Democratic Art

The New Deal's Influence on American Culture

Sharon Ann Musher

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226247212
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout the Great Recession American artists and public art endowments have had to fight for government support to keep themselves afloat. It wasn't always this way. At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted $27 million—roughly $461 million today—to supporting tens of thousands of needy artists, who used that support to create more than 100, 000 works. Why did the government become so involved with these artists, and why weren't these projects considered a frivolous waste of funds, as surely many would be today?In Democratic Art, Sharon Musher explores these questions and uses them as a springboard for an examination of the role art can and should play in contemporary society. Drawing on close readings of government-funded architecture, murals, plays, writing, and photographs, Democratic Art examines the New Deal's diverse cultural initiatives and outlines five perspectives on art that were prominent at the time: art as grandeur, enrichment, weapon, experience, and subversion. Musher argues that those engaged in New Deal art were part of an explicitly cultural agenda that sought not just to create art but to democratize and Americanize it as well. By tracing a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s, this highly original book outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.

ONE

May the Artist Live?

In October 1933, just seven months after FDR’s initial inauguration, Audrey McMahon, the director of the College Art Association, entitled an article she published in the association’s journal “May the Artist Live?”1 McMahon had spent considerable time mulling over this question. Beginning with the stock crash in 1929, the association she directed had become the first stomping ground for indigent artists.2 On the basis of her experiences, she attested that New York housed about eight thousand needy artists, and she estimated that, nationally, two or three times as many were destitute. Using McMahon’s figures and the 1930 federal census as a yardstick, somewhere between one-third and almost one-half of the country’s artists found themselves without work or a means to support themselves in the early 1930s (and this figure does not include those who might have been reluctant to identify themselves to census workers as artists).3 Although unemployment was worse in certain areas than others and such figures routinely underestimate the underemployed and underpaid, roughly one-quarter of the national population was without work. Thus, the rate of unemployment among artists was, unsurprisingly, markedly higher than in the general population. Clearly, artists were particularly hard-pressed.

McMahon’s article represented a plea to continue support for the government-subsidized experimental art project she oversaw in New York City from December 1932 until its funds ran out in August 1933. The project employed one hundred artists to decorate public buildings with murals and teach underprivileged children in settlement houses in exchange for a modest weekly stipend of $15. “For a very small expenditure,” she wrote,

it is possible to put the artist to work. Throughout the land are vast public buildings with glaring, hideous walls—these can be decorated and art brought to people of every community. . . . Or shall our walls remain blank, and blank the minds of our people to art, and blank of hope the lives of our artists? Shall our children, who could be taught so much, to wield a brush, to enjoy a line or love a color, learn nothing while those who could teach them starve? Shall this age be known to posterity as a dark era during which we turned all our thoughts to material fears and closed our minds to the hope and relief offered by beauty? It need not be so.4

Calls by McMahon, her colleagues, and unemployed artists themselves for government investment in the arts might have fallen on deaf ears had they not developed in the context of new economic and political thinking about the role of the state in the nation’s economic and cultural development.

Artists benefited from new ideas regarding who should provide relief and what it should constitute. New Dealers—and artists and intellectuals themselves—viewed those in the art world as art workers.5 Although the work they produced was cultural, this cohort envisioned it as legitimately constituting labor like that produced by other workers in Great Depression America. The art projects, thus, fit into a broader government attempt to jump-start the economy and preserve the skills and morale of the unemployed able-bodied (largely, but not wholly, defined as white and male) by putting them to work.

Although the idea of work relief was central to the foundation of the art projects, new ideas about the state’s role in shaping culture were also critical. Cultural enthusiasts both on the Left and within the mainstream feared that the Great Depression put artists, private patronage, and national aesthetics more generally at risk of virtual extinction. To ward off such a fate and keep up with a growing international trend toward government subsidization of the arts and use of culture to promote overtly political ends, they argued that taxpayers needed to support the arts and to forge a democratic culture. Government-funded art had the capacity, they contended, to address the problems of leisure as well as the crisis of faith raised by the specter of mass unemployment. It could help lay audiences to live more meaningful lives, safeguard democracy, and oppose fascism. Of course, there were points of contention among those who developed and participated in the cultural projects of the New Deal about who should create government-sponsored art, the conditions under which it should be created, and how it should look, in terms of both content and style. Despite such concerns, the 1930s marked a critical—albeit short-lived—moment during which a tenuous alliance emerged between artists and the state and new ideas emerged regarding the role that government should and should not play in the arts.

What conditions and ideas drove the New Deal cultural turn? The growing gap in 1933 between the needs of artists and intellectuals and the resources available to them, coupled with key turning points, such as the Nelson Rockefeller–Diego Rivera scandal of 1933 and the formation of the Popular Front, spurred an array of leaders—within the president’s administration, within the established art world, and among rank-and-file artists and intellectuals—to imagine, demand, and create a wide range of approaches to government support of the arts. Objecting to the constraints that private patrons like Nelson Rockefeller placed on the artists they commissioned, this cohort turned, instead, to the government to provide useful and self-sustaining work for artists as it was doing for other unemployed laborers. They hoped that such public commissions would preserve their autonomy and encourage experimentation, even as they feared that it would impede them.

Two vital forces driving the development of the New Deal art projects were the crisis of the Great Depression and its impact on artists and intellectuals. The stock market crash intensified artists’ and intellectuals’ preexisting struggles by wiping out the art market. The downturn hit the pocketbooks of wealthy benefactors and reduced private patronage by individuals and corporations.6 Those who continued to buy works of art tended to search for good financial investments and safe, aesthetically pleasing works. The well-being of living artists was not at the forefront of their decisions.7 Criticizing the limited efforts of patrons to support present-day art, the artist-activist Chet La More explained: “Private patronage had failed in the function it must perform to have validity as an instrument for sustaining a vital development of contemporary art.”8 Beyond the shortcomings of individual supporters, artists could not find work outside the art world either. The Depression impaired secondary employment for artists and intellectuals, many of whom had previously made their living as teachers, graphic designers, advertisers, or menial laborers.

Within this context, artists and intellectuals found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. “Regardless of what talents or gifts we were favored with by the gods,” complained the influential modernist painter Max Weber, “in order to obtain a hearing and a return commensurate with our creative gifts, we must live in slums, lose our reason, cut off our ears and noses, and finally commit suicide if we hope for a considerable audience a half-century after our flight from this planet.”9 The novelist Sinclair Lewis similarly lamented the absence of institutional support for young writers in his 1930 lecture accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. “A true-blue professor of literature in an American university,” he explained, “considers literature to be something other than that which a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead; it is something magically produced by super human beings who must, if they are to be regarded as artists at all, have died at least one hundred years before the diabolical invention of the typewriter.”10

Musicians also suffered. The journalist I. A. Hirschman poignantly described their plight in the face of the Depression and longer-term trends, including the development of radio, records, and talking films. “Hundreds of . . . street musicians,” he wrote, “stroll . . . about the cities, shivering in winter, playing for pennies as best they can with numb fingers and running noses.”11

Philanthropists, unions, mutual aid societies, and professional organizations like McMahon’s College Art Association and the American Federation of Musicians struggled to fill the gap the Depression had created. Professional organizations used free performances to raise funds for artists and increase popular interest in live music and theater.12 But such private efforts were, as the art critic Suzanne La Follette explained, “unsystematic and wholly incommensurate with the need.”13

McMahon’s experimental program, just like her provocative question, “May the artist live?” marked a growing sense of frustration and a call for increased long-term government intervention in the arts. This call paralleled a similar endeavor to enhance government involvement in relief, work, and poverty. In the late nineteenth century, responsibility for providing relief for the indigent rested on local communities, which tended to stigmatize them, investigating their behavior and using it to distinguish between those who were worthy and those who did not deserve to receive aid.14 New Deal policies maintained such distinctions in terms of the relief they provided for women and racial minorities, who were more likely to receive means-tested direct relief than work relief.15 Yet the provision of work relief reflected a new attempt to nationalize relief and recast employment as a civic right.

Harry Hopkins, a trained social worker who provided funding for McMahon’s project as the director of New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA)—the first state relief organization in the United States—perhaps best embodies this shift in orientation. His work on relief and the challenges faced by the unemployed began well before the Great Depression. In 1912, as a twenty-two-year-old, the young Grinnell-educated Iowan moved to New York City to work at Christodora Settlement House, where he was charged with visiting the poor in their homes to determine their needs. But his experiences with a growing cohort of aid recipients—first at Christodora and then through the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, where he was charged with researching why relief applications had risen—led him to conclude that the roots of poverty lay in unemployment rather than personality or cultural shortcomings.16 In an address on federal relief at a Works Progress Administration (WPA) luncheon, he criticized the old stingy approach to the poor characterized by the Elizabethan Poor Law, which, he argued, was based on a moral philosophy that assumed that “if anyone’s poor it’s because something is wrong with them.” Instead, he contended that the unemployed should not be made to beg. As he put it: “They are American citizens like the rest of us. It is no fault of their own that they are out of work, and it is the business of society to take care of them.” “I made up my mind early in this game,” he continued, “that relief was a matter of right and not a matter of charity.”17

Hopkins was determined that the government should provide work for the unemployed, but he was also clear that just any job would not do. “Our major thesis,” he had declared at a conference geared to administrators of white-collar projects a few months earlier, “is determining that these unemployed people are to have decent jobs, that we are not going to let them lose their skills, and that we are going to put them to work on the things that they are best adapted to, and best qualified to do.”18 Hopkins’s consciousness regarding the difficulties that unemployed artists faced was reportedly raised shortly after the stock market crashed. In 1929, he volunteered with the Red Cross, an agency whose southeastern division he had run in the 1920s. While assigning privately funded jobs in the park system to unemployed men, he allegedly “noticed men carrying violin cases standing in line for pick-and-shovel jobs and, struck by the thought that fiddlers’ hands were probably disastrously vulnerable to such work, saw to it that the lightest jobs went to them.”19 Even if this story is apocryphal, by the time Hopkins was in a position to distribute work-relief jobs more broadly, he paid particular attention ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Art as a Function of Government
• 1 May the Artist Live?
• 2 Art as Grandeur
• 3 Art as Enrichment
• 4 Art as a Weapon
• 5 Art as Experience
• 6 Art as Subversion
• Conclusion: A New Deal for the Arts?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index