HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

President Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. The epochal Hundred Days of activist legislation which followed not only fought the terror and desperation engendered by the Great Depression, but began to weave the social safety net and physical infrastructure that Americans have come to take for granted.

Geographer and 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 in California is so vast and poorly documented that it required others to help harvest information not neatly contained in federal archives. Since then, the Project team has grown in numbers and ambition and, in 2007, the Institute for Research in Labor and Employment Library and the California Studies Center at U.C. Berkeley partnered to host the Project website.
Former State Librarian Kevin Starr likened the California’s Living New Deal 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. We also wish to honor the forgotten veterans of our peacetime armies, as we do those of wartime.