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.

• Mail Your Letters with a WPA Poster (Stamp)

  • February 24, 2017
  • Gabriel Milner

  Here at The Living New Deal, we've preordered the latest edition to the Postal Service's stamp gallery: Renderings of works initially created for the Poster Division of the WPA/FAP. These 20 "striking and utilitarian" images depict tennis players and bighorn sheep, industrial workers and ocean liners, and one of the most iconic images read more
• The Freedom From Fear/Yellow Bowl Project: Remembering America's Concentration Camps

  • January 20, 2017
  • Gabriel Milner

  In December 2015 I saw Donald Trump on CNN invoke FDR’s use of “internment” for the Japanese as a possible solution for the "Muslim problem". At the time, I was on my way to Manzanar, CA, one of ten US internment camps created in 1942 to hold 110,000 people of read more
• Florida’s New Deal Landscapes in Jeopardy

  • January 19, 2017
  • David Driapsa

  Florida’s State Parks — like those of other states — expanded and greatly benefited from New Deal programs as well as from Franklin Roosevelt’s personal interest in conservation (see previous newsletter for review of Douglas Brinkley’s Rightful Heritage.) So skillfully did experienced landscape designers and CCC recruits work to preserve read more
• Greenhills Named a National Historic Landmark

  • January 17, 2017
  • Susan Ives

  Near Cincinnati, Ohio, the Village of Greenhills is one of only three New Deal “greenbelt” towns in the country. On January 11, it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior. Greenhills was a demonstration project of the Resettlement Administration (RA) a short-lived New Deal agency that read more
• CCC Totem Pole Inventory Needed

  • January 17, 2017
  • Susan Ives

  During the New Deal, the federal government took an unprecedented step toward preserving Native American art: It funded an effort to repair and replicate scores of totem poles in southeast Alaska. Alaska, then a U.S. territory, was suffering from chronic unemployment during the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1942, the Civilian read more
• Schussing in New England, Courtesy of the CCC

  • January 17, 2017
  • Alex Tarr

  The long, cold winter months can take their toll on the psyche of residents of the Northeast. To help stave off cabin fever, winter sports that get people out and enjoying—rather than dreading—snowy days are invaluable. Surprisingly, it was not until the 1930s that snow skiing became a popular form read more
• The Fate of the New Deal

  • December 18, 2016
  • Gabriel Milner

  One of the many unknowns of Donald Trump’s impending presidency is the fate of America’s New Deal legacy. Last Tuesday, Newt Gingrich spoke before the Heritage Foundation in a wide-ranging speech celebrating Trump’s victory and the social, economic, and cultural changes it seemed to auger. Gingrich’s speech centered on his vision of read more
• A Quintessential CCC Picnic Grove

  • December 16, 2016
  • Glory-June Greiff

  In the early 1990s I was approached by an older gentleman named Euclid Dearing, a veteran of the CCC in Indiana, to write a National Register nomination for the Hominy Ridge shelterhouse in Salamonie River State Forest. He was a member of Company 589, which had originated at McCormick’s Creek read more
• On Restoring a New Deal Mural

  • November 15, 2016
  • Gabriel Milner

  For more than seventy years, the murals of Frank W. Long have been hanging in post offices and other public buildings in the South and Midwest. “It was almost by accident that I became a painter of murals,” Long writes in Confessions of a Depression Muralist. In Confessions, Long blends read more
• CCC Stone Hut Rebuilt After Fire

  • November 8, 2016
  • Gabriel Milner

  The work of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Vermont had a lasting impact on the state and its recreational infrastructure. Under the guidance of State Forester Perry Merrill, more than 40,000 individuals worked in Vermont’s 30 CCC camps, building new state parks, planting forests and, most notably, developing downhill read more