The Art of the (New) Deal

What the murals of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building can teach us about patriotism, propaganda, and beauty

- By Judith Shulevitz

To forge a new social contract is one thing.

To explain it to people is another. The bureaucrats of the New Deal understood that very well. They also knew that art and architecture could be powerful spreaders of political ideas. As it brought America out of the Depression, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration built or funded courthouses, post offices, town halls, gyms, pools, auditoriums, and much more—tens of thousands of public buildings and facilities—and its arts programs employed as many as 10,000 artists to decorate them.

The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, originally the Social Security Board Building, exemplifies New Deal art and architecture at their best. It’s the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal,” in the words of the founder of the Living New Deal, an organization dedicated to documenting and preserving the history and culture of the period. In 1935, Roosevelt's Social Security Act changed the covenant between the American people and the state. Social Security enshrined a new right to be protected against economic vicissitudes, reversing the assumption that Americans would scrape by on the strength of “rugged individualism”—a phrase made popular by Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover, who was being blamed for America’s woes. Seeking muralists and sculptors to work on the new building, the office in charge of the most prestigious commissions, the U.S. Treasury's Section of Fine Arts, held competitions and published an essay that effectively provided the theme. Its title was “The Meaning of Social Security.”