The New Deal’s Forgotten Song Book

March 29, 2024

Music for square dance at Skyline Farms, Alabama, 1937
Photo by Ben Shahn, Resettlement Administration. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a sprawling New Deal agency created in 1935 to oversee a disparate set of government initiatives, most of which focused on providing help in rural areas. This included an experimental program to build new homestead communities for “displaced populations”—farmers whose land had failed, miners whose mines had shut down and unemployed urban workers willing to try rural life. Almost completely lost to history is the agency’s Music Unit, hidden within the RA’s vaguely named Special Skills Division, which left a trove of recordings documenting the folk music of Depression-era America.

Charles Seeger was a technical advisor to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration). He also served as an administrator for the WPA’s Federal Music Project. His children, Pete, Peggy and Mike were renowned American folk singers.
Courtesy, Wikipedia.

The RA’s Music Unit dispatched federal workers as field representatives to lead music activities and record folk songs that were then incorporated into music programs meant to help strengthen ties among the homesteaders. This “social use” of music was intertwined with a larger (and controversial) goal of the RA to foster an ideological shift on the homesteads away from rugged individualism to an emphasis on collective responsibility.

It now seems clear that the lost history of the Music Unit is no accident—the Special Skills Division wanted to keep the Music Unit’s activities below the radar, likely to avoid attention from the RA’s many critics. Any music program within the agency would have been seen as frivolous; one invested in instilling a cooperative mindset among the rural poor could seem downright dangerous.

Between 1936 and 1937, Music Unit staffer Sidney Robertson became the RA’s most prolific folk music collector, recording more than 800 songs on solo collecting

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended the White Top Folk Festival in Grayson County, Virginia, 1933
Courtesy: https://www.archives-wcpl.net

trips through the Appalachians, the Ozarks and Upper Midwest. Sidney was fascinated by labor union protest music and made recordings of left-wing activists in St. Louis and striking millworkers in Tennessee.

She discovered new musical worlds in the immigrant enclaves of Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Polish and Lithuanian in the Midwest and was the first collector to record folk songs of ethnic immigrants and call them “American.” All of this informed her later work directing the WPA’s California Folk Music Project (1938–1940).

Dancers taught by Leonard Kirk, Cumberland Homesteads, Crossville, Tennessee, 1937
Photo: Ben Shahn, Resettlement Administration. Courtesy, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The RA was one of the New Deal’s most radical, far-reaching and highly criticized programs. It lasted just two years, from 1935 to 1937, when it became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). At that time, the overall focus of the New Deal had shifted away from the kind of direct relief that the RA had provided and towards the job programs of the Works Progress Administration. But the rich collection of recordings made for the RA, now archived at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, function as sonic equivalents to the FSA’s famous photographs documenting the hardscrabble 1930s—sounds of resilience, joy, protest, pain and humor among Americans struggling through the Great Depression.

WATCH the Living New Deal webinar, “Folk Music and the New Deal: Collecting the Hidden Soundtracks of the Great Depression,” featuring Sheryl Koskowitz and Catherine Kerst.

Sheryl Kaskowitz is the author of A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time (Pegasus, April 2024) and God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (Oxford University Press, 2013). Sheryl earned her PhD in music with an ethnomusicology focus at Harvard University and currently works as a freelance writer, editor and audio producer in Berkeley, California.

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Film Festival to Present New Deal Spirit Award

July 25, 2023

Old Greenbelt Theater
The theater opened on September 21, 1938, with Little Miss Broadway, a film starring Shirley Temple. Admission was 30 cents for adults and 15 cents for children. Photo Courtesy, Maryland Humanities.

Greenbelt, Maryland will celebrate the 90th anniversary of FDR’s New Deal (1933-1942) at the19th Utopia Film Festival to be held October 20-22 at the city’s historic Old Greenbelt Theatre. This year’s festival will include a presentation of the “New Deal Spirit Award.” The award recognizes independent films that reflect New Deal ideals.

Since 2005, the annual festival has showcased films about community building, cultural diversity, social and economic concerns and environmental issues. Projects eligible for the New Deal Spirit Award fall into three categories: full-length documentary or feature films (no longer than 90 minutes); short documentary or feature films (no longer than 30 minutes); and animation. Festival planners invite filmmakers and animators to submit their work for consideration by August 4, 2023.

Plaque at the Greenbelt Theater
The theater embodies the community values of safe, healthy, affordable housing for all citizens. Photo by Susan Ives.

The festival takes its name from the “utopian” origins of so-called green towns, planned and built by the federal government to provide affordable housing for families during the Great Depression. The towns, inspired by the garden city theory of urban planning, were ringed by forests and farms and designed to foster healthy living and community solidarity by incorporating walking paths, playgrounds and common areas.

Greenbelt, twelve miles northeast of Washington, DC, was built by WPA workers in 1937. Its residents were screened for their willingness to engage in the community. Greenbelt residents established cooperatives—community-run enterprises. The Greenbelt grocery and the newspaper, originally named “The Greenbelt Cooperator,” remain co-ops to this day.

Rexford Tugwell, the head of the New Deal Resettlement Administration, had envisioned hundreds of green towns. But critics derided them as “utopian.” Tugwell was dubbed “Rex the Red,” by some in Congress for his egalitarian views. Only three green towns were built—Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale, Wisconsin and Greenhills, Ohio.

Compared with its sister towns, Greenbelt has endured with few alterations.

The town’s center, Old Greenbelt, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997. Today, it’s considered a planning landmark and attracts visitors from around the world.

Chris Haley is the executive director of the volunteer-run Utopian Film Festival.

The Utopia Film Festival is run entirely by volunteers. Chris Haley, the executive director, also is director of the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland at the Maryland State Archives (and is the nephew of Alex Haley, author of “Roots”). Chris shared his thoughts on the New Deal at 90, the New Deal Spirit Award and the racial segregation in Greenbelt’s past.

“I think, especially given where we are as a nation right now, this award will remind us of what the New Deal represented—better ways to live if we act together as one community. Granted, the (New Deal’s) initial implementation, highly segregated, didn’t create that reality. However, the ideal is one we should always strive to achieve. The Utopia Film Festival wants to remind and recognize that spirit in film.”

The Utopia Film Festival is a project of the nonprofit Greenbelt Access Television, the festival’s primary sponsor. For information about the New Deal Spirit Award, contact the festival committee: [email protected].

Susan Gervasi is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in the Washington, D.C. area. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, the New York Daily News and numerous other publications. Her films include Defending Utopia: the Greenbelt News Review at 80; Psychedelic Mysticism: The Good Friday Experiment & Beyond; On the Trail of Jack Thorp; and Mary Surratt: Mystery Woman of the Lincoln Assassination.

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A Greenbelt Town Fights for Press Freedom

January 30, 2023

Shopping at Greenbelt Cooperative Grocery Store
Cooperatives remain central to life in Greenbelt today. Photo by Russell Lee, 1938. Courtesy, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

In 1937, Theodora and John Murray were among 850 families selected to reside in an experimental city built and owned by the federal government.

About a half-hour’s drive from Washington, DC., Greenbelt, Maryland is one of three planned residential communities conceived and developed by the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration (RA), which relocated displaced and low-income families during the Great Depression. These Greenbelt towns, described as “utopian” by both adherents and detractors alike, offered affordable rents in suburban villages meant to deliver families from blighted urban housing.

“They wanted to try an experiment that provided something healthy, with lots of green grass and trees,” says Greenbelt journalist Mary Lou Williamson, a 60-year city resident of the town. “There was plenty of fresh air and children could spend time outside in a safe community.”

Mary Lou Williamson, a 60-year resident of the town, reported on the public hearings that led real estate developer Charles Bresler to sue the Greenbelt News Review for criminal libel. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Photo by Susan Ives, 2022.

Prospective tenants were screened not only on the basis of income, but on their prospective suitability for starting a cooperative community. “They wanted people who would take care of things,” Williamson explains.

The Murrays and other Greenbelt townsfolk decided to start with a town newspaper. Churned out on a mimeograph machine, “The Cooperator,” became a vital part of promulgating “the Greenbelt philosophy.” Besides guiding new residents through a maze of organizational meetings, its editors and reporters encouraged readers to view themselves as “pioneers” of a new way of life, and promoted the city as a “model for future Greenbelts.”

Organized as a cooperative, the newspaper ushered in a proliferation of other co-ops. A credit union, grocery store, nursery school and babysitting co-op remain active today. The New Deal Café, a hive of activism, is cooperatively managed by town residents.

Mrs. Hoover reading the Greenbelt Cooperator in her living room.
The paper, published by the Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Association, Inc., was established in 1937 shortly after the federal government’s construction of Greenbelt. It has been published weekly without interruption ever since and is delivered free to most Greenbelt residents. Photo by Marjory Collins, 1942. Courtesy, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Critics of FDR’s Administration denounced the so-called “green towns” as a socialist boondoggle. But it wasn’t until after WWII that Greenbelt and its newspaper met with an existential threat, when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy proposed selling the three green towns to private interests. Greenbelt tenants narrowly voted to purchase the homes collectively and established a cooperative, Greenbelt Homes, Inc., in 1954.

McCarthy’s scrutiny had bred fear and distrust. Not long after Greenbelt was targeted during televised hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, The Cooperator changed its name to the Greenbelt News Review.

In 1965, real estate developer Charles Bresler and the city became embroiled in a zoning dispute.

At a heated city council meeting, a Greenbelt resident accused Bresler of trying to “blackmail” the city into a decision Bresler sought. News Review reporter Mary Lou Williamson, who would later become the paper’s editor, reported on the controversy and criticisms leveled at Bresler. He sued the News Review for criminal libel in what became a precedent-setting lawsuit.

Sally Meredith, reporter for the Greenbelt Cooperator
Photo by Marjory Collins, 1942. Courtesy, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

In 1970 the Supreme Court unanimously decided in the News Review’s favor, holding that reporting the news is protected by the First Amendment, and that the paper was not libelous for accurately reporting such “rhetorical hyperbole” at a lively public meeting,” but rather “was performing its wholly legitimate function as a community newspaper when it published full reports of these public debates in its news columns.”

Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing v Bresler (1970), “is a very important case,” says Washington D.C. attorney Lee Levine, who has argued libel cases before the Supreme Court. “Both for what it decided…and for the influence it’s had on the law since.”

Volunteer staff at The Cooperator
The weekly paper was renamed the Greenbelt News Review in 1954. In 1970, The News Review successfully defended the freedom of the press before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Photographer unknown.

The precedent established by Greenbelt’s hometown paper continues to guarantee freedom of the press. In a 1990 case, Milkovich v The Lorraine Journal, the Court reiterated its finding in the Greenbelt case of “rhetorical hyperbole” as protected speech under the First Amendment and expanded press protection against frivolous, but costly, lawsuits.

Watch: PBS segment about Greenbelt in “Ten Towns That Changed America”
(5 minutes)

Watch: “Defending Utopia, The Greenbelt News Review at 80,” a film by Susan Gervasi
Film: https://vimeo.com/285905039. (48 minutes)
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/257268409

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The New Deal Through the Lens of Arthur Rothstein

April 20, 2022

Self Portrait, Arthur Rothstein
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

President Franklin Roosevelt had a remarkable ability to rally the nation using the mass-communication media of his time. He crafted intimate “Fireside Chats” to reach Americans in their homes by radio, but in this pre-television era FDR also needed compelling visual imagery to advance his New Deal agenda, promote national unity and counter the growing political extremism from both left and right.

Photography was central to the administration’s wide-ranging media strategies.

The most influential body of work was produced by a team of photographers in the Resettlement Administration (RA), an agency created by FDR in 1935 that later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA) within the Department of Agriculture.

Rehabilitation client repays loan, Smithfield, North Carolina, 1936.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

One of the largest and most visible of the New Deal’s initiatives, the FSA assisted struggling rural families and dislocated industrial workers throughout the country.

The President appointed Columbia University professor and key New Deal strategist, Rexford Tugwell, as director of the Resettlement Administration. Tugwell brought a colleague—agricultural economist Roy Stryker—to Washington to create the RA’s publicity arm, referred to as the

Historical Section. Stryker believed the best way to fulfill the Section’s mission was through photography, so he immediately hired his former student and recent Columbia graduate, Arthur Rothstein, as the agency’s photo lab director and first photographer.

"Eighty Acres." Wife and child of agricultural worker.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

Over the next eight years, Rothstein and a group of more than a dozen photographers working under Stryker gained renown as the FSA Photo Unit.

The primary mission of the Photo Unit was to document the hardships of those struggling through the Great Depression and how the FSA was working to address their problems. These iconic images portray Americans amidst drought, dust storms and failing crops; unemployment lines and communities abandoned by failing industries. But they also evince hope: farms stabilized by the agency’s loans, families resettled to greener pastures and farm hands who found respite in FSA migrant housing.

Children of sharecropper, North Carolina, 1935.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

A secondary, but crucial role of the FSA’s photographers was to provide images in support of other New Deal programs. At times, Stryker’s photographers were loaned-out for assignments with other agencies, including the Interior Department and the US Public Health Service. These photographs often appeared in government reports and publications describing such New Deal initiatives as reducing child labor, improving international relations and boosting domestic tourism.

The Photo Unit produced more than 175,000 photographs during the 1930s and early 40s. Stryker provided the best of these images to newspapers, magazines and book publishers free of charge. This put a human face on the economic abstractions of the Great Depression and helped justify the need for the New Deal’s far-reaching initiatives. The FSA Photo Unit later became part of the US Office of War Information (OWI), employed to promote national unity as America mobilized for war.

Explaining the Rural Electrification Administration to farm women at Central Iowa 4-H Club Fair, Marshalltown, Iowa, 1939.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

Arthur Rothstein and his contemporaries at the FSA contributed significantly to the nation’s collective memory of the New Deal-era. Rothstein served as a photographer for the US Army Signal Corps during WWll. In the decades after the war, he continued to influence the field of photojournalism as a teacher, writer and mentor to countless photographers. He helped shape the visual culture of post-war America as director of photography at LOOK and Parade, two of the most popular magazines at the time.

Ann Rothstein Segan, Ph.D and her husband, Brodie Hefner, manage the Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project. Together they develop publications, educational programs and exhibitions on the life and career of Ann’s father, documentary photographer Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985). Segan and Hefner are active members and contributors to the work of American Photography Archive Group, The Living New Deal and Archivists Round Table of New York.

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Photographing New Deal Utopias

September 28, 2017

Daffodil House
Greendale, Wisconsin, 2009
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

Among the various New Deal programs to help displaced farmers and the urban poor was the Resettlement Administration’s plan to construct new communities called Greenbelt Towns. These towns were a utopian model of modern living envisioned by RA administrator Rexford G. Tugwell who served on FDR’s “brain trust.”

I became interested in Tugwell’s egalitarian ideas for fostering community through the physical and social aspects of town planning, encompassing affordable housing, communal activities, natural landscaping, and cooperatively owned businesses. It was a new concept for Americans, but not for Tugwell, who was influenced by the work of Sir Ebenezer Howard, an urban reformer whose work transformed the landscape of British industrial communities in the early 20^th Century. In order to provide relief from the overcrowded slums of London, Howard proposed creating Garden Cities–new communities that would combine the best features of both town and country, namely the social and economic advantages of living in a community with fresh air and green spaces.

Mushroom
Greenbelt, Maryland, 2009
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

I made multiple trips to photograph the three New Deal Greenbelt Towns–Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin. I had learned about the towns through my research on the Garden City, having been inspired by the design and community I found at Julia C. Lathrop Homes, a public housing complex built by the Public Works Administration in 1938. Chicago’s Lathrop Homes had been built with Garden City principles in mind. The New Deal Greenbelt Towns were sited on the suburban frontier outside metropolitan centers.

Gazebo
Greendale, Wisconsin, 2009
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

Photographing the Greenbelt Towns, I was struck by the beauty and modesty of the architecture and surrounding natural landscapes, as well as the generosity of the residents. Wandering the parks and converging paths, I reflected upon Tugwell’s bold attempt to introduce a new American way of life based on cooperation instead of unrestrained competition. I was impressed at how connected residents felt to their own town, and to their sibling model communities borne out of the Great Depression. As these towns celebrate their 80^th anniversaries in 2017 and 2018, I view them as vital communities to be protected and celebrated.

Mural
Greenhills, Ohio, 2009
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

I am excited to share my photographs of the towns in my new book, New Deal Utopias, as we continue to grapple with the roles of housing, nature, and government in contemporary American life. Like the Greenbelt Towns themselves, the book is the result of communal effort. I’m fortunate to have Natasha Egan, executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, who provided the artistic commentary and Dr. Robert Leighninger, author of Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, who provided historical context. I’m also indebted to the Living New Deal for providing fiscal sponsorship for the project. Because of the Living New Deal, I was able to secure a publishing grant from the Puffin Foundation as well as connect with an extensive and supportive community committed to preserving the New Deal legacy.

Jason Reblando teaches photography at Illinois State University and is working on a project on the New Deal Greenbelt communities. His work has been published in the New York Times, Slate, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He recently received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant to do research in the Philippines. www.jasonreblando.com

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Greenhills Named a National Historic Landmark

January 17, 2017

New Deal Housing
A New Deal neighborhood
Photo Credit: John Vashon

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 relocated displaced and struggling urban and rural families to planned communities built by the federal government.

The concept for greenbelt towns began in the late 19^th century. A “Garden-City Movement,” often dismissed as utopian, promoted self-contained, satellite communities surrounded by “belts” of farms and forests as the answer to the overcrowded cities of post-industrial England.

School Children
Greenhills, OH
Photo Credit: John Vaschon

The idea resonated with Rexford Guy Tugwell, an agricultural economist who was part of FDR’s “Brain Trust.” He persuaded the president that greenbelt towns could house thousands of people displaced during the Great Depression. Roosevelt made Tugwell the director of his Resettlement Administration (RA).

Tugwell immediately purchased some 6,000 acres in southern Ohio, including dozens of struggling dairy farms he hoped could be sustained by the soon-to-be-built greenbelt town of Greenhills.

WPA workers broke ground for the new town in 1935. Over the next two years some 5,000 men and women transformed more than a square mile of what had been cornfields into a village for 676 low-income families.

The WPA relied on mules instead of machines in order to maximize the number of workers and hours spent to develop the town. It directed them to add extra layers of plaster and paint to the buildings to keep people employed.

WPA workers
Building Greenhills
Photo Credit: John Vaschon

Greenhills’ planners provided what were seen as extravagances for low-income housing. Curved streets and cul de sacs separated homes from busy thoroughfares; walkways, pocket parks, and playgrounds were incorporated into pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods; a co-op shopping district (the first strip mall in Ohio), community center with a K-12 school, town library, and public swimming pool were constructed.

A variety of multi-family housing—duplexes, townhouses, and apartments—employed Colonial, Modern, and International-style architecture. Homes were built facing backward to provide views of common areas and open spaces rather than the street. Utilities were installed underground.

To the consternation of some in Congress, the cost of the project came in at $11.5 million.

Tugwell had envisioned 20 greenbelt towns but managed to build only three—Greenhills, Ohio; Greendale, Wisconsin; and Greenbelt, Maryland– before the Supreme Court ruled the RA unconstitutional. The RA was dissolved in 1937. The Farm Securities Administration (FSA) assumed some of its functions.

Apartment Houses
Greenhills, 1939
Photo Credit: John Vaschon

Greenhills is a living example of a time when government fully dedicated itself to improving the lives of working-class Americans. Yet, Greenhills has struggled to preserve its New Deal legacy.

Parts of Greenhills are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and preservation groups have long called for a plan to protect historic properties. Over residents’ objections, the Village Council voted to raze many WPA-era buildings. Fifty-two of the original townhouses and apartments have been demolished, replaced with new, stand-alone single-family houses. In 2011, Greenhill was listed among Ohio’s Most Endangered Historic Sites.

Greenhills’ newly awarded status as a National Historic Landmark, administered by the National Park Service, may help. Property owners will now be eligible for federal grants to rehabilitate Greenhills remaining New Deal-era structures.

Susan Ives is communications director for the Living New Deal and editor of the Living New Deal newsletter.

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Holliday Lake State Park – Appomattox VA

The area encompassing Holliday Lake State Park and the surrounding state forest was cleared in the 1800s for farmland. In the 1930s, the federal government, through the Resettlement Administration, began buying the farms to return the land to its former productive hardwood forest status. Construction of a dam was begun at Fish Pond Creek; however efforts were relocated to Holliday Creek where a lake could be developed. The park was established in 1939 and acquired in by the state of Virginia 1945. Holliday Lake State Park, formerly Holliday Lake Recreational Area, was renamed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation in 1972.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.