Jane Addams with Hull House children (ca. 1930)
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were not just an unprecedented effort to extricate the U.S. from the Great Depression but a concerted effort to use government to create healthier individuals and society in the process. Many of the leading New Dealers including Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt had worked in settlement houses earlier in the 20th century which were themselves inspired by the moral suasion of John Ruskin. Settlement houses were closely connected to the Arts & Crafts Movement as seen in the Mary Ward House in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood.
Dr. Gray Brechin is the founder and Project Scholar the Living New Deal based at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography, a nationwide network dedicated to the identification, mapping, and interpretation of public works built during the Roosevelt Administration. An architectural historian and historical geographer, he is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin and, with photographer Robert Dawson, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream. He and his husband Bob Chlebowski live in Inverness, California, but his heart is often in Wales.