Threat to Greenbelt, Maryland

Residents of Greenbelt, MD have created a petition to save their beloved town from changes in the Prince George’s County zoning ordinance that would weaken protections against ill-considered urban development. Greenbelt is the only one of the three New Deal Greenbelt Towns that retains most of its original features and is a National Historic Landmark. If the current Residential Planned Community Zone is eliminated without replacing it with a Neighborhood Conservation Overlay Zone, the unique character of Old Greenbelt could be impacted by incompatible development. Petitioners are looking for an outpouring of support to protect the town. For more information, contact Molly Lester at [email protected]. change.org/p/ejordan-greenbeltmd-gov-protect-old-greenbelt

Living New Dealer of the Month: Gabriel Milner

This summer our longtime Project Manager, Gabe Milner, moved on to a new job and a new life. Gabe had been a pillar of the Living New Deal team for three years, keeping the operation running and organized down to the last detail. Always cheerful and ready to help, he was a model of efficiency and good will. Gabe is now teaching AP US and African American History at the Episcopal School of Los Angeles, a diverse school drawing students from around greater L.A. Gabe was the author of many blurbs for “Living New Dealer of the Month” and now it’s his turn. Thank you again, Gabe, for all you did for us!

Summer 2017

New York City was the country’s single greatest recipient of New Deal investment. This summer, the Living New Deal was warmly welcomed to the city to celebrate the publication of our new map and guide to New York’s vast New Deal legacy. We are deeply grateful to Roosevelt House at Hunter College, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Society; to the National Jobs Coalition; and to our Advisory Council members Professors Frank Roosevelt, Ira Katznelson, and Willliam Leuchtenburg; and Ambassador William vanden Heuvel of the Roosevelt Institute for their participation and support.

Many social and political leaders brought their ideas and talents to Washington in 1933 via New York, among them Frances Perkins, Henry Alsberg, Harry Hopkins, Homer Folks, Jane Hoey, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and FDR himself. Their values drove the New Deal agenda—relief, recovery, and reform.

In this issue, you’ll learn about some of New York’s most charismatic New Dealers and the lasting impression they made on the city and beyond. The Living New Deal’s message of positive, public-spirited leadership is evermore important. We appreciate your support!

Spring 2017 Newsletter

These days it’s important to remember a time when our government invested in new infrastructure, the arts, parks, the environment, and the health and welfare of the American people. Our new publication, a “Map and Guide to New Deal New York,” highlights a thousand examples of what the New Deal created in just one city. The map will make its debut next month in Manhattan at events at the Roosevelt House at Hunter College and Museum of the City of New York, both featuring leading writers and scholars of the New Deal.

In this issue, you’ll find a medley of history, news, and commentary: the cost of wooing a reluctant Congress to the New Deal; the CCC’s long-term impact in Idaho; and the prolific life of a CCC artist, Frank Cassara, who died recently at 103; and more. Thank you for your support for a new New Deal!

Winter 2017

A colleague’s research into the art of the New Deal recently led her to the National Archives. That’s where Kathleen Duxbury discovered a calendar published in 1939 by the Federal Arts Project, a lifeline for artists during the Great Depression. The calendar showcased a collection of WPA posters. What’s more, the dates perfectly matched those of 2017. The similarities and contrasts between 1939 and 2017 are noteworthy. Then, as now, our country faced economic, environmental, and social turmoil. By contrast, our leaders then launched themselves into actively improving the lives of everyday Americans by creating jobs, affordable housing, public art, and recreation. In this, our first newsletter of 2017, we call out some remarkable examples.

In the year ahead, we will continue to shine a light on the New Deal and the spirit of compassionate and honest government that it stands for. A source of hope, then and now. Thank you for your support.

Fall 2016 Newsletter

Amidst the shambles of the Great Depression, FDR and his “brain trust” set about making America work again— investing in jobs, infrastructure, the environment, public spaces, education, and the arts. Much of what got created during the New Deal is hiding in full view. At the Living New Deal, we’re working to bring the New Deal to light.

In this Fall issue we we offer stories of discovery and tribute for the New Deal heritage we all share.  If you have memories, photographs, or places connected to the New Deal that you would like to share with us, we welcome hearing from you. Help us rekindle a new New Deal! Your support makes our work possible. Thank you!

Summer 2016

During the hardest of times, the Great Depression, government invested in jobs, education, art, theater, parks, and infrastructure. The New Deal rebooted the economy, rekindled Americans’ spirits, and built the foundation for our nation’s future prosperity.  The question is, Why not now? We’re working to document, preserve, and rekindle what the New Deal stood for and achieved. Here’s a sampling of stories that we think will inform, surprise, and delight. Please share our newsletter and give us the thumbs up on Facebook. Help us spread the word: We need a new New Deal today!

Thanks, always, for your support.

Edith Hamlin and Me

Edith Hamlin painting WPA mural at Mission High School.

Edie on Ladder
Edith Hamlin painting WPA mural at Mission High School.  Source
Photo Credit: Thunderbird Foundation

After I organized Coit Tower’s 50th anniversary celebration in San Francisco in 1984, Edith Ann Hamlin and I became good friends. During the next six years, I often visited her at her studio in the Excelsior District of San Francisco.

Hamlin was 82 then and had been part art of the California and Southwest art and scene for more than half a century. Her studio had a huge Hopi clay pot and several large woven Native American baskets. One of her large landscape paintings of the Southwest rested on a tall easel.

Born in Oakland, California, Hamlin’s interest in art began early in life on sketching trips with her father. She won a two-year scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, and was one of four students chosen to paint a mural on the school’s walls. By age 22, she knew she wanted to be a muralist.

Painter of the Desert

Painter of the Desert
Edith Hamlin portrait of her husband, artist Maynard Dixon.
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

Hamlin moved to New York to attend Columbia’s Teachers College, but when she heard there might be work for artists in San Francisco, she learned to drive and headed west in a Model A Ford—a trip that would cement her career as an artist.

Edie arrived in San Francisco in time to get the job— one of 26 artists to paint murals at the city’s landmark Coit Tower, the first Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). Launched in 1933, PWAP hired artists for their abilities not their need for “relief.” Hamlin learned fresco painting on site. Her mural, “Sports and Hunting in California,” is on the tower’s second floor.

“Civilization Through the Arts and Crafts as Taught to the Neophyte Indians”

Mission High Mural
“Civilization Through the Arts and Crafts as Taught to the Neophyte Indians”
Photo Credit: Sally Swope

Three years after her Coit Tower commission, Hamlin got hired by the Works Project Administration (WPA) to paint two 8 by 24 foot murals in the library at San Francisco’s Mission High School. It was a prestigious assignment. The huge murals took Hamlin and four assistants a year to complete. Artist Maynard Dixon, whose studio was a few doors from Hamlin’s on Montgomery Street in the city’s bohemian North Beach district, helped Hamlin paint the faces of the Spanish conquistadors, missionaries, and indigenous people depicted in the Mission High murals.

Dixon and Hamlin shared a fascination with the Southwest and Native Americans. Following Dixon’s divorce from Dorothea Lange, he and Edie married and moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1939. They kept a summer home and studio in Mount Carmel, Utah, near Zion National Park until Dixon died in 1946. Edie recalled those years as the happiest of her life.

She returned to San Francisco where she continued to paint until her death in 1992. I’ll always remember our lively discussions, her warmth, and encouragement.

Sally Swope is a travel writer and author of My Shangri-La, My Adventures in Asia. She is a contributor to the Castro Courier in San Francisco. Email

CWA Models Found in Museum Attic

Model of a Kiva

CWA Model
Model of a Kiva  Source
Photo Credit: Museum of the American Indian

Attics sometimes become unintended archives. At the Museum of the American Indian in Novato, California, director Colleen Hicks and archeologist Teresa Saltzman made a serendipitous discovery early this year. In January 2016, they found nine models of ancient Southwestern Puebloan structures in the museum’s attic—dusty and forgotten for more than 35 years.

Inscriptions on the back of the handmade models revealed that they were created in 1934 by seven different artists working for the Civil Works Administration— one of many New Deal programs to put unemployed people to work during the Great Depression. In this case, the artists were commissioned for educational and documentary purposes as part of a reconstruction project at Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico, an important preserve of Ancestral Puebloan structures.

CWA model of an ancient Puebloan dwelling

Pueblo Model
CWA model of an ancient Puebloan dwelling  Source
Photo Credit: Museum of the American Indian

The models, constructed of plaster of Paris, wood, and stone, weigh about five pounds are about 9-inches high and 8-inches deep. Intricately detailed, the models represent archeological sites in national parks, including Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Aztec Ruins.

Some of the models, like that of the Pueblo Bonito, perfectly mirror structures at Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a place many Puebloans today consider their ancestral roots. Beginning around 850 AD, native people built a highly developed society at Chaco Canyon. Many Pueblo people today take annual pilgrimages to these sites to honor their ancestors.

Signature on the back of a CWA model.

Inscription
Signature on the back of a CWA model.  Source
Photo Credit: Museum of the American Indian

Each model is dated and signed by the artist: Elizabeth Seabrook, Arthur Moore, Ruth Flores, Dick Dalryup, Bert Frost, Glen Berger, and Asa Putnam. But little is known about the models or the artists whose signatures they bear. The National Park Service has contacted museums around the country for any information about the CWA models, some of which are yet to be accounted for. They hope is to display them at the Aztec Ruins National Monument in honor of the National Park Service centenary this year.

Established 48 years ago as a repository for archeological artifacts from the indigenous Miwok people, the museum has evolved into an educational and cultural center for the Bay Area. The CWA models are part of the current exhibition of photographs of ancient Puebloan sites by California photographer Tom Benoit, on display through July 2016. www.marinindian.com

Colleen Hicks, MA, Executive Director, has been the Director of the Museum of the American Indian for 10 years. Teresa Saltzman, MA, is an archeologist and rock art specialist at the museum. Joshua Horowitz, Ph.D is on the museum’s Board of Advisors, and teaches history at Dominican University and San Francisco State University. Email

George Grant, Photographer of National Parks

Haircut at CCC Camp, Glacier National Park, 1933

Lake McDonald barber
Haircut at CCC Camp, Glacier National Park, 1933
Photo Credit: George A. Grant

More than eighty years after President Franklin Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), it remains one of the most memorable of the New Deal programs. Endearingly called FDR’s “Tree Army,” the CCC was key to an unprecedented era of environmental restoration and parks development that took place in the 1930s. Photographs of CCC “boys” at work and enjoying camp life played an important role in promoting both the parks and the CCC’s achievements.

The task of documenting the CCC, especially in western national parks, belonged to George Alexander Grant. A Pennsylvania native, Grant fell in love with the West’s rugged landscapes while stationed in Wyoming during World War I. Laboring in eastern factories after the war, Grant yearned to return to the West. He landed a seasonal job at Yellowstone in 1922. There he picked up a camera—perhaps for the first time—and produced images that impressed the park’s Superintendent Horace Albright. Grant reluctantly turned down a coveted ranger position at Yellowstone in hopes of working for the Park Service as a photographer. Six years of correspondence with Albright–and Albright’s appointment to Director of the National Park Service in 1929– led to Grant’s becoming the Park Service’s first staff photographer. Just months later, the nation was plunged into the Great Depression.

Death Valley, CCC Camp

Funeral Range
Death Valley, CCC Camp
Photo Credit: George A. Grant

By 1933 Grant was the chief photographer of the National Park Service and on the front lines of a golden age for national parks.  That year marked the creation of the CCC and FDR’s executive order nearly doubling the size of the parks system through the addition of national monuments, battlefields, and historic sites. Grant would spend the next seven years chronicling the CCC’s work in national parks. His finely detailed images depict men laboring on the shores of Jackson Lake in the Grand Tetons; pausing for lunch amid the grandeur of Glacier National Park; restoring historic fortifications at Vicksburg National Military Park; clearing snow from roadways in Rocky Mountain National Park; and tackling camp chores like laundry and getting a haircut.

CCC Clearing Snow in Rocky Mountain National Park, 1933

CCC Clearing Snow
Rocky Mountain National Park, 1933
Photo Credit: George A. Grant

Like the photographs of his friend and contemporary, Ansel Adams, Grant’s vivid black-and-white photographs were seen by millions of Americans. Through these images, Americans could see the results of the CCC’s labors and the physical and emotional sustenance the work provided its enrollees.  Yet, Grant has remained virtually unknown because nearly all of his published photographs were simply credited “National Park Service.”

The Park Service’s 2016 centennial year is an ideal time to remember the contributions of this unknown elder in the field of outdoor and landscape photography.

CCC Crew lunchtime at Glacier National Park

CCC Crew
Lunchtime at Glacier National Park
Photo Credit: George Alexander Grant

Ren and Helen Davis are writers and photographers based in Atlanta, Georgia. Their newest book, Landscapes for the People: George Alexander Grant, First Chief Photographer of the National Park Service (University of Georgia Press, 2015, $39.95) complements the National Park Service Centennial commemorations. The Davises have co- authored six books, including Our Mark on This Land: A Guide to the Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps in America’s Parks, published in 2011.