4/17, 7.30 pm: Gray Brechin on The Living New Deal
The Living New Deal: Excavating the Public Landscape of the Depression
In less than a decade, President Franklin Roosevelt’s various public works agencies radically transformed the United States, improving the lives of millions while setting the stage for the post-war economic boom. For the past quarter century, however, the New Deal’s ideological enemies have systematically rolled back and erased the memory of its epochal accomplishments without understanding how it profited them and continues to do so. Dr. Gray Brechin will discuss the Living New Deal Project - a statewide collaborative effort to document and map the physical legacy of the New Deal in California which, he hopes, will provide the foundation for a national inventory and for a discussion of the role of the public sector in a just society. He will also discuss how he believes many of the New Deal public works are a government-sponsored continuation of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and show examples in Berkeley.
Here is some biographical information:
Dr. Gray Brechin grew up in and witnessed firsthand the conversion of California’s Santa Clara Valley from carbon- to silicon-based life forms. That epic transformation required historical amnesia among residents and promoters alike in order to keep the speculative bubble inflating, as well as to deaden the pain that might be occasioned by recalling what Silicon Valley replaced in the course of its triumph. Witnessing that change - along with a 1985 sojourn in Venice - imbued Brechin with a lasting concern for the environmental costs of perpetual and heedless urban growth.
Brechin received a B.A. in geography and history (1971), an M.A. in art history (1976), and a Ph.D. in geography (1999), all from the University of California at Berkeley. Between 1978 and 1992, he worked as an architectural historian, critic, and televsion producer in San Francisco where he continued to develop his ideas on how humans use the earth. In 1978, he co-founded the Mono Lake Committee and in 1984-5 helped to break the story of the poisoned Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley while working at KQED-TV. At that PBS affiliate, Brechin witnessed the commercialization of public broadcasting - a transformation as dramatic in its way as that of the Santa Clara Valley.
Brechin returned to the U.C. Berkeley Geography Department in 1992 to write a dissertation that would use San Francisco as a paradigm to illustrate how great cities use remote control technology and military force to exploit urban hinterlands. Published by the University of California Press in 1999 as Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, the book spent sixteen weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle’s best-seller list; Gary Snyder called it “a great gift” and Jan Morris “one of the very best books I have ever read about a place.” A co-recipient of the 1992 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize given by the Center for Documentary Studies, Brechin simultaneously collaborated with photographer Robert Dawson on a project documenting the declining environmental and social health of California. Also published by the University of California Press in 1999, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream served as the basis of a three-year traveling exhibition of Dawson’s photographs sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities.
Dr. Brechin is currently a visiting scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography and Project Scholar for the Living New Deal Project within the California Historical Society.