In many cases, this placed the federal government in the role of taking risks for private entrepreneurs no longer willing or able to gamble on new material. Franklin D. Roosevelt Harry Hopkins It was created to alleviate the mass unemployment of the Great Depression and by the time it was terminated in 1943, the WPA had put 8.5 million Americans back to work [2]. The skyrocketing popularity of media like the phonograph, radio and movies had recently supplanted many thousands of live performers: some 30,000 musicians had been displaced by new mechanical modes of music reproduction; the government estimated that well over 30,000 theater workers were unemployed by the mid-'30s. Federal Music Project ensembles -- orchestras and chamber groups; choral and opera units; concert, military and dance bands; and theater orchestras -- presented an estimated 5,000 performances before some three million people each week. But Federal One cannot be written off as hopelessly flawed. To this day, the American Guide Series constitutes the most comprehensive encyclopedia of Americana ever published; several volumes have been reissued recently, some in updated form. Moreover, what was the main purpose of the WPA cultural projects? By 1941, employment in the Writers Project had declined, but others showed increases. WPA Federal Art Project, first major attempt at government patronage of the visual arts in the United States and the most extensive and influential of the visual arts projects conceived during the Depression of the 1930s by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Though these Federal One projects were mandated nationally, they were conceived with local cultural situations in mind. Its purpose was to create all kinds of jobs at every level of the skill ladder, preserving professional and technical skills while helping individuals maintain their self-respect. You could not be signed in. The GLOBE Project (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Project) is a study of cross-cultural leadership that spans over 60 countries and cultures. Federal One didn't effect a complete transformation of the cultural landscape; when it was over, cultural production and distribution returned to something very much like the patterns they had taken earlier. The project caught on so much in the 1930s … It gave dramatic form to FDR's famous statement, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished.". The designers of the WPA rejected the idea of setting up a program of subsidy for existing arts organizations. The Committee produced a small parade of disaffected former WPA workers who testified that the Projects were tools of the Communist Party designed to breed class hatred in the United States. The Federal Theatre Project, for example, set up a "try-out" theater in New York City to assess the potential of new material for commercial production: its first production, Woman of Destiny, was subsequently sold to the movies for $25,000; the second, Backwash, was sold to a Broadway producer. (Return to referenced text), McKinzie, p. 250. Philip Guston, Moses Soyer, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jacob Laurence, Ivan Albright, Marsden Hartley, Philip Evergood, Mark Tobey -- these were just a few of the painters for whom the FAP provided a living and the chance to find "a new orientation and a new hope and purpose based on a new sense of social responsibility." The administrative records include bulletins, memoranda, policies, and procedures, as well as financial records and salary schedules. The music project supplied performers and teachers of music an occupation. (Return to referenced text), Flanagan, p. 54. Such were the contradictions of attempting to mandate regionalism from a program centralized in Washington, DC. In the fall of 1934, building on his success with PWAP, Edward Bruce was named to head up the new Department of the Treasury Section of Painting & Sculpture, later known as the Section of Fine Arts. The original terminal at National Airport in Washington, D.C. was a New Deal project? Persistent unemployment was a continuing concern, and Roosevelt felt that simply doling out relief payments would mean "spiritual and moral disintegration destructive to the national fibre." The Federal Art Project also compiled a 22,000-plate Index of American Design, dispatching artists to record a wide variety of American designs in furnishings and artifacts from the colonial period on. The smallest component of Federal One, the Survey employed archivists to identify, collect and conserve historical records throughout the United States. The Federal Writers Project is best-known for its American Guide Series, intended to produce comprehensive guidebooks for every state, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.; similar guides were published for many localities. See more. Projects were designed by local officials to provide the maximum number of jobs to help the unemployed in the vicinity. Protests by artists' unions throughout 1936 succeeded in forcing TRAP's payroll up to its highest level of 356; but never did TRAP attain its authorized level of 450 artists. Thus was born the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which in roughly the first four months of 1934 hired 3,749 artists and produced 15,663 … PWAP ended in April, 1934, along with the rest of the CWA. Their attacks led to the ultimate censorship: the termination of the projects. Nevertheless, the controversy over their culpability rages on. The largest and most important of the New Deal cultural programs was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a massive employment relief program launched in the spring of 1935 -- the beginning of FDR's "Second New Deal," as his second term came to be known. Marshall and Sidney Lumet. (Return to referenced text), Stuart Davis,"American Artists' Congress," Art for the Millions (New York: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973), p. 249. 69.5.1 Administrative records of Federal Project No. A thousand artists submitted nearly 1,500 designs. With the rise of communism in Russia an… A key component of the WPA was Federal Project Number One, which was tasked with putting unemployed artists back to work. The Oklahoma theater carried out extensive historical research throughout the state, using radio to contact people who might provide historical information. 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