Posters of the WPA.

• Author: McElvaine, Robert S.

The democratic vision of the WPA posters. Art For Our Sake

In the final months of the Reagan era it is refreshing to be reminded of a time when the public interest was taken seriously. The common suffering of the Great Depression brought the nation together as nothing else short of war has ever done. Plainly, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor his lieutenants knew where they were going, but they were willing to try anything that might advance the common good.

When the experimentation of the early New Deal failed to reduce unemployment, necessity dictated that something dramatic be done before Roosevelt faced the voters again in 1936. The creation in 1935 of a massive work relief program, the Works Progress Administration, met the president's political needs and the social, economic, and psychological needs of the jobless.

One of the goals of WPA administrator Harry Hopkins was to give people jobs appropriate to their skills, talents, and experience. The most controversial idea was to create projects for artists. Using taxpayers' money to pay people to paint, act, write, play music, or dance seemed, to many conservatives, the ultimate boon-doggle. What was worse, many projects began turning out socially conscious art. The government, it seemed, was using the tax money of the well-to-do to spread propaganda against these same successful Americans. Roosevelt, of course, was fully supportive of the free enterprise system but saw the task of bringing high culture to the public as a worthy mission.

In recent years interest in the cultural programs of the WPA has soared. But one fascinating division of the WPA Federal Art Projects has remained shrouded in obscurity. The Poster Division produced some two million posters for government agencies. When the project was scrapped during World War II, so were most of the posters. But small caches survived, and about two thousand posters still exist(*). Approximately three hundred of them have been beautifully reproduced in a book edited by Christopher DeNoon. They are, as DeNoon says, "a significant part of our national art heritage....They deserve to be seen again."

American stuff

The posters deal with a whole range of New Deal social concerns: public health, Indian culture, education, wildlife conservation, public housing, and many others. Underlying both the posters and the New Deal approach is the idea of responsibility. For instance, posters address previously taboo subjects such as venereal disease. One...