New Dealish: The Floating White House

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The Roosevelts with King George IV and Queen Elizabeth of England aboard the USS Potomac, June 9, 1939

The Roosevelts with King George IV and Queen Elizabeth of England aboard the USS Potomac, June 9, 1939
Courtesy, Wikimedia Commons

The USS Potomac was FDR’s retreat from the pressures of the White House. He sometimes hosted advisors and heads of state aboard the Presidential yacht but it also was his getaway for fishing trips, poker games and family gatherings. At least one of FDR’s famed radio chats was broadcast from the Potomac. Four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR boarded the yacht ostensibly on a fishing trip. But he secretly transferred to the USS Augusta, a Navy cruiser bound for Newfoundland, to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to form the Allied partnership and plan what Roosevelt called the “United Nations.”
After FDR’s death in 1945, the Potomac passed through several owners, including Elvis Presley. It was later confiscated for drug smuggling. In 1980, it sank off Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The wreck was nearly sold for scrap but the Port of Oakland purchased it for $15,000 and volunteers raised $5 million to restore it. Now berthed in Oakland, the USS Potomac is a National Historic Landmark and, thanks to the Association for the Preservation of the Presidential Yacht USS Potomac, open to the public.

America’s Voices

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

America’s Voices

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (center) and daughter Anne (standing behind him) at Warm Springs, Georgia, 'Little White House' in 1933 with Bun Wright's Fiddle Band.
Courtesy, AmericanRootsMusicblogspot.com.

Within the Resettlement Administration, the New Deal agency charged with relocating struggling families, a little known Music Unit deployed field workers to government-planned communities around the country to boost residents’ morale and solidarity through folk music. Using the latest 1930s technology, the aluminum disk, they recorded hundreds of performances in a multitude of styles and languages. In the mind of Sidney Robertson, who recorded and archived many of them, every song represented America’s voice.

 

Art for the People

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

Art for the People

Artist George Biddle painting murals at the Justice Department Building in Washington, DC.
Biddle wrote a letter to newly elected President Roosevelt suggesting the government create opportunities in federal buildings for American mural painters to “improve the quality of American life.” Courtesy, US Treasury Dept.

Perhaps best known for its public works projects, the WPA also employed tens of thousands of actors, musicians, writers and artists through a jobs program collectively known as Federal One. “Hell, they’ve got to eat too,” said FDR’s advisor Harry Hopkins, director of New Deal relief programs. Seven percent of the WPA budget would be dedicated to the arts. Lesser known are visual New Deal art programs under the Treasury Department. According to a 1936 government report, “The Treasury Department has erected, or is erecting, and has control of some 2,800 buildings” scattered over the United States. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first federal art program; the Section on Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Act funded artists to add murals and sculptures to public buildings. Preserving the New Deal’s complex, often overlooked and sometimes misunderstood art legacy is a challenge—one that the Living New Deal is preparing to meet. 

 

New Dealish: The Roosevelt Martini

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Courtesy, Robbreport.com

FDR may be best remembered for leading the country though the Great Depression and winning the war against fascism, but some consider his repeal of Prohibition to be a pivotal achievement. Upon signing the 21st Amendment in 1933, (ending the nation’s thirteen years of illegal alcohol consumption), Roosevelt said, “I believe this would be a good time for a beer.” But, in fact, it was the gin martini that the president preferred. The Roosevelt Martini was testimony to his questionable mixology skills. Despite FDR’s late grandson, Curtis Roosevelt, describing FDR’s martinis as “the worst” tasting, FDR often enjoyed drinking more than one, which, at times, would inspire him to burst into his college fight song. Pinning down the exact recipe for the president’s signature drink is bit of a headache. A variety of recipes have been documented. (A common complaint is that the Roosevelt Martini is too heavy on the vermouth).

The Roosevelt Martini (Courtesy of Culinary Historians of Chicago)

Add ice to a mixing glass
Pour in 50ml of gin, 25ml vermouth (These amounts were sometimes reversed)
Splash of olive brine
Stir for 30 seconds
Strain into a cocktail glass
Garnish with an olive and lemon twist

(179 calories)

The Kids Are All Right?

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

The Kids Are All Right?


Courtesy, the National Archives.

Between 1933 and 1934, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) opened nearly 3,000 Emergency Nursery Schools (ENS) for low-income children. The schools were free. The children were provided with nourishing meals and medical attention; played together; were read to and taught how to brush their teeth, comb their hair and use proper table manners. The day nurseries provided jobs to thousands of unemployed workers as teachers, cooks and supervisors. In 1942, the U.S. Senate authorized $20 million to provide public care for children whose mothers were employed in the war effort. By 1944, enrollment neared 130,000 children. In 1971, Congress passed a bipartisan bill to establish national child-development and day-care centers, but the bill was vetoed by President Nixon, who dismissed it as “family weakening.” Today, there is still is no broad-based federally supported child care.

 

Reviving the Corps

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

Reviving the Corps


CCC members erect a sign for Camp Roosevelt, Virginia, 1938. Photo by Everett.

When FDR first took office in 1933, nearly a quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. In one of his first acts as president, FDR issued an executive order establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps. Within three months, the CCC hired 300,000 young men. At its peak a few years later, the Corps had half a million men working on environmental conservation, wildfire prevention and disaster relief. Last year, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act passed the House and Senate with the support of every Democrat and no Republicans. However, a jobs provision modeled on the CCC was left on the cutting room floor. Last month, by executive order, Biden authorized the creation of the American Climate Corps. The program aims to train 20,000 young people for green jobs in the first year. The federal funding to put them to work will have to wait.

 

Capturing the Past

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

Capturing the Past

"The Future,” by sculptor Robert I. Aitken

"The Future,” by sculptor Robert I. Aitken
Completed in 1935, the sculpture sits at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance of the National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

On June 19, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation establishing a “National Archives of the United States Government.” It was the culmination of decades of congressional debate on the issue of national records preservation.The new agency began by acquiring federal records from the U.S. Senate, White House, Department of State, Federal Works Agency and other federal entities. Gathering records from around the country posed a greater challenge. No one at the time knew the full extent of federal records in offices and storehouses beyond Washington, D.C. The WPA took up the challenge. In 1936, WPA workers surveyed and inventoried two-million linear feet of records in 5,000 government buildings. Today, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) holds billions of pages of textual records, tens of millions of photographs, millions of maps, charts, drawings and much more, all available to the public. NARA  is an invaluable resource to the Living New Deal as we research and document the vast legacy the New Deal left to America.

 

Rewriting America

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

Rewriting America

 


Henry Alsberg, director of the FWP, testifying before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, 1938. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

The New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), begun in 1935, employed more than 10,000 out-of work writers, editors, art critics, researchers and historians. Women made up forty percent of the workforce, including as state directors. It hired now-renowned African American writers. The FWP’s founding director, Henry Alsberg, was a journalist, a Jew and a suspected Communist. A group of conservative business men complained to FDR that the Project was “dominated by Communist sympathizers.” A censor was installed at the FWP’s central office to police for “subversive” material. The chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Rep. Martin Dies, claimed that one-third of the FWP’s members were Communists. Alsberg was called to testify, then fired. The FWP was dissolved and nearly erased from the public’s mind. Until now.

 

When the Dust Settled

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The Fireside—News and Views from The Living New Deal

When the Dust Settled

Black Sunday

Black Sunday
Courtesy, Wikipedia

On April 14, 1935, known as “Black Sunday,” a dark cloud roiled the Great Plains. The dust storm carried 300 million tons of Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas east to the Atlantic Ocean. A decade-long drought, overgrazing and poor farming practices dried up 100 million acres of prairie, rendered a half million people homeless and ultimately displaced two and a half million people. It was the largest migration in American history. The New Deal’s response—stabilizing crop prices, making loans to help farmers pay their bills, planting trees as wind breaks, teaching farming methods to conserve soil and water—and eventually, rain—brought relief to the land and hope to those who stayed.

WATCH: Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Blues

 

Historian Victoria Wolcott Wins New Deal Book Award

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Dr. Victoria Wolcott, winner of the 2022 New Deal Book Award.

Dr. Victoria Wolcott
Photo by Yves-Richard Blanc

Victoria W. Wolcott, professor of History at the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, has been named the winner of the Living New Deal’s annual New Deal Book Award for 2022. Her book, Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, (University of Chicago Press, 2022), explores the New Deal’s influence on the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Wolcott has published on a wide range of topics related to civil rights and social and racial justice. Her award-winning book examines how the emergence of experimental interracial communities in mid-20th-century America helped shape the views of civil rights leaders.

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, was unanimously chosen among eleven works nominated for this year’s award.  A review committee of New Deal historians, chaired by Eric Rauchway, distinguished professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of Why the New Deal Matters, praised Wolcott’s book as “a profound and engaging study of interracial cooperative communities that experimented with new ways of life in the years of the Depression and New Deal. Their vision of new and better ways to live laid the foundations for the postwar Civil Rights movement.”

The Living New Deal launched the annual New Deal Book Award in 2021 to recognize and encourage nonfiction authorship about the New Deal, (1933-1942), an era defined by FDR’s presidency, the Great Depression and the nation’s entry into World War II.  The $1,000 award will be presented to Dr. Wolcott on June 24, 2023 at the Annual Roosevelt Reading Festival, held at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.

Richard Walker, director of the Living New Deal, expressed appreciation to all the nominees and the review committee. “It is immensely satisfying to see the high-quality scholarship being done on the New Deal, the significance of which still calls out to us ninety years later.”