Old and New
Despite multiple crises during the 1930s—or perhaps because of them—the New Deal was generally successful at articulating the need for “progress.” In urban areas that meant a modern industry with safe working conditions and affordable housing; in rural areas it was the application of science to agriculture and conservation. Underlying the optimism was a vision that progress was not only necessary but inevitable. It had been only forty years since the historian Frederick Jackson Turner articulated what came to be known as the Frontier Thesis: that American institutions had adapted themselves “to the changes of an expanding people— to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life” (2). Although New Deal policies didn’t explicitly invoke the 19th-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny, that earlier assumption of topological transformation continued to shape progressive visions of rural and urban areas.
Oscar Weissbuch’s etching, Old Shed, shows a pre-industrial United States that was rooted in self-sufficiency. At first glance, everything suggests rural squalor and decline. Fallen tree limbs and roughly cut stumps are scattered across the composition; even standing trees seem to be in a state of decay. The shed itself has been constructed of bricks and roughly cut limbs for its roof joists, yet it still looks sturdy and wedged into the side of a hill. Weissbuch’s dense lines in the foreground demand engagement with the materiality of time-present rural America, as distinct from his lightly sketched and idealized valley background. Maybe the passing of an older way of life wasn’t inevitable or even progress.
In comparison, Juan de Felipe’s Hendrik Hudson Bridge represents the push “forward” of modernization and a valorization of New Deal infrastructure. The construction project symbolizes what was happening throughout the United States: it was just one of more than 75,000 bridges, along with 650,000 miles of road, 125,000 public buildings, and 800 airports built between 1935 and 1940 (“Works”). The Roosevelt Administration always was careful to link large development projects to a future world of better jobs, higher standards of living, and civic concord. This extended to cultural programs like the Federal Art Project, with its charge of increasing cultural democracy. De Felipe’s painting literally bridges two sides of a deep river, echoing art accessibility and reinforcing national values during the Great Depression (Mathews). Many artists viewed government sponsorship in a positive way, by seeing their work as an asset to a broader social effort (Rosenzweig).
A comparison of de Felipe’s painting to the actual construction site at roughly the same time, however, shows him softening the blow of brute modernization. He radically compresses the job bridge’s width and the extent of its jobsite; he frames the construction with foliage, water, and friendly looking barges. Works such as those by Weissbuch and de Felipe show a visual dialogue between our conceptions of past and present during the New Deal Era. Rather than presenting modernization as something Americans should fear, they portray it as an extension of values the United States was founded upon: that of implacable progress.
Works Consulted
-- Mathews, Jane De Hart. “Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy.” Journal of American History 62.2 (1975): 316–39. JSTOR. Link
-- Rosenzweig, Roy, and Barbara Melosh. “Government and the Arts: Voices from the New Deal Era.” Journal of American History 77.2 (1990): 596–608. JSTOR. Link
-- Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” 1893. Pages 1-38 in The Frontier in American History (1920). Courtesy Project Gutenberg. Link
-- “Works Progress Administration.” Britannica. 21 Mar. 2026. Link