Art & Architecture: Legacy & Loss

News items that speak to the vast legacy of New Deal art and architecture and to controversies about the loss of historic works or their relevance to modern times.

• From Four Freedoms to Four Fights

  • June 16, 2015

  In his 1941 State of the Union, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlined his vision of America as redefined by the New Deal and as defining itself against the imminent threat of fascism. (Eleven months later, the U.S. would enter World War Two.) That vision was encapsulated in his Four Freedoms, commemorated ...
• Celebrate LaborFest!

  • June 13, 2015

  Since 1994, San Francisco’s LaborFest has brought together workers, artists, and scholars to memorialize America's labor movements, past and present. Through panels, films, concerts, and site visits, it aims to foster dialogue across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and craft. This year, LaborFest will celebrate labor balladeer Joe Hill (pictured here), framed ...
• Happy 80th Birthday, WPA

  • April 8, 2015

  On this day, April 8,1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, establishing the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects. Almost every community in the United States had ...
• Ten Reasons for a National Youth Service

  • June 16, 2014

  Ever since the New Deal’s National Youth Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and a brief flurry of public-spiritedness during the Kennedy years, America has minimized both expectations and opportunities for public service.  Fewer Americans than at any time in our history — less than one half of 1 percent— ...
• WPA Posters Inspire A New Generation

  • January 30, 2014

  Inspired by the New Deal arts programs, Creative Action Network (CAN), an online community of mission-driven artists, announced a crowdsource campaign to create a new collection of “See America” posters celebrating America’s national parks.  Within a few weeks about two hundred poster designs hit their inbox, with new submissions arriving ...
• The Great Recession is Not Just a Memory

  • January 3, 2014

  The government and the news media would like us to believe that the recession triggered by the financial crisis of 2008 is behind us and the economy is up and running at a fine clip.  But the reality is not so bright.  The recovery has been the worst from any ...
• "The Cost of Doing Nothing"

  • December 6, 2013

  Stephen Seufert, a recent college graduate and blogger in Pennsylvania, has sent us this excellent op-ed piece he recently published in a local paper, The Bucks County Courier-Times.  Thank you, Stephen, and we hope that more young Americans come to think like you about the need for positive government action ...
• Robert Reich on Closing the Income Gap

  • September 21, 2013

  Robert Reich, Living New Deal board member, has been getting a lot of attention lately, thanks to his new film, Inequality for All.  He has been interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and by Bill Moyers on Moyers & Company.  Moyers asked Reich: what can we do to fix ...
• America's Crumbling Infrastructure

  • September 16, 2013

  Yet again we are reminded that the United States has not invested enough in maintaining and expanding the national infrastructure since the New Deal/Postwar Era. As a result, bridges collapse, sewage systems overflow, and parks go to seed, among other things. This opinion piece from the New York Times from fall 2012, ...
• Jay Leno & President Obama Talk WPA

  • September 3, 2013

  What a nice surprise to have Jay Leno bring up the WPA as a model during his show featuring President Barak Obama.  Leno asks, "Would it be possible to do a modern WPA?  Where kids get paid a decent wage, you give them food, and they fix up Detroit, they ...