Hands Across America

In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought his trusted welfare administrator Harry Hopkins to Washington, D.C., to oversee the government’s newly created work-relief programs. As one of his first tasks, Hopkins launched what amounted to a PR campaign for the New Deal by commissioning films highlighting government efforts to help revitalize the diminished U.S. economy. Hopkins enlisted Ralph Steiner, a New York-based filmmaker and photographer, to produce one of these films. Steiner’s subject: the hands of the common worker.

Steiner was an experimental filmmaker without Hollywood ambitions. His first film, H20 (1929), was a plotless, 13-minute silent film comprising close-up images of rainfall and ocean waves. (Today it is included in Congress’s National Film Registry for its “striking visual effects.”) Although Steiner made much of his living doing advertising photography for mainstream outlets such as Ladies’ Home Journal, his political sympathies and professional experience were aligned with the mission of the WPA. He was a member of the progressive Workers Film and Photo League in New York, which made newsreels about the labor movement, and a founder of Nykino, a group of filmmakers that mixed dramatized scenes into its leftist documentaries. While these groups’ works sometimes found their way into mainstream theaters, they were often shown independently at union meetings and other gatherings.

Hopkins’s instructions to Steiner were simple: make a film to boost people’s faith in the US economy. The resulting four minute film, Hands, was an artfully composed advertisement for the government’s new relief efforts. Eventually, after the Works Progress Administration was formally created in 1935, Hands would be promoted as showing the benefits of the New Deal. Like H20, it was made up of a series of close-ups: hands carrying out a variety of tasks such as shaking a thermometer, tying a shoe, tossing out chicken feed, or operating machinery. Multiple shots focus tightly on checks from the Department of the Treasury—a sight familiar to workers on the relief payroll.

Meanwhile, another New Deal organization, the Resettlement Administration—which, in 1937, would become the Farm Security Administration, deploying photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document rural suffering—was getting into the documentary-film business. Two years after shooting Hands, Steiner was hired as a cinematographer on the film The Plow that Broke the Plains, a documentary which chronicled the ravages of the Dust Bowl.

Accompanied by poetic narration and a score by composer Virgil Thomson, the 25-minute film garnered support from film critics while ruffling feathers in Hollywood. Studio executives complained that the government-funded film was propaganda and had no place in movie theaters; major distributors also refused to pick up the documentary. In a May 24, 1936, article, the New York Times scolded Hollywood for “turning its manicured thumb down” at such a “compelling, dramatically vital, photographically exceptional” film. “If the government can make pictures like this, as artistic, as interesting, as emotionally effective, I can see why private enterprise should be worried,” chimed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Eventually, the critical acclaim and audiences’ curiosity won out; even without a major distributor, the film ended up showing in around 3,000 theaters.

The Plow That Broke the Plains was Steiner’s last work for the WPA, and it is his cinematography for that film that is often remembered before his work on Hands. But Hands is remarkable not just as an example of early New Deal film efforts, but for its lyrical, experimental nature. “I never do fancy-shmancy cutting,” Steiner said in a 1973 address at his alma mater, Dartmouth. “I’ve had criticism from filmmakers saying that my films are ‘boring’ … and that as education I’ll bore the hell out of little kids who are trained by TV to get ideas fast.” He implored the assembled graduates to slow down: “Lie down and let the clouds float over you and enjoy the world. My God, you’re all going to be dead so soon!”