Word: reliefs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MOST extensive American commitment to the arts ever undertaken, the Federal Arts Project was born in 1935 when Harry Hopkins included it--with separate Theatre, Art, Writing, and Music Projects--in his Works Progress Administration. Hopkins had two goals in mind: relief for unemployed artists and the development of American culture at a time of national depression--psychological as well as economic...
PERHAPS MOST POIGNANT about the Project was one of its original goals, a goal that remained central--providing relief to unemployed performers. Many were aging vaudevillians; the Depression and the emergence of the motion picture industry had killed vaudeville, and its performers were stranded. As one performer described the Theatre Project to a Writers Project interviewer, "I don't know what would have happened without it. After all what can a man of fifty...
...worth considering how a seemingly pedestrian, and certainly non-artistic, purpose--giving unemployed people a job--fit into the results of the Project. Perhaps this explosion of creativity, and the Big Names that came out of it, had something to do with the way the basic need for relief--both in the Project itself and more generally in the nation--tempered artistic self-centeredness, even arrogance, to some extent...
...Viet Nam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders ... As social life becomes more and more warlike and barbaric, personal relations, which ostensibly provide relief from these conditions, take on the character of combat ... a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class ... the Protestant virtues no longer excite enthusiasm ... The happy hooker stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal success...
...having started late, have not been going on long enough to give clear shape to whatever they are finally to be. At first, they could scarcely be recognized except by what they were not. Mainly, they were not the '60s. To an exhausted, convalescent society this was a relief but also disconcerting. It was not easy, even with Jerry Ford in the White House, to begin watching for pratfalls instead of apocalypses. Still, by the time Jimmy Carter tried to whip up a moral crusade for energy conservation, much of the country seemed to have perfected the knack...