We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. Soon, the WPA instituted a landmark ruling forbidding sexual discrimination. As a result, between thirty and forty percent of newly hired artists on federal projects were women. This equity of opportunity enabled women to rise to positions of leadership and have access to resources that had a lasting effect on national institutions and on the history of art. In her book, Arrington challenges the popular memory of WPA art as a story of straight white men. Instead, she argues that the works of art that many women created under the Federal Arts Project made visible Black, immigrant, and women’s lives in a way that challenged segregationist, xenophobic, and sexist structures intrinsic in the nation’s institutions.
During our conversation, Arrington explores the extraordinary achievements and tribulations of New Deal women artists and administrators. Among them include Alice Neel, Gwendolyn Bennett, Augusta Savage, Georgette Seabrooke, Lenore Thomas, and Pablita Velarde. Along the way, we track how these women and the Federal Art Project more broadly came under fire from local and national government officials who attempted to censor or suppress their radical work, to fire them from their jobs or force their resignations from projects, and to investigate them for “un-American” activity. We contemplate the challenges of writing histories of lost and often deliberately destroyed archives. And we consider the lessons of women’s participation in the Federal Arts Project for the future politics of public arts provisioning.
Lauren Arrington is Chair and Professor of English at University of South Florida.
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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com
Transcript
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Scott Ferguson
Lauren Arrington, welcome to Money on the Left.
Lauren Arrington
Thanks. I’m so glad to be here with you.
Scott Ferguson
I am so happy to have you here with me. We’ve invited you on the show this month to talk to us about a book that you’ve just finished writing and is in production and is not out yet. It doesn’t even have a title yet, although you’ve told me you’re floating some ideas. It is about women artists, diverse women artists, who worked and contested, and variously participated in the shaping of the New Deal arts programs.
Before we get into our discussion about your new book, I want to invite you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself; your professional background, what discipline you’re in, the kind of research you’ve done up until this moment, before we turn to this particular book project.
Lauren Arrington
Sure. I’m a Professor of English at the University of South Florida. I grew up in Florida and came back about two years ago after spending most of my career in the UK, and most recently in Ireland. I did my doctorate at Oxford University and then just ended up staying in the UK by various good fortunes.
My doctoral research — I only belatedly realized — kind of set me on the course of the common thread that runs through all of my books. I was working on the question of government funding of the Irish National Theater and the impact that that funding had on the theater’s productions. I started out my career as a literary scholar, focusing mostly on Irish literature and then British literature.
The big kind of monolith in Irish literary history was that there was no censorship of the theater in Ireland, that it was a free theater, unlike the theaters in Britain, which had censorship coming from the Lord Chamberlain’s office. But that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because if you’re taking state money, particularly from a government like the early Irish one that has a really strong ideological program, surely, they’re going to want some measure of compliance in the kind of art you’re producing. Can there really be free art when you’re taking government money?
I investigated that question and was able to turn up some new archival sources and show that actually there were private compromises and even instances of self-censorship from some really big players like W. B. Yates, who was a director of the theater. He is best known as a poet and was also a playwright. That rewrote the question of how state funding and the arts worked in the early Irish state. After that, my second book was about an Irish socialist republican called Constance Markievicz. Her last name was a Polish name because she married a Polish artist that she met in Paris where they were both in art school. Her movements in art circles in Paris and London and Dublin are what mobilized her to the politics which she arrived at socialist republicanism.
I was really interested in, after writing that biography, staying in the field of life writing. My most recent book was a group biography of poets including Yates and Ezra Pound, who were living in Rapallo, Italy, during the early years of Mussolini’s regime. I was thinking about the question of fascist aesthetics, how fascism in Italy took a very aesthetic impetus.
It was very different to German National Socialism and the way that certain ideas, particularly ideas about the past, were recovered and represented in art and in Mussolini’s Italy. I was thinking about the way that those poets were influenced by those aesthetics that were coming through the regime and being, in many ways, interpreted by Ezra Pound.
Most people think Ezra Pound is fascist. He’s arrested by the Americans and has a famous trial in the US. He goes back to Italy as soon as he can, gives a fascist salute, famously, from the boat. But most people don’t think about the poets who are visiting him and in his circle as having any kind of fascist orientation.
I was thinking particularly about the ways that those aesthetics were encoded in poetry that we might not really see. That was my book, The Poets of Rapallo, which came out in 2021 during the pandemic. The pandemic is actually where I started thinking about this book that I’ve just finished, which is going to come out with St. Martin’s Press, which is a division of Macmillan, in late 2026.
Scott Ferguson
The through line seems fairly clear. You’ve been thinking about how state finance variously inflects aesthetic production and social life. It would seem very natural that you would turn to similar questions during the New Deal in the United States. But maybe you can talk to us a little bit more about what motivated you to make this particular turn.
I kept wondering, were you thinking about this during the end of Trump 1.0 or did that come after?
Lauren Arrington
It was actually after the project began — which is kind of strange now to think about, given what’s happening on or in our federal landscape — but the project actually began in a moment of optimism.
Scott Ferguson
That’s what I was wondering.
Lauren Arrington
Yeah. We were living in Ireland, where I had taken a job at a university. It was lockdown, which meant something very different in most of Europe to what it meant in the US, particularly in Florida, where there were very few pandemic restrictions. In Ireland, it was about two years of restriction on social life.
During the depths of the pandemic, we couldn’t live in our apartment except to go grocery shopping once a week, and everyone was permitted to take one walk a day, but you couldn’t go further than a mile from your house. It was a very dark psychic landscape that most of us were living in.
There was, of course, also a very real economic impact and the Irish state saw this. Politicians started thinking about the concept of universal basic income, which of course has been circulating for a while. In particular, they were thinking about how a version of that could be applied to visual artists, performing artists and writers in Ireland because there had been an immediate and detrimental effect on performing arts and visual arts, particularly with exhibitions closed.
There were no gigs, no concerts, no pubs even to play in. Book buying went up slightly, but then new books often went under the radar because there couldn’t be the kinds of launches that bring the media attention that, particularly, emerging authors need. The Irish state began a pilot scheme for artists and writers to sort of fund a base level of income in a way to compensate for those losses of the pandemic.
I was seeing all this unfold, and I was thinking about the New Deal. Why is nobody talking about FDR? This is the precedent here. I started reading and doing research on the New Deal from my laptop because there were no libraries open.
Everything that I kept reading was turning up the very same story, dry history, post office art, rural programs, which were important, but seemed to be the only story. We’re all hearing about the Farm Services Administration. We all know Dorothea Lange’s photographs, the Dust Bowl migration murals that are kind of glorifying this American colonialist expansion.
I started going deeper and deeper. I was like, this can’t be all there was. Then I started reading about the community arts projects and community art centers. I started finding names that I didn’t recognize and digging as far as I could into various archives wondering, “who are these people?”
There were a lot of women, particularly women of color, communist women, Native American women, who had been written out of the historical record. I thought I really wanted to tell their stories and not just the story of the arts projects again. I didn’t want to write another doorstop book about the New Deal.
I wanted to write a book that was focused on the lives of these women and how, in the midst of the depression, they found ways to live as artists and to keep themselves creatively alive, and the role that the state played in making that kind of creativity possible.
Scott Ferguson
Maybe we can pull back to the beginning of the New Deal and the very idea about financing the arts. How did that come about? How was it shaped at first? How was it variously discriminatory toward women and people of color? And how did some of those broader contestations play out?
Lauren Arrington
Right. We all talk about FDR as the architect of the New Deal, but actually the architect was probably Harry Hopkins. He was who did the real idea generation, we might say, and as for this aspect of Roosevelt’s presidency, he was his right hand and top adviser. Hopkins had this vision for this kind of national structure.
He invited Holger Cahill, who was involved in the early Museum of Modern Art, to think through this process. Holger Cahill tapped a woman called Audrey McMahon, who had started a pilot project to help fund artists in New York, where there was, of course, a high concentration of artists for various reasons.
For one, the nature of New York as an arts and cultural hub, also, the Great Migration, which brought new energy into the city and new networks and new kinds of artistic production. Audrey McMahon had piloted this program for artists in New York. Holger Cahill knew about it, so he invited Audrey McMahon to come to DC and talk about the idea.
Out of those conversations emerged the Federal Arts Project. McMahon remained a key player because she was appointed as director of the Federal Arts Project for New York which means that she has probably the most powerful position in all of the federal arts project because of the volume of artists that she’s dealing with.
She’s also a woman torn between bureaucracy and passion. She has a real passion for art. She is involved in the art education at NYU, which is where she starts this pilot project. But she also is an administrator and is constrained by the bureaucracy with which she is presented. She always has to make her budget.
In doing that, she’s forced to make some pretty harsh cuts at key points to the federal arts projects that are handed down to her. The artists don’t see that. They don’t understand how she’s squeezed between an idea that actually originated with her, although she doesn’t really get the credit for it and the pressures that she’s under that are coming from DC.
The Artists Union actually pickets her offices, which comes together in order to defend the right of artists to have employment and fair working conditions, and they advocate for those rights under the New Deal. They come to picket McMahon’s office. She doesn’t know what to do. She gets angry, I think, because she doesn’t feel seen or understood.
Because she’s an administrator, she’s automatically vilified as, like, a department chair.
As soon as you become an administrator, you’re like a baddie, right? No matter your intentions. She doesn’t feel seen. She gets really angry at the artists, at their inability to understand the economic constraints. That the budget isn’t bottomless, right? There are only so many funds. But she does make some pretty big missteps.
One of those is understanding the way that racism is inherent to the structures of the New Deal. Despite what they’re saying in DC, it has a racist structure of privilege encoded in it, and she cuts black jobs first. She participates in that. Black artists then form their own union, which is open to anybody, but it’s primarily black artists, in order to lobby for that reinstatement.
And they actually have some measure of success and get jobs reinstated early on in the project. Soon those are eventually cut as the project is pruned and ultimately decimated as we head into the Second World War.
Scott Ferguson
I think for a lot of people, we imagine that when we think about the New Deal arts projects, we think there were some photographs documenting poverty in the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of easel painting of the so-called “American scene,” which were potentially, not only ideologically conservative, but also aesthetically conservative; not pushing beyond perspectival conventions that had been around since the Renaissance.
I think we also have a sense of a certain kind of paternalism, which of course was there and so were the American scene paintings. In this kind of paternalism, or “Well, we’re just funding some art, and everybody does what they’re supposed to do and then it’s over.”
Whereas what your project shows us is that it was improvised and contested and messy and involved all kinds of creative triumphs, as well as horrible, horrible decisions and problematic organizations. I think one of the many impulses in this book that I really picked up on, and I actually regret framing this book at the outset as being just about artists,
is thinking about people in leadership roles, whether they are literally artists who are taking up leadership roles or are just variously taking up these organizing roles, because without that work there would be no artwork. I’m so fascinated by potentially even thinking about the aesthetic dimensions of what it is to organize, to socially reproduce.
What does it mean to have a school that teaches children how to sculpt, how to do printmaking, how to write poetry or whatever it’s going to be? And I love that you’ve introduced this right away. You can’t separate it. This isn’t just a story of some solo artists. It’s a story of a whole improvised apparatus of administrators and artists, and sometimes people cross roles.
Lauren Arrington
Absolutely. That was one of the things that made this book so hard to write because, like I said, I didn’t want to write a doorstop history of the New Deal arts projects. The challenge was how to convey that sense of collectivity among a handful of artists whose careers I wanted to highlight, and I began thinking about it as a group biography.
Folks were asking me early on, “How is this a group biography?” “Did they know each other?” You know what I mean? Because it wasn’t like the Bloomsbury Group where there were geographical constraints and a common artistic purpose, the sense of starting something new together and a lot of direct collaboration between these artists.
When you’re an artist, most artists are kind of working on their own. I allowed that to get in my head a little bit. Then I realized that actually it is a group biography because the structures create the group.
Scott Ferguson
And the groups create the structures. One of the moments that I love is when you’re talking about as the Harlem Renaissance is dying down and the depression is kicking up, Harlem starts to kind of create these new spaces that were actually, in certain ways, more based on group solidarity and were less beholden to white rich patrons who very much put their stamp on what would count as representations of black life.
Lauren Arrington
Absolutely. There was a real desire in Harlem, particularly, to get away from that legacy of the Harlem Renaissance as being the product of white patronage and a desire to advocate for black artists to be in administrative roles. Charles Alston is an important collaborator with Augusta Savage in that regard. He has a group that is more like a group called the 306 group, and they meet in what was an old horse stable in Harlem and have political conversations and conversations about art and conversations about the economy and conversations about what power means now.
That’s where we see this push against McMahon, and against the Federal Arts Project to instate more black administrators who have better salaries and better opportunities and to eliminate that kind of glass ceiling. But we know that there are tensions there, too, between folks who rose to prominence under the old order and folks coming up with a new way of doing things.
Even in Harlem, we’re seeing those kinds of tensions between the old guard of the Harlem Renaissance and new visionaries like Augusta Savage. Several of these artists, like Pablita Velarde is another one of those artists who we could talk about, who has to face challenges from within her own local network as well as challenges from the government apparatus in order to do the work that she feels compelled to do.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah, let’s switch to her because that pushes us across the country, right? They’re in a very different scene with a different set of political legacies, constraints, entanglements, and horrors.
Lauren Arrington
Yeah, absolutely. Pablita Velarde was a pueblo woman who grew up just north of Santa Fe. She, like Augusta Savage, shows talent as an artist from a really young age, but is constrained by social convention in terms of the role that she should play. Women in Pueblo culture were not artists, they worked with textiles. They should not be visual artists. Pablita Velarde is sent to a boarding school in Santa Fe where she, because of an early iteration of the federal arts project, is introduced to mural painting. Through that she is mentored as an artist and through those connections that she makes at her school, she is tapped by the National Park Service to make art for Bandelier National Monument, which is a big national monument under the National Park Service. It is northwest of Santa Fe and just south of Los Alamos, where the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, had started, making this national park, and they’re now building a visitor’s center, and they realized they need some art for the exhibits. So, she is sideways funded through the Federal Arts Project to make that art there.
Lauren Arrington
But again, she’s faced with constraints about what the Park Service believes Pueblo culture should look like and her own direct experience of growing up under Tewa culture in particular.
Scott Ferguson
You suggest in the book that a lot of the dictates from the white administrators is based on relatively old and problematic, ethnographic research. There’s also the interesting twist that there are certain rituals or aspects of Native American life that perhaps shouldn’t be depicted in public, if I’m remembering correctly. There’s all kinds of constraints and challenges that she’s negotiating.
Lauren Arrington
That’s right, that’s right. Even within Pueblo culture, which is very much a Spanish invention, from one way of colonization of what is now the American Southwest, there are different cultures. Pablita Velarde grew up on Santa Clara Pueblo, which is a settlement of a group of people descended from the Tewa people who were absorbed into a more hegemonic kind of Pueblo culture.
There were particular dances that were not supposed to be witnessed by women. There are other dances that should only be witnessed by members of that culture and not subject to tourists. Pablita Velarde is torn between portraying what she sees as these beautiful, celebratory parts of her culture and the cultural diktat that those are private moments.
The question over whether she should portray that actually comes when she’s further along in the Bandelier National Monument project, because early on she’s basically prescribed paintings that have been or gleaned by employees of the National Park Service from reading ethnographic research that doesn’t even relate to her culture. They’re just being absorbed and purported to be like Tewa Pueblo dances, Tewa Pueblo traditions.
They actually belong to completely different cultures altogether. There is just this hegemonic idea of what, quote, “Pueblo culture” is like. She starts to push against that, to add her own levels of detail, and then as she’s given more agency in the project, she starts to develop her own ideas for scenes that she would like to paint for the visitor’s center.
Scott Ferguson
This might be a nice opportunity to plunge into some aesthetic strategies and details. Your book is filled with beautiful readings of various artworks of various styles. Do you want to talk about Velarde’s particular kind of aesthetic strategies with reference to one or more works that you unpack in the book?
Lauren Arrington
Sure. I want to talk a little bit about my visit to the archive where the paintings are held. The paintings are in Tucson at the Western Archeological Conservation Center, which is a division of the National Park Service. It took months and months and months for me to get a visit arranged to the conservation center.
Scott Ferguson
Why was that? Was that pandemic related or…?
Lauren Arrington
That was staffing related. So again, if we talk about federal resources, when I got there I realized the issue, and some really helpful archivists explained to me that there had been various furloughs.
Scott Ferguson
Austere staffing.
Lauren Arrington
Exactly, austerity staffing. Meanwhile, their inboxes kept filling up, and so it was only when I picked up the phone right before I was getting ready to head off on my archive trips that I was able to get through.
They were so helpful once I was there. So helpful. But one of the restrictions of the archive is that there were a number of paintings that I could not take pictures of because there had been conversations with the Tribal Council that they should not be reproduced.
Scott Ferguson
For what reason?
Lauren Arrington
The images depicted should not be witnessed by Anglo people, folks from outside of Pueblo culture. So those ideas that Velarde was working with when she was making the paintings persist with regard to certain paintings. Her paintings are very a flat style of painting, which – in art history – was contested because it was very much imposed in a way as a Santa Fe style of painting drawn from an ethnographic primitivist view of what art from the region historically looked like and a desire, in a way, to perpetuate a linear history of a particular art style. There was an art teacher called Dorothy Dunn, who taught at Santa Fe Indian School, where Velarde was, that schooled the children in this particular style of painting.
When we are thinking about Augusta Savage and the freedom that students had in her studio to experiment with clay, there’s a kind of an inverse situation in Santa Fe Indian School where we have a white art historian teaching “Native American art” to students from the pueblos in the surrounding region who been steeped in that culture for their entire lives.
It’s very prescriptive, this kind of Santa Fe style, but it takes off. It’s very popular. It has a market, and that’s one of the reasons that these artists were encouraged to perpetuate the style as well, because it’s sold to tourists and we see Velarde making an income for herself once she finishes school, by being able to sell this art.
Scott Ferguson
I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about the challenges of this archive, which I can let you explain, but it’s rather slim for political and historical reasons. Maybe talk a little bit about why the archive is so slim and what kinds of challenges that you’ve faced in researching and writing, and how you’ve tried to get around these absences.
Lauren Arrington
Yeah. If I had known this book was going to be so challenging to write, I like to think I would still have written it, but I am not so sure. And let me tell you, my next book is going to be about someone who has left thousands of pages of archives.
Scott Ferguson
Yes.
Lauren Arrington
I am tired from sleuthing. Writing about underrepresented artists, you have those challenges of there not being the funding structures in place, perceptions of value that mean that their archives have been preserved. Sometimes we know that’s because of economic status, and sometimes that is because of structural racism. Sometimes that is because of the politics of the artists themselves, or what parts of their lives that they were not comfortable having preserved.
I’m thinking particularly here about an artist called Lenore Thomas Straus. Lenore Thomas, as she was when she was working on the project, was commissioned to create a series of friezes for the first planned town in the United States called Green Belt, in Maryland, just outside of D.C.
Scott Ferguson
A proto suburb.
Lauren Arrington
Exactly. You can read about this in the book, but basically the whole project of these green belt towns were segregationist and Lenore Thomas fought against that. The kinds of scenes that she wanted to depict in those friezes were anti-lynching and anti-lynching sculpture that is censored.
But in relation to her archive, what I’m thinking about is that Lenore Thomas was queer. She had a lover, Sally Ringe, who she lived with in Virginia and then in Maryland. She was also a communist. She had two huge black marks against her in terms of the McCarthy era. Lenore Thomas’s archive, which exists in the Greenbelt Museum, curated by a wonderful archivist, Megan Sharon Young, consists of mostly photographs. Not letters and not personal papers. Just photographs of her and photographs that she took of her work in Greenbelt.
When I was writing about Lenore, I wrote mostly from photographs in order to understand things like her perception of the world around her. I could contrast the photographs that she took with official photographs from the New Deal agencies in order to understand how she was contesting those racist hierarchies of power as they played out on the Greenbelt site.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that? One of my many favorite parts of this book is when you’re contrasting. What’s the name of the photographer who uses angles in a very racialized way? You read her photography and argue how she is pushing against that. Can you spell out these details that are still a little fuzzy for me to remember.
Lauren Arrington
Yeah, sure. Carl Mydans is one of the main photographers on the Greenbelt site. He’s probably who you’re thinking about, but in the whole photographic section of the resettlement administration, as it was called, and the farm security administration where Dorothea Lange works, they were taught a particular photographic aesthetic that played to what you were talking about earlier in terms of this white, paternalistic, colonialist American dream.
Firstly, Greenbelt was not a segregated work site. There were white workers and black workers on the site, but they were captured doing very different kinds of labor and photographed in prejudicial ways. Mydans photographed these white workers often from a low angle. You see them against these like clear blue skies; you can intuit it’s blue even though they’re black and white. There are clear skies, and these almost three-quarter profile portraits presenting this heroic portrait of upstanding American laborers. Right? The black workers are photographed from a high angle. They’re photographed by Mydans, and he’s obviously standing on something, a ladder or a truck or something.
He’s pointing the camera down and so you see the tops of their heads. You literally see them against the dirt. It is the opposite image for these black workers. That is deliberate, as we know from Dorothea Lange’s recollections of how she was taught to take photographs, how she was told to take photographs, which she pushed against. We also see, when you contrast with Lenore Thomas’s photographs, which are very much on the level in every way, you see how those politics are conveyed in those kinds of images.
I spent time thinking about the photographs and thinking about how Lenore Thomas shows us what she thinks and what she believes when she can’t tell us in her archive.
Scott Ferguson
Speaking of form, I am curious, I’ve never written a trade press book. For our listeners. ,we’re academics, we usually write academic monographs in a scholarly rhetoric or frame. Different fields and subfields have their own customs and standards, but we all write fairly similarly in this mode. A trade press book, however, is for a popular readership.
That mode of address is supposed to not be scholarly, and it’s supposed to be a little looser and warmer and not everything is footnoted. I’m wondering, what was it like composing in that more popular mode? What kind of challenges did you face?
Did you learn lessons about your own voice and its range?
Lauren Arrington
Well, I guess the first thing I’d want to respond to is what I think is a misconception that trade writing is not supposed to be scholarly, but I think that that informs some conceptions about scholarly writing and what it is supposed to be like. I respect writers, it is a hard thing to sit down and write.
No matter what genre you’re writing, props for doing it. The kind of writing that I’m interested in is writing that is enjoyable to read and writing that strives to convey quite complex ideas like we’ve been talking about in terms of the photographic aesthetics, in a way that appeals to readers, in a way that also teaches. It teaches in such a way that we’re communicating as peers to readers, who are picking up books and opening them and wanting to learn. Not feeling like there needs to be a distance in the diction or the structure between the writer and the reader. Rather, we’re meeting on the page in a way that I can bring my expertise and what I’ve learned and communicate it to a reader who maybe never even heard about the subject but is interested, using language that’s easy to understand, that takes its time in order to explain big concepts if we need to talk about big concepts, we’ll usually dwell on that rather than just throwing out a term and expecting immediate recognition and then moving on or digging right down into the deep stuff, but instead, actually slowing down and thinking about what things mean. That’s one of the most enjoyable things to me about the process of writing this book has been learning to slow down and sit with an image,, a painting, a photograph, a person, a place, and write about it in a way that brings it to life to someone who’s never seen it or been there or shows something new about it to someone to whom it’s quite familiar. I was lucky to have benefited from The Robert and Ina Caro Award from Biographers International Organization to support research for this project. Bob Caro is the hero, really, of this kind of writing. He’s the genius behind this kind of biographical writing.
He talks about when he was writing his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, of going to live in the Hill Country of Texas so that he could understand the landscape and the people and the frames of meaning that Johnson grew up under. I could not go and live in Santa Clara Pueblo for a few years with my family in order to write this book, but I could travel there. I stood in the landscape, right?
I thought about what it means and my whole frames of meaning changed as a result. Writing this book changed me because I thought, when I was sitting in Dublin digging up names of artists I thought were interesting, that nobody had heard of them. Pablita Velarde was one of them and then I got to New Mexico and she was everywhere.
People refer to her by her first name, like, “oh, Pablita,” and her paintings are in the state house and she’s on license plates, she’s everywhere. It’s like, well, how ignorant were we to presume that Pablita Velarde was an unknown? I think that writing a trade book also requires you to think about other experiences and lives removed from your own and what amazing knowledge readers will also be bringing to the subject.
Scott Ferguson
That’s lovely. I want to ask questions about lessons. Lessons for today. Lessons for tomorrow. I will say that we at Money on the Left have been long advocates for a federal job guarantee that would be financed by the federal government and provide living quality work for everyone and anyone who wants it and can contribute to their community and not be threatened by unemployment.
It would include all kinds of benefits along the way. We are certainly advocates for the Green New Deal, which is not on everyone’s lips right now in the middle of an authoritarian takeover of our federal government, but we remain advocates for it. We hold out the dream and the possibility for a publicly led employment society that is financing interesting, wonderful, creative and inspiring labor that would include aesthetic labor. Usually, at least in the context of the history of the United States, the New Deal is, for better and for worse, the model. It’s the template that you have to reckon with.
It’s the precedent that you have to look to and decide what’s worth saving and what’s worth recuperating. I find your book to be really inspiring for that problem, for that project, because it shakes up our frames of reference, to use the term that you’ve been using. It makes the challenge of going back to the New Deal feel fresh again, rather than kind of stale or, just dismissing it as if it was all just white supremacy and paternalism. Or the opposite: that it was socialism in America and we had finally done it. I don’t know who actually believes that. I’m wondering, what are some of the lessons that you’ve taken away or that were maybe tacit or implicit for what this means for a future of politics, of state financing, of the arts?
I will say that, one of the threads that I picked up on, that we talk a lot about when we talk about the politics of the job guarantee, is the way that publicly financed employment, especially guaranteed employment, which we know these projects were not guaranteed at all, but especially guaranteed employment can potentially free up laborers, including artists, to not only experiment, but to extract themselves from abusive situations, whether that’s an abusive partner or it’s a controlling, white patronage class.
That’s one thing, for example, that comes to mind that feels like an important lesson from the stories that you’re telling. What else do we take forward from this past?
Lauren Arrington
I think one of the things that we have to understand, which is very difficult for folks who are steeped in the American psyche, is that these things take time. It takes time to build sustainable infrastructures. That was one of the problems with the New Deal arts projects, that there was this massive expansion and then a contraction and the resentment that came with that, and then a little bit of expansion and then the whole thing was scrubbed, basically, because of a need to invest in the war economy and to pivot the arts to the war economy.
I think one of the issues that we have in the US is the four-year — hopefully, what is still a four-year presidential term — and this false binary of the political landscape being either Republican or Democrat.
The four-year turnover means that when do you have time to actually build a program. FDR had too many terms, one would argue, and exercised too much presidential power. This is really the problem and not a solution. It’s not really a lesson, Scott. It’s a question of, how do you build a sustainable infrastructure if you need to have a turnover in leadership?
The answer is that you require agencies that are not politicized in order to make these programs happen. That was also one of the issues with the New Deal is that all these agencies were tied so closely to FDR’s presidency that they couldn’t exist without him and Hopkins at the helm.
That leads me to think about the NEH, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and lessons that we can take there about the need to protect these independent agencies from the executive office and the need to preserve them, constitutionally or otherwise, in order to have a solid platform for the long term projects.
I was reading back and as I was finishing the book, the cuts started coming. I was trying to finish it at the end of 2024, and it was a slog. Then the election happened, and the executive orders started coming down, and it just really mobilized me to finish this book quickly because it felt like it had a new object.
There was a new context that I was responding to, and it just so happened to line up, unfortunately. But anyway, what I wanted to say is that the NEH was encouraged by scientists who were depressed and frightened by the possibility of nuclear apocalypse and the belief that in a nuclear age, with the rapidity of scientific evolution and the threat that that brought to our existence. The humanities were crucial to preserving our morality, our ethics, our sense of why it matters, what our value is. I am skeptical about whether 50 years later from the congressional testimony of nuclear scientists advocating for the National Endowment of the Humanities, if scientists and humanists can still find commonality because we have become so siloed and so intent on our own individual projects and our disciplines, but also, as individuals we’ve become so individualistic. Can we see value outside of ourselves that was there at the New Deal?
That was there in the 50s. I have a measure of hope that we can get there again, but it requires us to maybe allow ourselves to experience these apocalyptic moments like we had with the pandemic. A time when suddenly things are stripped back and you realize what matters in your day to day, right?
The people around you, your health, your well-being, your mind, you know? With the constant treadmill of the consumer cycle, the workday, the targets, when do we have time to think about these things? I think there are a few lessons there. One is to take back from 2020 or 2021 and how, a few years ago, our existence was threatened then and the imagination that was required to bring us out of it and how we can recover that and allow that to stay with us. That as soon as we’re comfortable, we don’t go back to business as usual. Maybe we require these outside threats to our humanity in order to prioritize our cultures.
Scott Ferguson
That’s a beautiful way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Money on the Left and exploring your recent work with us.
Lauren Arrington
I really appreciate it, Scott. Thanks for having me on today.
* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Thomas Chaplin (transcription) & Robert Rusch (graphic art)