American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (49 page)

4. HOLD THE JOKES, PLEASE

T
he furious debate over neutrality had bypassed the WPA. But while it raged, the agency was anything but placid. It was coping with internal problems of its own, and although these lacked the grave import of war and peace, in keeping with the contest between isolation and involvement they did reflect divisions between two impassioned and vocal schools of thought within the country. Some of these were more serious than others.

In the months before war broke out in Europe, the regrowth of the WPA as a result of the Roosevelt recession had triggered a resumption of the wisecracks that had been a feature of the 1936 presidential race. Some went to great lengths to be funny. During construction of the Aquatic Park in San Francisco, jokesters told of WPA carpenters discarding half their nails because the heads were on the wrong end, until supervisors issued instructions to save them since they could be used later when work shifted to the other side of the building. The do-nothing WPA as an example of suspended animation was another popular theme: one old fellow asks another his age. “Eighty-four,” says the other. “I would have been eighty-six, but I was on WPA for two years.”

This brand of humor persisted in nightclubs and on the vaudeville circuit until it reached the point where the workers who were the butt of the jokes started feeling sorry for themselves. Their complaints reached the American Federation of Actors, which in March adopted a resolution prohibiting its 10,000 members from using witticisms about the WPA and WPA workers in front of paying audiences. “The WPA joke is a very great injustice,” said federation executive Ralph Whitehead, and compared it to a joke at a funeral. The heads of Actors’ Equity and the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, when asked if they would join the ban, said they sympathized but didn’t want to put shackles on their members’ humor.

In rare instances the WPA even displayed an ability to laugh at itself. The Theatre Project turned the tables in a lighthearted revue called “Sing for Your Supper,” which featured a skit in which the actors sang and danced as they leaned on miniature shovels. But the jokes, of course, persisted, along with other barbs. A year after workers found laugh lines about the WPA unfunny, Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers had a hit with a Jesse Stone song entitled “W.P.A.,” which rhymed the old shovel-leaning charges and put them to a foxtrot beat featuring Armstrong’s trumpet:

Sleep while you work while you rest while you play

Lean on your shovel to pass the time away

The three major radio networks banned play of the song on the grounds that it was in “bad taste,” and the complaints eventually reached Decca Records, which in the summer of 1940 announced it was withdrawing the record from the market.

But it was certainly hard not to laugh at—and with—some of the more far-fetched projects. The straitlaced Brehon Somervell, head of the WPA in New York City, defended its “record for good work” against the jokes, but in November 1938 he revealed that a $103,339 project to repair fire hydrants in Brooklyn would include painting and stenciling them and topping them off with shiny aluminum domes. “Brooklyn’s Fire Hydrants to Be Glorified by WPA,” chortled a headline in the
Brooklyn Eagle.

And how could the law-abiding citizens of Indianapolis be persuaded to visit a local fire station to submit themselves to voluntary fingerprinting by a WPA worker? By suggesting that they might bump their heads and suddenly become amnesiacs, forgetting who they were. That was actually one of the arguments for a joint Indianapolis police–WPA program that had been launched in December 1937. Set up with a $5,453 WPA grant, the fingerprinting scheme sent eighteen relief workers for police instruction, and then to four city fire stations that had been pressed into service for the program. Although some 3,000 “non-criminal” prints already were on file with the police, the early turnout for the WPA program was disappointing.

“Despite invitations to the public to have prints taken and filed, there has been little response,” reported the
Indianapolis News
. “Apparently the fact that fingerprinting was developed originally for use in identifying criminals makes it difficult for police to extend the service to people generally.”

Nonsense, said Lieutenant Albert G. Perrott of the Indianapolis police bureau of identification, who was coordinating the program with the WPA and had trained the workers. He said criminals had it all over law-abiding citizens because their fingerprints were on file. “If a criminal is picked up dead, they check his fingerprints, find out who he is and ship him home, and he gets a nice funeral—flowers and music and everything. In many cases, the honest citizen loses out completely in a case like this. They may never get the right name on his tombstone, if he ever gets one; he may land in the potter’s field or in a lime kiln. I understand they put ’em in a lime kiln in Chicago.” After all, 60,000 unidentified bodies were discovered in the country every year.

Criminal and non-criminal fingerprints would not be mixed, said Perrott. And women were reassured that fingerprints would not reveal their age: “Wrinkles may come, hair fall out and teeth disappear, but the fingerprints do not change through the years.” The only caution he offered them was that they should refrain from having manicures before they got their prints taken, because it took gasoline to get the ink off “and there goes your nail polish.”

Despite the lieutenant’s impressive salesmanship and ample local news coverage—“City ‘Awhorl!’” read one headline, clearly pleased with itself—that lured volunteers to the fire stations in the program’s first days, business quickly fell off, and the WPA fingerprinters, who were on duty from eleven in the morning to nine at night six days a week, were rarely called upon to apply their newfound skills. Other law enforcement agencies, including the New Orleans police department and the New York State Bureau of Identification, also employed WPA trainees to take and classify fingerprints, but none of these tried to lure citizens in to give prints voluntarily.

There were any number of reasons why law-abiding people might have been reluctant to put their fingerprints on file, and within the WPA some of them were especially strong. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover wanted to establish a national fingerprint index, and in April 1938 he said he thought it should start with workers on the rolls of the WPA. Hopkins strenuously resisted the idea, but it resurfaced after he resigned, and Harrington was a far more malleable figure. To convince would-be critics that he was neither a fire-breathing liberal like Hopkins nor a conservative, he bragged that he had never voted in his life and therefore was free of political bias. By January 1939—within a month of his appointment—he had allowed Somervell in New York City to order all WPA educational workers who came into contact with children to be fingerprinted in order to prevent sex crimes. But many others whose contacts with children were random at most, including carpenters, printers, and clerks, reported to the WPA Teachers’ Union that they, too, had been ordered to submit to fingerprinting.

Union executive secretary William Levner called Somervell’s order a “trial balloon” for ordering all New York City WPA workers—then numbering 170,000—to provide fingerprints. In turn, he said, that could lead to labor blacklists, police surveillance, intimidation, and potential blackmail.

In Philadelphia, WPA administrator Harry R. Halloran refused fingerprinting for the workers in his education and recreation division after some 200 New York workers were caught in the fingerprint dragnet and fired, many for petty offenses long in the past. One had stolen a single item when he was twelve years old and never committed a crime since. Halloran said he believed that “intelligent selection of competent personnel is far more effective in preventing the possibility of sex crimes than fingerprinting.”

Fears that the New York program could be misused were further borne out after Somervell added workers who handled valuable government property to the list of those told to report for “voluntary” fingerprinting. One was Anthony Merendino, a non-relief construction engineer. His fingerprint record revealed that twenty years earlier he had pawned a ring he bought on the installment plan and hadn’t finished paying for. For obtaining money under false pretenses, he was convicted and sentenced to a twenty-month jail term, which he served. His WPA career had been remarkably successful. From associate supervisor of a small project, he had worked his way up to a supervising engineer, and at the time his prints were taken he had 4,000 people working under him, was making $2,900 a year, and had a job rating of 100 percent. Merendino, told he was about to be fired, resigned instead.

Both the jokes and the lurking suspicions that led to the push for fingerprinting WPA workers were fostered by the poisons spewed into the political atmosphere by the Dies and Woodrum committees. And many, indeed most, WPA workers faced additional troubles in the months preceding the start of the war in Europe. These stemmed from a drive in Congress to assert stiff new controls over the WPA, adjusting wage scales downward, curbing political involvement, and generally bringing the agency to heel.

5. PINK SLIPS AND PINKOS

C
ongress was determined to “fix” the WPA in 1939. Several factors contributed to this determination. One was a residue of anger at Hopkins, now removed as a target himself, over the charges that local officials had played footsie with political campaigns in several states in the 1938 elections. Conservatives retained their general distaste for the vast cadre of workers on the public payroll who seemed to favor unions and other forms of “leftist thinking,” and that distaste was heightened by the uncountered accusations aired before the Dies Committee. Before the fixing was over, the WPA would face an unsettling array of changes.

The first of these was an absolute ban on political activities by WPA employees. Public Resolution Number One, which went into effect in March 1939, made it a felony to offer a job as a political reward, to threaten to deprive anyone of a job as political punishment, or to solicit political contributions within the WPA. It was also a firing offense (though not a criminal one) for anyone on the WPA payroll to work in or manage a political campaign, or try to influence the outcome of a campaign.

Colonel Harrington, at a March 9 news conference, said the latter portion of the new law covered hundreds of the agency’s 35,000 administrative personnel. As a result, he said, “we are having to remove a number of persons who have been county chairmen, presidents of political groups, or who have occupied other positions of that character.” If they didn’t quit, he said, they would be fired. Evidence of activities that violated the criminal portions of the statute would be turned over to the Justice Department.

The ban on “pernicious political activities,” to take effect later in 1939, would be widened to include all federal employees under the Hatch Act, of which Democratic Senator Carl A. Hatch of New Mexico was the prime champion.

But these rules were minor in their impact compared with the provisions of the new relief appropriation act for the 1940 fiscal year that grudgingly allowed the WPA to continue. Contained within the legislation that cut off funding for the Federal Theatre and forced the remaining arts projects to turn to the states for sponsorship was a far more drastic change. The new relief act forced the abandonment of the prevailing wage system that had governed WPA pay rates from its start, despite attempts to change it. Prevailing wages meant trade union rates in urban industrial areas, and where those wages were the norm, a WPA worker could earn a month’s pay by putting in a little over a week’s worth of hours. Replacing this happy arrangement was a “security wage” that allowed workers to earn roughly the same monthly pay, but in many cases doubled and almost tripled their hours. Workers and their unions reacted with outrage.

Work stoppages halted WPA projects across the nation early in July when 100,000 workers, mostly skilled tradesmen, walked off the job. In New York, strikes shut down construction of two schools and the new airport at North Beach that would later be called La Guardia Field. One thousand WPA workers in Rochester quit the projects they were working on and signed their names to a petition demanding that Congress return to the prevailing wage system. Employees halted work in Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco. State WPA offices also reported walkouts in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Indiana, Washington, and Mississippi. Most of the job actions were peaceful, but in Minneapolis, a policeman died after a clash with striking workers.

Skilled workers in urban areas suffered most under the new rules. In New York City, on the four-week standard by which the WPA kept its pay records, carpenters who had earned $85.75 by working 48 hours now had to work 120 hours for $85.20. The same $85.20 for 120 hours of work over four weeks applied to plumbers and electricians, who had worked 42 hours for $84; bricklayers 42 hours for $79.21; structural iron workers 44 hours for $84.70; sheet metal workers 46 hours for $85.10; metal lathers 48 hours for $84; and painters 56 hours for $84.

At the middle-skill levels, workers also saw their hours more than double, but they at least received small four-week raises under the new scale. Drill runners, bricklayers’ helpers, house wreckers, concrete and cement workers, and asphalt workers, all of whom had drawn pay of between $56.01 and $64.01 for working between 48 and 64 hours, now received $66 for 120 hours on the job.

Common laborers were the largest group affected by the new wage regimen. They had worked longer hours for less pay under the old scale, so were less drastically affected. Already used to putting in 112 hours over four weeks for a $56 paycheck, now they would work 8 hours more for 80 cents less.

Professionals were affected, too. The hours of dentists, doctors, and lawyers on the WPA payroll doubled, from 60 hours to 120, while their pay dropped from $91.08 to $90. Teachers and recreation instructors fared a little better. They had worked 84 and 96 hours, respectively, for $91.06, and under the new scale would work 120 hours for $90.

The WPA took a hard line against the stoppages. Harrington told reporters on July 6 that he didn’t consider the job actions a strike, since strikes were intended to lead to negotiations, and negotiations were not going to happen. The WPA’s work would benefit from the new arrangement, he said; construction supervisors would find jobs easier to manage with all of the workers on the same schedule. And he suggested that the new wage scale would reduce cheating, since workers frequently used their extra time to hold private jobs under assumed names, a practice the WPA’s investigative unit was helpless to stop unless it received reports of violators.

Two days later, Harrington met with a delegation from the American Federation of Labor, which represented 125 unions, and told them that their protests were useless. They were to tell their workers that “the requirement of working 130 hours a month is law [120 hours over four weeks translated to 130 hours a month]; that no official of the WPA up or down the line can change it; that we offer employment under those conditions—working 130 hours a month for a security wage. The decision as to whether they accept the employment or not is in their own hands.

“Furthermore, if anyone is off his job for five consecutive working days without any reason other than that he doesn’t want to work, he will be dropped from the rolls.”

Somervell, in New York, echoed this ultimatum, and the city’s welfare commissioner said that WPA workers who refused to accept the new wage scale would be turned down for home relief. Somervell threatened to file felony charges against anyone interfering with WPA jobs, even if this meant merely throwing up a picket line.

Most of the wildcat strikes stopped within the five-day limit. Even with the usual summer uptick in private hiring, the waiting list for WPA jobs was always larger than the number who were working, and those already on the rolls were not ready to give up their steady paychecks even if it meant many more hours on the job. But in Minneapolis, the work stoppages persisted for two weeks and shut down much of the WPA construction in the city. Workers who wanted to go back to their jobs were prevented by union protesters until city and state police stepped in to protect them. But eventually, even the most persistent strikes dissolved after Roosevelt declined to back moves in Congress to restore the union wage scale, and when the Workers Alliance called a one-day strike to protest the new work rules, few workers joined in.

An even larger problem for WPA workers followed on the heels of the revised wage scale. That was a provision in the appropriations act aimed at preventing “careerism” in WPA employees. It stated that relief workers on the agency’s rolls could work no more than eighteen months in succession. Then they had to give up their jobs for at least a month and apply to be recertified for relief before returning. This provision, along with the new wage scale, would take effect September 1. Harrington estimated it would affect at least 600,000 of the 2.4 million employees then on the rolls and hamper a number of projects that would lose essential personnel. By August 31, with German tanks massed at the Polish border, WPA employment stood at 1.8 million as the eighteen-month rule temporarily stripped the rolls.

Yet another new rule landed on the WPA as the result of the new appropriations act, one more example of the Dies Committee’s effect upon American political life. It included a requirement that WPA employees now had to take a loyalty oath as the price of their jobs. At its least, this requirement allowed Harrington to scoff at the committee’s charges of Communism within the WPA’s ranks.

Asked at the same July 6 news conference if he had had to halt “Red activities,” the colonel was at first incredulous. “Do you mean that seriously?” he asked the questioner.

Assured that he did, Harrington said, “No, I have not found it necessary to halt Red activities in the WPA. There is a great safeguard now, you know,” he continued sarcastically. “They have to take an oath that they do not advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence.” He did not take the charges seriously, he said, and did not think the oath was necessary.

Nevertheless, the anti-Communist outcry had its effect on behavior within the WPA. Even the pro-Communist Workers Alliance told its members they were required to pledge their loyalty to the United States in an echo of the oath required by the relief appropriations bill. “The idea is to answer those who charge we are subversive and against the government,” said Willis R. Morgan, president of the New York chapter. He said Communists could take the pledge and still belong to the union. (By that point the union’s leadership was almost entirely in Communist hands; founder and national president David Lasser would resign within a year and denounce the Workers Alliance as a Communist front.)

Workers who declined to sign the loyalty oath were summarily dismissed. But very few, no matter how they felt about it, were willing or able to give up their paychecks on grounds of principle. In New York, only 66 of the 103,985 WPA workers in the city failed to sign, some apparently because they were sick and had not been at work. One who refused was Art Project muralist August Henkel, a Communist who had run for Congress and state office on the party ticket.

Henkel had painted aviation scenes for the terminal at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, but once he was fired and his politics had been revealed, critics looked for evidence of subversion in his murals. The Women’s International Association of Aeronautics, the Flatbush Chamber of Commerce, and the Floyd Bennett Post of the American Legion found much cause for suspicion. The Wright brothers, they said, seemed to be dressed in Russian peasant garb, one of Henkel’s planes resembled a Soviet aircraft, the star on a pictured Naval Reserve hangar was red, not the regulation white, and one of his figures looked like Josef Stalin. As far as the Stalin image was concerned, Henkel maintained that he had merely copied a picture of Franz Reichelt, a mustachioed Austrian tailor who dabbled (fatally) in parachuting, having combined an overcoat and parachute that he tested by jumping from the Eiffel Tower and falling to his death. Nevertheless, his Bennett Field murals were ripped down and destroyed in 1940.