Art and Democracy
I
FOR sixty years our national wealth grew at the rate of 5 per cent per annum; by 1929 we owned 40 per cent of the wealth of the world. Our vast physical frontiers did this for us. We always had some new place to go to; we could skim off the cream in one place and move on to new territory with its wealth of natural resources to be tapped.
Our world was full of romance and action. It was a robust period. Well-being was judged by dollars. We did not cultivate life — we blasted it out. Each new generation had new worlds to conquer. Our so-called pleasures were bought, and the yardstick of our standard of living was the dollars we had to spend.
Now our physical frontiers no longer exist; we have reached the end of that horizon. Are we going to find new horizons and a finer, fuller life? To talk of defeat and curtailment and less abundance is unworthy of this country. The era of easy money may be over, and the rate of growth in our wealth is bound to slow down. We are out of the wilderness period and into the garden period; the time has come to cultivate what we have.
We have more than any other nation — in wealth, in climate, in natural beauty and resources. We have more than enough to build a civilization that is finer than anything that has gone before, and to give our people a higher standard of living, in terms of the things that make living worth while, than any nation has ever had.
To do all this we need idealism, as well as horse sense. We need a better understanding of service and less selfishness. We need a new conception of the common good, and the happiness that comes from serving it. The time has gone by when the few can be happy living on the top of misery. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are being demanded as a right. The way is open, but to gain it we need a new valuation of life and the will to earn it.
I am not fitted, nor have I the desire, to discuss our economic problems. Of one thing I am convinced: any policy based on the theory that we must have a cat-and-dog fight over the bones we already have, and how they should be divided, is fatuous. It would simply provide a feast before the deluge unworthy of everything this country has accomplished.
The inequalities of wealth in America are too great, and a lot of housecleaning must be done; but there is no simple remedy for all our ills. Let us study all these problems and work them out, but let us do so with malice toward none and charity for all, and also with the high faith and knowledge that we have a richer and fuller future ahead than we have ever known before.
II
To do this we have to study what our objectives are, our means of gaining them, how they can best be secured. So I come to my main thesis. In considering our standard of living, too much weight is being given to the money we have to spend and too little weight to what we are getting out of life. You can’t buy the kind of life a human being should aspire to. A nation cannot provide this kind of life for its people by confining its energies to increasing national wealth in terms of dollars.
All over this great country of ours — and I speak whereof I know — there is a longing and soul-striving for something more and finer and better in life than mere material possessions. There is a desire for beauty, a reaction against the ugliness that surrounds us, a wish to fill one’s time with new interests, a hope to find an outlet for the creative spirit. Every human being has latent in him the wish to be a writer or a painter or a musician or a craftsman. No one remembers the money makers of the world, but the world remembers the leaders of thought, the creators of beauty and of things of the spirit. Here we have a vast field of new wealth in which to develop a true standard of living, of well-being and happiness and contentment.
Under existing conditions the pioneers who can open this frontier to us are being starved to death. The world has no place for them. They can open new mines of untold wealth in terms of the things that make life worth living, and they are told they are not wanted. The hand that can paint a lovely picture, that can soothe and awaken the spirit with music, that can embellish our homes with fine craftsmanship, is given a shovel and told to dig a ditch to keep body and soul together. The mind that can create a poem, or be a leader of thinking, or delve in new worlds of knowledge, is asked to be a timekeeper to the ditch diggers in order to feed a family. The creative impulse, the skill to produce, cannot grow among these thorns. It must be cultivated and helped.
Study the history of the great artistic movements of the world. These movements have produced about all there is in the world that has stood the test of time. Nations may come and go, but those nations which have not produced spiritually in art and literature have left the world no richer.
No great artistic or spiritual movement has ever developed without a patron. The patron is a most necessary element. I believe that there is innate in the soul of man at all times the wish, the longing, the ability to develop the richness of the spirit and the beauty of life. It is always there to burst forth if it has an opportunity. In the past the patrons of art and culture have been first the Church, and secondly the great and near great. The Church extended patronage when the Church and the State were one — that is, when the Church could tap the resources of the State to pay for it. The great did it when they could say, ‘I am the State.’ Both did it from an essentially personal motive — the Church to glorify its doctrines, and the great to glorify themselves. In spite of the element of self-glorification, these patrons caused to be produced for their countries works of art that have had an incalculable effect on the lives of the people of their time.
We have had a beginning of an art patronage in this country. It was a patronage by the rich. (I am always interested to see the irresistible impulse that develops in the minds of so many rich people to use the wealth they have accumulated for social good and artistic development.) It was in a very real sense a voluntary share-the-wealth movement. We can no longer look to this source of development, however. Of necessity this patronage must come out of surplus wealth and income, and the State, through income and inheritance taxes, is transferring this surplus to itself. I have no criticism of these taxes in principle, though I think inequalities exist in their administration, but the fact remains that the State has to a large extent withdrawn this patronage and substituted nothing, or next to nothing, in its place.
III
The government has now made a start — not a very big one, but a start; and for the first time, to my knowledge, an administration has shown a genuine interest in and sympathy with the artistic life of the country. The start was made a year and a half ago. Four one-hundredths of one per cent of the money appropriated by the government for public works was used to employ a group of artists of this country at a small weekly wage to decorate public buildings with painting and sculpture. The experiment lasted only four and a half months, but it did quite amazing things. Six hundred men and women in this country who were leaders in art gave practically all of their time to direct it, and some thirty-five hundred artists were employed for shorter or longer periods carrying on the work.
Space does not permit me to enlarge on what this movement did for these artists. It not only helped them in their dire need for the necessities of life, but morally and spiritually helped them enormously in making them feel that they had a place in the body politic and had something to give which their government wanted. The most significant thing this project accomplished was to prove that there was a longing for beauty throughout the country. That small expenditure paid vast dividends in contentment and happiness.
On October 16, 1934, the Secretary of the Treasury by executive order set up the Painting and Sculpture Section in the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department to have charge of the decoration of the federal buildings erected by the Division. The plan of operation provides a splendid long-range programme for securing for our public buildings the best art which this country is capable of producing, and stimulating its painters and sculptors. As the Section develops, I think it will become apparent what an important influence it will have on the artistic development of the nation. Of necessity, however, its scope is limited, and to meet the tragic conditions that face the artists of the country at this time its work should be supplemented.
Congress has recently passed a relief measure appropriating $4,880,000,000 to provide work relief, and ‘ to increase employment by providing for useful projects.’ Of this sum, $300,000,000, or about 6 per cent, is set aside for ‘assistance for educational, professional, and clerical persons.’ This little sentence has in it the germs of a vast accomplishment for the enrichment of the life of our people.
A small percentage of this sum, set aside as ‘a project or projects to develop the artistic and cultural life of the people,’ could accomplish amazing things. It is a logical development of the interest already shown by the government and may easily be the means of carrying on a movement which will give this country its real immortality. We should not consider this expenditure as merely a relief to the needy, but, in the wording of the bill, as an opportunity to increase employment by providing a useful project, a chance to give to our people art and beauty and new fields for wealth as measured by a real standard of living. Could any project be more useful? To-day we are the only great power I know of on the face of the earth that has not a branch of its government devoted to art and literature. The opportunity has come to us, through this appropriation, to take the lead in this movement. I, for one, hope it will be carried out, not on the old basis of the aggrandizement of the great or near great, but on the basis of a patronage befitting a republic where the objective will be to give to all the people new beauty, new interests, new pleasures, and a happier, richer life.
What we need is not official and pompous art, but the fostering and cultivation throughout the country of the creative spirit which is ready to spring up everywhere. What we need is not relief dependent on a pauper’s oath, but a friendly and helping hand to the men and women of this country who can create this new frontier of beauty and spiritual uplift for us. Those men and women of our country who have so much to give and ask for so little in return should be relieved from the tragic necessity of providing the bare necessities of life; they should be stimulated to create their best by the knowledge that what they have to give is wanted by their government, and that they are looked upon as an asset rather than a liability to the State.
To carry out this movement we should mobilize all the best we have in this country to guide and encourage it. Our objective should be to enrich the lives of all our people by making things of the spirit, the creation of beauty, part of their daily experience; by giving them new hopes and sources of interest to fill their leisure; by eradicating the ugliness of their surroundings; by building with a sense of beauty as well as mere utility; and by fostering all the simple pleasures of life which are not important in terms of dollars spent, but are immensely important in terms of a higher standard of living. Let us move forward with the firm belief that we have new frontiers and the means to develop them, and that through their development we can make this country of ours a better and happier place in which to live.