Documentary Recalls FDR’s “New Deal for Artists” as Advancing American Society

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel specialized in oral histories, so he knew whereof he spoke when over 40 years ago he lamented that “even in the history books [and] the memories of people” it was as though the Federal Art Project never existed.

This sentiment comes at the beginning of The New Deal for Artists, a 1979 documentary meant to help fill that void. Although the rise of the internet has exponentially increased the available information on every subject under the sun, a new digital remastering of the film — itself an oral history, told by artists whose careers were launched and lives were saved by the still-little-known New Deal program — not only feeds us stories of the past but gives us food for thought about the future and the role of government.

With the Great Depression raging, Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency with a fervent belief that government could and must play a larger role in the day-to-day lives of the American people. To enact this “new deal” with Americans his administration created what came to be known as an “alphabet soup” of programs to put people to work. Chief among these was the Works Progress (later: Work Projects) Administration, or WPA. And it was under the WPA that the Federal Art Project, or FAP, was born in 1935. 

Over the course of its eight-year history, the FAP would at least briefly employ roughly 10,000 artists, paying them $23.60 per week to ply their various trades — an astounding sum considering that in today’s dollars this amounts to $1,840 per month during America’s worst-ever economic crisis.

Because the FAP was purposely set up to free artists from the creative constraints of having to worry about the marketability of their work — oppressive in the best of times, let alone during the Depression — the program fomented what narrator Orson Welles called “an unprecedented artistic renaissance” in the United States. Writers including Terkel, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, and Ralph Ellison were sustained by the FAP for a time. Richard Wright wrote Native Son while enjoying its financial support. Without the FAP we likely would never have heard of painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, or Jackson Pollack. And although Orson Welles was one of few artists getting steady work during the Depression, it was the FAP’s Federal Theatre Project that propelled him into the stratosphere, furnishing him the opportunity to stage a version of Macbeth that proved to be both a sensation and a landmark in theatre history, employing 150 Black actors — only four with prior stage experience — plus African drummers and dancers.

The progressive nature of so much FAP work — the birth of American Abstract Expressionism, the Negro Theatre Unit (remember, this in the 1930s, when Black people could not elsewhere get hired as theater techs), the “social documentary” style of WPA photographers like Dorothea Lange “giv[ing] voice to the voiceless” — is one of The New Deal for Artists central themes. As presented through the lens of writer/director Wieland Schulz-Keil, FDR’s progressive approach to enabling artists propelled the country forward both socially and artistically.

But we all know what happens eventually to progressive idealism in our Land of the Free: it gets painted red by politically opportunistic conservatives. Thus, the last third of The New Deal for Artists documents the sad rise of the Red Scare, as right-wing reactionaries get the government to clamp down on content critical of capitalism, a rein-tightening which culminates in the WPA’s shutting down the pro-union, Welles-directed musical The Cradle Will Rock four days before its Broadway opening. (It was produced the following year by Welles’s Mercury Theatre and is now regarded as a classic.) Before long government censors were “suggesting” changes to a book on the history of civil liberties — and the abridgement thereof — in the State of Illinois, and before long FAP was only a shadow of its former self.

What you take away from The New Deal for Artists may depend on your political bent. What cannot be denied, however, is that the government’s choice to nurture thousands of artists during the worst of economic times changed the course of American art history while providing relief and training for thousands of Americans who might never have otherwise found work, Americans who produced hundreds of thousands of works telling stories that otherwise would never have been told. 

The New Deal for Artists tells their story, in their words. Listen to that story and you learn a bit more about our American story, which may include a moral about how we all benefit when artists are not simply left to the mercy of the “free market.” 

To book The New Deal for Artists for virtual screenings, visit Corinth Films: http://corinthfilms.com/films/new-deal-for-artists