In 1927 alone there were a number of significant achievements in technology, including
"radio-telephone service between New York and London, San Francisco and Manila; the
development of the first national radio network; the opening of the Holland Tunnel,
the first underwater vehicular tunnel in the world; the introduction of talking films;
[and] the production of Henry Ford's fifteen-millionth automobile."
For the first time, these technological advancements connected massive numbers of people across the country.
Suddenly people were seeing the same images, listening to the same radio programs, purchasing
mass-produced national newspapers and magazines, and communicating cross-country via the telephone.
This was also a period of great movement through the travel and
displacement that resulted from the economic crisis, wide distribution of the automobile,
and an improved transportation infrastructure. Large billboards advertised the "American Way of Life"
with images of happy families in new cars, vacationing in America. These advertisements were only part
of a larger movement in the visual arts. Art was becoming accessible to more
people through all of the aforementioned technological advancements, advertising, and
federal funding for the arts.
Before the U.S. government starting funding the arts, a group of influential, federally funded, Mexican artists called los tres grandes brought the Mexican search for identity to the Mexican public walls in
"the first important mural movement that originated outside of Europe".
In the early nineteen thirties, the most famous of these artists, Diego Rivera,
provided American intellectuals with a symbolic and physical representation of the two sides
of the American debate regarding the cost of progress.
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