One Third of a Nation, 1935.

During years of the Roosevelt New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined a number of phrases that have become part of the nation’s common speech. One was the caution that our country had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Another, typified by these two photographs by Arnold Eagle, was that one-third of our nation was “ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-fed..” “One Third of a Nation” was also the title of one of the Federal Theater Project’s Living Newspaper productions, which brought theater into communities where it had never been seen before.

Photograph by Arnold Eagle.

See this image in the Portraits of Labor exhibit.

Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City.