as Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Dorothea Lange helped humanize the verbal and statistical reports of the terrible poverty and turmoil in the agricultural sector of the economy and brought documentary photography into the cultural pantheon of the nation.
Between 1933 and 1942 ten thousand artists produced some 100,000 easel paintings, 18,000 sculptures, over 13,000 prints, 4,000 murals, over 1.6 million posters, and thousands of photographs. Over a thousand towns and cities now boasted federal buildings embellished with New Deal murals and sculpture. Some 6,686 writers produced more than a thousand books and pamphlets, and the Federal Theatre Project thousands of plays. More than the quantity of the output, however, is the way in which these programs shaped Americans’ understanding of who they were as a people and their country’s possibilities. Before the New Deal, the notion that government should support the arts was unheard of, but thanks to the New Deal, art had been democratized and, for a time, de-commodified, made accessible to the great majority of the American people.
Perhaps Roosevelt himself best summed up the significance of the New Deal arts programs:
A few generations ago, the people of this country were often taught . . . to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves . . . But . . . within the last few years . . . they have discovered that they have a part. . . . They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors—people they have known and lived beside and talked to. . . some of it good, some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive–all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved. The people of this country know now . . . that art is not something just to be owned but something to be made: that it is the act of making and not the act of owning that is art. And knowing this they know also that art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all the living and creating peoples—all who make and build; and, most of all, the young and vigorous peoples who have made and built our present wide country.
New Deal support for the arts had coaxed the soul of America back to life, but we are in danger of losing it again. Under the obsession with deficits, arts programs in the public schools are being cut, federal funding for the arts has dropped dramatically, and even private funding has been reduced. Without art, we are ill-equipped as a people with the collective imagination that is needed if we are to resolve the enormous challenges that confront us in the twenty-first century. Who or what will there be to coax this generation back to life?
Sheila D. Collins is Professor of Political Science Emerita, William Paterson University and editor/author with Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg of When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal. She serves on the speakers’ bureau of the National New Deal Preservation Association, the Research Board of the Living New Deal and the board of the National Jobs for All Coalition, is a member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group and co-chairs two seminars at Columbia University.
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The post When art coaxed the soul of America back to life appeared first on OUPblog.
By David Roll
He was a spectral figure in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Slightly sinister. A ramshackle character, but boyishly attractive. Gaunt, pauper-thin. Full of nervous energy, fueled by caffeine and Lucky Strikes.
Hopkins was an experienced social worker, an in-your-face New Deal reformer. Yet he sought the company of the rich and well born. He was a gambler, a bettor on horses, cards, and the time of day. Between his second and third marriages he dated glamorous women — movie stars, actresses and fashionistas.
It was said that he had a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife. A New Yorker profile described him as a purveyor of wit and anecdote. He loved to tell the story of the time President Roosevelt wheeled himself into Winston Churchill’s bedroom unannounced. It was when the prime minister was staying at the White House. Churchill had just emerged from his afternoon bath, stark naked and gleaming pink. The president apologized and started to withdraw. “Think nothing of it,” Churchill said. “The Prime Minister has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.” Whether true or not, Hopkins dined out on this story for years.
On the evening of 10 May 1940 — a year and a half before the United States entered the Second World War — Roosevelt and Hopkins had just finished dinner. They were in the Oval Study on the second floor of the White House. As usual, they were gossiping and enjoying each other’s jokes and stories. Hopkins was forty-nine; the president was fifty-seven. They had known one another for a decade; Hopkins had run several of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies that put millions of Americans to work on public works and infrastructure projects. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had consoled Harry following the death of his second wife, Barbara, in 1937. The first lady was the surrogate mother of Hopkins’s daughter, Diana, age seven. Hopkins had become part of the Roosevelt family. He was Roosevelt’s closest advisor and friend.
The president sensed that Harry was not feeling well. He knew that Hopkins had had more than half of his stomach removed due to cancer and was suffering from malnutrition and weakeness in his legs. Roosevelt insisted that his friend spend the night.
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Hopkins and Barbara Duncan
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Returning to New York after a trip to Europe in the summer of 1934.
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Hopkins at the 1940 Democratic national convention
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In Chicago with daughter Diana, age seven. From left to right behind them: John Hertz, founder of the Hertz car rental empire, thoroughbred race horse owner and a close friend of Hopkins; David, Hopkins’ twenty-eight-year-old son; and Edwin Daley
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Under the fourteen-inch guns of the British battleship Prince of Wales
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In August 1941, Churchill, Hopkins and British officers discuss the forthcoming meetings with President Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland in what became known as the Atlantic Conference.
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Hopkins conferring with Roosevelt
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In the Oval Study, June 1942.
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Rabat, Morocco
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After visiting American troops in Rabat, Hopkins, General Mark Clark (second from left), Roosevelt, and General George Patton (right) discuss the North Africa campaign during a lunch in the field.
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Roosevelt celebrating his sixty-first birthday
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In the roomy cabin of his Boeing Clipper with Admiral Leahy (left), Hopkins and Captain Howard Cone, the Clipper commander (right). They were on the final leg of their return from the Casablanca conference.
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At the Tehran conference outside the Soviet embassy
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December 1943, left to right: General George Marshall shaking hands with British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Archibald Clark Kerr, Hopkins, V. N. Pavlov (Stalin’s interpreter), Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov (with mustache).
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Louise “Louie” Hopkins
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Louise “Louie” Hopkins charmed the Russian officers as she and Harry toured Berlin on their way back from Moscow in June 1945.
Hopkins was the man who came to dinner and never left. For most of the next three-and-one-half years Harry would live in the Lincoln suite a few doors down the hall from the Roosevelts and his daughter would live on the third floor near the Sky Parlor. Without any particular portfolio or title, Hopkins conducted business for the president from a card table and a telephone in his bedroom.
During those years, as the United States was drawn into the maelstrom of the Second World War, Harry Hopkins would devote his life to helping the president prepare for and win the war. He would shortly form a lifelong friendship with Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine. He would even earn a measure of respect and a degree of trust from Joseph Stalin, the brutal dictator of the Soviet Union. He would play a critical role, arguably the critical role, in establishing and preserving America’s alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union that won the war.
Harry Hopkins was the pectin and the glue. He understood that victory depended on holding together a three-party coalition: Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. This would be his single-minded focus throughout the war years. Churchill was awed by Hopkins’s ability to focus; he often addressed him as “Lord Root of the Matter.”
Much of Hopkins’s success was due to social savvy, what psychologists call emotional intelligence or practical intelligence. He knew how to read people and situations, and how to use that natural talent to influence decisions and actions. He usually knew when to speak and when to remain silent. Whether it was at a wartime conference, alone with Roosevelt, or a private meeting with Stalin, when Hopkins chose to speak, his words were measured to achieve effect.
At a dinner in London with the leaders of the British press during the Blitz, when Britain stood alone, Hopkins’s words gave the press barons the sense that though America was not yet in the war, she was marching beside them. One of the journalists who was there wrote, “We were happy men all; our confidence and our courage had been stimulated by a contact which Shakespeare, in Henry the V, had a phrase, ‘a little touch of Harry in the night.’”
Hopkins’s touch was not little nor was it light. To Stalin, Hopkins spoke po dushe (according to the soul). Churchill saw Hopkins as a “crumbling lighthouse from which there shown beams that led great fleets to harbour.” To Roosevelt, he gave his life, “asking for nothing except to serve.” They were the “happy few.” And Hopkins had made himself one of them.
David Roll is the author of The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler. He is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP and founder of Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, a public interest organization that provides pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world. He was awarded the Purpose Prize Fellowship by Civic Ventures in 2009.
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The post Who was Harry Hopkins? appeared first on OUPblog.
By Gil Troy
As we mark the centennial (Feb. 6th, 2011) of Ronald Reagan’s birth, the tug of war over his legacy continues. Reagan’s popular image – and popularity — have fluctuated as wildly as the stock market. One way to make sense of this is to think of Ronald Reagan as having nine public lives.
Central to the Reagan legend is this conservative Republican president’s origins as a Hollywood Democrat. Ronald Reagan was a New Deal Democrat who by the 1950s felt that the Democratic Party had lost its way. He always insisted: “Maybe my party changed. I didn’t.” And yes, Reagan was an actor. Actually, he never understood how anyone could be in politics without first having been in showbiz.
By 1966, when he ran successfully to become California’s governor, Reagan’s transformation was complete. During his two terms as governor, and during his triumphal 1980 run for the presidency, Reagan was known as a Conservative Ideologue, beloved by the right, disdained by the left. Although he won in an ABC election, with most Americans choosing Anybody But Carter, Reagan claimed he received a mandate for change.
Reagan started strong in his third incarnation, as the Reagan Revolutionary. He promised to cut the budget, reduce taxes, trim the bureaucracy, revive America, face down the Soviets. During his first seven and a half months in office, Reagan secured the largest budget cut in history – some $35 billion in domestic spending from Jimmy Carter’s request – and reduced the personal income tax rate by almost one quarter. Initially, Democrats were flummoxed. But by the summer of 1981, with Americans experiencing the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, Democrats attacked what they now called the “Reagan Recession.” Getting traction on the “Fairness Issue,” critics attacked the President as Mr. Magoo, a bumbling anti-Communist cowboy, a reverse Robin Hood and warmonger. They said he cut taxes for the rich and burdened the poor while risking nuclear war by calling the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” They mocked his gaffes, from blaming trees for causing air pollution to counting ketchup as a vegetable (which actually emanated from the Department of Agriculture not him). After Democrats surged in the 1982 Congressional midterm elections, pundits started eulogizing Reagan’s failed presidency.
Fortunately for Reagan, the economy revived before he had to face the electorate for re-election. With inflation tamed, jobs being created, American pride returned. Reagan reigned as a Popular Patriot. He blessed the prosperity as “Morning in America.” He pushed for a peaceful ending to the Cold War by going to Berlin to say to his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.” He repeatedly spurred Americans to build their county as “a shining city upon the hill.”
Yet by the time Reagan retired in January, 1989, even many Republicans were losing enthusiasm for him. By promising a “kinder, gentler” nation, Vice President George H.W. Bush became president implicitly casting Reagan as the Unkind, Ungentle President. The disrespect for Reagan in the Bush White House as lazy, ignorant, detached, became so overt that former President Richard Nixon fired off a note to Bush’s Chief of Staff John Sununu urging discretion. Bush then called Reagan to apologize.
When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he joined the pile-on, targeting Reaganite “greed” and accusing Reagan of neglecting middle class Americans.
As Reagan faded into the haze of Alzheime
One of the best tributes to our fallen troops, in my opinion, is taking very good care of their surviving comrades. To celebrate Memorial Day we have excerpted a piece 
from the beginning of The G.I. Bill: A New Deal For Veterans, by Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin which looks at just how beneficial the G.I Bill was not only for troops but for all of America. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies and the Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University. Stuart M. Blumin is Professor Emeritus of American History, Cornell University.
In July 1995 President Bill Clinton spoke at a commemorative service in Warm Springs, Georgia, soon after the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Looking back on FDR’s long and remarkable presidency, Clinton identified as its “most enduring legacy” an achievement that came neither from the Hundred Days of initial New Deal legislation nor from the structural reforms of the Second New Deal, nor even from FDR’s successful prosecution of World War II. Rather, Clinton pointed to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944-The GI Bill- a law passed late in Roosevelt’s presidency, following his initiatives but shaped by many others besides himself. 
The GI Bill, Clinton observed, “gave generations of veterans a chance to get an education, to build strong families and good lives, and to build the nation’s strongest economy ever, to change the face of America.” This one piece of legislation, he continued, perhaps with an eye to his own presidential legacy, “helped unleash a prosperity never before known.” It was a New Deal for veterans and, through them, for the postwar nation as a whole.
Fifty years earlier this would have seemed a very strange choice for an FDR encomium, but by the 1990s it was as reasonable as choosing Social Security, the WPA, or victory over the Nazis. When Clinton spoke, praise for the GI Bill was widespread and partook of the increasing respect and nostalgia among the vast majority of Americans for what the journalist Tom Brokaw would soon call “the Greatest Generation”-the young adults (many of them boys and girls who quickly became adults) who, in foxholes and bombers, shipyards and munitions factories, helped rescue the world from fascism. The very large numbers who had served in the military during the war returned to help create a peacetime society of unprecedented prosperity, and it came to be generally understood that the GI Bill was the essential instrument of their successful reintegration into civilian life. Clinton, himself a postwar “baby boomer,” spoke for a generation of Americans who saw the GI Bill as the key to a kingdom of peace and plenty.
Praise for the GI Bill was is by no means restricted to members of FDR’s political party. Bob Michel, a former Republican congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who served as minority leader in the House of Representatives for fourteen years (the longest minority leadership in U.S. history), has described the GI Bill as “a great piece of legislation” that “cut across the economic strata” and made it possible for “many thousands of veterans, including tens of thousands who would not have thought of college,” to get undergraduate degrees. Michel points to the almost universal approval of the bill. “I don’t know of anyone,” he reflects, “who has ever maligned it.” Michel was himself a highly decorated World War II veteran and a beneficiary of the GI Bill. Nonetheless, it is clear that his admiration for this legislation is not just informed by his own good fortune but also reflects the experiences of an entire generation.
Leaders from outside politics have also expressed admiration for the GI Bill, and these include many who do not ordinarily favor forceful government solutions to pressing social issues. Two years before Clinton’s Warm Springs address the widely respected management theorist Peter F. Drucker wrote that future historians might welcome to regard the bill as “the most important event of the 20th century” in that its provisions for government-subsidized college education for World War II veterans “signaled the shift to the knowledge society.” Drucker’s was a sophisticated appraisal of how one public initiative could, even as a largely unintended effect, unleash larger forces that would in turn transform an entire society. His analysis reinforces, too, the popular perception of the bill as a product of bipartisan consensus, when what seemed to matter at the moment of its passage was not Democratic or Republican political advantage but the interests of the veterans and the nation at large. It bears the stamp of neither party. It is an American document, a mid-twentieth-century Bill of Rights. The American Legion, pressing hard from late 1943 for its version of a comprehensive veterans’ bill, originally called it the Bill of Rights for GI Joe and GI Jane.
As is suggested by this language of rights and of GI Joe and Jane, much popular praise for the bill has been more personal than that of public leaders asked or inclined to reflect on its general significance. It was what gave your father or grandmother or some elderly veteran who told you his story the opportunity to realize in his or her own lifetime what could have been only distant dreams while in a foxhole in the Ardennes, in a field hospital in Italy, or in a breadline during the Great Depression. Personal success stories that trace back to the GI Bill abound within families and well beyond, some of them known to us, to be sure, because, like Bob Michel’s, they involved famous people.
The GI Bill-assisted career of William Rehnquist, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, is one such story. Rehnquist had a brief taste of college life at Kenyon College before entering the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942. When his military service was finished, he used the GI Bill to enroll at Stanford University (he was attracted by the California climate), where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and eventually a law degree. He became a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and the rest, as they say, is history. When asked years later how he had chosen his profession, Rehnquist answered, perhaps with tongue in cheek, “The GI Bill paid for an occupation test that told you what you ought to be. They told me to be a lawyer.”
