A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  5. The Tuskegee Institute statistics were generally lower than those of the NAACP.

  6. Many others were active leaders in the anti-lynching movement. Most notable was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who led a one-woman crusade to combat lynching after the murder of her three friends (Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart) who owned a grocery store in Memphis that competed with a white-owned store. Wells-Barnett—an African American investigative journalist—exposed that only one in every six individuals who was lynched was accused of rape, and that many of those accusations were false, resulting from either consensual sex between white women and black men, or black men simply being in the company of white women. Wells-Barnett’s own safety in Memphis was compromised when it became known that she was the author of the anti-lynching reports from the black-owned Memphis Free Speech. She fled Memphis and relocated to Philadelphia and then Chicago, where she continued to organize on behalf of the anti-lynching movement and the feminist movement. See Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad: An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2008).

  7. Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 50.

  8. Ibid., 49.

  9. Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 34.

  10. Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, New Updated Edition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 1986), 78.

  11. Ibid., 97.

  12. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 12.

  13. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 411–12.

  14. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 5.

  15. Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 34.

  16. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 51.

  17. Ibid., 76.

  18. Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, white women, and the Mob (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 32.

  19. Elisabeth Freeman, “The Waco Horror,” Supplement to The Crisis 12, no. 3 (July 1916): 6.

  20. Subsequent bills that were introduced included the Costigan-Wagner Bill that was defeated during the 1930s. The Wagner-Van Nuys Bill, drafted by NAACP lawyers and introduced to the Senate in 1934, was also defeated. President Roosevelt failed to throw much support behind the bill, but he did create the civil rights section of the Justice Department, which won its first conviction of a lyncher in 1946 and helped to reduce the proliferation of lynchings in the decades that followed.

  21. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 74.

  22. Ibid., 8.

  23. Ibid., 135.

  24. Oswald Villard reportedly first proposed the idea of a Silent Parade to Du Bois and Johnson. See Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 539.

  25. The Ku Klux Klan was re-founded in 1915 after being dormant from the early 1870s. It experienced a rapid growth from two thousand members in 1920 to two million in 1926. Close to two-thirds of the members lived outside the South, including 50,000 in Chicago, 38,000 in Indianapolis, 35,000 in Philadelphia, and 16,000 in NYC. See Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, 118.

  26. Lewis W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 506.

  27. Ibid., 507.

  28. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 26.

  29. See Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); The Library of Congress, with essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Lewis, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: Amistad, an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2003).

  30. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 46.

  31. David Levering Lewis, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 514.

  32. Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 42.

  33. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 47.

  34. Du Bois wrote, “The men who will fight in these ranks must be educated and The Crisis can train them: not simply in its words but in its manner, its pictures, its conception of life, its subsidiary enterprises.” Quoted in Lewis W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 494.

  35. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 45.

  36. “Opinion,” The Crisis 18, no. 5 (September 1919), 231.

  Chapter 13: Become the Media, Circa 1930

  1. Russell Campbell, “Radical Cinema in the 30s: Introduction,” Jump Cut 14 (March 1977), 24.

  2. Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 29. David Platt, the national secretary for the F&PL and editor of its short-lived publication, Film Front, later downplayed the connections between Moscow and F&PL chapters in the United States. In 1977 he stated, “It is true that the CP USA played an important role, but the League of which I was a part was rooted in the conditions existing in the country in the early 1930s. It wasn’t necessary for anyone on the outside to press buttons to tell us our task was to cover the breadlines, flophouses, picket lines, hunger marches, etc. People interested in films and photos as weapons in the social struggle came over to the League as I did, partly out of admiration for the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovjenko, and Vertov, but mostly in response to the failure of the older independent documentarians, as well as the commercial film industry, seriously to concern themselves with what was going on in the streets, factories and farms in the years following the stock market crash.” See David Platt and Russell Campbell, “Dialog on Film and Photo League,” Jump Cut 16, 1977, 37.

  3. Ibid., 29.

  4. Campbell, “Radical Cinema in the 30s,” 23.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 38.

  7. Ibid., 39. By 1931, the F&PL began meeting at 7 East Fourteenth Street.

  8. Russell Campbell, “Interview with Leo Seltzer: ‘A Total and Realistic Experience,’ ” Jump Cut 14 (March 1977), 26.

  9. Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 103.

  10. Campbell, “Radical Cinema in the 30s,” 23.

  11. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 28.

  12. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 101.

  13. Alexander, Film on the Left, 17.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid., 26.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 27.

  18. Ibid., 43. Samuel Brody argues that the Soviet films had an influence on working-class U.S. audiences: “It must be said, that intellectuals and artists in the 1930s who saw all of these great films couldn’t possibly totally escape the content. They saw that here was a different technique, a different aesthetic, and at the same time, a revolutionary content. And that helped push them towards a more Marxist and revolutionary outlook on life in general. How can you separate the Russian Revolution from October?” See Tony Safford, “Interview with Samuel Brody: ‘The Camera as a Weapon in the Class Struggle,’ ” Jump Cut 14 (March 1977), 29.

  19. Alexander, Film on the Left, 39.

  20. Ibid., 40.

  21. Ibid., 29.

  22. Carla Leshne, “The Film and Photo League of San Francisco,” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006), 363.

  23. Ibid., 364–65.

  24. Ibid., 366.

  25. Ibid., 368.

  26. Ibid., 369.

  27. Samuel Brody, reflecting on the demise of the F&PL, stated in 1977, “The split in the old Workers Film and Photo league in the thirties was the result of a pr
incipled disagreement as to whether we ought to continue doing short documentaries born in the heat of the class upheavals of the time or concentrate on enacted, recreated ‘features’ produced over considerably longer spans of time—blockbuster productions, so to speak. The result was a split away from the Workers Film and Photo League and others who looked upon us as the great unwashed who could not be initiated into the more lofty realms of cinema art.” See Safford, “Interview with Samuel Brody,” 30.

  28. Alexander, Film on the Left, 47.

  29. Ibid., 46.

  30. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 65.

  31. Ibid., 66–67.

  32. Ibid., 68.

  33. Leshne, “The Film and Photo League of San Francisco,” 371.

  34. Ibid., 367.

  35. Safford, “Interview with Samuel Brody,” 30.

  36. Ibid. In the same 1977 interview, Brody added, “I am not a disinterested art-for-art’s-saker. The most ‘escapist’ art is, by that very fact, sterile at best and reactionary at worst. This art abdicates the artist’s responsibility to society and social progress.” Ibid., 29.

  Chapter 14: Government-Funded Art

  1. Chet La More, “The Artists’ Union of America,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 237.

  2. Biddle is often given central credit for proposing the idea. See Olin Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program: A Memoir,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 14; Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5; and Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 226. However, it is likely that other artists were involved in this process. Lincoln Rothschild argues that the Unemployed Artists Group played a key role in urging advisers to FDR to form the PWAP. See Lincoln Rothschild, “Artists’ Organizations of the Depression Decade,” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 200.

  3. Beniamino Benvenuto Bufano, “For the Present Are Busy,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 107.

  4. Langa, Radical Art, 34.

  5. Louis Guglielmi, “After the Locusts,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 114–15.

  6. Holger Cahill, “American Resources in the Arts,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 36.

  7. Ibid., 38.

  8. Ibid., 43.

  9. Throughout the essay, Holger Cahill cites the work of philosopher John Dewey as an influence in helping him to arrive at a more egalitarian view of art.

  10. The book Art for the Millions details many of the various WPA-FAP projects and contains a wide array of short essays by artists, designers, and administrators. The book itself was written in 1936 as a national report by the Washington Office of the WPA-FAP. The essays are fascinating but tend to be overly optimistic. This is unsurprising, as they served the purpose of championing the WPA-FAP to help sway a reluctant Congress to continue to fund the arts. The original publisher, the Government Printing Office, failed to publish the text in 1937, and a private publisher fell through in 1938 and again in 1939. By this time, the WPA-FAP was in crisis mode and the book was never published. Holger Cahill held on to the manuscript and was unable to publish it before his death in 1960. In 1973, the art historian Francis V. O’Connor obtained the manuscript from Mrs. Holger Cahill. O’Connor published Art for the Millions (adding his introduction and photographs) and also deposited the original documents in the Library of the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution. See Francis V. O’Connor, “Introduction,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 13–31.

  11. For a more in-depth look at the WPA-FAP art centers in the U.S., see: John Franklin White, ed. Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.), 1987 and Francis V. O’Connor, ed. Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973).

  12. C. Adolph Glassgold, “Recording American Design,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 167.

  13. Ibid., 168–169.

  14. Eugene Ludins, “Art Comes to the People,” in O’Connor, ed. Art for the Millions, 232–33.

  15. Ibid., 233.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Langa, Radical Art, 43–45.

  19. Cahill, “American Resources in the Arts,” 43.

  20. Robert Cronbach, “The New Deal Sculpture Projects” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 140.

  21. For a more extensive treatment of the right-wing governmental attacks against the WPA-FAP, see Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 149–71.

  22. Langa, Radical Art, 205.

  23. McKinzie The New Deal for Artists, 154.

  24. Ibid., 155.

  25. Langa, Radical Art, 206.

  26. During the build-up to World War II and the war itself, the U.S. economy began to recover, aided by selling steel and materials to the Allies.

  27. Vachon, quoted in James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 139.

  28. Roosevelt, quoted in McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 169.

  29. Jacob Kainer, “The Graphic Arts Division of the WPA Federal Art Project,” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 166.

  Chapter 15: Artists Organize

  1. Boris Gorelick, “Artists’ Union Report,” in Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 183.

  2. Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers During the Great Depression,” Archives of American Art Journal, 14, no. 1 (1974): 7.

  3. Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists on the Barricades: The Militant Artists Union Treats with the New Deal,” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (1978): 22.

  4. Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 10.

  5. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Stuart Davis, “Why An Artists’ Congress?,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 66.

  8. Olin Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program: A Memoir,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, Francis V. O’Connor, ed., (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 28.

  9. Politically, McMahon took the middle road with the hopes that this path would ensure that the WPA-FAP would not be completely cut. She noted, “The conservatives were certain I was a ‘Red’; the liberals thought I was conservative. Both were wrong. Emotionally and practically I was dedicated to helping artists in distress and to furthering the WPA/FAP. Politically I was totally committed to the Roosevelt doctrine.” See Audrey McMahon, “A General View of the WPA Federal Art Project in New York City and State”, in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 74.

  10. “Our Municipal Art Gallery and Center,” Art Front, February 1936. pg. 4.

  11. “Self-Government and the Municipal Art Center,” Art Front, February 1936. pg. 5–6.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Einar Heiberg, “The Minnesota Artists’ Union,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 244.

  14. Chet La More, “Crisis in the Rental Issue,” Art Front, January 1937. p. 16–17.

  15. Joseph Solman, “The Easel Division of the WPA Federal Art Project,” in O�
�Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 120.

  16. “The Artists’ Unions and Spain,” Art Front, December 1936, 3.

  17. Langa, Radical Art, 185.

  18. “On to Spain,” Art Front, March 1937, 3.

  19. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8.

  20. Langa, Radical Art, 185.

  21. Meyer Schapiro, “Public Use of Art,” Art Front, November 1936, 4.

  22. Clarence Weinstock, “Public Art in Practice,” Art Front, December 1936, 8–10.

  23. “Full Report of the Eastern District Convention of the Artists’ Union,” Art Front, June 1936, 5–7.

  24. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers,” 10.

  Chapter 16: Artists Against War and Fascism

  1. Gerald M. Monroe, “The American Artists Congress and the Invasion of Finland,” Archives of American Art Journal, 15, no. 1 (1975): 16.

  2. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 11–12.

  3. “A Call for an American Artists Congress,” Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Printed Matter, 1936–1942, n.d., Box 4, Reel 5898, Frame 314, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Printed-Matter–305715.

  4. Gerald M. Monroe writes that Stuart Davis “secured the assurances of [Alexander] Trachtenberg [CP USA representative for cultural affairs] that the Congress would be free of any interference by the party.” He adds, “Although the Communist Party had an interest in the formation of the Congress, it could not have taken place without the support of noncommunist artists, who surely constituted the vast majority.” See Monroe “The American Artists Congress,” 14–15. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams present a slightly different argument: “Stuart Davis was assured that the Party would not interfere in congress activities, but it is possible that, as with the Artists’ Union, a small, perhaps shifting, group of Party members actually ran the daily affairs of the organization.” See Baigell and Williams, Artists Against War and Fascism, 10–11.

  5. Stuart Davis, “Why An Artists’ Congress?,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 69.