The Surprising Lessons of FDR’s New Deal Art Programs

We tend to think about social change as in like someone has a really good idea and you get that person with the right idea in the right place and it happens. Hi, I'm Andrew Goldstein and this is The Art Angle. A podcast from Art and Net News where the art world meets the real world bringing each week's biggest story down to earth. Shockingly enough, we are now coming up on the one year anniversary of the lockdown of the United States. At this point last year, a creeping dread had begun to blanket the globe and then in March, it happened. COVID hit the East Coast, fanned out across the country, and within weeks, whole areas of society were slammed shut like windows during a hurricane. In the art world, as everywhere else, the costs of the closures were immediately palpable, with widespread furloughs and job cuts across the sector, enormous projected financial pain, and predictions of museums and galleries alike going dark for good. Facing this economic catastrophe, many pundits in the art world quickly look back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and in particular, the Works Progress Administration for inspiration on how to meet the moment. Today, with President Joe Biden in the White House, hopes for such an ambitious federal project have peaked. But do we really understand the lessons of the New Deal's arts projects? And are they really the example we should be looking to today? To discuss, I'm very pleased to have Ardenette News Chief Art Critic Ben Davis back on the show. Thanks very much for coming on the pod to talk about this juicy subject, Ben. Great to be here. It's a relevant subject, unfortunately, a relevant subject, I should say. Okay, so for starters, why do you think it is so relevant today? The New Deal is the most radical period of state intervention into the economy in the history of the United States, which is a country that doesn't have much of a tradition like that. And that means that anytime there is a failure of capitalism, like there is now, or like there was in 2008, that people reach for the history of the New Deal FDR in the 1930s. And it also means that anytime there is a big project that requires a lot of state investment people also reach for the idea of the New Deal. You see that in the concept of the Green New Deal that people have been talking about a lot lately. And then for the arts community, there was a big artistic component of New Deal policy. There was a New Deal for the arts. So it's natural that people look to that history too. Now I think an interesting nuance to bring out maybe is that in the 1930s, it was very much part of the conversation that the Great Depression didn't just cause the crisis, but it revealed a crisis that was already there for artists. There was a sense that the private market couldn't sustain artists. That private money had abandoned the American artist, and that people saw the crisis both as an immediate situation to be addressed, but also as a chance to negotiate a new relationship to society, a new relationship to government, a new relationship to the audience. And I think that you see in a lot of the interest in the New Deal, the idea of a new New Deal for the arts now is some of the same sense that the arts are really in trouble right now. That artists are really hurting and suffering, but also that they have been for a while. The system is really broken, and this is a chance to seize upon the moment in order to set things on a better footing. So I think that's why the idea of a New Deal is resonating right now. So remind me, what is the story exactly behind the New Deal's fabled arts programs? It may be that aside from Social Security, the New Deal arts projects are the main thing, the general public knows about the New Deal these days, after all, they left public works of art all over the country. But nevertheless, I think that it does seem to people in some sense, like a minor miracle, that there was this period in the 1930s when the United States government cared enough about artists to employ thousands of them through a crisis. And I think that people find that moving and exciting today. So the period of the New Deal arts projects are roughly from 1933 to World War II, and there are actually multiple projects that have different dynamics within them. In the early part of the New Deal, what you call the first New Deal, you have the Treasury section, which employs artists in public works programs, so to put artworks in various projects of the United States government, is constructing to get the economy back to work. And then in the second period of the New Deal, what you call the second New Deal, which I generally considered the more radical part of the New Deal, you have the Works Project Administration, when artists are employed, basically as work relief, they're employed to do art as a form of sustaining them through unemployment. And for American Art History, this is a very important time period, like a lot of what we value in post-war American art was seeded in this time period, famously Jackson Pollock, the very famous abstract expressionist painter, Cut his teeth on the New Deal arts projects, William DeCooning, another very famous post-war painter was also employed by the WPA, although he was not a citizen. So when there was backlash against the arts projects, and they forced them to fire non-citizens from the project, the US government fired William DeCooning. Alice Neal, who's a very important painter, was employed on the WPA Charles White, who's probably the most important social realist painter, and a very, very important painter of African-American themes, African-American life, Black life got his start on the WPA, manifesting in Chicago, he was part of a sit-in by radical artists protesting against conditions on the project, and also demanding that the project hire more Black painters, and that made him a lifelong radical himself and deeply affected his art. So the New Deal Arts program is extremely important for the history of American art. And what is the impetus for supporting the arts in particular? People who tell the story of the New Deal arts programs, there's kind of this mythological founding moment, which is this letter that the painter George Biddle sends to Roosevelt in 1933. And George Biddle just happens to have gone to school with Roosevelt, just after Roosevelt's second fireside chat, when the country is still basically in freefall, and writes to Roosevelt and says, I'm rooting for you, and look, there are also a lot of artists who are rooting for you, and there's this huge mural Renaissance going on in Mexico that's of international importance, and there are a ton of American artists who would love to be part of the new spirit of solidarity that you're trying to culminate with the New Deal, and would love to be part of American art Renaissance, something to think about Roosevelt. And so the legend is that he gets that letter, he kind of passes it along to the New Deal administrators, and that's the genesis of the New Deal Arts programs. This mythology is what that is. It kind of begs the question, what is the role that arts have in some kind of cataclysmic economic depression? Is arts something that puts a little bit of window dressing on public works and makes it more palatable to the people and more attractive, or is it something that is more like a utility, like some kind of public good, like water, or is it somehow a luxury like fine wine? What is the role that they thought art was going to play? Right, so this minor little question, what is art, is what you're asking, and that's the most college freshman thinking about art theory kind of question, and yet it also happens to be a question of tremendous practical importance when it comes to something like talking about relief for artists, the role of artisan society in a time of crisis like the 1930s, or like a one-to-date, and there's not really one answer to that question, I mean, there was a lot of debate in this time period about this very thing. There's this myth of how it started where it's like, here's a good idea, Roosevelt, the artist I've got your back, will you have their back, and then he takes up the challenge, the gauntlet of arts? Who were the actual architects behind his arts programs, and what were their motivations? I would actually like to start a step behind that. What I would emphasize is that there was tremendous popular struggle in the 1930s, and Roosevelt in many ways were responding to that. So there are good ideas, there are good technocrats at the top, but that's not, in my opinion, the prime motor of what happened. There's an interesting historical coincidence that the very same week the George Biddle sends this letter to Roosevelt, it's the same week that Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, is that Rockefeller Center making his infamous mural man at the crossroads, and that the Rockefellers have destroyed because it has an image of Lenin in it. This was a hot controversy in the time period, there was a lot. of sympathy for the Russian Revolution and the Mexican Revolution amongst artists. So there was a artist committee that was formed to defend the mural, and it was out of that committee, and the free speech activism that came around that, that larger formations of artists were formed, that then went on to become the artist's union, which then became agitated for artists to be included in the New Deal, which then actually organized the Federal Arts Project when they actually happened. Most scholars will tell you that the artistic components of this came out of the much, much wider climate of activism. This is like an era of tremendous labor organizing, the beginning of white color unionism. There are lots of infrastructures for artists organizing throughout society, the John Reed clubs, which is essentially amounts to an alternate leftist art world that is scattered around the country. So all that I think is the foundation of what becomes the New Deal Arts Projects, and then you have administrators who are what you call radical New Dealers, who are able to synthesize with this energy and respond to the radicalism that's the demands that are being put on the administration. So it's fascinating to think that this letter really may have played some role, but a much larger role was played by these empowered unions that managed to lobby their way into a seat at the table and really help shape this legislation. Is that what you're saying? Hold your K-hill, who is the legendary head of the Federal Arts Project, says, I think George overstates things a little when he takes credit for the projects. There were lots of people arguing for that back then, as in there was lots of activism in the streets. And this is endemic to our field, Andrew, which is a field of intellectuals and artists who are very invested in the power of their individual voices. So we tend to think about social change as in like someone has a really good idea, and you get that person with the right idea in the right place, and it happens. Like you have a plan and you implement the plan. But in my assessment, that's not really how social change works, and certainly not how people thought about social change working in the 1930s when people had this tremendous sense of the mini against the few. There was tremendous new organizing of people, both in labor and among artists who frankly looked at the upsurge of radicalism amongst industrial workers, the 1930s, the same period sees the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organization, CIO, which really the high point of American labor activism coincides exactly with the birth of the artist's projects. And they took inspiration from the sit down strikes in Flint, and you really have to appreciate the audacity of the artist union, and the just sheer street level common sense radicalism that people had imbibed from just the extreme conditions that people were living with in the 1930s. They hear you had artists who were employed in the Works Progress Administration. It's a relief program. It's for unemployed people to pay them to keep their skills fresh and essentially unemployment. And yet they unionized that project and were constantly pushing back against the conditions that they were asked to be worked under. So it's kind of amazing to think of that radicalism that you would at once be like basically being paid as a relief measure and still have the sense of consciousness of worth in the midst of a depression where unemployment was the highest 25% across the economy. The sense of collective solidarity and the emphasis that people put on the value of labor was such that people were constantly wrestling and fighting back against the terms of this very quirky form of employment that came out of the second new deal. It's very interesting what you're saying about the collective action that really was the wellspring of a lot of these programs because it brings up the topic that Adam Curtis talks about in his documentary hypernormalization, which is that right now we're living in a time of all this really individualized action and people thinking about how is this going to work for them and their sense of expression and their goals for themselves. Whereas it used to be that there was much more collective action and it's notable because this actually played into the whole definition that Holdger K. Hill had for art and the intention of this program. Can you talk a little bit about how Holdger K. Hill saw art and what kind of art he wanted to nurture at the WPA? This is really important both for our understanding about historically and for the political fights that happened around it. Again this is a matter of how art history is told, but when we think about the ideologies of artists and arts administrators and critics during the 1930s people probably think about Marxism. This was a time when there was a lot of organized socialist Marxist communists, Trotskyist activism that was shot through all this stuff. You probably think about social realism, like the ideologies of making art that was realist in character. You might think about Americanism or American scene painting. The New Deal is very nationalist project. That is something that you have to actually reckon with is that it's prescribed artistic ideology was about painting the national character scenes from contemporary American life. The administrators were not Marxists. They weren't socialist. The New Deal wasn't a socialist project. It was maybe a social democratic project. What they had then that we don't have now is they actually had a radical liberalism with its own philosophy, including an artistic philosophy that was far to the left and these administrators were inspired by the philosophy of John Dewey, American pragmatist. He had this concept of art as experience, which is that the art object wasn't the important thing. What was important is the experience of art. The New Deal, particularly the stuff that came out of the second New Deal, which is the WPA projects, when artists were employed for relief purposes instead of part of the public works programs that came out of the first New Deal. Their idea was to make art available to the common person and the idea was really making art accessible to a lot of people so that there was a whole distributed network of community art centers across the country, including places like Harlem here in New York, probably the most famous of these art centers. These days is the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is a very famous museum now and was originally came out of this movement. But the original idea was that we want art to be everywhere. We don't have to be separate like often New York, often the big city. A lot of the ideology of the New Deal has a kind of anti-corporate character. There was a lot of concern about monopoly capitalism, the idea that a very dehumanizing form of capitalism had taken control, and that wealth was writing roughshod over ordinary people, and that society had become very alienated, very urban, very distance from the people. So even within the New Deal, the emphasis actually wasn't on quality, so much access was what was important. Maybe making the experience of art open to more new kinds of people was always important. And in a later time period or actually pretty quickly, that became a wrestling match where people demonized the New Deal for subsidizing bad art, not just subsidizing propaganda. I think people will not be surprised to hear that the New Deal was very, very controversial for being communist plot to destroy American culture by people who were against Roosevelt by the public and right, but also just this idea that it went against market principles and it subsidized bad art. And the interesting thing about that is that there actually was a philosophy of that, that it was on some level that quality could become very abstract, and that our ideas of quality were very connected to ideas of luxury, forced and veblin. The sociologist who came up with the idea of conspicuous consumption was a very influential figure. So the idea was to take away the kind of idea of art as this symbol of refinement and status object and get down where ordinary people were, give them paintings, be in dialogue with what they were interested, and that would look to people with a certain kind of educational formation background and taste like bad art, but that was actually baked into the intellectual package at the beginning. As part of an actual philosophy became very controversial later on and actually excuse to attack not just the New Deal Arts Projects, but the New Deal as a whole. I mean, I think a lot of people today, when they think of the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration, they think about the murals, they think about all those dust bull photographs by Dorothy O'Ling and Gordon Park's photographs and Harlem, and really these photographs had showed the struggles that the regular American people were feeling across the country. I think that one lesser known aspect of these programs was really it's enormously ambitious widespread educational drive. What were they doing in terms of educating normal people across the country about making art, you know, appreciating art? There was a real rhetoric that the artist had been come alienated from his audience and so there was a need to put art back in dialogue with the people and brackets. So you mentioned that these programs were not universally beloved on the political spectrum. I believe it was really something more akin to a dining book. What were the political battles that were being waged over FDR's New Deal's arts programs? This is really important. And actually now, at a time when we're looking for answers and trying to navigate really choppy waters and really scary times and looking for clues in the past, the rhetoric of the New Deal Arts Project was always this kind of idea that the artist is respected as a worker now, just like real labor, and that a new kind of American culture where the artist was not above or below other sorts of folks. In practice, that is something that people believe. They're repeated a lot. It was sort of a ideal of people shot for. But it was just as controversial then as it might be now. And when the Republicans took back control of the Congress in 1938, and there's like a pretty sharp turn in the public opinion, there's like an all-out war on the New Deal Arts Projects. Letters written to editors talking about how the New Deal Arts Projects are just an excuse to fund layabouts that they just fund bad artists who can't make it on the honest, free, open market. There was a real all-out war on the New Deal Arts Projects. Hold your kehil who's ahead of the FDR's Projects said he had a dead cat coming through his window at every minute. And this is what I think is really important. That was the thin end of the wedge of attacking all of the New Deal. There was a really mobilized reaction to the New Deal to just roll back a lot of the measures that have been taken to restabilize the economy. In 1937, he cut a lot of the budget for the New Deal Arts Projects' provoked a recession, called the Roosevelt Recessions started destabilize the social basis for the New Deal. In this time period, it's the arts that really become the face of painting the entire New Deal as a boondoggle. There's a quote from the nation that I have in front of me that I'll read to you. The federal art projects have become the focal point for the continuing attack on the standards and methods of relief symbolized by the Works Project Administration. The reason it's easy to discover nobody loves the artist, ridiculing him or condescending to him is an old American pastime. That didn't go away in the 1930s. So what happened to the New Deal programs? Do we still have the Works Progress Administration today? No, no, no. It was voted to wind down. There were liberals and artists certainly who wanted to make it permanent. That was a big, big, big subject of the aspirations of artists in that time period. And lefties in general was the idea that this experiment had worked. It had been a good thing. It raised spirits. It had created a new kind of American art, and she made permanent. But it was undercut, attacked, Roosevelt backed off of it because he couldn't afford the political capital for it. At a certain point, there's what's called the coffee pepper bill. That's introduced in 1938 to make a permanent public arts program in the United States. And it's just really resoundingly defeated. 195 to 35. The New Deal itself was sort of coming apart on its own contradictions. And World War II was living. There was the need to court favor with big business in order to meet the demands of rearmament. And art was considered to be a frivolity and luxury that couldn't be afforded. Everything ran aground in World War II. The idea of the labor upsurge that had sort of impelled this new spirit among the arts was completely quelled. Even the Communist Party advocated for no strike packed during World War II. So the spirit of militancy was completely contained. And the spirit of militancy was what always kept the New Deal Arts going because they faced cuts from day one. You know, the very first year that the New Deal Arts Projects were in effect hundreds of artists in New York state to sit in of the New York office to protest cuts. The project lasted as long as there were people willing to fight for it. And as soon as that kind of moment ended, the New Deal Arts Projects collapsed with it. Now, in a moment when we're talking about economic relief and he's really severe, crisis situation faced by arts institutions, artists, and so on. If we look to the 1930s for an example, I mean, we have to face this horrible but not often talked about truth of the 1930s is that the New Deal didn't end the Great Depression, although it did a lot of good things. World War II and rearmament ended the Great Depression. That's the truth and the flip side of the truth is that it was World War II and that mobilization that also destroyed the very fragile, precious, a very temporary basis for this kind of unique and extraordinary history form of government art patronage. So what are the lessons of the New Deal's arts programs for today and are there any good ones actually? I mean, people are getting crushed right now. Absolutely crushed and the arts industries need help and the New Deal is our precedent to that. I don't want to poo poo. Some of the examples that provides what people have to realize is it's not just a good idea you propose and then say some well-intentioned technocrats take it up. I mean, it's something you fight for. It's something you fight for and it was made possible in the 1930s by an unprecedented period of social disruption and class conflict and protest that is unlike anything we've seen in our lifetimes that lasted for years and years and years and involve lots of organizing and even then even then at the end of the 1930s when capital was off its back foot and it started trying to walk back some of the advances in the public sense of what they expect from government that had come out of the New Deal. You know, it was in the investigation of the New Deal arts projects that the House Un-American Affairs Committee first entered the scene. It was in investigating first the theater project and then the arts project more generally that the anti-communist craze began. That took on a whole other life post-war as we enter the Cold War period, the Huak which began as investigating radicalism in the arts became a complete monster in the post-war period and completely ruined thousands and thousands of lives and became the way that left-wing sentiment was publicly punished and that all started. That all started with the WPA arts projects and the way that they were used as a symbol for everything that was wrong with government support and so I think that we should advocate for these things. We have to be prepared to fight for them. We have to be organized enough to be prepared for the kind of backlash that comes with these things. Now we have President Biden in the White House and in his Oval Office, he has a very large dramatic portrait of FDR and FDR looms large over the national consciousness of America. He was the only president to have three terms. His presidency spanned the Great Depression and World War II. How neatly do the lessons of his presidency apply to the situation that we're facing today? I worry that if you look at the example of the New Deal period, there was a lot of conflict that went into impelling that kind of left-wing turn and I just don't see the level of sustained organization right now to make that possible. I mean when Roosevelt was elected, there was an occupation of Washington DC by tens of thousands of World War I veterans demanding a bonus that they've been promised during the military attack them, force them out as dramatic as what we saw in the Capitol January 6th. This was a much more dramatic spectacle of General's MacArthur, Patton and Eisenhower literally being deployed against U.S. veterans attacking them with tear gas and that was the extent to which there was organized revolt by people demanding some form of relief was in that time period. I don't really see that right now partly because we're all frozen inside because of this pandemic. But like I said, I think that it was World War II and not the New Deal that really created the conditions to escape the emissration of the Depression. If we look for the equivalent, today it's probably climate change that people say rightly that we need a war economy-style mobilization to rejigger what we do. So maybe that's the better like analogy to look to in terms of historical rhymes and for what we might expect or hope for. Speaking of historical rhymes, if you look at the political spectrum today when it comes to climate change, there's not really a consensus that people on the left are very much passionate about the scope of the threat and the need to act and then people on the right, they don't see it as really as threatening as the scientists are laying it out to be. I think there's always going to be conflicts over these big matters. It's a matter of building political coalition and not trusting people to do the right thing. You know, capitalism was in crisis in the 1930s. So there was a kind of a mandate to do something. And so that created the space for some mainstream left-wing experimentation. But how far went left, depending on how far people organized? I think it's the same now. I mean, climate change is a crisis that will affect you whatever your ideology. Correctly if I'm wrong here, but one of the things that is not so often talked about with the works progress administration is that this was a form of work fair. The whole idea behind commissioning these murals, these photographs was that it was a way to make them get paid for honest labor in a way that was, I think, palatable to the American sensibility, that you're not giving out money for nothing. You're giving out money to pay an honest wage for work. Even if that work has politically contestable value. So the difference today is that Biden's $1.9 trillion relief bill is actually not a form of work fair. There's a lot of direct stimulus and direct checks to individuals based on an income level. And that kind of levels the playing field. And maybe there's something in that that is kind of revelatory that the main thing to do is not to treat artists as different from other workers in any way, but to just treat them as citizens in need of support. That is my perspective sort of. I mean, anytime you kind of carve out artists as a special group that you run into these problems over who gets to define themselves as an artist, what counts as being a professional artist, these are very slippery concepts. And incidentally, I mean, one parallel that does not exist between the New Deal period today is that the kind of media culture that they were in was just so radically different. It was just the beginning of the forms of real kind of mass popular culture that we see today. So that there was this kind of rhetoric around the New Deal arts programs of mass democratic culture. That's what they're trying to create. It's hard to argue today that the masses are hurting for culture when it's just so easy to access culture of all times. You need a different kind of case you make for artists and arts institutions. On the flip side, there were just a couple of museums in that time period. The MoMA was just founded the same week as the Great Crash in 1929. The Whitney was just founded. Museum culture in the United States actually came into its own during the Great Depression. The arts were just a much smaller, more boutique kind of thing. And today, partly because neoliberalism has meant emphasizing cultural services over manufacturing and blue collar laborer. That means that the culture industries are just much bigger. They're much more of a part of the economy in every state. So in that sense, there's more of a popular basis for bailout for art museums and arts institutions, cultural institutions all the time because that's just a much bigger part of the economy. You know, I mean on the flip side of that, I think there might be an argument you can make that not singling out artists for special forms of stimulus or support may deny the soft underbelly to opponents of the overall program that Roosevelt had. Maybe the idea of keeping artists within this much more generalized form of public support might make the whole overall project more successful in the long run. The definition of what an artist is who gets to count is very open. You say artists and you mean someone who makes their living off of selling their creative labor. That is a by far a minority of people in the field. The more common economic position, well probably the second most common is that you're just independently wealthy and you're hobbyist essentially. But then the most common is that you have another kind of job. And so I often am in more in favor of organizing artists where they were in schools, for instance, or in arts institutions, which are both in crisis and suffering. I think there's room for arts at the table. I think if people organize for it, I think that the threat of the entirety of relief being demonized by the arts is not abstract. The first COVID relief was passed last year. You know, Nikki Haley, who's a Republican associated with Trump. She immediately floated the same kind of stuff. You know, you pull out the bullet points about the arts in the relief bill and you say like, oh, this is what Washington is all about. It's a bailout for the Kennedy Center. You know, it's a bailout for the NEA, which funds degenerates. That will be the playbook for all the debates going forward about this. So people should get ready. I mean, people should be ready to go to battle for what they believe. They should be ready to argue for the value of art. And they should also be ready to form solidarities with other kinds of struggles. It's one thing to say in a kind of abstract intellectual way that like art spawned all of us. It raises all of our quality of living and so on. And the other to actually have practical alliances formed. So that's not just a platitude that sounds good, but that actual other people who are hurting see their struggles in the struggle of the arts. And there was an awful lot of that work that went into what happened in the 1930s. I mean, there was an awful lot of solidary strikes by artists. A red one study that said that only the longshoremen were more active in solidarity strikes than the artists. So I think that gives you a sense. I mean, there was a kind of fuzzy liberal idea. You know, the arts are this kind of nice thing to have. And we should create an American culture. But then there was also a militant side that was really like our struggle is the struggle of other people, of our fellow citizens and some other people around us. It was a real concrete position that people showed in action. Now this has been absolutely fascinating. I think that hopefully it will serve as a little bit of a corrective to the hazing nostalgia that has developed around the WPA. The lessons are don't put art in your program to save the country and have artists organize. The arts are a huge part of the economy. Historically, there's been a big attempt to cut the national endowments for the arts. But it's never gone through and that's because actually the national endowment for the arts has made it very self-conscious effort that it's very modest. Appropriations go equally throughout the country. And those kind of programs are popular. Funding for culture widely distributed and eclectically seated is popular. So I don't want to poo poo those demands. I think that they can be part of a popular program. I hope they are. Well, this is totally fascinating Ben. Thanks as always for coming on the podcast. I have a feeling that if we're lucky, we're going to have more to talk about on this topic as the Biden presidency advances. That's it for this week's episode of The Art Angle. If you like what you've heard, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. Also, take a moment to rate and review us. It will help other listeners discover what we're doing. The Art Angle is produced by Sony Manila Lee, Tim Schneider and Caroline Goldstein. Thanks for listening and see you next week.