SYNOPSIS

With the failure of President Hoover’s policies at the end of 1929, marked by the stock market crash on October 24, 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the decade that began with the dream of endless progress and prosperity came to an end with millions unemployed. American industrial workers who had lost their jobs lined up in the streets for a bowl of soup and hunk of bread. Depression, new technology and foreclosure by the banks drove more than half the American farmers to bankruptcy. By 1932 something had to change and the newly elected President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the New Deal to put America back to work. The Works Project Administration (WPA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) were formed to carry out this plan.

The Washington Post
– Sandy Rovner

“A dazzling and moving portrait of a period that deserves its place in the sun.”

The New York Times
– John J. O’Connor

“[A] warm look back at W.P.A. and the arts…This is not a dispassionate treatise. Introduced by Studs Terkel and narrated by Orson Welles, it is a celebration of an experiment that ended only, as Mr. Terkel sees it, ”when the primitives, the Neanderthals, took over.”

The New York Times
– Jennifer Dunning

““I think one of the horrors of our society – American society – is this break with the past, this lack of continuity. Young people know nothing of the past. For that matter, even people who lived through the past have forgotten. And I think the New Deal and its arts projects are a case in point. It’s as though they never existed. Not even in the history books. Not even in the memories of people” — Studs Terkel.”