The New Deal
Post Office Murals

On one of our cross-country trips we stopped for the night in Wauseon, Ohio, a town about 30 miles east of the Indiana border and just off the Ohio Turnpike. In the twilight we walked around the downtown and passed the post office. It was closed, but the lobby was still open, and on the wall was a painting which had the look of a New Deal mural. One of the great features of the internet is the ability to check on your hunches. 

The mural, entitled “Cooperative Planning and Developing, Wauseon,” was painted by Jack T. Greitzer and was commissioned by the U.S. Treasury

Section of Fine Arts, not to be confused with the W.P.A. program to hire artists. 

Government officials were different back then. When some people questioned the wisdom of paying artists, Works Progress Administration head Harry Hopkins noted that artists “have got to eat just like other people.”

The Post Office murals were commissioned by the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, was created in 1934 to ensure the “embellishment” of government buildings, mainly post offices. Artists competed for the jobs, and local dignitaries usually helped to select the winners.

The program ended in 1943, but by that time 1400 murals had been painted. Some of the murals have been destroyed, but with time has come appreciation.  Now the paintings are highly valued. 

Many of them emphasize local agricultural production or industries.  The the one in Seneca, Kansas, is entitled “Men and Wheat” and shows the harvest. In California “Grape Pickers” by Lew Keller, painted in 1942 ,is located in the St. Helena Post Office. (In the Nineties some local residents hired an artist named John Maxon to produce an echoing work that featured Mexican grape pickers.) The El Viejo post office in Modesto features eight smaller murals with agricultural themes, all done in 1936 by artist Ray Boynton.

I’ve seen the only post office mural painted on slate. It’s in Bangor, Pennsylvania, a town that bills itself “the buckle of the slate belt.”  That mural features scenes of slate production, now an industry no longer viable.

The New Deal was truly a gift to the arts. Farm Security Administration black and white photos documented America from Maine to California. Almost every American is familiar with “Migrant Mother,” photographed in Nipomo, California, by Dorothea Lange. The Federal Writers Project interviewed over 2000 former slaves and provided a valuable history of the horrors of slavery. The American Guide Series written by out of work writers boosted the tourism industry. Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow all received Writers Project paychecks at some point in their careers.

At a time when the arts are under attack, when the Kennedy Center has been taken over by boors, when National Public Radio and Public Television are seen as a waste of money, it is good to be reminded that at one time our government actually supported artists and writers.

You can get a list of all of the locations of all of the post offices that have New Deal murals along with the year the murals were painted and the men and women who painted them. Look up “New Deal Post Office Murals” and check the Wikipedia article.

Here’s a sample. While there is no San Gabriel County, that is the name of the painting done in 1938 by Ray Strong. It is located in the office of the Postmaster in San Gabriel. I love it.

~ Roy Christman