Time & Perspective Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt treats art as a living force rather than a relic. He rejects two habits at once: treating culture as a museum of dead treasures and imagining it as something imported from elsewhere to confer prestige. Art, he argues, belongs to the ongoing, everyday activity of people who make, imagine, and build their world. That stance dignifies the present and democratizes creativity, locating it in streets, schools, workplaces, and public buildings, not only in salons or distant capitals.

The context heightens the claim. Speaking at the 1941 dedication of the National Gallery of Art, Roosevelt was shaping a national vision amid crisis. Europe was at war, the United States was months away from entering it, and the New Deal had already invested in artists through the WPA. Murals in post offices, sculptures in parks, and community theaters were not embellishments but civic infrastructure, intended to nourish morale, identity, and shared purpose. By insisting that art is part of present life, he tied cultural vitality to democratic health, suggesting that a free society shows its strength in its capacity to create.

The phrase living and creating peoples carries two cues. It affirms plurality: many communities, regions, and traditions, not one official style. And it insists on contemporaneity: the measure of a people is not just what it inherits but what it generates now. Museums, in this view, are not vaults but civic forums where past and present meet to energize the public imagination.

Roosevelt also counters cultural deference to Europe that long shaped American taste. He does not deny the value of old masters, but he refuses to define American culture by imitation. The point is not isolation, but confidence: exchange with the world while trusting the creativity rooted in local experience. Art, then, becomes a shared public good, a sign of collective agency, and a reminder that a nation’s spirit is proven not by what it stores but by what it makes.