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Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. -Shakespeare, As You Like It
The Great Depression of the 1930s stands unrivaled as the greatest tragedy in American economic history. Whether one takes the measure of this episode through the number of bankruptcies, bank failures, and foreclosures; through the length of the breadlines; or through the official statistics on the shrinkage of national income and employment, the conclusion is always the same: this period in the nation's history was an economic disaster.
Such conditions, one might reasonably suppose, would be highly unpromising for substantial public support for the arts; nevertheless, American painters and sculptors enjoyed a higher visibility then ever before. Indeed, when measured as a share of Gross National Product, public monies committed to the arts were higher in the 1930s than at any earlier or subsequent moments in our national experience. This stands out as all the more remarkable when juxtaposed against the climate toward arts funding in the late 1990s: today, at a time when the country is enjoying unparalleled prosperity, the National Endowment for the Arts-the financial support for which has never been overly generous-is struggling to survive at all.
The Conception and the Mexican Connection
Much of the explanation for federal patronage of the arts during the Great Depression can be traced to the convergence of a number of strong personalities, with uncanny abilities to make acceptable what would otherwise have been unacceptable. Not the least among them was the president himself. During the electoral campaign of 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signaled clearly that he was ready to experiment and that he would not be bound by conventional taboos about limits on what was proper in the behavior of the federal government. More particularly, he affirmed his willingness to commit resources to assist society's most distressed. When he took office on 4 March 1933, there was no lack of worthy candidates for such relief-- and artists were among them. Not that many artists are in the upper end of the income distribution in the best of times. In the worst of times, their ranks were dominated by people in real need, and with the collapse in the...