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.

• Shock Troops of Disaster

  • November 9, 2012

  In addition to the calamity of the Great Depression, in the 1930s the U.S. was beset by environmental catastrophes—floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, drought and a Dust Bowl. But the nation had something then that it does not have in 2012 to deal with devastating storms such as hurricanes Katrina, Irene and

  In addition to the calamity of the Great Depression, in the 1930s the U.S. was beset by environmental catastrophes—floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, drought and a Dust Bowl. But the nation had something then that it does not have in 2012 to deal with devastating storms such as hurricanes Katrina, Irene and ...
• Roosevelt 2012 - Toward A European New Deal

  • September 27, 2012

  A collective has been formed in France by leading political and academic figures such as Michel Rocard, Stéphane Hessel, Edgar Morin, Susan George, and to agitate for a program of action against austerity in Europe, in the spirit of the New Deal.  One of the collective's members is Curtis Roosevelt, ...
• Colbert and Grunwald on the Politics of Hope

  • September 18, 2012

  Michael Grunwald, author of The New New Deal, defended New Deal politics in conversation with Stephen Colbert this week. Colbert, through the voice of his right-wing avatar, confessed that the New Deal gave “hope to a shattered country.” Grunwald offers a comparison between then and now; he defends the 2009 ...
• Fear Itself

  • September 3, 2012

  In a tendencious and thought-provoking pair of articles in the Huffington Post, Sanjay Sanghoee makes the case for "Why Republicans Hate FDR and Why Obama Must Become Him".  He begins with the following provocation: "Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, Democrat, and architect of the New Deal, ...
• A Bridge to Somewhere

  • September 2, 2012

  In a recent article in The Daily Beast by Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, author of Inventing America: A History of the United States, reflects on a trip to Cape Cod, linked to the mainland by three New Deal bridges.  These bridges greatly improved life for motorists and ...
• Republican Convention Site A Public Works Project

  • August 28, 2012

  Carl Gibson nails the contradiction in Republican Party thinking between the convention slogan, "We Built It", and the convention site, the Tampa Bay Times Forum. The slogan emphasizes private enterprise as the creator of all good things (rather than bad old government), but the Tampa Forum was built with $62 ...
• Los Angeles Investment in Schools Helps Kids Learn

  • August 28, 2012

  BY RADOMIR AVILA | Daily Californian Friday, August 17, 2012 Implementation of a $19 billion public works project to build hundreds of new Los Angeles Unified School District school facilities over the past few years to combat overcrowding was associated with an increase in student achievement, according to a UC Berkeley study published ...
• New Deal Shattered the Austerity Myth

  • June 6, 2012

  David Woolner, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, recently took on the prevailing mantra of budget cutting in the midst of the Great Recession – as if we'd never learned anything from the New Deal's break with conventional wisdom in the Great Depression of the 1930s.  As Woolner puts it: "Roughly ...
• A New New Deal for Youth?

  • June 6, 2012

  Even a capitalist like John Studzinski, a senior managing director of The Blackstone Group, evokes the memory of the New Deal in proposing a kind of national service program for investing in the youth of Europe and North America, who are in desperate straits due to high unemployment, underemployment and ...
• New French President Evokes A New Deal for Europe

  • June 5, 2012

  France's newly-elected president, François Hollande, is an admirer of the New Deal who   thinks that Europe needs economic stimulus of the kind provided by the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s, not the austerity regime imposed on the European Union by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank ...