A Time When the Business of Government Was Culture

WASHINGTON — As one New Dealer later put it: “The world was standing on its head.” Bankruptcy was rife, farmers saw land they had tilled all their lives claimed by banks, and in the cities 13 million jobless walked the streets.

Yet in the midst of the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, the federal government launched an unprecedented campaign to foster, of all things, the arts. From theater and motion pictures to painting and sculpture, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration bankrolled a variety of endeavors throughout the country that had as their main goal putting unemployed artists to work.

Some 150 examples of this effort recently went on display at the National Archives in Washington, giving the thousands of Americans who throng there weekly to view such political artifacts as the Constitution and the Bill of Right a firsthand look at a cultural watershed.

Ironically, the retrospective “A New Deal for the Arts” comes at a time when current federal subsidies for the arts are under severe challenge on fiscal and ideological grounds.

The Depression-era programs were not without their critics as well, who pointed out that the painters, writers and musicians who toiled for government paychecks produced no immortal masterpieces.

But the program nurtured such future luminaries as painters Ben Shahn and Jackson Pollock, authors Studs Terkel and Saul Bellow, playwright Arthur Miller and filmmakers Orson Welles and John Huston. Indeed, New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg estimates that 80% of the painters and sculptors who gained world recognition in the 1940s and 1950s were supported during the Depression by government funds.

Perhaps more significant, through their collective energy and vitality, the artists toiling on the federal payroll are widely credited with exposing grass-roots America to the arts, and vice versa.

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In an era when public exposure to artworks was much more limited, most Americans viewed the art world as an alien land, populated solely by dilettantes. Culture, lamented poet William Carlos Williams, was something “which God knows we in America ain’t got much of.”

But aided by the personal blessing of President Roosevelt and the organizing skill of Harry Hopkins--honcho of the Work Projects Administration, which sponsored most of the New Deal’s art programs--the government’s art projects reached out to the nooks and crannies of the U.S. landscape. Writers’ workshops, theater clubs, art centers and chorales sprouted in communities across the land.

From the start, many were skeptical. “I find myself in considerable doubt that any genuine ‘creative writers’ are in need of government aid,” journalist H.L. Mencken, justly celebrated for his cynicism, wrote to a federal official seeking his opinion on the idea. “My fear is that if you begin to offer subsidies to writers, they will go to quacks.”

But Mencken’s judgment was overruled by simple logic; the severe economic hardship afflicting the entire country had not spared its artists. “Hell,” Hopkins said, “they’ve got to eat like everyone else.”

Once the programs were underway, the inherent tension between public mores and artistic inclinations posed a constant threat. Hoping to head off trouble, one bureaucrat, Edward Rowan, contended that while government artists should be granted “the utmost freedom of expression,” officials should “check up very carefully on the subject matter of each project.”

He added: “Any artist who paints a nude for the Public Works of Art project should have his head examined.”

But even artists who chose presumably innocuous subjects sometimes ran into trouble. A mural for the post office in the eastern Kansas town of Seneca that depicted farmers working on a tractor and combine in a wheat field provoked the local postmaster to complain that the terrain looked more like the western part of the state. Muralist Joe Jones changed the background to suit the critic.

Other artists seemed to go out of their way to be provocative. Murals for San Francisco’s Coit Tower, a city landmark overlooking the waterfront, caused intense embarrassment among officials because segments of them showed a worker reading a Communist paper, books by Karl Marx and the revolutionary motto: “Workers of the world unite,” along with a hammer and sickle. After much wrangling, authorities had this symbol of the Soviet Union painted over but left the rest in hopes it would go unnoticed.

Another left-wing painter, Rockwell Kent, in a mural for Washington’s main post office commemorating the start of airmail service between Puerto Rico and Alaska, included a letter bearing an inscription in an Eskimo dialect: “Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us free.” To make sure this did not go unnoticed, Kent phoned a newspaper to call attention to the quote. The artist rejected government requests that he alter the language, and it remains in place today.

Such episodes made it increasingly difficult to defend the programs against conservative critics. And in 1943, as the wartime economic boom reduced unemployment to a minimum, thus undercutting the initial reason for the arts programs, the federal government left the cultural stage. In all, it had spent $83 million to promote the arts between 1933 and 1943.

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Not until 1965, when Congress created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, did the federal government make another major commitment to support cultural activities. Since Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, dismantling these programs has been one of their goals. Although the programs have endured significant cuts, the arts community--displaying the type of political moxie that would have made FDR proud--has responded with a major lobbying campaign, and the issue remains in doubt.

National Archives officials, for their part, have no desire for the exhibition on the New Deal programs to get drawn into the ongoing battle.

“This is a historical exhibit,” said Bruce Bustard, the curator who assembled it. “We aren’t taking a stand one way or another.”

* The National Archives Exhibition Hall, located on Constitution Avenue between 7th and 9th streets, N.W., in Washington, is open 10 a.m.-9 p.m. until Labor Day, and then 10 a.m.-5 p.m. through March 31. “A New Deal for the Arts” is on display through Jan. 11.