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.

• Imagine the U.S. Without the New Deal

  • May 17, 2012

  Imagine the U.S. without the New Deal, and you’ll get something like the 19th century. Not the Hollywood version, mind you, but a nation of often impassable country roads and unpaved city streets; fetid rivers, lakes, and beaches reeking of sewage and industrial waste; epidemics of cholera, typhoid, polio, and ...
• A Federally-Funded Jobs Program? Lessons from the WPA

  • April 7, 2012

  University of Missouri, Kansas City, Economics professor John Henry (a honorable name in its own right) writes that the federal government can – and should – create jobs, just as it did under the New Deal.  See Prof. Henry's remarks on the amusingly-named blog, Naked Capitalism.  There's a terrific slide ...
• Jobs Crisis Shows Need for 'New' New Deal

  • February 28, 2012

  The nation is now experiencing the most severe jobs crisis since the Great Depression. President Barack Obama's jobs plan will provide a much-needed extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut for working Americans. Nevertheless, only a federally funded jobs program, such as the Works Progress Administration, launched by ...
• Machinists Union Calls for New WPA

  • February 17, 2012

  The International Associations of Machinists (IAM) is circulating a petition calling for a new Works Progress Administration to create a 21st cntury infrastructure program.  To find the petition, click here.     ...
• Machinists Union Calls for New WPA

  • February 17, 2012

  The International Associations of Machinists (IAM) is circulating a petition calling for a new Works Progress Administration to create a 21st cntury infrastructure program.  To find the petition, click here.     ...
• Why We Got Ayn Rand Instead of FDR: Thomas Frank

  • February 6, 2012

  Thomas Frank is author of a provocative new book, Pity the Billionaire, on how Tea Party Populism derailed a New New Deal. Editor's note from AlterNet: In  2008, the house of cards came crashing down around us, and all of the economic doctrine we'd been fed over the past few decades ...
• FDR's Continuing Relevance - David Woolner

  • February 6, 2012

  130 Years After His Birth, We Still Live in FDR's World   " were to pause for a moment to consider just how much Franklin Roosevelt's leadership continues to influence their lives, they might soon conclude, as the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once observed, 'that the world we live in today is ...
• 18,000 City Bridges Structurally Deficient

  • December 20, 2011

  A new report shows that more than 18,000 of the nation’s busiest bridges clustered in the nation’s metro areas are rated as “structurally deficient.” Overall, there are some 70,000 structurally deficient bridges, but those in the metro areas carry 75 percent of the traffic that must cross a deficient bridge each day, according ...
• A New Civilian Conservation Corps

  • August 29, 2011

  Letter: A New Civilian Conservation Corps Marcy Kaptur, a U.S. representative for Ohio's 9th District, responds to a recent editorial about creating jobs. Eleanor Roosevelt feared that without a federal jobs program designed for America's youth during the Great Depression, the nation would lose an entire generation. The Civilian Conservation Corps saved ...
• One-Fourth of California's State Parks Closing

  • June 5, 2011

  Parks aren't luxuries or "amenities." They're places of economic, cultural, and spiritual value. During the Great Depression the government put young people to work in the parks building trails, bathrooms and visitor centers. In his last term as governor, Jerry Brown fostered the California Conservation Corps, giving young people - ...