Make Cotton Great Again: The Racial Fabric of New Deal Art in the Southern U.S.

During the Great Depression, federal arts programs provided relief employment for artists and decorated thousands of public buildings nationwide. Of the 140-odd murals and sculptures created under the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934-43) that incorporate black and white subjects within the same commission, nearly two-thirds crop up in former Confederate states and of these, roughly half depict the cotton industry. The striking prominence of African Americans in these cottonscapes is doubly surprising: first, because they defied the prevailing whiteness of Southern sharecroppers in visual culture like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and second, because they proliferated during the precipitous downturn of an industry ravaged by deleterious disinvestment in infrastructure, the boll weevil, international competition, and overproduction. Rather than document present-day agricultural conditions, then, these utopian agrarian tableaux primarily function to belie and compensate for economic decline and challenges to systems of white supremacy. Practically all of these southern scenes envision sharply hierarchical mixed-race vignettes, in which generic African Americans appear servile, orderly, and yet always content in their subordination. Artists hailing from the beyond the region quickly discovered that their multiracial compositions often ran afoul of local sentiment. When community member complaints made their way to federal administrators, muralists were obliged to domesticate black bodies and augment visual racial hierarchies. Despite this, a handful of leftist artists were able to circumvent repeated pressure from local residents and federal administrators alike to include more egalitarian mixed-race workplaces and to produce more dignified portrayals of black sharecroppers.