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project was no more than a liberal gesture, employing a select few, and ignoring the dire distress of the great majority of American artists.
But that move of the liberal New Deal Government awakened artists to the realization that they had every right to go to the Government when all other resources and prospects had been exhausted, to demand support for their continued functioning as creative workers.
Artists at last discovered that, like other workers, they could only protect their basic interests through powerful organizations. The great mass of artists left out of the project found it possible to win demands from the administration only by joint and militant demonstrations. Their efforts led naturally to the building of the Artists' Union.
The relatively greater scope of the present art projects is due, in large measure, to the militant stand of the various artists' unions, on behalf of all unemployed artists. 
The unions have also gone a long way toward showing that the best American art cannot be developed by merely encouraging a hand-picked few.
Their insistence on a democratic extension of Government support to young and unknown artists has brought out a vast variety of talent completely ignored by private patronage and commercial galleries. For the young generation of American artists there is no visible hope except continuation and expansion of Government art projects. 
Growing economic insecurity cannot be ignored by even the most firmly established American artists, those who contribute regularly to the big museum exhibitions .Now they are organizing to gain at least a minimum compensation for their important contributions through the loan of contemporary art to museums. They are requesting that the museums pay a small rental fee for the use of their work. 
The hostility of most museum officials, and their boards of trustees, to the proposals of the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers is indicative of their indifference to the needs of artists. 
In the struggle around the rental policy, the American Society has found its campaign can only be advanced through the active cooperation of other artists' societies and the Artists' Union. Here is a concrete instance of how great numbers of American artists are drawing together on an ever widening front for mutual support against exploitation 
But we can give no adequate picture of the extreme urgency for concerted group action of all progressive American artists, an urgency which is tangibly demonstrated by the gathering of representative artists from all sections of the United States, from Mexico, Cuba and even South America, here in this Congress, unless we portray realistically the possibilities contained actually within the situation in the United States and throughout the world today.
The increasingly open drive of arch reactionaries like William Randolph Hearst and the American Liberty League to promote so-called recovery at the expense of the living standards and freedom of expression of the great masses of American people is a direct menace to the whole body of American artists. 
It is Hearst's Daily Mirror That launches the most vicious attack against
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the artists on Government projects, calling them "Hobohemian chiselers" and "ingrates ready to bite the hand that feeds them."
It is probably no accident that a prominent art critic, associated with the Hearst press, writes of his disgust with the work produced on the projects. He advises the young artists to disperse, return home, admit they were not intended to be artists, and take up pursuits more suited to their abilities.
Hearst, today the spearhead of the sharpest attacks upon intellectual free-dom in this country, focuses his drive against the artists at just that point where they have made their only real advance toward economic security, namely, the Government projects. 
This attack is part of a general drive by powerful vested interests to perpetuate exploitation by smashing the efforts of the underprivileged Ameri-can masses to gain security and a decent living standard. The goal of intrenched interests is a regime founded on suppression of all those liberties which Americans fought to establish and are today struggling to maintain. This goal is shrewdly screened with such slogans as "Back to the Constitution" and "Save America for Democracy," and hypocritical appeal to Americanism and love of country.
The examples of the so-called national resurgence that were accompanied by the most brutal destruction of the economic and cultural standards of the masses of people in Italy and Germany through the introduction of Fascism should warn us of the real threats that lie behind the rabidly nation-alistic movements in this country. 
There is a real danger of Fascism in America.
How Fascism is plunging headlong toward a devastating new World War is evident to every reader of the daily press. Fascists have no other solution for the crying needs of their people than an outburst of war. 
To carry out their program of death and destruction they would enlist the services of even the artists. Here is how Mussolini employs an artist, F.T Marinetti.
"We, Futurist poets and artists," Marinetti says, "have recognized for 27 years that war is the only world hygiene. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, as the heavy tank. It creates the flying geometries of the aeroplane, the spiral smoke of burning villages. War is beautiful because it serves the greatness of great Fascist Italy."
That is the way a Fascist artist speaks.
The talents of many American artists were employed to whip up the war psychology essential to win over the mass of Americans to support participation of the United States in the last World War.
It is because artists do not want their creative talents perverted and used to mask a barbaric war that they have signed the Call for an American Artists' Congress and come together here to show their solidarity. And this struggle against war cannot be divorced from the struggle against every manifestation of war-mongering reaction.
The members of this Congress who have come together to discuss their problems in the light of the pressing social issues of the day are representative
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