During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the prevailing aesthetic views among artists in the United States were shaped by the harsh economic realities of the period, when millions of Americans found themselves unemployed or dispossessed. Not surprisingly, most artists of this period chose to work in socially oriented styles. However, while the Regionalists – led by Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry – embraced a rightist, isolationist ideology, recoiling from the present and seeking to recapture in their paintings America's agrarian past, the Social Realists – among them William Gropper and Ben Shahn – depicted the condition of workers engaged in a class struggle. Both groups built upon earlier traditions in American painting that now assumed a new urgency.