Back to Work: FDR and Labor's New Deal

December 1, 2012–June 2, 2013
The Wolfsonian–FIU @ 1001 Washington Avenue

In accepting his party’s presidential nomination in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged a “new deal for the American people” to combat the Great Depression. After taking office in March of 1933, Roosevelt experimented with a variety of new programs designed to revive the economy and put millions of unemployed farmers and industrial workers back to work. Illustrated books, pamphlets, periodicals, and other print materials from the era reveal the promise of the New Deal to create jobs, the social realities that such programs were designed to address, and a parallel development of the 1930s: growing influence and militancy of the labor movement, as reflected in the proliferation of strikes.

This library installation was co-organized by Rosita Maria Sosa and Iris Sanchez-Ruiz, Miami-Dade County schoolteachers enrolled in Florida International University’s Teaching American History Master’s degree program, in collaboration with Wolfsonian chief librarian Frank Luca.