While living in New York City in the 1920s, Thomas Hart Benton had been seeking an opportunity to paint a large-scale mural and found his opportunity in 1930 for the New School's flagship building designed by Austrian architect Joseph Urban. At the time, wall space being more valuable than monetary compensation to Benton, he told New School president Alvin Johnson, “I’ll paint you a picture in tempera if you finance the eggs.” A sweeping, cinematic narrative of American life, the epic ten-panelled mural cycle installed in the boardroom, depicts scenes of industry, labor and leisure from city street to farmland. The "America Today" murals cemented Benton's career and began an art movement known as Regionalism. The Depression years polarized public opinion and Benton’s murals, initally lauded for their authentic, gritty portrayal of American life, were later criticized for their naïveté and anti-intellectualism.

Benton returned to the New School several times to repair the murals. His last visit was in 1968. In 1982, the murals’ need for protection and conservation and their value as a source of much-needed revenue prompted the New School to sell the cycle to the Maurice Segoura Gallery, requiring that the panels be kept together. After searching for a local buyer for two years, the gallery indicated that they might need to separate the panels. The New School intervened and the situation attracted the support of Mayor Ed Koch, who campaigned to keep the murals in New York.

In 1984, the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States (now AXA) bought "America Today" and displayed the murals in their new corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan. In 2012, AXA donated "America Today" to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which celebrated the acquisition with a major 2014-2015 exhibition, "Thomas Hart Benton's 'America Today' Murals Rediscovered." As presented in the Met's exhibition, critical consensus now ranks "America Today" among Benton's most renowned works and as one of the most significant accomplishments in American art of the period.

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Benton, Thomas Hart. “An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography.” Kansas Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 2 (Spring 1969).

Griffey, Randall R., Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Stephanie L. Herdrich, Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015, 9.

Braun, Emily, and Thomas Branchick. Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals. New York: The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S., 1985, 25.