12 Alicia Azuela, ‘Public Art, Meyer Schapiro and Mexican Muralism’, Oxford Art Journal, 17: 1, 1994, p.55. 13 Francis O' Connor (ed.), Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators o f the
WPA Federal Art Project (Greenwich.: New York, 1973), p.47.
could also conjure up the language of America's past involvement in the Mexican wars; even the relatively liberal Bruce promised the Treasury that the formation of the Section of Fine Arts in 1934 would 'deal with social protest by stopping the "Mexican Invasion" on the border'.14
More significantly, administrators like Cahill responded to their critics with a defence of pluralism - 'American art is anything that an American artist does' - despite imposing much of the regulation which accompanied the projects.15 Presenting the case for the emerging national art allowed such commentators to formulate its components in a manner that was tolerant of otherwise suspect influences:
In sum [its] cultural origins - the Depression scene, the American scene, and Mexicanism - were reflected in the art of the New Deal programmes. The American artist, imbued with the mood of social consciousness engendered by the Depression, painted themes that expressed a commonplace sensibility, such as society on welfare, society at play, society working, and society sustained by the new idealism of the Roosevelt administration.16
Thus, in so far as a“coherent mode of argumentation existed, the arts administrators suggested that it was possible to bring forth artistic greatness from national
adversity, conditional upon the pragmatic emphasis on relief being matched by aesthetic dedication (usually to the mural form). In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Biddle spelt this out more explicitly, claiming that 'mural art can never be important unless it is interpreting a great social and collective idea’.17 Such assertions,
coupled with his enthusiasm for the Mexican muralists, appear ironic in the light of
• 1R
subsequent anti-collectivist controversies.
Moreover, the characterisations of Federal One as a ‘Red Nest’ bore little
resemblance to its administrators’ Democratic Party loyalties. Running through the personal correspondence of both Biddle and Bruce is a strand of personal respect for the President and loyalty to the vision of the New Deal. The former was expressed in a stream of greetings cards, Christmas presents and other gifts.19 As arts lobbyists and administrators, Bruce and Biddle combined flattery and gratitude in order to remind the President of their innovation's potential rewards. Thus Bruce wrote to Roosevelt:
14 McKinzie, New Deal for Artists, p.56. This was facilitated by Bruce’s control of the Section of Fine Arts: ‘only the Section, unencumbered by relief criteria, could fulfil Bruce’s quality standards’. See Belisario Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (New Jersey: Associated Universities Press, 1983), p.57. 15 McKinzie, New Deal for Artists, p.l 10.
16 Contreras, Tradition and Innovation, p.25.
17 Biddle to Eleanor Roosevelt, June 28, 1933, PPF 458, FDRL.
18 Influential commentary in this genre appears in Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Communist
Penetration of America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), esp. p.174.
19 For example, see MA Lehand to Mr. & Mrs. Edward Bruce, January 9, 1939; Roosevelt to Edward Bruce, January 2, 1941, PPF 2577, FDRL.
I hope that in my small way, I have been able to convince you of my devotion to you and the things you stand for and that you will allow me to make a suggestion, which I feel is needed in this country ... I genuinely believe that an appeal on your part to the best side of human nature would bring an instant response and would ring around the world.20
Bruce's gushing prose suggests his belief in the President's capacity to transform popular support, derived from political loyalty, into a pattern of widespread and participatory arts appreciation. Moreover, such correspondence is indicative of the extent to which federal arts administrators saw their successes and future prospects as bound up with the development of the New Deal. This would suggest the accuracy of describing 'Brains Trust' members and their contemporaries in cultural patronage as Roosevelt's political cadre, actively attempting to construct a national- popular hegemonic bloc.
Such sentiments were echoed by George Biddle. Although acting in a professional capacity, the fierce personal loyalty to FDR was clearly visible when he stated that, 'as President of the Mural Painters of America, I should like to tell him personally on behalf of American artists how grateful they are to his administration’.21 Correspondence between Roosevelt and his arts lieutenants illustrates pertinently the range of relationships connecting artists to the administration. With
characteristic flattery, Bruce presented his own successes in such terms, in that
‘obviously, the award of the [Columbia] University Medal of Excellence, although j described as a personal award for my work as an artist, has been given to me as a ■ ;
tribute to your art programme’ .22 ;
A combination of friendship and politicking continued throughout the decade. As the years passed, the clamour for personal attention remained, albeit mediated by an awareness of external events. Hence the comments Biddle enclosed with a copy of
his autobiography sent to the White House: ‘I had hesitated at this moment in our < country and the world's history to bring to your attention the record of so slight an
achievement’.23 Such attention was all the more important given the threat which wartime reorganisation posed to existing government art projects.
As early as the end of the First Hundred Days, many of the prerequisites for an attempt at a New Deal national-popular mobilisation were in place. Roosevelt began to establish a cadre of loyal administrators within the state, a substantial electoral base and a consensus as to the nature of the problems facing society. From this vantage point, his administration began to articulate the aspirations of a depression-stricken populace. Thus, a central theme in our study is the ways in which this process was inflected through arts patronage. The purpose of this observation is not to reduce federal art to a simple expression of New Deal politics, but rather to assess the consequences of a dynamic being established between the
20 Bruce to Roosevelt, August 28, 1935, PPF 2577, FDRL. 21 Biddle to Roosevelt, January 20, 1936, PPF 458, FDRL. 22 Bruce to Roosevelt, March 6,1937, PPF 2577, FDRL. 23 Biddle to Roosevelt, October 3, 1939, PPF 458, FDRL.
two. On this basis, we suggest that this can help to clarify the relationship between the 'external1 and 'internal' politics of art (e.g. the connections between institutions like the state and the gallery). In terms of the arguments outlined above, these linkages can be seen in the adoption of the model of Mexican muralism: 'externally', the work of Rivera et al suggested the possibility of constructing the national-popular; 'internally', the mural provided a means of establishing such a mode of address on the basis of craft-produced mass
communications. In short, this connection logically obliged the administration to develop an aesthetic strategy to accompany its broader political approach.
Roosevelt himself attempted to stand above the various aesthetic controversies, paying close attention instead to matters of personnel. On one occasion he expressed doubts over the historical accuracy of a Poughkeepsie post office mural depicting 18th Century white settlers with horses,24 but such interventions proved exceptional rather than frequent. Indeed, much of his official correspondence seems preoccupied with staffing issues, and deflecting criticisms both made by Congress and other complainants. In public, however, he attempted to explain both the necessity of relief and the importance of developing a distinctly national culture, but even with Roosevelt's legendary capacity for communication, his attempts to motivate public arts to a wider populace were uneven. In terms of public appeal, his promises of recovery - conveyed on radio via the famous Fireside Chats - acquired far greater purchase than speeches concerning cultural patronage; the same can be said of his numerous memorable wartime broadcasts.
This pattern was also evident in his attempts to defend such expenditure against the austerity drives of Congress, which ultimately saw it as an eccentric luxury and voted accordingly. At best the general position was one of indifference, and ‘Congress did not, as some enthusiasts desperately tried to believe, view the cultural projects as the first steps resulting from a commitment to subsidise American culture. While those who served on the Writers’ Programme thought that cultural improvement was as important as relief, members of Congress were not concerned with this extension of the Programme's
benefits.’25 This highlights a key limit of the extent to which a durable coalition in support of cultural patronage could be pursued under Roosevelt's hegemony: it won backing from cultural practitioners, the rest of the intelligentsia and, albeit more passively, from the vast audiences attending Federal Theatre productions. However, it proved more difficult to persuade Congress to renew funding in consecutive rounds of budget appropriation voting. In summary, the case for federal arts funding in general - and Federal One in particular - was advanced on two planes. It was initially promoted as a humanitarian form of unemployment relief for cultural practitioners, a trend personified in the image of the
flautist whose highly-trained lips were being destroyed whilst performing construction work in freezing conditions. Secondly, patronage was also presented as offering a sound basis for the future development of a mature national culture, itself almost synonymous with the administration. Dialogues between individuals who were sympathetic to patronage and also bound up with the implementation of the New Deal tended to oscillate between these two
24 Roosevelt to Bruce, December 8, 1938, PPF 457; see also OF 400: New York ‘P’, FDRL.
25 Kathleen O'Connor McKinzie, cited in Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, p.327.
poles. Thus, although state patronage became part of a national-popular orientated hegemonic strategy in an ad hoc, semi-conscious fashion, it can nevertheless be located within the broader goals of the New Deal as a distinctive counter-crisis strategy. This does not explain the forms that such cultural production would assume, however: to this we now turn.
Constructing the National Popular
As we have discussed elsewhere, the election of Roosevelt in 1933 signalled a sea-change in American politics.26 It was no longer appropriate for society to be organised around a platform of nativism; thus, even prior to the First Hundred Days Prohibition was becoming treated with increasing contempt, viewed as a failure, if not a disaster. The reasons for this were twofold; firstly, demographic changes had substantially shifted the balance between contending social forces. Initially the targets of nativist politics, there were now 'twenty- five million of these second-generation Americans; together with their parents they constituted a third (forty million) of the white population and a majority of the working class'27 On this basis, a return to the nativism of the twenties was highly impractical, in that it would privilege exclusion and coercion over a consensus-building hegemonic strategy.28 Secondly, the depression itself forced a reordering of political priorities. Although police departments and sections of the press maintained a seemingly obsessive interest in regulating strong drink, gambling and personal conduct,29 others saw the slump as a far more pressing problem. Most importantly, this was reflected in Roosevelt's historic electoral gains, which lead to a substantial decline in the Republican vote. Much has been written concerning the political, psephological and demographic dimensions of this shift, but less concerning the ways that New Deal Art codified it. This is a theme that we explore in the remainder of this chapter.
To summarise our argument: New Deal patronage developed as a novel form of unemployment relief but, through a semi-conscious process of innovation and pragmatism, it led to the establishment of a de facto mass communications agency under government auspices. The experimental character of such activity is
demonstrated by the adoption of Mexico as a model, suggesting a partial departure from earlier notions of cultural supremacy. However, it was one thing to mandate the production of ‘socially useful’ murals on post office walls; it was quite another to reach a consensus as to what the content of such murals should be. Taken
26 Graham Barnfield, Addressing Estrangement: Federal Arts Patronage and National Identity Under the
New Deal (Sheffield: CMCRC Occasional Papers, 1993), pp. 9-13.
27 Mike Davis, ‘The Barren Marriage of American Labor and the Democratic Party’, New Left Review 124, November/December 1980, p.46.
28 However, we should note in passing that 1930s political life was littered with conservative authoritarian movements seeking to revive this programme, such as the Silver Shirts and followers of Father Coughlin. See
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1982).
29 Likewise, ‘as late as 1933 high-school students in the most devastated state in the nation, Mississippi, could list pressing national issues in order of importance as strong drink, illicit sex, idleness, gambling, narcotics, pornography, and, last of all, poverty’ (Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940 [London: Macmillan, 1989], p.57).
together, these contradictory influences meant that the promotion of federal art as national art was a discursive strategy that developed on more of an ad hoc basis than from planning and foresight. Differences of emphasis and tactics meant that a clear strategic orientation was seldom apparent in the work of Federal One. In turn, this suggests that New Left historiography’s interpretation of the New Deal as an exercise in ‘bailing out capitalism’ underestimates its crisis-ridden and
contradictory features. Without wishing to exaggerate the strength of labour relative to capital in the 1930s, we maintain that the Roosevelt administration was, at the level of society’s hegemonic strata, experienced as a compromise. As we see below, this process found expression in, and was mediated through, New Deal cultural production.
In many respects, FDR took his cue in such matters from Edward Bruce. In opening the First Municipal Art Exhibition, Bruce summarised cogently federal art's
congruence with mass appeal: ‘the Public Works of Art Project is, I believe the first genuinely democratic movement which has ever been started for the employment of the artist and the support of the arts’.30 This opening speech is instructive, in that it allows us to "identify the different elements which meant that such art could be presented as democratic:
A great Democracy has accepted the artist as a useful member of the body politic, and his art as a service to the state. It has taken the snobbery out of Art, and made it part of the daily food of the average citizen. It is, I believe, a distinct setting up of our civilisation, a new conception and definition of public works - a recognition that things of culture and of the spirit contribute to the well-being of the nation. It has elevated the artist to the rank of artisan - has recognised him as a labourer worthy of his hire.
It has been made possible by our well beloved President. It is part and parcel of the New Deal. It is a significant example of the motivating force behind the President's whole policy - to give all the people of our country "a more abundant life".
As a record of shared aspirations, the components of such democracy are clear to all. Aesthetically, it projected a number of challenges to the conventional status of the artist within American society. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to link comprehensively this shift in public perceptions to US traditions of large-scale cultural production, or 'mass culture', but more immediately, we should be alert to the attempts of both Bruce and Roosevelt to demystify and defend the artist, now elevated 'to the rank of artisan'. PWAP stipulations also exercised a contradictory influence, in that means-testing artists as the precondition to their employment31 usually meant that those potentially most competent at furnishing public spaces
30 Edward Bruce, ‘Address at the First Municipal Art Exhibition of City of New York’, February 27, 1934, PPF 2577, FDRL.
31 See McKi'nzie, A New Deal for Artists, p. 18.
were often ineligible to work on the project. Cultural workers able to secure PWAP relief then had to negotiate a second hazard, that of how to produce.
Art became available to all as the output of a state industry, albeit one supported by popular mandate. The arts were - more or less - explicitly treated as a resource with which to offset the ravages of the slump. Bruce's lavish praise of his presidential mentor should not blind us to the emerging consensus in Washington, namely that the connection between the New Deal Coalition and the embellishments of public buildings conferred aesthetic worth upon the latter. What developed was the peculiar moralisation of art according to a political agenda. There were three components that underpinned this process. Initially, a consensus emerged that federal arts be ‘socially useful’, which formed part of the backdrop to the Commission of Fine Arts’ antiquarian vision. In turn, this facilitated an emphasis on folk themes, ultimately embodied in the notion of a ‘usable past’. Implicitly and explicitly, this suggested that both mass culture and European high culture could not be considered part of New Deal-sponsored cultural production. A third factor was that such art became closely identified with the Roosevelt administration, a perception that strengthened its position as an ‘authentic’ national force whilst ultimately contributing to its downfall. Each of these themes is considered below.
How could art be ‘socially useful’? As the repudiation of perspectives associated with the Commission of Fine Arts demonstrated, the cultural advisors appointed - rather than inherited - by Roosevelt had a clear idea of what constituted anti-social art. This was expressed in the numerous controls that they placed on form and content, often on quite ] arbitrary grounds but nevertheless sanctioned, at whatever level, by the state itself. The t PWAP, for example, insisted that the residents of a Westport artists’ colony ‘were expressly forbidden to experiment with “cubism, futurism and all forms of modernism’” .32 Even the Commission on Fine Arts contributed to this consensus; as one of eight bodies that vetted Post Office and Justice Department murals, it guarded against panels which contained ‘quickly outmoded themes, ignored the beautiful, and promoted social theories “at variance with the established ideas of the fundamental rights and duties of citizenship’” .33 This concern was not due to the strength of abstract artists within government projects, and at this time neither Willem de Kooning nor Arshile Gorky had broken completely with realist