Sign In

- Or use -
Forgot Password Create Account
The item illustrated and described below is sold, but we have another example in stock. To view the example which is currently being offered for sale, click the "View Details" button below.
Description

If Calvin Coolidge Could Be Brought Back To Life To View This Vast New Superstructure of Government He Would Probably Think Himself on Mars.

Fascinating image intended to illustrate the flow of money spent by the Federal Government during the New Deal, with explanatory text at the left and an explanation of the Federal Budge for 1935 -- Anno II of the New Deal -- on the verso.

The message reflects that vitriolic disapproval of Henry Luce and his publishing empire against the New Deal.  In the introductory text on the verso, the author notes:

The prophets of doom are busy, and some of them have gone so far as to set the date for the end of the world. The end of the world will come some time during the opening weeks of January.  That will be when the President of the U.S. goes before Congress to deliver his budget message for the year known as Fiscal 1936.  In the figures that his message will contain, whatever they are, the prophets of doom will see fresh evidence that the federal government is engaged in a "spending orgy" that is leading us remorselessly on to complete financial ruin.   

As noted by P.J. Mode:

This is one of two allegorical maps illustrating articles on New Deal spending and taxes that appeared in Fortune Magazine in consecutive months. This map . . . shows the "Financial Irrigation of the United States By Funds Appropriated for Emergency Use Under the New Deal." Money from taxes and the sale of government securities at the top flows into the U.S. Treasury and "reservoirs" for the Public Works Administration and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and from there through a series of overlapping pipes to dozens of new government agencies. Some agencies are "irrigated" from all three sources, others from only one or two. The explanation of the map emphasizes that "There is no specific limit to the amount by which the funds [for the PWA and RFC] could be increased." . . .

Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune, was sharply critical of the New Deal, and personally hostile to Roosevelt. After the President's death, he remarked that it was "my duty to go on hating him." Brinkley 2010, 193.

LeRoy H. Appleton was a popular American graphic designer. In his later career, as an illustrator he was also co-author of a book American Indian Design and Decoration, still reprinted today.