Time & Perspective Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt is doing something sly here: he’s smuggling cultural policy into the language of democracy. By rejecting art as “a treasure in the past” or “an importation from another land,” he’s pushing back against two comfortable evasions Americans have long used to sideline the arts. One is nostalgia, the idea that real culture is already finished and safely embalmed in museums and “great books.” The other is inferiority dressed up as sophistication: art belongs to Europe, to elites, to elsewhere. Roosevelt’s sentence refuses both. Art, he insists, is domestic, contemporary, and collective - “part of the present life” - not a luxury item for peacetime or a garnish for the well-to-do.

The subtext is New Deal muscle. In the 1930s and early 1940s, federal support for artists (murals, theater, writing, music) wasn’t just benevolent patronage; it was an argument about what counts as “work” and who counts as a full participant in national life. Calling artists “living and creating peoples” folds them into the same moral category as farmers, factory workers, and builders. It’s plural, deliberately: not a single canon, not a single accent, not a single “proper” tradition.

Rhetorically, Roosevelt uses negation to clear the ground, then pivots to an expansive definition that makes art sound like infrastructure - a civic utility for the present tense. In wartime and depression alike, that’s a political claim: culture is not what you protect after you’ve saved the nation; it’s one of the ways the nation proves it’s worth saving.