May 7, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: The Arts

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

On threequotes that together help sum up the creation and arc of the WPA’s vital artistic and culturalprograms.

1)     “Hell, they’ve got to eat, too”: FDR’sSecretary of Commerce HarryHopkins was one of the most vocal and influential architects of both theNew Deal overall and the cultural programs comprised by Federal ProjectNumber One specifically. And I really love Hopkins’s blunt quote aboutwhy a New Deal organization like the WPA should fund artists and their work. Asthe second quote will reveal, that wasn’t the only motivation behind creating FederalProject Number One, but it’s a really important emphasis nonetheless: that artistsare both workers and people like everyone else, and needed the same collectivesupport that all Americans did during the Depression.

2)     “The immediate concern of the idealcommonwealth”: Again, there were also other, more philosophical layers to the creationof Federal Project Number One, and they were nicely summed up in the program’smission statement, and particularly the second of its main two main ideas: “thatthe arts, no less than business, agriculture, and labor, are and should be theimmediate concern of the ideal commonwealth.” Of course I entirely agree, andmy favorite word in that quote is “immediate”: that the arts are in no way aluxury or a higher-order concern, but a vital focus, never more so than in ourdarkest moments.

3)     “A dangerous promotion of race mixing”: Suchwas oneof the attacks directed at the Federal Theatre Project by conservatives inCongress, attacks that led not only to the defunding of that project andFederal Project Number One in 1939, but in many ways the end of the New Dealoverall. On the one hand, those attacks and fears were as nonsensical as theyalways have been, will be, and are. But on the other hand, it’s most definitelythe case that artistic and cultural works do help us move toward a more perfectunion, one that is genuinely inclusive and fully reflects our foundational anddefining diversity. For the years that they existed and thrived, the WPA’s artsprograms embodied and amplified that crucial goal.

Next WPApost tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?