LaborArt: Touching Workers at FDR Memorial

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
The FDR Memorial includes images of workers, but they’re easy to miss. While tourists – especially school kids – love to take pictures of each other on George Segal’s "The Breadline," few give more than passing glance to Robert Graham's bas-relief sculpture nearby. Barely visible to the eye, images slightly protrude from the weathered surfaces of six-foot-square panels and half a dozen columns. “They are the faces of a distant, desperate time. A time of withered farms and shuttered factories, of shuffling bread lines and plaintive street corners,” wrote Washington Post staff writer Susan Levine when the Memorial opened in 1997. “Captured in bronze, their expressions reveal both their plight and their resolve. They are the faces that Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped put back to work.” The sculpture is called "Social Programs" and pays tribute to the “alphabet soup of agencies that Roosevelt created to give people jobs and help pull the country out of the Great Depression,” Levine wrote. “There was the CCC, the FERA, the FTP, the TVA, the NRC and many more. Indeed, the middle panel is a gallery in its own right with 36 framed scenes that show people working: a woman cleaning a factory grinding machine, a construction worker catching rivets, a dam laborer carrying a drill on his shoulder.” Unlike most sculpture, which often comes with a stern “Do Not Touch” sign, Graham wanted people to touch his work. The captions are in Braille, but Graham told the Post that he hoped the tactile and familiar images would “invite people to feel the faces, the hollows, the bumps. I hope that people do that. That's the kind of thing that makes a monument your own.”
- report/photos by Chris Garlock. Got LaborArt? Email us at streetheat@dclaborarchives.org