Shirley Temple at FDR Birthday Ball Courtesy, Imgur.com.
As president, FDR used his birthday, January 30, to advance his most important cause—raising awareness and money to eliminate polio, a disease FDR knew first hand. In 1934, more than four thousand communities across the nation came together at 600 celebrations for what would become an annual “Birthday Ball.” They raised millions of dollars for the Warm Springs Foundation, a charity FDR founded in response to the scourge. He later chaired the March of Dimes. Many today seem to have forgotten that such efforts led to breakthrough vaccines that eradicated polio throughout much of the world. Roosevelt likened the fight against polio to war. “It strikes with its most frequent and devastating force. And that is why much of the future strength of America depends upon the success that we achieve in combating this disease.”
In a piece titled, “Biden’s Plan Isn’t ‘Spending’ but ‘Investing,'” Nicholas Kristof compares President Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan to the New Deal programs that built the physical infrastructure of the nation. Using the example of the Yamhill-Carlton High School built by the Public Works Administration, Kristof argues that the Biden plan is, “not an ‘expense’ but an ‘investment’.” Read the full piece here.
Jonatan Shipley, Living New Deal contributor, was quoted in the Living New Deal mentioned in an Idaho News story about food banks. Read the full story here.
Living New Deal Advisor June Hopkins, the granddaughter of key New Dealer Harry Hopkins, participated in a panel discussion with other descendants of the original F.D.R. Cabinet and Brain Trust descendants during a conference titled, “The New Deal Then and New: What is the Role of Government in Response to Great Crises?” and presented by the Roosevelt House.
PROGRAM
The descendants of the original F.D.R. Cabinet and Brain Trust introduced a new public program presented in-person and on zoom “The New Deal Then and Now: What is the Role of Government in Response to Great Crises?”
As the nation awaits a vote on President Biden’s historic infrastructure bills—a “new New Deal,” as many have called it—Roosevelt House hosts a public conference examining the lessons of FDR’s original New Deal, and how those lessons can inform the federal response to the most challenging set of crises since the Great Depression. The program will be led by descendants of Franklin Roosevelt’s own Cabinet members and “Brain Trust.”
This in-person conference—also available to attend virtually on Zoom—is the result of the vision and determination of a group of descendants of the FDR administration who, for more than a year, have urged Congress to embrace a transformational legislative agenda—and launch a 21st Century New Deal for the benefit of all Americans. Joining them for the conference will be noted authors, historians, and advocates.
Three one-hour sessions examine the following vital and timely questions: How did FDR’s New Deal save the country, and how did promoters of limited government push back? What’s at stake now?—a consideration of jobs, climate change, filibuster reform, and voting rights; and, the central question: what makes this the time for a modern New Deal?
Participating descendants include:
Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall is the grandson of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Labor Secretary, and founder of the Frances Perkins Center.
David Hopkins Giffen is the great-grandson of Harry Hopkins, WPA Administrator and Commerce Secretary, and the Executive Director of Coalition for the Homeless.
June Hopkins is the granddaughter of Harry Hopkins, WPA Administrator and Commerce Secretary, and the author of Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer.
James Roosevelt, Jr. is the grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and serves as co-chair of the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee.
Phoebe Roosevelt is thegreat-granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, a high school history teacher, and an attorney who served in the Affirmative Litigation division of the New York City Law Department.
Henry Scott Wallace is the grandson of Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President and Secretary of Agriculture and Commerce, and is a former congressional candidate and co-chair of the Wallace Global Fund.
Participating authors, journalists, historians, and advocates include:
Mary Ellen Sprenkel is President and CEO of The Corps Network, a nationwide network of public-service job corps, and helped the White House design the new Civilian Climate Corps.
Green New Deal poster Poster Illustration, Jordan Johnson. Courtesy, Creative Action Network.
Our New Deal ancestors found work, hope and resilience during the hardest of times. Even as they built the infrastructure that would underpin modern America, they studied the technologies and cultures of those who came before, as we must do now. In the face of climate change, jobs, hope, and resilience can again be found in rebuilding our nation and restoring the environment. A new New Deal must be environmentally just and inclusive. These—and other hard-won lessons from the past can show us the way forward.
Richard A Walker wrote an opinion piece titled, “WV stands to lose out because of Manchin,” for Charleston Gazette-Mail. Walker looks to the New Deal to reflect on the actions of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who “has thrown a monkey wrench into President Joe Biden’s effort to get his ambitious Build Back Better legislation through Congress.” Read the whole piece here or here.
75 Years Later, ‘War and Peace’ Survives, But Its Ideals Have Not
As multiple crises pile atop one another in the young 21st century, a tripartite mural at a former San Francisco post office lobby rebukes us with its dated optimism.
“War and Peace,” by the artist Anton Refregier, is a reminder of what might have been had the U.S.—and the world—learned enough from two catastrophic wars and the rise of fascism between them to have chosen a different path. When Refregier painted it 75 years ago at one end of the Rincon Annex post office building in downtown San Francisco, the mural expressed the then-widespread hope for a future that didn’t happen.
In 1940, Refregier, a resident of Woodstock, New York, won a prestigious juried competition to paint 27 murals for the post office lobby. His award was one of the largest commissions sponsored by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a New Deal initiative to embellish federal buildings with work by leading American artists. It also was one of its most provocative commissions, because the mural cycle Refregier envisioned would represent the full, messy history of San Francisco, including its racial and class divisions—subjects rarely, if ever, seen on post office walls.
World War II postponed the project, and in 1943, Congress terminated the Treasury Section and transferred his commission to the new Public Buildings Administration. Refregier mourned the loss for himself and for the nation; he said that the Treasury Section’s commissions “would have eventually developed into a monumental art of world significance,” like Mexico’s murals, had it not been killed.As multiple crises pile atop one another in the young 21st century, a tripartite mural at a former San Francisco post office lobby rebukes us with its dated optimism.
Photo: Courtesy of The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
In spring 1945, Fortune magazine sent Refregier to San Francisco to make drawings of the United Nations Conference on International Organizations. The gathering was designed to abort another world war, or worse.
Just two weeks before the meeting’s opening, a cerebral hemorrhage felled the man who’d conceived the United Nations. The conference delegates mourned Franklin Roosevelt’s absence at the opening, and a month later, they met in an ancient grove of redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument to dedicate a plaque that named him “the chief architect of the United Nations and Apostle of Lasting Peace for All Mankind.”
Roosevelt’s death and the political jockeying Refregier witnessed at the U.N. conference inspired him to create “a magnificent climax” to a mural cycle showing a city largely built on conflict. While keeping most of his original plan for the mural, he scrapped his design for the final piece (a panoramic painting of the San Francisco world’s fair of 1939) and replaced it with a triptych—a three-paneled picture—depicting the healing of old wounds through international cooperation and the price of not doing so.
In the left panel, an immense armored hand rises from a pile of burning books, a swastika flag, and concentration camp prisoners to confront the massed guns of the Allies. In the right panel, people of all races gather round a circular table covered with the flags of many nations, the sun of a new day rising behind them.
Refregier sought to bridge the two antithetical pictures with a portrait of Roosevelt in the center. He was inspired by a photo of the ailing president on his return from a hazardous wartime trip to meet Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt’s face, the artist said, was that of a “tired, sensitive, and completely beautiful” man who “lives in the heart and the minds of the people” and thus “belongs to the history of this city.” He would dedicate the entire cycle to the memory of the late president.
Refregier returned to San Francisco in June, 1946 to paint the lobby, but he quickly fell afoul of unsympathetic bureaucrats in the Public Buildings Administration. His new superiors in Washington ordered him to remove Roosevelt, telling him that the image of a recently deceased president was inappropriate for a federal building. With the support of intellectuals, unions, and other artists, Refregier resisted for seven months, but he ultimately capitulated to what he saw as the forces that were even then launching the Cold War.
“It was necessary,” he said, “to erase the image of Roosevelt and his plans for coexistence, peace, and hope of friendship with the Soviet Union in order to see the American people on to the Cold War.”
The artist replaced Roosevelt’s face with a multiracial group looking to the United Nations for a fulfillment of the “four freedoms” that the president had named in his 1941 State of the Union address. In addition to the freedoms of speech and religion, Roosevelt had insisted that two more freedoms—from fear and from want—should become global human rights. Four golden pillars stood on the Opera House stage during the U.N. conference to represent those freedoms.
But the world was not to be freed of fear or want. As Refregier foresaw, the Cold War erased the hopes Roosevelt had inspired for peace and economic freedom, while the McCarthy era brought purges against those who shared Roosevelt’s vision. Led by nationalist organizations and the Hearst press, efforts to censor or destroy Refregier’s murals began even as he was painting them. In 1949, Representative Richard Nixon responded to a concerned American Legionnaire, “I believe a committee should make a thorough investigation of this type of art in government buildings with the view to obtaining the removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.” Three years later and just a few months into Nixon’s vice presidency, the House Committee on Public Works met in Washington to consider the destruction of Refregier’s murals.
With strong support from the San Francisco Establishment and beyond, the murals survived but the post office did not. In 1979, the building was redeveloped as a multi-use complex. Its current owners maintain the extant lobby as a public space listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, just steps from where the nations of the world once met to sign the U.N. Charter, a growing legion of the homeless, hungry, and sick shuffle city streets below opulent towers. They testify to how very far San Francisco, the nation, and the world have veered from Roosevelt’s freedom from want and freedom from fear.
At a time when collective global action is needed to address climate chaos, pandemic disease, nuclear weapons, and resurgent fascism, few today look to the U.N. as the congress of nations Roosevelt and Refregier hoped it would become.
Like Roosevelt’s face, the purpose for which it was created has been erased.
Gray Brechin is a project scholar at The Living New Deal in U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Geography. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (U.C. Press, 1999). Refregier’s quotes are from his papers at the Archives of American Art.
Courtesy, Michigan Department of Natural Resources
The infrastructure bills now stuck in Congress could reverse the decades-long dismantling of the New Deal. Popular with the public, the legislation includes funding for a new Civilian Conservation Corps—a Civilian Climate Corps. The original CCC, arguably the most popular of the New Deal’s programs, hired millions of young men to plant forests, build parks, fight fires, prevent flooding and restore drought-stricken soils. A new Corps would do this and more to meet the climate crisis and hire those the original CCC excluded—women. A recent opinion poll shows 85 percent of Democrats and more than 60 percent of all voters favor a CCC today.
The Free Library of Philadelphia is hosting a New Deal exhibit called “For the Greatest Number: The New Deal Revisited.” Co-curated by Laura Stroffolino, who is Print and Picture Collection Curator, and and Caitlin Goodman, Curator of the Rare Book Department, the exhibit shows how workers shaped the nation during the Great Depression. Find more details here and here.
The Zakheim murals at the UCSF Medical Center will stay in place after a court order. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the work to remove the mural has been temporarily halted after Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch granted a motion for a restraining order requested by San Franciscans for Balanced and Livable Communities.
