Sounds of the New Deal

From 1933 until the onset of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed to reverse the economic downturn of the Great Depression through work programs administered by the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA). While these programs failed to end the Depression, they left a colorful history of early progressive experiments in a mixed economy. Of particular note here are the New Deal’s efforts to create work for unemployed artists, writers, poets, moviemakers, and musicians. Peter Gough’s book traces the origins and development of the Federal Music Project (FMP), one of the least studied of the New Deal’s cultural agencies. Through thorough research, Gough has learned that the FMP and its 16,000 employees were in large part locally controlled and representative of a diverse group of Americans. The FMP’s many “cross-cultural presentations most often found origin as grassroots ventures” (p. 196). Sounds of the New Deal is a revised doctoral dissertation Gough wrote at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The sources are impressive. Gough has scoured relevant published secondary literature, dissertations and theses, WPA administrative records, local records, sound recordings, and oral histories. The latter include his own interviews with Pete Seeger, whose father, Charles, worked for the FMP and whose younger sister wrote the foreword to this book.

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