A New Deal for the Arts

During the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s and into the early years of World War II, the federal government, as one of its efforts to employ some of the millions of Americans then without work, supported the arts in unprecedented ways. For 11 years, between 1933 and 1943, federal tax dollars employed artists, musicians, actors, writers, photographers, and dancers. Never before or since has our government so extensively sponsored the arts. This book, based on a 1997 exhibit at the National Archives and Records Administration, tells the story of these short-lived, but remarkable, cultural endeavors.