Cultural Policy of the New Deal

This is the final version of Harry Boyte's Distinguished Humanities Lecture at Arizona State University, March 20, 2019. The lecture argues that the immense cultural organizing of the New Deal helped to create a new (and renewed) story of democracy as the work of the people. This history is relevant again.

Dorothea Lange, Documentary Photography, and Twentieth-Century America charts the life of Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), whose life was radically altered by the Depression, and whose photography helped transform the nation. The book begins with her childhood in immigrant, metropolitan New York, shifting to her young adulthood as a New Woman who apprenticed herself to Manhattan’s top photographers, then established a career as portraitist to San Francisco’s elite. When the Great Depression shook America’s economy, Lange was profoundly affected. Leaving her studio, Lange confronted citizens’ anguish with her camera, documenting their economic and social plight. This move propelled her to international renown.

This biography synthesizes recent New Deal scholarship and photographic history and probes the unique regional histories of the Pacific West, the Plains, and the South. Lange’s life illuminates critical transformations in the U.S., specifically women’s evolving social roles and the state’s growing capacity to support vulnerable citizens. The author utilizes the concept of "care work," the devalued nurturing of others, often considered women’s work, to analyze Lange’s photography and reassert its power to provoke social change. Lange’s portrayal of the Depression’s ravages is enmeshed in a deeply political project still debated today, of the nature of governmental responsibility toward citizens’ basic needs.

Students and the general reader will find this a powerful and insightful introduction to Dorothea Lange, her work, and legacy. Dorothea Lange, Documentary Photography, and Twentieth-Century America makes a compelling case for the continuing political and social significance of Lange’s work, as she recorded persistent injustices such as poverty, labor exploitation, racism, and environmental degradation.

This historiographical essay examines major debates about the politics of race during the New Deal. A central focus is the way in which Black Americans viewed FDR and how scholars have portrayed that view.  It illustrates the impact of activists and leaders on New Deal policy.  In several ways, this chapter includes original research from my dissertation.

According to the editors, the text as a whole aims to present scholarship on the New Deal written by new scholars covering this period.

Only three sample pages are presented here, pages 131, 133-134.

Further down on this page is information about my historiography on portrayals of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) which covers portrayals of her during the New Deal period and in scholarship on women's history:
http://tinyurl.com/PortrayalsOfBethune.

Published by The State Historical Society of Missouri (Columbia, Mo., 2009), this illustrated survey of forty-one editorial cartoons from the collections of The State Historical Society of Missouri provides an overview of the depression era through the eyes of Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick.  The cartoons were published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and primarily deal with national issues. The catalogue includes discussion of the social, political, and economic of each cartoon, and the imagery covers topics ranging from the 1929 stock market crash, the Bonus Army protest in Washington, D. C., and the election and re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Resumen
El cine comienza su andadura a finales del siglo XIX como un mero entretenimiento de masas, revelando a un público ávido de novedades las posibilidades del reciente descubrimiento. Será a partir de la Revolución bolchevique de 1917 cuando los organismos de poder descubran la capacidad de la imagen en movimiento como herramienta de propaganda ideológica. Los regímenes comunista y fascista se sirvieron del cine para difundir su doctrina y en la democracia de Estados Unidos, durante el período del New Deal (1933-1939), el cine clásico de Hollywood desempeñará la misma función propagandística, aunque haciendo uso de lenguajes y géneros variados y, con frecuencia, mucho más sofisticados. Es precisamente esta faceta del Séptimo Arte, su uso como agente difusor de ideologías, la que nos interesa y se analiza en el presente artículo.

Abstract:
The cinema begins its career in the late nineteenth century as a mere mass entertainment, revealing to an eager audience the possibilities of the new discovery. It was from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 when the power of the moving image as ideological propaganda tool was discovered by the governments. The communist and fascist regimes used the cinema to spread their doctrines and in the American democracy, during the New Deal period (1933-1939), the classical Hollywood cinema will perform the same propaganda function, but using different languages ​​and genres, and often much more sophisticated. It is this aspect of the cinema, its use as a carier of ideologies, that interests us and analyze this article.

The United States of America has never formally declared a cultural policy nor established a Cabinet-level department of cultural affairs, as have many other nations, post–World War II — thus depriving the American people of any foundation or context for transparent, open deliberation over the nature and priorities of public cultural policy. Our de facto policy must be discerned in the aggregate of specialized policymaking and actions taken by federal, state, and local governments.

Our reluctance to declare formal policy is largely due to the nation’s stance in conducting the Cold War — focused around an exaggerated Soviet threat — and its associated domestic anti-communist campaigning.  “Collateral Damage” traces the story of anti-communism through much of the twentieth century, focusing on its cultural impact. The historical narrative follows from the first mass expression of anti-communist sentiment nationally, in the Red Scare of 1919, through its later expression in the “McCarthy era” of the Fifties, and its legacy since. Various approaches to cultural policy emerge throughout; but I focus especially on contrasting the federal cultural programs of the New Deal with those of domestic cultural agencies established in the 1960’s.

History reveals that politicians and policymakers relied on religious values for Cold War purposes, rather than crafting secular statements of national cultural values. Six other significant impacts of anti-communism can be seen in U.S. cultural policy since the Sixties: the primacy of the private sector; Euro-centric bias in defining the cultural field; an approach to cultural diversity that marginalizes voices from outside traditional fine-arts contexts; a proscription against engagement with social issues in the arts and humanities; the replacement of democracy with “free enterprise” as the foundation of national policy; and a U.S. stance in international cultural-policy deliberations that reduces transnational cultural issues to matters of commerce and national security.

To suggest what a secular statement of national cultural policy might resemble, "Collateral Damage" ends with a selection from First Lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic National Convention.

Taking two pavilions exhibited at Exhibition Internationale 1937 as its beginning point, the introductory chapter identifies linkages between them (some of which are not stylistic). One was entered on behalf of the Soviet Union, and the other the United States of America. The paper offers a comparative analysis of both these regimes with a focus on their domestic use of culture and ‘myth’ during the 1930s. What ensues are two exhaustively documented chapters which provide a new way of interpreting their civic architectural production by making use of the concept ‘rooted modernism’ recently introduced by Roger Griffin. Griffin’s concept will be linked with a plethora of scholarship on the modern nature of Stalinism (in Soviet Russia) and New Dealism (in the United States). I will make the case that their proposed ‘modernism’ can be seen through the lens of ‘stripped classicism’, an alternative strand of architectural ‘modernism’ which architects of both regimes deployed extensively. We argue that these feats of human creativity are inexorably linked with the incentives launched by both governments to ‘modernise’ and solve the socio-economic problems of the recent past (which in Stalin’s Russia flattered to deceive). The paper provides historians with a new interpretative framework for understanding the broad cultural phenomenon of ‘modernism’ and how it interacted with ideologies during the interwar period.

From the 1890's on, the construction of American national identity and of the modern citizen draws on various definitions of the notion of folk music, produced by various intellectual circles and supported by the development of field collecting, to result towards the end of the New Deal Era in a tentative consensus on the basic content and the very existence of American Folk Music. Composers and musicologists address American Folk Music as a tool to try and set up an American composition school to rival the european ones. Academic folklorists approach it as a scholarly object through a text-centered paradigm requiring its linguistic anglo-centeredness. Anthropologists apply the notion to Amerindian, then later on Black-American musics. Along with the psychologists, they introduce in its definition the new concepts and bias of the competing evolutionist, diffusionist, functionalist and relativist theoretical schools. Progressive educators and social workers use it in their social engineering programs, most importantly in the Americanization-related ones.These various paradigms coexist, compete, and influence each other until the 1930's, when the institutionalization of American Folk Music inside Federal State agencies encourages a synthesis of these different approaches. The present thesis aims to describe the works and ideas of these various contributors to the invention of the American Folk Music through the study of the life and career of one of the New Deal collectors instrumental in this synthesis, Sidney Robertson.

The dawn of New Deal progressive politics is an era that has been relegated to a single chapter in history books, a time of contentious politics, a time of radical political doctrines of the far left and the far right. From the administration of Woodrow Wilson to the fourth term of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the United States of America was forever changed, reconstructed in ways that the war of rebellion never could have forecasted. The etiology of great change in America, like most revolutionary changes, cannot be isolated to a singular phenomenon or causal agent, but rather is a complex interconnected network of systems, ideas, actions, reactions, and sociocultural shifts. This paper will synthesize and analyze a deeper, more intimate, story of contentious politics and revolt and offer a telling narrative of history where American nationalism had an objective meaning.

Gli anni Trenta: la crisi, la Grande Depressione, gli scioperi, Harlan Miners Speak, i linciaggi, gli Scottsboro Boys, l’FBI di J. Edgar Hoover, i gangster movies, Alcatraz, la retorica di Franklin D. Roosevelt, il New Deal, la Farm Security Administration, il Wagner Act, la crisi tra esecutivo e Corte Suprema, il giusrealismo. Gli anni Trenta: il libro foto-documentario, il romanzo proletario, il romanzo bottom-dogs, il romanzo del ghetto, il romanzo hard-boiled, i romanzi di John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Nathanael West e John Dos Passos. Gli anni Trenta, quindi, tra giustizia e letteratura. L’ipotesi di questo libro è che negli anni Trenta la rappresentazione letteraria delle categorie della legge possa essere analizzata alla luce di una serie di analogie tra la ridefinizione del patto sociale e la riscrittura del patto narrativo in senso più inclusivo. Gli anni Trenta, quindi, visti da lontano (con uno studio quantitativo) e da vicino (con un’analisi narratologica dei testi).

Creative industries are recognised as a key driver of economic growth in both developed and developing nations. In addition to recognising the importance of creative industries, the Australian government has recently renewed a focus on the vast northern tropical area of this island nation as key to future economic and population growth, via the release of a white paper focussed on development options for the north. However, the white paper contains virtually no references to creative industries. In addition, Australia’s most recent national cultural policy, Creative Australia, has after only a few years slipped into obscurity and despite major resources being invested towards its development. Drawing on the almost 100 years of policy documentation relevant to Northern Australia, this paper highlights the limited attention paid to arts, culture and creative industries, and considers this relative policy vacuum in the context of global developments in creative industries.

This study investigates the genealogy of rescaling the cultural armature of heritage in the Global South rooted within the colonial culture and postcolonial aid programs. Taking the case of historic Cairo, it explores how policies have developed through experimental practices of conservation to scale up authority, control, and power over residents and neighborhoods from the 19th century to the present. The paper theorizes two paradigmatic approaches of conservation practices – by aesthetics and development – which have expanded Cairo’s inventory of monuments. The infatuation of heritage experts (the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe and Aga Khan Trust for Culture) with old neighborhoods has fostered accumulation by dispossession, disrupting people’s environments to generate a worlding image of heritage. The paper concludes with the metaphor of conservation practices as re-construction sites, as they repurpose the relationships between heritage, people, and their me...

ABSTRACT Artists play a major role in the cultural fabric of society. They operate within the creative industries, a sector of activity widely accepted as significant to developed and developing economies. While there is a substantive body of literature relevant to the nature of policy-making as applied to the arts, research that explores the views of practitioners at the grass roots level is limited, and particularly so in regional north-eastern Australia, an area with significant challenges caused by isolation and distance. This article contextualises the issues of relevance in relation to artists’ engagement with policy, after which it presents survey and interview data obtained from those working in the field. The findings reveal the influence of isolation in north-eastern Australia, not only in a geographic sense, but in terms of the number of artists who see themselves as disconnected from policy, arts and cultural strategy.

On November 23, 2015 University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto announced his decision to shroud a thirty-eight by eleven foot fresco from 1934 by UK alumna Ann Rice O’Hanlon (1908-1998) in Memorial Hall. Two days later facilities management personnel draped a long white cover across the Depression-era mural and attached a placard to explain the arrangement was only temporary. The action came after Dr. Capilouto met with African-American students on November 12th to discuss ways the Commonwealth’s flagship university could be more inclusive, and listen to the specific struggles students of race encounter, particularly issues relating to financial aid, achievement gaps, and graduation rates. The fresco was one other small concern students raised, alleging the work of art inaccurately represents Kentucky’s history, presents a sanitized description of the working conditions of slaves, and overall conjures up painful reminders of actual race relations in the Bluegrass state in the early twentieth century. Since then, the decision and ensuing debate has received enormous media coverage, with The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, The National Review, and The Huffington Post all publishing stories about the events leading up to the covering of the mural and the subsequent reactions. Needless to say, a spotlight has been placed on Kentucky’s primary institution of higher education, and many anxiously wait for the long-term solution to be unveiled by President Capilouto.

This text is extracted from Chapter 2 of my 2015 dissertation, "Painting 'Section' or Painting Texas?: Negotiating Modernity and Identity
in the Texas New Deal Post Office Murals." This chapter contextualizes the Texas Post Office murals within the rapidly changing socio-cultural environment of Texas in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Simultaneous to the Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism and war, Texas began to develop as a modern state and its people faced the usual disruptions in the social order due to modernization. Commensurate with these changes, the state's political and business leaders, and many of its most prominent cultural practitioners, utilized a variety of strategies that capitalized on existing discourses to advance a universal concept of the Ideal Texan that suppressed existing social identifications constructed on the divergent, regional development of Texas. And while the murals did not function according to those concerted efforts, they did, as representations of state, regional and local interests, at least reflect them. I therefore argue in this chapter that the Texas Post Office murals, when interpreted within their local contexts, provide insight into a shift in Texas identity from traditional local and regional affiliations to a unified, constructed conceit that issued from the state's business and political elite.

ABSTRACT Different governments in Europe are advancing corporatist mechanisms to foster a homogenizing and conservative understanding of culture. Illiberal practices framed within these policies include a delegated censorship and several measures based on xenophobic claims. Despite the importance of this phenomenon, the available literature on cultural policies has not adequately addressed it so far. This article proposes a conceptual framework to distinguish these illiberal cultural policies from the ones framed by liberal democracies on one hand and totalitarian regimes on the other end. This conceptual scheme is developed through a qualitative methodology based on a thorough review of the relevant literature currently available, a series of semi-structured interviews with relevant actors and a comparative analysis of the cultural policies developed by the ‘populist radical right’ governments in Poland and Hungary.