Los tres grandes indirectly helped shape U.S. cultural policy too.
In 1933, George Biddle, an artist who had spent time with Rivera in Mexico, wrote a letter to his friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had recently been sworn in as president. In it, he told Roosevelt about the ways in which the Mexican government had funded the creation of murals on government buildings as a way of expressing “the social ideas of the Mexican Revolution.”
Roosevelt passed the letter along to the Treasury Department, which launched a public works project in government buildings. This was followed, a year later, by the establishment of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, a program that helped keep thousands of artists employed during the Great Depression, and resulted in the production of thousands of public murals and works of sculpture.