Illustrations

In 1933 and 1934, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), commissioned approximately 3,700 artists to produce over 15,000 paintings, murals, prints, crafts and sculptures for government buildings across the United States. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, battling unemployment during the Great Depression, wanted the art to be “native, human, eager and alive—all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things they know and look at often and have touched and loved.”

Douglass Crockwell was chosen to paint three Post Office murals.