Defending Utopia: The Greenbelt News Review at 80

Defending Utopia: The Greenbelt News Review at 80 tells the story of a courageous home town newspaper and the battles it fought on behalf of its citizens.
In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal planners launched an extraordinary home-building experiment in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
Greenbelt, Maryland was the most controversial of three suburban “green towns” designed to relieve Depression-era housing shortages. Residents were selected for their willingness to create a healthy, happy and harmonious community.
But critics charged that the “utopian” green towns project was foolishly idealistic, wasted taxpayer dollars and tat Greenbelt’s many non-profit cooperatives were dangerously socialistic, if not communistic.
Since 1937, though, a volunteer-run weekly newspaper has defended a city Eleanor Roosevelt called “the first garden community in the land, planned for the uplift and unfolding of the human.” And in a 1970 libel case before the Supreme Court, the Greenbelt News Review fought to protect for all newspapers the First Amendment freedoms critical to American democracy.
The March Reel and Meal program is presented by the Utopia Film Festival. For more information on this month’s program contact Susan Barnett at 301 474 7465 or Frank Gervasi at 301 474 7680.
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