My presentation will highlight a selection of posters produced during by the Federal Art Project, an arm of the Works Progress Administration, as part of FDR’s New Deal in America in the 1930s. I will establish the tendency of such works to adopt a range of visual rhetorics associated with a number of European Modernist avant-gardes including Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, and the Russian Avant Garde. Focusing on a small number of examples, my analysis will highlight the manner in which the inclusion of such Modernist rhetorics can be read as attempts to equivocate, subvert, and undermine the ostensibly hegemonic aims of the New Deal projects, with a particular focus on the ideological and political content that such movements often sought to convey through their formal elements, including Fascist, Socialist, and anarchist tendencies.Significantly, in the context of authors such as A. Joan Saab and David Scott, I will examine the paradox which may be seen to arise as a result of such equivocation. Represented by the contention that the inclusion of such ideologically saturated rhetorics noted above, by a diverse group of often unknown artists, can ultimately be seen to reinforce the inherently democratic ideals underlying the production of art in America in the 1930s by emphasising, as a whole, the heterogeneous nature of the United States itself, the democratic nature of such artistic expression, and indeed expression more generally, within its borders.