New Deal Today: Policy & Politics

News items that speak to the resurgence of interest in the New Deal as a touchstone for public policy and political action today.

• Notes from the Field: A Reunion for Indiana CCC'ers

  • August 25, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

    Glory-June Greiff writes us from Indiana:   For 62 years, on the last Sunday in July, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) veterans have been coming to Indiana’s Pokagon State Park, in the far northeast corner of the state, for the oldest continuous CCC reunion in the country. Twenty years after the CCC was read more
• Aug. 24: Gray Brechin (and New Deal San Francisco) at the Mechanics' Institute

  • August 21, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

  On Monday, August 24, Living New Deal Founder Gray Brechin will speak at the Mechanics' Institute, San Francisco. Gray will be examining the New Deal's impact on that city, which the Living New Deal has recently documented with our Guide to the Art & Architecture of the New Deal map. read more
• Colorado New Deal Sites Named National Historic Landmarks

  • August 18, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

  On Tuesday, August 4, the United States Department of Interior and National Park Service announced the placement of Mount Morrison CCC Camp and Red Rock’s Amphitheatre on the register of National Historic Landmarks (NHL). A National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, or object officially recognized by the United read more
• The WPA and The Art of Nature

  • July 27, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

  The August issue of venerable arts and (counter)culture magazine Juxtapoz explores the image of nature in artworks created by Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor for the "See America" campaign, promoting the National Parks.   Carlo McCormick’s “THE WPA AND HOW THE FEDERAL ARTS PROJECT CHANGED AMERICAN ART,” considers how artists represented American nature in the 1930s read more
• CCC Project at Pocahontas State Park Historic District Added to the Virginia State Registry

  • July 15, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

  The Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR) recently named the 7600-acre Pocahontas State Park, one of Virginia’s largest Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) projects, to the Virginia Landmarks Registry (VLR). The DHR said that all of the park, along with two other new listings in the VLR, will be forwarded to the read more
• Old Santa Fe Trail Building Now Open to the Public

  • July 14, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

  After being closed for two decades, and a year after its 75th Anniversary, the Old Santa Fe Trail Building—the former home of the Southwest Regional Office of the National Park Service (NPS)—is again open to the public. Constructed in the Spanish-Pueblo Revival style and completed in 1939, the office was read more
• Notes from the Field: Restoring the Black Mountain Lookout Tower

  • May 20, 2015
  • Natalie Heneghan

  At 9,500 feet, the Black Mountain Lookout Tower offers a stunning, 360-degree view above the tree line of Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built this tower in 1939, one of hundreds of such structures erected by young men working for the federal government during the New read more
• Films From and About the New Deal and Its Worker-Artists

  • May 1, 2015
  • Gabriel Milner

  Margot Smith is a retired social scientist currently residing in Berkeley, California, where she made award-winning independent videos on political and social justice issues. Recently, she contacted the Living New Deal to lend some of her work to our project.   Take a minute and a half to watch cleaned-up promotional footage read more
• Regional Libraries and the Rural/Urban Knowledge Schism

  • April 30, 2015
  • Gregg Mitchell

  Since the earliest years of the American Republic, but especially since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a divide between rural and urban communities. This conflict persists today in several forms, one being the disparity of available knowledge between these spaces. Different states have their own unique divides, and for read more
• Daughter of Coit Tower Artist Bernard Zakheim: Keep Tower Public!

  • November 2, 2014
  • Alex Tarr

  Read Ruth Gottstein's scathing editorial in the SF Examiner on the need to keep Coit Tower and public parks free and open to the public. Gottstein is the 92-year-old daughter of Coit muralist Bernard Zakheim. She brilliantly connects the recent viral video of children being forced off of a playground in read more