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To celebrate October and the spooky season, we wanted to highlight an item that has our staff divided on whether it is scary or endearing. That item is… our marionette puppet of Benjamin Franklin, created as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Museum Extension Project.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a program created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to create jobs for out of work Americans. These government-funded jobs were part of the Second New Deal effort to improve America’s infrastructure and boost workers’ morale. In addition to manual labor jobs, the WPA provided jobs in fields like theater, writing, and painting that kept the arts alive during a difficult economic period (Britannica).

Additionally, the WPA created – along with the Federal Theater Project and Federal Writers’ Project – the Museum Extension Project (MEP), which aimed to produce materials to help students “visualize” what they were being taught. The goal of the project was to employ artists, sculptors, and writers to make historical and educational objects that were often specific to local history and art. The MEP was one of the most successful and least controversial WPA projects, as it put “visual culture” into schools and in the minds of schoolchildren. Illustrations, dioramas, architectural models, marionettes, and hand puppets were all produced to connect public education with local historical and creative institutions (Miner).

The Benjamin Franklin marionette puppet housed at SCRC was produced as part of Pennsylvania’s Museum Extension Project, highlighting the founding father who made his home in PA. The Franklin puppet functions as both a marionette and a hand puppet; it has a cloth pocket attached to the back of its body and strings that control its hands and legs. While we don’t know the specific show or lesson associated with this puppet, we speculate that it was used in teaching about the life of Franklin. In addition to the puppet, we have small pieces of furniture – including a candle stand, schoolmaster desk, table, and two long benches – which may have served as scenery or objects for the puppet to interact with. We believe its removable cap is intended to represent an older Franklin, after he had lost much of his hair.

Interactive, visual teaching tools like these were innovative for the 1930s. Access to museums was limited for many Pennsylvania schools, so the Museums Extension Project worked to bridge gaps between resources and educational need. Marionettes like this one offered accessible, imaginative, and engaging education on history, hygiene, safety, and eating well that allowed young students to experience history and art in ways that they otherwise would not have been able to (Miner).