the story

Ben Shahn was commissioned to create a mural for the community center in Jersey Homesteads, New Jersey in 1936. He finished it in 1938, making it his first completed mural. Jersey Homesteads was a planned community, originally created for Jewish garment workers. It was sponsored by the Resettlement Administration, one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Although in a sense it was a failed experiment (the cooperative factory and farms never worked out), the town still exists today. The government sold off the box-like houses (actually designed by Bauhaus architects), and Ben Shahn and his family were among the first private owners. In 1945 the townspeople voted to rename the town Roosevelt in honor of the late president. The community center is now the Roosevelt Public School, and the mural continues to tell the story of the town’s founding to each new generation of schoolchildren.

The story reads from left to right, with immigrants arriving through Ellis Island on the left, workers organizing through unions for better working conditions in the middle, and an idyllic planned community represented on the right. Art historian Diana Linden has suggested that Shahn used the structure of the Jewish sacred text, the Haggadah: from slavery (the oppressive conditions in Europe for Jews); through deliverance (liberation through coming to America and the labor movement); to redemption (offered by the New Deal, unions, and the town of Jersey Homesteads).