Living New Deal Webinar: Saving the Republic: The New Deal and Far-Right Extremism with Kevin Baker

Reply

Please join us on Zoom for Kevin Baker’s talk, Saving the Republic: The New Deal and Far-Right Extremism, about the rise of the far-right during the 1930s to counter the New Deal and its social liberalism.

Baker, an award-winning author, is a contributing editor to Harper’s and a regular contributor to Politico, The New York Times and The New Republic.

Baker offers this preview: “Picture an America in which an angry crowd of veterans surround the Capitol and are dispersed with tear gas and gunfire; a disgruntled Marine general is approached about leading a coup to overturn an election; right-wing fanatics hoard weapons and set up paramilitary camps around the country… We’re not talking about America today but America in the 1930s.”

The webinar is part of our series The Next New Deal, featuring writers, speakers and thinkers on the New Deal and its lessons for today. Thursday, March 24, 2021, 7pm EDT. Click here to register.

Introducing Our New Board Members

Reply

We are pleased to welcome two new members to our National Research Board of scholars of the New Deal and present-day America.

Darrick Hamilton, professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School in New York is a leading expert on inequality and racial disparity. As Director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy, Darrick is a well-known policy advisor and national media commentator. He is an alumnus of Oberlin College and the University of North Carolina.   

Laura Pulido is professor of Geography at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She is known for her work on how race, class and gender shape the places we live, the landscapes we inhabit and our relationship to nature. She is the author of many books and articles on race and justice. She started and edits the People’s Guide series on American cities, published by the University of California Press, which highlights the hidden histories of popular communities’ struggles for justice. 

Living New Deal Webinar: “Art and Activism: Posters for Social Change”

Reply

Our first webinar of the year, on January 7 brought together leading experts on the role of posters in social movements. Lincoln Cushing, an artist, archivist and author based in Berkeley, discussed the history of posters as tools of social change. Ennis Carter, founding director of Philadelphia-based DfSI/Social Impact Studios and author of Posters for the People, talked about posters of the WPA. She maintains an online archive  of thousands of posters created during the New Deal era. Max Slavkin, is co-founder and CEO of Creative Action Network, which runs crowdsourced, caused-based campaigns and an online marketplace for art with purpose. Max’s book, Posters for a Green New Deal, features 50 original pull-out posters by artists worldwide. Susan Ives, who directs the Living New Deal’s Communications, moderated the discussion. The webinar can be viewed on YouTube or at our Facebook page.
  The Living  New Deal-NYC will present our next webinar, “The Health of the Nation,” on public health programs during the New Deal and now. Monday, February 8, 2021, 8pm EST.

Investing In Prosperity

Reply
The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

Investing In Prosperity

wpa  The New Deal was an unprecedented campaign of national construction. According to a study by economists Price Fishback and Valentina Kachanovskaya, the New Deal cost $41.7 billion at the time—about $827 billion in today’s dollars. What did America get for its money? Michael Hilzik, in his book The New Deal, A Modern History, summed it up this way: “The WPA produced 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards and 125,000 public buildings were built, rebuilt or expanded. To this day, Americans still rely on its work for transportation, electricity, flood control, housing and community amenities.” The New Deal laid the foundation for the decades of productivity and prosperity that followed. Eighty years on, America’s infrastructure has fallen into desperate disrepair. President Biden’s $1 trillion plan to “build back better” is a belated downpayment on decades of deferred maintenance, as well as investment in America’s future.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: NEW DEAL BOOK AWARD FOR 2021

Reply

The Living New Deal invites submissions for the First Annual New Deal Book Award.  

This award has been established to recognize and encourage non-fiction works about the history of the United States in the New Deal era, 1932-1942, or inclusive of a substantial portion of that remarkable decade between the nadir of the Great Depression and US entry into World War II. 

Submissions for the award must have a 2021 imprint and be nominated by a publisher or colleague.  Hard copy books or locked PDFs should be submitted no later than November 15, 2021.

The winner will be announced in Spring 2022 with a cash prize of $1,000. Presentation of the award will take place during the Roosevelt Reading Festival at the FDR Library at Hyde Park NY in Summer 2022, to which the five finalists will be invited. 

For submission details please find information at the Living New Deal website.

Interactive Map of New Deal Sites in New Mexico

Reply

The New Mexico Chapter of the National New Deal Preservation Association and the New Mexico Humanities Council collaborated to produce this interactive map of New Deal sites in New Mexico. The map features New Deal projects that include CCC camps, public buildings, public art, and monuments. See more details and view the map here.

Interactive Map of New Deal Sites in New Mexico

An American Renaissance

Reply
The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

An American Renaissance

Rep. Martin Dies with Hollywood studio executives, 1939
Texas Rep. Martin Dies, first chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Photo Credit: National Archives & Records Administration. Courtesy, Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In the midst of the Great Depression the federal government initiated a series of programs to hire unemployed artists and writers. Today, these provide a lens through which American history, values and everyday life were viewed in the 1930s. The first such program, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), 1933-1934, hired more than 3,700 artists during its 5-month existence. They produced more than 15,000 artworks in practically every type of public building. PWAP was replaced by the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture (TSFA),1934-1943, which sponsored competitions and awarded commissions to selected artists who turned out more than a thousand post office murals. The WPA launched the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935, along with the Federal Writers’ Music and Theater Projects. All came under attack from conservatives in Congress and ultimately were defunded. The creative output that resulted from this unprecedented era of government sponsorship is now regarded as an American Renaissance.