It’s all around you, but you don’t see it. You use it every day, but don’t know it. And it very well may have saved your own family seventy years ago when your grandparents’ hands joined millions of others to build it.

It’s the public landscape of the New Deal — an invisible matrix of public schools, hospitals, parks, roads, sewers, airports, amphitheaters, bridges, golf courses, aqueducts, power stations, city halls, art works and more, constructed by a half dozen federal agencies. They were created by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to lift the country out of Depression, and we have been enjoying and prospering from that legacy ever since.

The Living New Deal Project (orginally, the New Deal Legacy Project, NDLP) is a growing collaborative team documenting the cumulative impact of the WPA, CCC, PWA, CWA, FSA, and other New Deal programs on the Golden State. Writer Gray Brechin and photographer Robert Dawson began the Project in the fall of 2003 under the auspices of the California Historical Society with a seed grant from the Columbia Foundation. They soon discovered that the New Deal legacy is so vast and poorly documented that it required others to help harvest information not neatly contained in federal archives. Former State Librarian Kevin Starr has likened the Project to a WPA project from the 1930s in its ambition and scope. In the process of revealing what the New Deal accomplished and left us, we hope to demonstrate the necessary and enriching role of the public domain in a healthy democracy, as well as to honor the forgotten veterans of our peacetime army as we honor those of wartime.

Such an ambitious inventory has never before been attempted. The Living New Deal Project is using the Internet to enlist the aid of teachers, students, librarians, historians, and others throughout the State to engage in a collective act of discovery that will serve as a model for a national inventory.

The Project will culminate in a multimedia presentation of its findings to coincide with the 75th anniversary of President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of March 4, 1933. The 2008 rollout will include:

• A book richly illustrated with archival and contemporary photographs encapsulating the findings of the Project.
• A searchable online database will enable visitors to discover what the New Deal did for their communities and to serve as an electronic guidebook to projects throughout California.
•Maps prepared by GreenInfo and others will show spatially the extent and variety of New Deal projects.
• A website will explain the Project and serve as an Internet-based resource for New Deal studies.
• A major museum exhibition will feature historic photographs and those by Robert Dawson, along with text panels and an introductory video.
• The California Exhibition Resources Alliance will sponsor a traveling exhibition for small, community-based museums and cultural institutions.
• Oral histories will be collected from those who participated in New Deal projects.
• Public programs including lectures, tours, and specially designed forums will enable scholars to discuss the New Deal’s goals and legacy with audiences and to elicit the memories of New Deal veterans.

Please join us!