American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (46 page)

9. THE DEATH OF THE THEATER

D
ies and his committee had bloodied the Federal Theatre Project, but the coup de grâce was still to be applied, and the dagger lay in the hand of Representative Clifton A. Woodrum. Woodrum, a conservative Virginia Democrat who chaired the House Appropriations Committee, held the purse strings. He had the potential to do just as much if not more damage than Dies, and he announced his intention to do just that. It was time, he announced, “to get the government out of the theater business.” His vehicle was an Appropriations subcommittee that he also chaired. Its charge was to investigate relief spending, a sweeping mandate that allowed the chairman free rein.

Hallie Flanagan was optimistic at first. Here at last, she believed, was an opportunity “to have a real investigation with findings made public.” She wrote Woodrum to that effect but his response was the same as that of Dies: she heard nothing.

In fact, Woodrum recycled the Dies Committee’s collection of suspect witnesses in hearings that began in the spring of 1939. As had Dies, he concentrated on the projects’ weak spots. For the Writers’ Project, that meant the troublesome New York office. His attacks against the Theatre Project were broader, but also concentrated on operations in New York. Unlike Dies, Woodrum had paid investigators at his disposal, but objectivity was not in their job description.

The chief investigator was H. Ralph Burton. He was hired to look at the accomplishments as well as the failures of both projects, but those good intentions, if actually meant, quickly deteriorated. He assembled reams of material, which he used in selective and damaging ways. This was especially frustrating to Flanagan, who was proud of the fact that in its four years the theater project had been so successful at attracting audiences that box office receipts, not tax dollars, had been paying for all its non-labor costs for some time. Theater rentals, costumes and scenery, and play royalties were funded from the $2 million the project had taken in from paying customers, an impressive figure given the top ticket price of 50 cents for most shows. The government had paid these costs in the beginning, but Burton testified only that the project cost more than it took in. This was hardly surprising, since its original purpose had been to give work to the unemployed, but he declined to point this out.

Burton’s men pored over Writers’ Project manuscripts for evidence of “class-angling” and other “Communist propaganda.” What they didn’t find they were willing to plant. Aiming to produce visual proof of the project’s leftist tilt, they visited the empty offices one lunch hour armed with cameras and some Communist literature they arranged on desks for an intended photo session. An administrator, James McGraw, caught them in the act and threw them out before they could photograph the “evidence.”

Only one committee member objected to the parade of unchallenged witnesses. Clarence Cannon, a Missouri Democrat, pointed out that they were “people who either have been fired or are going to be.” When Burton recycled a charge from the Dies Committee hearings—that members of the New York Writers’ Project were communistic based on their gift to Edwin Banta, the fired worker who turned out to be a spy and an informer, of a book signed by Communist leader Earl Browder—Cannon reminded the committee that discrimination based on politics was barred in the WPA and cited Mayor La Guardia’s statements disavowing any subversive control of New York WPA units. He also contested their conclusions. When a witness presented as evidence of communistic intent the fact that audiences had hissed at a police character in a play called
Life and Death of an American,
Cannon reacted with unbridled scorn: “So because in a play an audience gets up and hisses a policeman, you think that is sowing the seeds of communism? This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of. If that is sowing the seeds of communism, then we have communism all over this country.” He called the statement opinion without fact, and “wholly worthless.”

But no one else spoke up for the Theatre Project. Indeed, an internal decision had been made to sacrifice it for the overall good of the WPA. Ellen Woodward had resigned as deputy administrator over women’s and professional projects back in January, when she was appointed to the Social Security Board. Florence Kerr, one of her regional administrators and a longtime friend of Hopkins from Grinnell College days, was appointed to replace her. With Hopkins’s departure in December for the commerce secretary’s post, Aubrey Williams had moved to full-time administration of the National Youth Administration, and Howard O. Hunter, Hopkins’s Midwest regional administrator, had replaced him as the WPA’s second in command. Collectively with Harrington, this new regime judged the theater to be expendable. The numbers talked. Two and a half million jobs were on the line, as against 8,000 in the theater project.

The House Appropriations Committee reported out a $1.775 billion relief bill for the year beginning July 1, 1939. It contained the stipulation that no funds were to go to the theater. Flanagan still believed the project could be saved; she had many supporters, and she knew she could persuade them to descend on Washington. But when she asked Hunter—she had never been given the opportunity to meet with Harrington—who would lead the fight to save the FTP, he told her there would be no fight.

Flanagan fought on regardless. She ignored WPA rules and rallied thirteen House members who agreed to speak for the project. Another promised to introduce an amendment putting the project back into the bill. New York theater critics telegraphed Woodrum as a group disputing his statement that they disapproved of it and urging that it be continued. Brooks Atkinson, the noted drama critic of the
New York Times,
wrote that the project “has been the best friend the theatre as an institution has ever had in the country” and that it “deserves to be rescued from partisan politics.”

But as Flanagan wrote later, partisan politics were “booted and spurred.” Representatives speaking for the project on the House floor were shouted down, as was the amendment to restore its funding. Having lost the battle in the House, she turned to the Senate. Here Hollywood joined the fight, with James Cagney among those offering to guarantee the non-labor costs in the California project. Lionel Barrymore made a radio speech in which he said that killing any of the arts projects was “almost like taking one of the stripes out of the American flag.” Actress Tallulah Bankhead—the daughter of House Speaker William Bankhead of Alabama—visited the Senate Appropriations Committee and pleaded with a catch in her throat, “But actors are people, aren’t they? They’re
people
!” The attacks set Flanagan to musing. She couldn’t accept that the congressmen who called classic plays by Sheridan and Molière dangerous and indecent, or who said that other plays stirred class hatreds, really believed what they were saying. She wondered instead if they were spurred by fear of a more literate public educated by plays on current events such as the Living Newspapers, or by fear of better understanding between blacks and whites, because many politicians found thinking people a risk.

And when Flanagan actually won the battle in the Senate, hope remained. Its version of the appropriation bill retained three-fourths of 1 percent of the total for the Federal One arts projects, including the theater. But hope faded as quickly as it surged. Traditionally, differences between the House and Senate versions of bills each has passed are worked out in a conference committee from both houses. This time, when the conferees met, Woodrum and the other House members refused to yield, threatening to kill the whole relief appropriation. Roosevelt called it “discrimination of the worst type,” but he signed the bill rather than bring the entire WPA to a grinding halt.

The Federal Theatre Project went dark at midnight on June 30, 1939, with several successful productions still on the boards. One was the innovative
Swing Mikado,
a jazzy update of the popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Another was
Pinocchio,
Yasha Frank’s adaptation of the children’s story that had found an enthusiastic audience with children and adults alike. Frank wrote a new ending for the final performance. In it, Pinocchio became a puppet again after a brief life as a boy. With stagehands striking the sets on an open stage before the audience, the actors laid him in a wooden box that bore his epitaph: “KILLED BY ACT OF CONGRESS, JUNE 30, 1939.”

10. A DIFFERENT PLAYING FIELD

T
he Writers’ Project survived the onslaught, but only under vastly altered circumstances. The entire WPA was under pressure in the spring of 1939, and when the dust had settled it was a much different organization than it had been under Harry Hopkins in the early days of the New Deal, when the need for jobs was desperate.

In 1937 and 1938, Roosevelt had tried to push through a federal reorganization plan that would give him the power to realign the government’s executive agencies into more functional groupings. This was based on a plan submitted by the President’s Committee on Administrative Management and was largely free of partisan impact. But in the wake of Roosevelt’s failed court-packing plan, Congress had been in no mood to expand presidential powers even in the administrative area. Not until the spring of 1939 did it finally pass a reorganization bill, and it was much weaker than the one the president had originally requested.

It allowed him, among other things, to create three broad departments. A Federal Security Agency grouped departments whose thrust was to promote economic security, including the Social Security Board, the United States Employment Service, the Office of Education, the Public Health Service, the National Youth Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The National Youth Administration had originally been a jobs program, albeit one whose purpose was to allow young men and women to pay for schooling. So, too, had the CCC, whose “boys” had been sent into the woods to work on conservation and other projects. Their move into the security agency demonstrated a new emphasis on the long-term goals of training and education rather than just providing jobs and fighting unemployment. Under the aegis of a Federal Loan Agency were the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Electric Home and Farm Authority, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Federal Housing Administration, and their associated agencies and boards, as well as the Export-Import Bank of Washington. The idea here, said Roosevelt in his message to the Congress about the new plan, was to stimulate and stabilize “the financial, commercial, and industrial enterprises of the nation.”

The third of the new entities was a Federal Works Agency. This grouped the entities that dealt with public works not routinely handled by other departments, and that administered construction grants and loans to state and local governments. It was here that the WPA was now placed, along with the agriculture department’s Bureau of Public Roads, the public buildings branch of the Treasury Department’s Procurement Division, the National Park Service branch that managed federal buildings in the District of Columbia, the United States Housing Authority, and the Public Works Administration. In fact, the new agency virtually replaced the PWA, and was placed in the charge not of Ickes, who wanted it, but of John M. Carmody, who headed the Rural Electrification Administration, charged with pushing electric service into remote and unserved areas. Under the new umbrella, the function of the WPA remained much the same. Its name, however, changed; it became the Work Projects Administration, which allowed it to keep the same initials. Roosevelt told Congress the new name was “more descriptive of its major purpose.” He also said the reorganization would save $15 million to $20 million.

Ickes’s Interior Department had lost several of its functions in addition to the PWA, putting him, as he wrote, “very low indeed in my mind.” At the WPA, however, Harrington embraced the new structure along with his new title, which had changed from administrator to commissioner. With its construction role unaltered, and the lighter work managed by the Division of Women’s and Professional Projects continuing as before, he oversaw much the same organization as Hopkins had.

Harrington’s attitude about the arts projects, however, was markedly different from Hopkins’s; he viewed them as a distraction from the WPA’s construction and service work and a red flag to conservatives in Congress. Indeed, the Woodrum committee’s assault on the Federal Theatre Project would affect the writing, art, and music components by removing them from federal sponsorship and forcing them to scramble to find sponsors at the state level. All did just that, cajoling university presses, music societies, art leagues, and the like to step in, and except for the banned Theatre Project were thus able to continue operating. At the Writers’ Project, renamed the Writers’ Program, Harrington removed his main remaining trouble spot by dismissing Alsberg in September in favor of a more efficient successor, John Dimmock Newsom, who had headed the project’s Michigan office and, in the words of Katherine Kellock, was “not given to Greenwich Village dreams of sponsoring genius.” He simply wanted to see the American Guide series through to completion, although this itself posed a major challenge: more than half the state guides were still to be published.

And of course, it did not require congressional action to kill individual programs in the arts. That could be done locally. The Art Project’s teaching component in New York included a program for mental patients at Bellevue Hospital. Late in 1939, New York administrator Somervell decided to include it in his weekly inspection tour of WPA activities. He collected Audrey McMahon and they proceeded to the hospital, where they looked in on several classes in progress and then moved on to meet some of the adult patients who were among the students. The treatment wards were under lock and key, and McMahon later described staff members unlocking the doors to admit them and locking them inside, unlocking them to let them out again, and repeating the process as they went from one ward to another. At a male ward, the staff coordinator repeated the introductions of McMahon “and the administrator, Colonel Somervell.” At the mention of rank one of the patients jumped to his feet, snapped to attention, and saluted. “The trouble,” recalled McMahon, “was that he was minus the trousers of his hospital pajamas and his jacket was flapping wide.” McMahon could barely keep from laughing, but Somervell was not amused. He turned abruptly and as they left the hospital said, “Mrs. McMahon, that project is closed.”

But while the arts received an outsized share of criticism and attention, the WPA’s primary purpose continued to be its vast variety of building jobs. In terms of national iconography, none was more important than a twenty-month, $250,000 refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty. For years rainwater had been pouring off the statue’s copper sheeting and invading the pedestal on which it stood. Starting in 1937, WPA crews had installed flashing to reroute the water, repaired the masonry, strengthened and painted the steel frame, reinforced the spikes jutting from the statue’s crown, put new glass into the torch (which was then lit from the inside), installed a new staircase, added an acre to the Bedloe’s Island grounds, and performed extensive landscaping before the statue reopened to visitors in December 1938. In January 1939, San Francisco had christened its $1.5 million, WPA-built Aquatic Park near Fisherman’s Wharf on the shore of San Francisco Bay. A center for boating, swimming, and other water sports, the park featured grandstands overlooking the city’s only downtown beach, a modernist building housing restaurants and walls of murals that was likened to “a great white ocean liner,” and views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. The park employed 782 workers and artists for two years, of whom the
San Francisco News
wrote, “WPA critics will have to eat all their jokes about ‘shovel leaners’ when they come to Aquatic Park.” Down in San Antonio, Texas, former congressman Maury Maverick had turned the tables on the machine that beat him in the 1938 Democratic primary and was now the mayor of San Antonio. True to his New Deal credentials, he had launched a plan of city-wide improvements that encompassed the city’s parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools, and even the Mexican and black slums and the red-light district, using WPA labor. The plan’s centerpiece was the heart of the city itself, a twenty-one-block stretch of the San Antonio River that meandered through the business district. For much of San Antonio’s long history the river had been a flood-prone, litter-strewn nuisance, but plans to beautify it with riverside walkways, landscaping, stairways, and pedestrian bridges had been gathering force after a devastating flood in 1921. Maverick had secured WPA funding for the beautification project while he was still in Congress, and construction of the $400,000 project had gotten under way early in 1939. Architect Robert Hugman, who had drawn the plans, had named it the San Antonio River Walk and columnist Ernie Pyle wrote that it was going to make the Texas city into “a kind of Venice.”

But the largest of the WPA’s current construction jobs was a twenty-four-hour-a-day whirlwind of work that was transforming a swath of shoreline of the Borough of Queens in New York City into the nation’s most modern commercial aviation complex.

North Beach, as the site was called, jutted into the East River between Bowery Bay and Flushing Bay. Beginning in the 1880s, the Gala Amusement Park there had attracted visitors from Manhattan and Long Island. Later North Beach was home to a sportsmen’s air park, Glenn Curtiss Airport, where, during the late 1920s, wealthy private pilots had arced over the East River in biplanes and speed racers. The depression grounded them, but aviation dreams floated in the head of Fiorello La Guardia, then a congressman, and once Roosevelt was in the White House and he had been elected mayor, those dreams started to take flight. He objected to the fact that buying an air ticket from another city to New York got a passenger only as far as Newark, New Jersey. That was where New York–bound flights landed, and to the Little Flower it was a breach of contract. On a flight from Chicago in 1934, he insisted on his rights and refused to disembark until the plane carried him from Newark to an actual New York destination, Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. With the New Deal and his own extraordinary success at luring federal public works dollars to New York—the PWA had built the Triborough Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, and several other major projects, to say nothing of Robert Moses’s WPA-funded parks and swimming pools—La Guardia realized that a major airport was within his reach. Once the WPA approved the project, the mayor kicked it off himself in one of his exuberant forays into the spotlight. On September 9, 1937, as reporters and photographers looked on, he took the controls of a steam shovel and dug a bucketful of earth from a bluff that overlooked the East River and Rikers Island, which itself now sported a new complex of men’s penitentiary buildings.

The bluff was an unusual feature of the North Beach shoreline. Most of the shoreline was low and marshy, thus requiring the addition of tons of refuse used as fill. A great deal of this fill was barged from Rikers, which itself had been expanded with the addition of dirt from New York City subway excavations before the first jail there opened in 1932. Once the 432-acre tract had solid footing, the actual work on the airport began.

The plans envisioned a combined sea and land facility. The great Pan American Clippers and the transatlantic seaplanes of European airlines, including Air France, Royal Dutch, Deutsche Lufthansa, and Britain’s Imperial Airways, would set down in Flushing Bay and disembark their passengers at a bayside platform. The seaplane complex would include two hangars, together accommodating twelve to fourteen planes, connected by a tunnel to a marine air terminal. Waiting rooms and baggage facilities would be housed in an administration building that also housed offices for customs, immigration, health, and flight control and navigation.

The land-based companion airport was to be even more expansive. Here on the acres of landfill would be built four runways ranging in length from 3,532 to 4,688 feet, an administration and terminal building, and six hangars to service the planes of four domestic airlines—American, Eastern, Transcontinental & Western, and United—that would use the new airport as their eastern terminus, appropriating that distinction from Newark. A prime feature was an observation deck that would let sightseers watch the planes take off and land.

Costs rose way beyond the original $22 million estimate. Detractors began to mock the frenzied work on the isolated spit of land as “Fiorello’s Folly.” But the mayor was undaunted. He appeared at the site so often, usually with visitors in tow, that workmen took to handing him their tools. One of the men on the job was Clifford Ferguson. Ferguson, a union carpenter, never turned over any of his precious tools, not even to New York’s mayor. He’d had them stolen once, managed to recover them, and after that rarely let them out of his sight. But he would always remember the mayor’s visits, his enthusiasm for the job, and the way his energy seemed to give the shift a second wind even when they had been at work for several hours. “He kind of picked you up,” Ferguson said.

The airport was Ferguson’s first job for the WPA. Earlier in the depression, he had done whatever work he could to make a dollar. He had been around buildings doing odd jobs since he was ten years old, working for his contractor father, and sometimes—he recalled this most vividly of all—working in theaters: never on the sets but offstage, repairing seats and floors. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he was driving a taxicab; and he kept that up off and on for a year. He worked as a night watchman at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Astoria, Queens. He mixed concrete for his brother-in-law, who had worked on the subway lines that were being extended into Brooklyn, until he dislocated a shoulder while heaving a 100-pound bag of concrete onto the back of a truck and was unable to work for almost a year. It seemed to him that job interruptions were the norm, whether they were the result of an injury or the lack of a job in the first place. “Nobody ever had work straight through,” he said.

Like everyone he knew, Ferguson was familiar with the extent of WPA work going on around him. You couldn’t miss the signs, and even if you did you couldn’t miss the armies of shovel-toting, wheelbarrow-pushing men, some wearing felt hats and overcoats, who swarmed over the new roads now pushing through the eastern boroughs of the city. Ferguson had seen, and scorned, his fair share of shovel leaning. But he was married, with three sons, and when news of the airport project began circulating through the halls of his union local in 1938, he applied, was certified for relief, and took the job without a second thought.