The younger artists of America are conscious as they have never been of the social revolution that our country and civilization are going through, and they would be very eager to express these ideas in a permanent art form if they were given the government’s co-operation. Diego Riviera tells me that it was only possible because Obregon allowed Mexican artists to work at plumbers’ wages in order to express on the walls of the government’s buildings the social ideals of the Mexican revolution. The Mexican artists have produced the greatest national school of painting since the Italian Renaissance. “There is a matter which I have long considered and which someday might interest your administration. A transcript of the letter dated May 9, 1933, survives in the Smithsonian archive: In an interview recording his memories of the events that led to the Federal Art Projects, Biddle described writing a letter to the President to suggest creating, “a mural program comparable with what Rivera had done in Mexico, in which I said, ‘You could get artists to work at plumbers' wages to carry out the ideals of your social revolution.’” Biddle’s letter was explicitly political, tying the idea of the nascent mural project to the communist Mexican muralists and equating the Mexican revolution to Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. Biddle had studied and traveled through Mexico with the famed communist artist Diego Rivera, and wanted to continue the Mexican artist’s work blending political idealism with public art. The idea of creating government relief programs for artists was first raised in 1933 by artist George Biddle, who suggested to his schoolboy friend President Franklin Roosevelt that he and a team of painters should create murals to decorate the new Justice Department building then being built in Washington. Santa Clara) Photo by Gordon Kenneth Grant

Gordon Kenneth Grant, Agriculture and Industries of Ventura, fresco, United States Post Office in Ventura, California (675 E. As part of this gigantic government scheme to revive the economy, four art programs evolved that would have an enormous impact on the cultural life of the nation. The US government spent astonishing sums of money, making roads, library buildings, swimming pools, parks, and meeting halls across the nation, employing some eight million people.

Over 20% of the American workforce were idle in the worst years of the depression. The New Deal attempted to resolve the problems of mass-unemployment by providing employment, building new American infrastructure under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Surely art could be effective in the United States, too, as a tool to inspire its citizens as they strove to pull their country out of its economic crisis. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used idealist art to indoctrinate and lead the German people toward the principles of National Socialism. What did this mean for art? The post-revolutionary Russians were successfully transforming their country and using the socialist realist avant-garde as a propaganda tool to persuade their people of the necessity for hard work, self-sacrifice, and patriotic idealism. As the United States struggled to know itself during the great depression of the late 1920s and ‘30s, Roosevelt led his New Dealers into a decade of effort to rescue America.

3. the wpa spent money on the arts.