American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (38 page)

6. DECLINE AND REVIVAL

T
he Roosevelts made their way back east, stopping to highlight the massive Grand Coulee and Fort Peck dams and to dedicate a WPA bridge in Chicago, and they were back in Washington by the end of the first week in October. From there, the president witnessed the painful drop in the economy. Before it was to bottom out in March 1938, two-thirds of the economic gains achieved since 1933 had been lost. Industrial output fell 40 percent overall, steel production 75 percent, and corporate profits 80 percent. The stock market as reflected by the Dow fell to 99, losing nearly half its value. By then, 4 million Americans who had regained jobs since 1933 had lost them, and the unemployment rate had jumped back up to 19 percent. Harry Hopkins and the other nascent Keynesians had been correct: the unprimed pump was sucking air.

Equally painful to the president was the failure of his legislative package in the special session to which he called the Congress in November. He had summoned it because he wanted a farm bill to replace the struck-down AAA, the industrial wage-and-hours bill that had so far eluded him, the authority to reorganize the executive branch to give him more flexibility in managing the government, and a plan that would create seven regional planning bodies to develop and manage natural resources as the Tennessee Valley Authority was doing in six states in the Southeast. But the revitalized conservatives were in no mood to cooperate, and when the session adjourned in December after five contentious weeks, it had produced literally nothing on Roosevelt’s list.

By the time he delivered his fifth State of the Union address in January 1938, he was no longer talking about balancing the budget in the year ahead. He threw a bone to Morgenthau and the other budget balancers, saying his budget request for fiscal 1939 “will exhibit a further decrease in the deficit.” But he added that while he was “as anxious as any banker or industrialist or business man or investor or economist that the budget of the United States government be brought into balance as quickly as possible,” he would not permit “any needy American who can and is willing to work to starve because the Federal Government does not provide the work.” He hinted that the blame for the shrinking economy lay with businesses that were preventing expansion by withholding investments in new plants. This he interpreted as a politically motivated strike at his economic program. “The selfish suspension of the employment of capital must be ended,” he declared.

In fact, there was blame aplenty for the economic plunge, although if a single word could describe the cause, it was probably
confusion
. True, industry was not investing in new production capacity, but whether this was the work of monopolists and profiteers determined to undermine the reforms of the New Deal, or simply uncertainty over how far those reforms would go, was unclear. “We don’t know,” Lamont du Pont had said in 1937, addressing questions that ranged from the future course of everything from taxation to the advance of unions. Indeed, business was still coming to terms with the new landscape as approved by the Supreme Court: the collective bargaining provisions of the Wagner Act, as well as taxes for Social Security and unemployment compensation. Roosevelt’s attacks on what he termed “economic royalists” and “selfish interests” suggested that more, and more drastic, measures might be in the offing. Now that the Washington State minimum wage had been upheld, his push for a national wage-and-hours law threatened to raise business’s operating costs, and he made it clear at every turn that he would not rest until it passed. The people favored it “by an overwhelming vote,” he had said in the State of the Union address. They wanted “the Congress—
this
Congress” to install a floor beneath wages and a ceiling over hours. In a similar vein, the vast gains in unionization in the auto, steel, and mining industries had contributed to the nervousness with which business viewed its future prospects.

Blame aside, the first months of 1938 recalled the depths of 1933. The relief rolls swelled in hard-hit industrial cities still trying to regain their economic footing. Cleveland exhausted its relief budget in the first week of the year, leaving 65,000 people without emergency food and clothing. Chicago had no money to keep open its nineteen municipal relief stations. Detroit’s rolls of employable relief recipients eligible for WPA jobs jumped a startling 434 percent, and Toledo’s rose 194 percent. St. Louis and Omaha foresaw the end of their relief funds, and Omaha cut back to token payments. Many people were once again forced to scavenge for food, and starvation and suicide crept back into the public consciousness.

Hopkins was watching all this from Palm Beach, where he was recuperating from cancer surgery. He had finally mustered the courage to seek a diagnosis of the eating problems that had plagued him for more than a year. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, had confirmed his worst fears and performed an operation that removed the cancer, together with most of his stomach. Around the first of the year, when he was again able to travel, he had accepted Joe Kennedy’s invitation to convalesce at his winter home.

But although he was absent from Washington, Hopkins was not silent. He resumed his advocacy of deficits to shore up purchasing power, his allies including Marriner Eccles and Leon Henderson, and when Roosevelt invited him to Warm Springs at the end of March he made his case directly to the president. By then, reeling from the business wipeout and the reappearance of staggering human hardship, and looking ahead to the midterm elections in the fall, Roosevelt had heard enough. He passed his decision on to Hopkins on the train back to Washington: budget balancing was off the table and he would ask the Congress for new spending to try to pump up the economy.

On April 14, he sent a $3 billion spending plan to Congress. It would add money to the WPA, CCC, and National Youth Administration and fund new public works, highways, federal buildings, slum clearance, housing, and flood control projects. He also said he was loosening credit by reducing bank reserve requirements. It had been a mistake, he told the people the same night in a fireside chat, to have tried to reduce spending. One week later, the WPA rolls were back above 2.5 million.

Hopkins was soon on the stump again, touting the rebirth of the WPA. The president was monitoring Hopkins’s health personally, having decided that the WPA head was the best choice to succeed him as the Democratic candidate in 1940, and Eleanor had invited him to move into the White House, where Diana had been living since Barbara’s death. Although he was in what for him was fine health following his surgery and long recuperation, to Eleanor, his longtime ally on programs for youth, women, and the unemployed, Hopkins now gave the impression of “being hollow” physically. He had always been thin and slumped, but the operation had increased that sense of concavity; his suits hung even looser and his collars gapped around his scrawny neck. He was also in fine fettle; in a nationwide radio broadcast on May 8, he toted up the agency’s accomplishments: 43,000 miles of new roads and 119,000 miles of road improvements, 19,000 new bridges, 185,000 culverts, 105 new airports, 12,000 new schools and other public buildings, 15,000 small dams, 10,000 miles of water and sewer lines, and more than 10 million trees planted and improvements on millions of acres of land.

“These things constitute national wealth and national assets. Any private business which builds improvements to its physical plant counts these improvements as assets, and considers itself richer because of them. Government alone counts the cost of such improvements on the red side of the ledger,” Hopkins said.

By the end of June, Congress had passed Roosevelt’s new spending plan and the Fair Labor Standards Act. This was his wage-and-hours law at last. It banned the employment of workers under age sixteen in industry and established a forty-hour workweek, a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour (phased in over eight years, after starting at 25 cents an hour), and time and a half for overtime. The night before he signed the law on June 25, Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat in which he said that except perhaps for Social Security, it was “the most far-reaching, the most far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country.” But despite these successes, his opposition was solidifying in Congress. This was a result of the continuing fallout from the court fight and the new vigor of conservatives, so the prospect for further New Deal reforms was dim.

That month, Hopkins released a WPA survey that assessed relief needs since 1933. Its conclusions were based in part on an “unemployment census” that Roosevelt had launched with a fireside chat the previous November, seeking data on the skills and locations of those who were then jobless. Unemployment relief is “not the permanent cure,” the president had said. But as the recession persisted and deepened and Hopkins gained in influence, the administration’s thinking changed. The data now suggested, said Hopkins, that high unemployment “can no longer be regarded as a temporary problem to be treated on an emergency basis.”

The report recommended the establishment of a three-part program that included relief, unemployment insurance, and an ongoing government-sponsored work component. “No single program will eliminate the distress from unemployment,” it stated.

Time
took note of Hopkins’s reemerging profile a month later, in a cover story in its issue of July 18. He had last graced the magazine’s cover during the CWA’s flurry of temporary job creation in the winter of 1934. Now, more than four years later, the WPA was adding 60,000 workers a week. Hopkins’s portrait, this time rendered in color, showed him in a typical pose, his hands cupped around a match as he lit a cigarette, his dark, bulging eyes gleaming. The story noted that he was hard at work in his “plebian” office in the Walker-Johnson Building at a time when most of official Washington was on vacation, and elaborated on his view of the need for a permanent work program, which he had been touting in speeches and on national radio. “This new frontier of idle overhead,” as he described it in a May radio address, meaning jobless workers, idle machines, and unused capital, had cost Americans $200 billion in lost wages since 1929. With 12 or 13 million still unemployed, he said, only the government had the resources to organize all their “resourcefulness, ingenuity and courage” into a program that would “provide a broad base of purchasing power…increasing the stability of the economic system.”

Hopkins was less voluble when it came to his personal life. He told
Time
it was “nobody’s g——d——business” whether he was engaged to thirty-three-year-old Dorothy Donovan Thomas Hale, the widow of artist Gardner Hale, who had died in an automobile crash in 1931. The magazine described her as a “beauteous Pittsburgh-born glamour girl” with homes in Paris and Southampton and a résumé that included a Broadway chorus line. In fact, she and Hopkins were not engaged. And his tongue loosened once again when he was reminded of attacks on the WPA by Representative Hamilton Fish, a New York Republican. Fish had applied to the WPA an often-used damnation of corruption orginally attributed to eighteenth-century Jacksonian Party representative and Senator John Randolph of Virginia, that “like a dead mackerel in the moonlight, it stinks and shines and shines and stinks.”

“They can call names just so often,” Hopkins said. “I know a lot of adjectives myself and I am going to start in pretty soon.”

It was not an idle threat. The WPA was demonstrably not corrupt at the national level. Hopkins still rejected patronage in WPA hiring, and pressuring workers to support a favored candidate was a firing offense. But five years in Washington had inured him to the ways of politics. He knew that politicians would lay claim to WPA votes if they could. He also knew that jobs translated into votes without a lot of prompting, and rolls that increased before elections sent a message. So did pay raises, such as the across-the-board wage hikes that had gone through in Kentucky and Oklahoma after pro–New Deal senators Alben Barkley and Elmer Thomas, who were fighting tough renomination battles, were attacked by opponents who pointed out that WPA workers in neighboring states made more than they did. The primary election season that was now under way before the midterm elections in November found many of the administration’s friends under pressure from the right. Reform remained a part of the Roosevelt agenda, and Hopkins, especially now that he had entered the inner circle, was committed to pursuing that agenda. Between his hopes for a permanent WPA and a new interest in his own electoral possibilities, he was more than ever the politician, ready to do battle with the administration’s enemies.

Meanwhile, the agency continued its resurgence. By late August 1938, the numbers of men and women working for the WPA had surpassed the previous high reached in February 1936, and they continued to climb toward 3.3 million, more than double the 1,435,169 of one year earlier. The agency, as if reflecting the thrust of its own study, was showing undeniable signs of permanence.

7. BUILDING ROADS IN NORTH CAROLINA (JOHNNY MILLS)

N
ow three years old, the WPA had embarked on and completed a wide array of projects. False starts such as the Florida ship canal and the occasional dry lake notwithstanding, there was much to be proud of. The agency had to its credit masterpieces small and large, from Art Project murals and structures built by hand of native stone and wood to the imposing array of art, craft, and architecture that was the Timberline Lodge.

But the largest component of the work program was, as Hopkins had pointed out, road building. WPA crews built and repaired roads and streets in cities, often joining works already under way. In San Francisco, for example, the majestic Golden Gate Bridge had been started with bond financing in 1933, prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration, but before it was completed and opened in May 1937, the WPA had contributed by building one of its approaches. The agency built new roads through remote areas, its workers living in field camps far from home. Its major aim from the beginning had been to improve the more than 2 million miles of dirt and gravel roads that were the main links between farms and market towns. The work, which included clearing right-of-way, digging and clearing drainage ditches, building culverts and small bridges, widening and scraping roads, and often resurfacing them with gravel or crushed stone made on the spot with rocks dug from the roadside, gave paying jobs to many farmers who for a variety of reasons could not force a cash income from their farms. One of these was Johnny Mills.

Mills lived in a one-industry county in the hardscrabble mountains of western North Carolina. That industry was paper, its one plant the Mead Paper Company factory in the Jackson County seat of Sylva. It spewed from its smokestacks a vile mixture that hung over the hills like thick white wool and smelled like rotten eggs. He had gone through the sixth grade in school and done odd jobs since. He met Shirley Shuler at her sister’s wedding party in 1936. He was a ropey five-nine with a head of jet-black hair, she was a brunette with a beautiful smile, and it was not long after the party that they started to talk of getting married. Mills was twenty-one but Shirley was only sixteen, which was why, when the day came—April 17, 1937—they had to drive the forty miles from Sylva across the state line to Clayton, Georgia, to get married. It was no spur-of-the-moment elopement, though. Shirley wore a blue silk dress and Mills a blue serge suit he’d bought for $16 at the Sylva Supply Company; Judge Frank A. Smith, the Clayton County ordinary, read the vows; and Shirley’s mother put on a wedding supper in their honor when they got back home.

They moved in with Shirley’s grandfather, a widower who needed help keeping up his ninety acres in the Willets community north of Sylva, on the way up Balsam Mountain. They ate what the cornfield and the garden and the chickens and hogs and a single milk cow produced; Shirley churned butter, canned vegetables, and preserved fruit, and Johnny continued to pick up the day work that bought the flour and shortening and coffee and sugar and lamp oil that the land could not provide. He hoed corn, he picked apples across the ridge at Barber’s orchard, he went into the woods and felled and hauled the blight-killed chestnut trees that the Mead Paper Company prized for making paper.

“I worked many a day for a dollar,” he said.

But the day work and the land together were not enough to give them a doctor’s care when Shirley got pregnant. As her delivery date in April 1938 approached, Mills needed a regular job, and there was only one prospect: the WPA. From their spot on the mountain, he could walk down to the road to pick up a bus or flag down a southbound train. The bus ride cost 20 cents and so did the train, so his preferred ride to town was one he could hitch for free aboard one of the log trucks hauling wood to “the Mead,” as locals called the paper factory. Sylva was a single long main street of stores crowned by the Jackson County courthouse atop a hill at the west end, with a parallel lower-level street behind the stores that ran alongside the railroad tracks and Scott’s Creek, a tributary of the Tuckaseigee River. The WPA office was on the main street.

Mills made the trip to town with some trepidation. He was a Republican. There were a number of them in the mountains of this southern state, descendants of the pro-Union strain that had survived since the Civil War in the areas of the South where there were no plantations and no slaves. As a Republican, he worried that the WPA would not be open to him. This was the way it worked with state jobs controlled by Democrats. He had seen the evidence the year before, when Roosevelt had passed through Sylva on his way from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Asheville, and the Democrats had shut the schools and county and town offices to line the streets with a show of election-year support. The president had gone straight through without stopping on a warm September day, waving from the open window of the car.

Hopkins himself had confronted this very fear in his first news conference back on the job in Washington after his convalescence. Reporters had greeted him with questions about the relief situation and politics in Pennsylvania, where charges were flying that WPA workers had been told their jobs depended on a certain way of voting.

“These things crop up every year at election time,” Hopkins said wearily. “I have said often before, and I repeat again that I do not care how these people on WPA vote. They can vote for anybody they please, and nobody will lose his job or be penalized in any way because he votes for this man or the other man. Furthermore, if any official of the WPA is found doing any funny business on political fronts…'he will be fired at once, and I do not have to ask anybody about whether I shall fire him or not. I do not intend to tolerate any political interference in the WPA.”

Apparently the Jackson County WPA supervisor, Cary Henson, had taken Hopkins’s words—and frequent memoranda to the same effect—to heart. “He was a good fellow,” said Mills. “He was a Democrat, but he wanted to be fair. He’d lived up in the mountains and he knew how it was. The politics didn’t matter to him.”

Mills was certified and put on a road crew. Like state highway departments across the nation, North Carolina’s had seized on the WPA to improve its road system, specifically those linking farms to market towns. In western North Carolina, as elsewhere, these roads were rarely paved and seldom even graveled; paving was reserved for federal highways and the state roads linking county seats. The rest—again reflecting the country as a whole—were descendants of horse tracks and wagon trails, widened over the years to meet the needs of motor vehicles but still likely to swim with mud during rainy seasons and harden into washboards of red clay when it was dry. Indeed, of the 351 miles of rural and secondary roads in Jackson County, less than half a mile was paved. Road work was not the WPA’s only focus in the county, where it had spent $175,000 through January 1937; the WPA sewing room in Sylva employed about twenty women; and a rich supply of native mica-flecked granite had gone into a school building in the Webster community and a gymnasium on the campus of Western Carolina Teachers College in Cullowhee, where two other WPA buildings were also on the drawing board. Still, here roads were the WPA’s primary work.

Mills began a routine that started at around four in the morning, in the darkness before dawn. He groped his way into his overalls, stumbled into the kitchen, where he lit a kerosene lamp and pulled on his boots, then plunged out the door into the chilly air, his lantern illuminating his path to the barn. Once he had milked the cow, he returned to the house, where Shirley was now up, frying eggs and making biscuits for their breakfast. Then he pulled on a coat, tugged his hat down, and took the lunch she had made—usually a sandwich of fried pork or chicken, more biscuits, and maybe a piece of pie or cake since she would rather bake than cook, all wrapped in wax paper or folded in a piece of flour sacking—and walked the mile down to the highway, where he waited for a state truck that would carry him and the other men on the road crew to the job site.

The day’s work varied with the roads and their condition. Specifications called for widening all roadbeds to twenty feet in anticipation of greater future traffic flow; in the mountains, where the roads often were cut out of steep hillsides, this meant digging away the embankments on the high side to gain width and dumping the dirt onto the low side to stabilize the roadway. “Shovels and wheelbarrows is what we used,” Mills said, “and we cleaned ditches out, and worked like that.”

Where graveling was called for, the men broke rocks and loaded them into trucks, and then unloaded the rocks into portable crushers that would reduce them to gravel. “A road hog crusher, it was called,” he remembered. “We dumped the rock there in that crusher and it come out with a man on either side, spreading that gravel on the road.” They would cover a section of the road and then move to another section and repeat the routine.

Certain levels of disability did not bar a man from working on a road crew, at least in western North Carolina. Shirley’s father, who had lost his left arm to blood poisoning from an infected cut, had learned to hoe a corn row with his right by rigging a metal loop to a leather belt that he wore outside his overalls and fixing the hoe handle in the loop. When Mills was assigned to a crew working on Yellow Mountain near Cashiers, a resort town about twenty miles from Sylva, he found his one-armed father-in-law distributing water from a milk can he carried on his hip to the men who were hauling rocks and spreading gravel.

Unlike the big-city road crews and the crews that worked out of camps assembled from a statewide labor force, Mills knew most of his fellow laborers. “There wasn’t hardly anybody in Jackson County you didn’t know,” he said.

The money he earned from the WPA—he recalled making about $44 a month, the rural rate for unskilled labor—paid for the doctor who attended Shirley when she gave birth. Patricia, their first child, was born without complications at home on April 8, 1938, with Sylva’s Dr. D. D. Hooper in attendance. Mills continued on the WPA for two more years, through the birth of their second child, joining road crews when new projects got the green light and stacking his shovel when they were waiting for approval.

Mills found it strange that some people were ashamed of working for the WPA, and that others criticized men like him as idlers: “When people talked about, you know, leaning on the shovel, well, we did a whole lot of work. And a whole lot of hard work. I guess there was some that thought you was on relief, but I know I was working for money when I was doing that. It wasn’t no different than no other job. You earned the money. You know, it was for the needy people. Good people, they can’t always help hard times, tough luck. I always figured I tried to make a living for my family. And it was a help to us.”