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

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

On three quotes that together help sum up the creation and arc of the WPA’s vital artistic and cultural programs.

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

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

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

Next WPA post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?