Capturing the Past

Reply
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

Reply
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

Reply
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

Reply

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.”

Winning Back a Lost Generation

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

 

Winning Back a Lost Generation

 
Educator Dr. Mary Mcleod Bethune and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt worked to establish the NYA. Photo: Martin Gross. Source: University of Central Florida

As the Great Depression deepened and families fell into poverty, many young people left home to fend for themselves. Youth unemployment spiraled to 30 percent. For many, finding work meant quitting school. Some saw few alternatives to joining gangs. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt anguished at the prospect of “losing this generation.” Her advocacy for a National Youth Administration made education, vocational training and a paying job possible for millions of young men and women of all races, along with the opportunity to contribute to their communities and to the U.S. war effort, as well.

 

Fear Itself

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

 

FEAR ITSELF


Official program for the inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Vice President John Nance Garner. Published by Inaugural Committee, (Wash DC), 1933.

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as the 32nd president of the United States. He had won in a landslide over the Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover. Millions tuned in to hear a live radio broadcast of FDR’s inaugural address. “So, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he assured the nation. “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work,” he proclaimed. “We must act and act quickly.” FDR’s first hundred days in office would bring a raft of relief programs, public work projects, financial reforms and regulations. The New Deal had begun.

 

The New Deal Turns 90

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

 

The New Deal Turns 90

“Promote the General Welfare"

“Promote the General Welfare"
Bas relief by Lenore Thomas Straus, Greenbelt, Maryland. Photo by Susan Ives

The nation was spiraling into the worst economic crisis in its history when presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt pledged “a new deal for the American people.” Upon taking office in 1933, FDR launched an all-out mobilization to beat back the Great Depression. “Neither before nor since have Americans so rallied around an essentially peaceable form of patriotism,” writes historian Eric Rauchway. “The New Deal matters because we all live in it…it gives structure to our lives in ways we do not ordinarily bother to count or catalog.” In 2023, the 90th birthday of the New Deal, the Living New Deal is counting, cataloging—and celebrating—the New Deal’s vast legacy.

 

The Eye of the Beholder

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

 

The Eye of the Beholder

Detail from the mural, “Library,” by Bernard Zakheim,1934.

Detail from the mural, “Library,” by Bernard Zakheim,1934.
Coit Tower, San Francisco. Photo by Markus Lüske, Courtesy, Living New Deal.

The Federal Art Project (FAP), (1935-1943), provided jobs to 10,000 struggling artists. They created thousands of artworks, including roughly 2,500 murals that adorn many public buildings—city halls, schools, post offices—to this day. The FAP muralists were encouraged to depict American life and culture so as to inspire and promote a national identity. But the results were not without controversy. Then, as now, America was ideologically and culturally divided. FDR proclaimed public art as a hallmark of democracy. Nearly nine decades later, the meaning of art—and democracy—is in the eye of the beholder.

 

ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH ADVERSITY

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

ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH ADVERSITY

FDR Hope Memorial, Roosevelt Island, New York

FDR Hope Memorial, Roosevelt Island, NY
Photo by Susan Ives.

FDR was 39 years old when he was stricken with polio in 1921. Back then, people with disabilities were considered weak and unemployable. FDR’s opponents sought to exploit his inability to walk as a political vulnerability. He was rarely seen or photographed using a wheelchair. Yet, many believe that FDR’s disability shaped him as a person and as president. He made conquering polio a national cause. By his own indomitable spirit and his advancement of federal policies, FDR helped to dismantle the societal barriers that, more than disability itself, can limit one’s ability to achieve. READ MORE

New Dealish: The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937

Reply


Courtesy, Smithsonian National Postal Museum

The federal government began taxing marijuana in 1937 after Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, testified to a Congressional committee that smoking marijuana “produces in it users insanity, criminality and death.” H.R. 6385, The Marihuana Tax Act, regulated the importation, cultivation, possession and/or distribution of cannabis and placed a tax on its sale. Moses Baca and Samuel Caldwell, arrested in Denver for possession and dealing, respectively, were the first in the nation to be convicted for failure pay the tax. During WWII, the US Department of Agriculture and the Army urged farmers to grow hemp for fiber and issued tax stamps to sellers to limit access to the drug. States sold their own tax stamps, some of which are highly sought after by stamp collectors. In 1969 in Timothy Leary v. United States, part of the Marihuana Tax Act was ruled unconstitutional as a violation of the Fifth Amendment, since a person seeking the tax stamp would have to self incriminate. In response, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1971, which repealed the 1937 drug tax. Marijuana today is treated as an illegal substance under federal law, but illegal drugs are no longer taxable.
With thanks to Roger Catlin, Smithsonian Magazine.
View the trailer of the 1936 film, Reefer Madness (1:30 minutes)