Threats of violence or arrest did not stop activist photographers and filmmakers from shooting footage, snapping photographs, or taking films on the road. Lester Balog made a cross-country trip from New York City to California in the spring of 1933 with Edward Royce, a WIR organizer, where they screened New York F&PL newsreels and a Soviet film—Pudovkin’s Mother—in more than fifty cities and towns in workers’ halls, community theaters, pool halls, and private homes.22 At each stop, Balog would screen films and Royce would address the audience. In Milwaukee, the two presented to five hundred people during an antifascist demonstration. In San Francisco, their audience eclipsed one thousand at the Fillmore Workers’ Center. For the next two months they would continue their tour down the California coast to Los Angeles and then up through the Central Valley.
Balog and Royce had arrived in California in the midst of the largest wave of agricultural strikes in the state’s history. In October, they returned to Tulare County, the site of a major cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley. Balog shot footage documenting the struggle, but he also took an active role in participating in the struggle: he created a ten-foot banner that was used during a funeral of a Mexican worker who had been killed. In the weeks that followed he continued to make graphics and took part in meetings of the strike committee.23 Balog demonstrated a common thread with F&PL members: they participated in struggles, documented them, and promoted them to other workers.
In San Francisco, Balog helped energize the San Francisco chapter of the F&PL. They set up shop at the Workers’ Cultural Center at 121 Haight Street—also called the Ruthenberg House—that included a workers’ school, a restaurant, a library, a ballroom, classrooms, and a darkroom for the F&PL. Here Balog edited short newsreels of the 1933 cotton strike and worked on a more ambitious film—Century of Progress. He was also listed as a cinematography instructor for the workers’ school in the spring 1934 catalog. Along with Otto Hagel, Balog taught a class that mirrored their activist-art practice; it was described as a study of the “criticism of bourgeois practices, analysis of Soviet newsreels, documentary and acted films, Montage, film production and projection of working class newsreels and films.”24
That spring, Balog, accompanied by Hagel, toured California again, traveling to Los Angeles and back up through the Central Valley. In a pool hall in Tulare County—the site of the cotton strike the prior year—they set up an impromptu screening of the F&PL film Cotton-Pickers’ Strike and the Soviet film Road to Life and screened it to an audience of 75 to 100 Mexican migrant laborers, the majority of whom were under twenty years old.25 The four-hour event ended when four police officers arrested Balog and Lillian Dinkin, a CP USA organizer, and charged them with running a business without a license. Both were jailed for thirteen days, then brought before a jury who deliberated for five minutes and found them guilty, handing out a forty-five-day sentence and a hundred-dollar fine. Their incarceration coincided with the San Francisco General Strike that was led by the International Longshoremen’s Association and succeeded in completely shutting down the city from July 16 to July 19. Balog and Dinkin were released on July 17 and returned to a tense situation: vigilantes had completely destroyed the Ruthenberg House, leaving the F&PL’s darkroom in ruins. With their space destroyed and much of their equipment impounded, the San Francisco F&PL fell apart less than a year after it had been started.26
Leo Seltzer, New York City Demonstration, 1933 (courtesy of Leo Seltzer, via Russell Campbell)
Leo Seltzer, Rent Strike East Harlem, 1933 (courtesy of Leo Seltzer, via Russell Campbell)
Newsreels or Art and F&PL Film Criticism
Other F&PL branches across the United States imploded over longstanding divisions over the artistic direction and the content of the films. In the New York F&PL, a number of filmmakers left to form Nykino—a more experimental, narrative film group—because they wanted the creative freedom to expand beyond agitprop work.27 In other cases, individual artists who remained with the F&PL had to make numerous compromises. William Alexander writes:
When Lewis Jacobs went south to film in the straitened mining communities, he expected to return to edit his material and shape a film. Instead, he was asked to turn over the footage to the League, with no explanation of what was to become of it. Some of it was edited—supposedly under the eyes of those with the “correct” political savvy—along with other footage, into Strike Against Starvation. Jacobs, who gained some valuable shooting experience at League cost, did not complain.28
This strict approach often led to infighting and members being dismissed, which was the case in the F&PL. Isador Lerner was unanimously expelled from the F&PL after he returned from the Soviet Union and reported to the New York group that Russia was not the utopian state that many had proclaimed it to be, and that he had witnessed many people on the brink of starvation.29
Ruthenberg House after the 1934 attack (Sid Roger Photo Collection, Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University)
Others criticized the quality of the F&PL’s work. Novelist Michael Gold wrote in the Daily Worker in November 1934: “Our Film and Photo League has been in existence for some years, but outside of a few good newsreels, hasn’t done much to bring this great cultural weapon to the working class. As yet, they haven’t produced a single reel of comedy, agitation, satire or working class drama.”30 Gold, instead, praised Vertov’s film Three Songs About Lenin, but neglected to stress that the F&PL operated on shoestring budgets, making it more difficult to produce features like their Soviet counterparts.
However, critiques and debates over art and propaganda alone did not derail the F&PL. Instead, the organization’s last gasp was the demise of the Workers’ International Relief (WIR) whose base operation in Germany was destroyed by the Third Reich, resulting in the F&PL losing much of its organizational and financial backing.31 Had this not occurred, however, the F&PL would still likely have changed course. In 1935, the Popular Front was introduced at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, marking a sea change in international Communist strategy. Instead of combating capitalism and capitalist nations, communists were encouraged to enlist Western democracies to create a united front against fascism—specifically a front against Hitler, Mussolini, and the rise of militarism in Japan. CP USA members were instructed to bridge alliances with any and all progressive groups, from labor unions to governments. CP USA changed its approach toward the New Deal, shifting from harsh criticism to a willingness to support some of its agenda. Consequently, the Popular Front’s call for building alliances ended much of the activity of sectarian cultural groups, including the John Reed Clubs and the F&PL, which all but folded by 1936. That year, the film division of the New York F&PL moved to 220 West Forty-Second Street in June, while the photography division remained at 31 East Twenty-First Street and was renamed the Photo League in 1937.32 The Photo League became a major force in documentary photography for more than a decade, before being buried by the Second Red Scare in 1951. The film division, however, closed in 1936. In the decades that followed, much of the F&PL film reels and photographs produced by F&PL were lost or destroyed due to communist witch hunts.
In 1953, Lester Balog was listed as a Communist in the Un-American Activities hearings in California. In an interview with Tom Brandon, he conveyed what had happened to his work:
Burned them! Believe it or not. I must have had seven or eight 400-foot reels, silent, 16mm. And what happens is, there were many people on it, some of whom were Lefts, Communists, Socialists, who were in demonstrations that may have had signs. . . . In ’52, we had some “visitors” and that worried me, and my wife too . . . I didn’t want to incriminate people who may have changed since then . . . after three or four days, I burned the stuff . . . it broke my heart.33
The film reels and negatives were gone, but the concept that lay behind the work—activists creating their own media—could not be so easily destroyed. It resurfaced many times in different forms, ranging from SN
CC Photo in the 1960s to Paper Tiger Television in the 1980s and Indymedia in the 2000s. In some cases, F&PL members took a direct role in sharing their past work and tactics with others. In the 1960s, Balog screened Century of Progress during an organizing meeting for the United Farm Workers.34 And Balog’s photographs continued to influence others. In 1941, Balog took the now iconic photo of Woody Guthrie holding a guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” scrawled across the guitar’s body. In the decades that followed, he remained committed to documenting the labor movement. Together with Otto Hagel, he worked as a photographer for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, producing images for their newspaper The Dispatcher.
Others remained equally committed despite the harrowing experience of living through the Second Red Scare. Brody remarked in his seventies, “What the ‘politically committed artist’ owes the people at this juncture is revolutionary art dedicated to revolutionary transformations of society. Any other formulation is mere intellectual obfuscation.”35 In words aimed at the younger artists, he added, “We need a new left film organization that would be tailored to the needs of our own time, with a ‘rage’ not merely for film for its own sake, but to put this powerful medium at the service of progress and change.”36
David Robbins, Philip Guston Sketching a Mural for the WPA Federal Art Project, February 15, 1939 (Digital ID# 3027, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, courtesy of the Archives of American Art Wikimedia Partnership)
Eitaro Ishigaki standing before his painting Harlem Court, circa 1940 (Digital ID# 2174, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, courtesy of the Archives of American Art Wikimedia Partnership)
14
Government-Funded Art: The Boom and Bust Years for Public Art
THE 1929 STOCK-MARKET crash that led to the Great Depression ushered in an economic crisis that plunged fifteen million people into unemployment by 1933. Yet the stock market was not the only market to crash. For artists, their market—the art market—also crashed. Galleries closed and private institutions that had once supported the arts became thrifty, leaving artists without patrons, without money for supplies, and without much hope.
This downturn was not new for artists, for their economic standing before the Depression had never been very stable. The printmaker and Artists’ Union organizer Chet La More cautioned, “To the artists, 1929 does not represent an abrupt change, but merely a point of intensification in the process which has slowly been forcing them downward in the economic scale.”1 Yet the Depression was dire, as artists, like the majority of Americans, found themselves searching for work in a sea of unemployment. The solution, many argued, was for the government to fund the arts.
This idea was not without precedent; artists simply had to look south. Beginning in the early 1920s, the Mexican government employed numerous artists to decorate government buildings, a program that sparked the Mexican muralist movement, highlighted by the work of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
In the United States a handful of artists, led by the Unemployed Artists Group, urged their government to follow the same path. The idea was proposed that artists be employed to decorate public buildings, including the new Department of Justice Building in Washington for “plumber’s wages.”2 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration responded favorably to the idea, and in November of 1933, the first program dedicated to putting artists to work, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was enacted under the direction of Edward Bruce within the Treasury Department. The program was limited, employing only a small number of artists and lasting only until May 1934, but it laid the groundwork for subsequent programs, most notably the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP), which marshaled in an unprecedented era of government funding of the arts between 1935 and 1943.
Combined, these programs had a significant effect beyond that of economic relief, for they fostered an environment in which artists were no longer isolated in the studio, or hidden within hermetic art scenes. Instead, they created an era of vast productivity in which artists created a wide range of public art. This art, in turn, reached a mass audience and ordinary Americans were exposed to a vast array of culture, whether it was visual art, music, dance, literature, or theatre. Together, the WPA cultural programs produced a brief window of time when the arts were considered an essential part of everyday life for many Americans across the nation. But the process of artists working for the government was a double-edged sword: a program that came with numerous controversies and compromises, and one that was incredibly short-lived.
Art for the Millions: A New Deal for Artists
“For the present we are busy.”
—Beniamino Bufano, sculptor3
The federally funded art programs followed the basic premise of other New Deal programs: temporary relief for unemployed workers. Artists were just one of many different factions who successfully lobbied for a share of the relief funds. Relief is one way of understanding the era, for the New Deal as a whole represented a major shift whereby the government directly intervened in the economy, giving the president a tremendous amount of executive power. Governmental intervention included the regulation of the stock market and the banking system, Social Security, pensions, unemployment compensation, laws against child labor, creation of public housing, minimum-wage standards, farm subsidy, and the Wagner Act that gave workers the right to collective bargaining. Some programs even hinted at socialism, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which involved government ownership of a major utility by operating a series of dams and hydroelectric plants in order to lower the cost of electric bills for consumers in the region.
Beniamino Bufano at work in WPA-FAP sculpture studio in San Francisco with Sargent Johnson behind to the right, ca. 1935–1940 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
For artists, the funding provided jobs and temporary economic security during a period where few other options were available. For most artists, galleries (the few that remained open) did not represent a viable option. The type of work preferred by many gallery owners was narrow and conservative. In New York City, the epicenter for visual art in the United States, fewer than ten galleries exhibited contemporary art during the 1930s on a regular basis, preferring instead to show the Great Masters and other art from the past.4
If anything, the 1930s brought to the forefront the hostility that many artists had long harbored toward the gallery system and their dependence upon it. The fact that many galleries went out of business during the Depression was welcome news to some. The surrealist painter Louis Guglielmi commented:
The private gallery is an obsolete and withered institution. It not only encouraged private ownership of public property, but it destroyed a potential popular audience and forced the artist into a sterile tower of isolation divorced from society.5
Public funding offered a different path for the artist. Holger Cahill, the director of the WPA-FAP, praised public funding as a means by which to counter elitism in the arts.
In a speech entitled “American Resources in the Arts” he explained that
many American artists, many American museum directors and teachers of art, people who would lay down their lives for political democracy, would scarcely raise a finger for democracy in the arts. They say that art, after all, is an aristocratic thing, that you cannot get away from aristocracy in matters of aesthetic selection. They have a feeling that art is a little too good, a little too rare and fine, to be shared with the masses.6
Cahill argued that this approach had distanced art from everyday people and had turned art into a “luxury product” found in a handful of metropolitan areas:
Because, during the past seventy-five years, the arts in America have had to follow a path remote from the common experience, our country has suffered a cultural erosion far more serious than the erosion of the Dust Bowl. This erosion has affected nearly every section of the country and every sphere of its social lif
e. There has been little opportunity for artists except in two or three metropolitan centers. With the exception of these centers, the country has been left practically barren of art and art interest. The ideas and the techniques of art have become a closed book to whole populations which have had no opportunity to share in the art experience, and which, in our industrial age, have become divorced from creative craftsmanship.7
Cahill stressed that a country lacking in public funding in the arts excluded both the urban poor and those living in rural areas.8 His alternative vision was for the WPA-FAP to reach out to every American, to give anyone who was interested the opportunity to participate in the arts.9
Aubrey Pollard, Holger Cahill Speaking at the Harlem Community Art Center, October 24, 1938 (Digital ID# 12273, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, courtesy of the Archives of American Art Wikimedia Partnership)
The WPA, acting as an umbrella for the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers Project, and the Federal Art Project, accomplished many of these initial goals. Opportunities that had once been dormant now seemed unlimited for WPA employees. Projects ranged in scope from directing plays and writing novels to recording folk songs, recording the narratives of ex-slaves, and painting murals within post offices.
The Federal Art Project included a wide range of opportunities for artists to get involved.10 A 1938 poster charted the various divisions within FAP and described the opportunities for artists to work in various mediums or as teachers, on production crews, and as administrators. Divisions included sculpture, murals, easel painting, photography, graphics, posters, and arts and crafts. Other options including positions devoted to building stage sets, frames, creating dioramas, modeling for artists, and serving as technical advisers (such as print technicians).
A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Page 18