American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (53 page)

12. THE LAST HURRAH

H
unter was in his native New Orleans dealing with a host of accumulated medical problems when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. “The goddamned Japs caught me with all my teeth out and a fresh abscess up my rectum—and with a fairly good diverticulitis in the gut I am really working both ends against the middle,” he wrote to Harry Hopkins in a December 15 letter. The two had been good friends when Hopkins headed the WPA, sharing both a social work background and a fondness for the horse track, so the tone of the letter was not unusual. Nor was the fact that Hunter sought Hopkins’s advice. “Should I stay on in WPA?” he asked. “Or should I wangle around for something else in Washington?”

Hunter was ambivalent because he was chafing under the yoke of the Federal Works Agency, under which the WPA had operated since the 1939 reorganization. He held out hope that General Philip B. Fleming, like the late Harrington a construction-oriented army engineer, would recover from an illness and take over the umbrella works agency. The FWA was currently leaderless, John M. Carmody having resigned in November, and to Hunter’s thinking it was “a disgraceful shambles.”

Hopkins replied three days later. His short note had an impatient tone, as if he couldn’t be bothered with trivia now that he had managed Lend-Lease, served as Roosevelt’s personal ambassador to Churchill and Stalin, and was part of the White House inner circle monitoring daily developments in the three theaters of the war. “I think you should stay with the WPA and get your mind off other things,” he wrote. “I think it is extremely important that you get yourself in a mental frame of mind where you have made up your mind that you are going to stay here and stick by this job.”

In fact, Hunter had already fired off telegrams to Stimson and Knox, the war and navy secretaries, on December 8, offering the WPA’s resources for the war effort. “Pending such time as full private employment is possible I assure you that the unemployed want to work for their country on the most essential projects,” he wrote. Another telegram went to state and regional administrators: “State of war demands complete cooperation and effectiveness of WPA. War and navy departments have requested acceleration of work on vital projects and possible deferment of others not essential at this time. You are instructed to close off rapidly as possible all construction projects of nondefense nature using critical materials or labor where they can be effectively used in defense activity.”

The administrators responded quickly. By Christmas, assistant commissioner Florence Kerr, the head of the old Division of Women’s and Professional Projects, now called the Service Division, had turned the toymaking shops that in several cities had built and repaired toys for the children of relief families into sign shops. Paint that had reddened cheeks on dolls now went into arrows pointing to air raid shelters, first-aid stations, and other civil defense emergency facilities. Sewing rooms shifted their output from layette kits for newborns to first-aid packets for shipment to the front. Soon after the new year, the WPA’s archaeology projects started to shut down from coast to coast.

By January 13, with the war just over one month old, Hunter had recovered sufficiently to return to Washington, where he addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors at the Mayflower Hotel. Although his frustrations had continued to mount, he kept them to himself and touted the partnership under which the WPA and the mayors had remodeled their cities. There had been “lasting improvements in every conceivable kind of public facility,” he told them, and he quoted from a posthumous award given to Harrington that called the accumulated work “the greatest peacetime achievement in the history of our country.”

Ever the New Dealer, Hunter went on to warn that “budget balancers” were claiming that the WPA was no longer essential despite the fact that just over 1 million men and women remained on its rolls. “Are people non-essential?” he demanded. “These people…'are not statistics and they are not zombies. They are men and women who are citizens of this democracy. They have not learned how to live happily or patriotically without eating.” He said the unemployed still needed “a chance to sweat in honest work as a part of our democracy.”

But their ranks were rapidly diminishing. In New York City, Colonel Somervell had returned to army service and, promoted to brigadier general, was overseeing the building of the Pentagon. His successor, Major Irving V. A. Huie, reported in February that the city’s WPA was shifting to war work and that the work-relief rolls now stood at 60,684, down from 97,986 a year earlier. Some 20,000 of these were in the Service Division, and by April the division was keying its remaining projects to war and civilian defense programs.

On May 1, the WPA Writers’ Program became the Writers’ Unit of the War Services Division of the WPA. Only forty state offices remained open, and their employees were a collection of middle-aged men and women who were not candidates for military or industrial work. Untrained as writers, they turned out such products as servicemen’s recreational guides to the areas surrounding army training camps. John Dimmock Newsom, the director who had replaced Henry Alsberg, had seen the American Guide series through to completion—the last of the state guides, Oklahoma’s, had been published in January—and he would soon resign and join the army. The Art Project became the Graphic Section of the War Services Division. Mural painters turned to designing camouflage patterns for tanks and ships, and graphic artists now turned out posters urging Americans to patriotism, conservation, and discretion. Music Project bands entertained soldiers in training. Holger Cahill now headed all three arts projects, recast as the Cultural Division.

May 1 also saw the departure of Hunter from the WPA. Fleming now headed the Federal Works Agency, but he had insisted on imposing administrative authority over the WPA, increasing Hunter’s frustration. He had written Hopkins in March to say the situation “stinks” and that he was unwilling to follow orders from “irresponsible and incompetent people.” Hopkins arranged an appointment with the president, at which an anguished Hunter repeated the charges of incompetence and interference, but Roosevelt’s attention was elsewhere. There was no indication at that point that he intended to dissolve the WPA, but he gave Hunter no encouragement. In his resignation letter, Hunter said it was “embarrassing for me to continue as WPA Commissioner,” and called for “major changes” in the FWA.

November brought midterm election losses for the Democrats, who saw their margin in the House diminish to thirteen votes. The low turnout benefited the Republicans, but so did a lack of progress in the war; American marines had a toehold on Guadalcanal in the Pacific but could not dislodge the Japanese, and American forces had yet to engage German or Italian forces anywhere, either in North Africa or in Europe, though an invasion of North Africa was imminent.

At the time of the election, WPA employment stood at 354,619, roughly 10 percent of its maximum in 1938. Unemployment nationwide was under 5 percent. The WPA had lost the rationale for its existence.

Roosevelt dropped the hammer a month later. On December 4, he wrote to Fleming as Federal Works Agency administrator and acting commissioner of the WPA. They had obviously discussed the letter’s contents beforehand. It was valedictory in tone:

By building airports, schools, highways and parks; by making huge quantities of clothing for the unfortunate; by serving millions of lunches to school children; by almost immeasurable kinds and quantities of service the Work Projects Administration has reached a creative hand into every county in this nation. It has added to the national wealth, has repaired the wastage of depression and has strengthened the country to bear the burden of war. By employing eight millions of Americans, with thirty millions of dependents, it has brought to these people renewed hope and courage. It has maintained and increased their working skills; and it has enabled them once more to take their rightful places in public or in private employment….

With these considerations in mind, I agree that you should direct the prompt liquidation of the affairs of the Work Projects Adminstration, thereby conserving a large amount of the funds appropriated to this organization. This will necessitate closing out all project operations in many states by February 1, 1943, and in other states as soon thereafter as feasible. By taking this action there will be no need to provide project funds for the Work Projects Administration in the budget for the next fiscal year.

I am proud of the Work Projects Administration organization. It has displayed courage and determination in the face of uninformed criticism. The knowledge and experience of this organization will be of great assistance in the consideration of a well-rounded public works program for the post war period.

With the satisfaction of a good job well done and with a high sense of integrity, the Work Projects Administration has asked for and earned an honorable discharge.

The news was sandwiched between columns of war coverage: U.S. marines fighting the fanatic Japanese for every inch of Guadalcanal; the army linked with British and Commonwealth forces now advancing against Germany’s General Erwin Rommel on the sands of North Africa and American bombers targeting Axis targets in Italy; the Red Army in the process of breaking the German siege of Stalingrad. Editorials commended the WPA and said that it should rest in peace, not to be revived. Letters to the White House offered praise and condemnation, as they always had. The Toledo Small Business Men’s Association noted “with interest and pleasure your abolishment of the WPA.” A hotel owner in Mitchell, South Dakota, wrote that the end of the agency “leaves a good taste in the public’s mouths.” A WPA recreation supervisor in Independence, Missouri, thanked the president “for the opportunity that I have had of working with some of the finest people that I have ever met or known.” A widow in Oxford, Mississippi, also offered thanks “for giving to the little person like myself a chance to work and try and make an honest living for myself and family. Of course I am referring to that wonderful program W.P.A.”

It spiraled to its end swiftly. Evidence of its presence began to disappear from the American landscape. This accelerated in February 1943 when Fleming ordered that the familiar red, white, and blue signs that marked its projects be taken down and processed for scrap to aid the war effort.

By May 1 WPA offices had shut down in thirty states and New York City. The entire project roll then stood at 37,000. The administrative staff, itself once numbering 36,000, was a skeletal 250, and news reports said employees were leaving daily for private jobs or other work in government. And those who remained were tying up loose ends, balancing accounts, and microfilming files that would provide, if anyone ever cared to look, a record of the most extensive and egalitarian jobs program ever seen in a democracy.

EPILOGUE

THE LEGACY OF THE WPA

I am sure that the full accomplishments of the WPA will never be known by any one person. It has simply been too large in figures and volume of things done to get it all in one brief statement.

—
HOWARD O. HUNTER,
COMMISSIONER, WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION,
TO THE U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, JANUARY
13, 1942

I
n fact, after its final death knell on June 30, 1943, no one would care to look at the WPA again for quite some time. In the heat of war, there was too much else to think about, and the agency closed its doors without fanfare. Two years later, when the war was ending and life slowly began to return to normal, Americans did not want to remember the depression. And its physical legacy, the works of the WPA, were so familiar as to go unnoticed. Their ubiquity rendered them invisible. The post-war generation grew up attending WPA-built schools. It rode on WPA roads, attended games at WPA stadiums, applied for marriage licenses at WPA courthouses, read books in WPA libraries, swam in lakes created by WPA dams, adopted pets from WPA animal shelters. But for some weathered plaques and cornerstones that marked these structures, they might have been there always, and they rarely got a moment’s thought.

The accomplishments of the WPA came to be measured in statistics: 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 civilian and military buildings, 800 airports built, improved, or enlarged, 700 miles of airport runways. It served almost 900 million hot lunches to schoolchildren and operated 1,500 nursery schools. It presented 225,000 concerts to audiences totaling 150 million, performed plays, vaudeville acts, puppet shows, and circuses before 30 million people, and produced almost 475,000 works of art and at least 276 full-length books and 701 pamphlets. Such numbers convey almost no impact by themselves. They are silent on the transformation of the infrastructure that occurred, the modernizing of the country, the malnutrition defeated and educational prospects gained, the new horizons opened.

The workers of the WPA of course moved on.

Grace Overbee, the Kentucky packhorse librarian, moved to a job in a WPA sewing room. When the agency shifted to defense work she and other women working in a building in the Lee County seat, Beattyville, made parachutes and uniforms, and when the WPA shut down she returned to farming and eventually remarried.

Henry Moar, the laborer and blacksmith’s helper at the Timberline Lodge, worked on other WPA jobs, was rejected by the draft, and spent much of his post-WPA life moving blocks of ice around the floor of the Northwestern Ice and Cold Storage plant in Portland.

Frank Goodman, the precocious teenager who headed youth publicity for the Federal Theatre Project in New York, followed John Houseman and Orson Welles to their Mercury Theatre. Anthony Buttitta became a private theatrical publicist for performing groups including the San Francisco Light Opera and a memoirist who recounted both the Federal Theatre and his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Milton Meltzer became an extraordinarily prolific writer with more than 100 books to his credit. Many were for young people, and one covered the WPA arts programs.

Thomas Fleming, the Writers’ Project researcher in Berkeley, was pink-slipped in a personnel reduction but got another WPA job with the Agriculture Department conducting botanical research. When the WPA shifted to defense work, he took one of the training courses and went to work at the Kaiser shipyard in Richmond, California, building the lightly armored aircraft carrier escorts that were known as “Kaiser coffins.” Near the end of the war, he cofounded with a friend what was then San Francisco’s only black newspaper, the
Reporter
.

Johnny Mills, who worked on WPA road crews in the mountains near his Jackson County, North Carolina, home, farmed and worked mining olivine, a green-colored, iron-bearing rock used in manufacturing processses for its heat resistance.

John B. Elliott, the archaeologist, moved in 1939 from the Green River digs in western Kentucky to explore Adena mound sites in northern Kentucky near the Ohio River. Using a crew of more than fifty men at a site called the Crigler Mounds, he unearthed an Adena “town house” that had been burned, as well as evidence of several log tomb burials. It was a spectacular and chilling discovery, because the cremated remains around the central tomb forced Elliott’s supervisor, William Webb, to wonder if the Adena had engaged in ritual human sacrifice. The last spade was turned at the Crigler Mounds on January 5, 1942, when all WPA archaeology shut down. Elliott, then thirty and subject to the draft, joined the exodus to farming that was considered vital work during the war. He and his wife returned to his family lands in New Harmony, Indiana, where their daughter was born in April 1942, and they would continue to farm through the war and beyond.

Jimmy Bonanno, the carpenter, spent the war years working for private contractors doing defense-related work in New England and New York State, returning to his family in Brooklyn only periodically. In addition to the monumental task of building Camp Edwards on Cape Cod in record time—its construction became a model for similar camp projects—he worked in Springfield, Massachusetts, and in Utica and Rome, New York. Eager to return home, he applied for a job at Sullivan Drydock and Repair, a Brooklyn shipyard that was building submarine chasers among other vessels for the navy, and although he passed the test he was never called. Nor was he called up for the draft, since his work was vital to the military effort. When he finally returned home for good after the war in the Pacific ended, he was greeted by a brand-new daughter, Annette Nicolina Bonanno.

Howard Hunter joined the army, made lieutenant, was captured by the Germans, and was interned at a prisoner-of-war camp in Adelboden, Switzerland, until the German surrender in May 1945.

Harry Hopkins married his third wife, the former Louise Gill Macy, at the White House in 1942. After Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs on April 12, 1945, less than a month before the German surrender, Hopkins performed one last mission for the government. Although sick and frequently confined to bed, at President Harry Truman’s request he mustered the strength to fly to Moscow at the end of May for meetings with Stalin and Soviet foreign minister V. M. Molotov. The talks produced a Soviet concession on voting procedures that salvaged the new United Nations but were less successful at limiting post-war Soviet influence over Poland. At the beginning of July, Hopkins left Washington for the last time and returned with his wife to New York, where they moved into a house on Fifth Avenue and he planned to write about his government experiences. In the meantime, Mayor La Guardia appointed him to arbitrate disputes in the New York garment industry. But his health continued to deteriorate and he died on January 29, 1946, of hemochromatosis, the digestive ailment that had plagued him for years. He was only fifty-five years old.

The great works of the WPA fell victim to neglect and disrepair, its most ambitious initiatives obscured by fading memory.

The Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood was abused by its early patrons, who found the handmade furnishings and art too attractive to resist. They stole watercolors from the walls, stuffed the handmade bedspreads into suitcases, and tossed the wrought-iron lamps with their rawhide shades out the window into the snowbanks, then fished them out and took them home. The lodge closed from 1942 to 1945, reopened after the war, and closed again in 1955 after the electricity was cut off because of unpaid bills. Reopened later the same year, it continued to entertain more visitors than it was built for, and the heavy traffic took its toll on the handmade furnishings that remained.

The WPA turned the San Antonio River Walk over to the city in March 1941. It featured new sidewalks, stone footbridges, stairways from street level, waterside benches, and 4,000 trees, shrubs, and other plantings. Fifty thousand San Antonians came out for the opening and a parade of boats. Then they went away. For almost thirty years, the River Walk languished as a hangout for drunks and derelicts, avoided by most of the city’s residents.

Roosevelt tried to resurrect the ill-fated Florida Ship Canal in 1939, at the beginning of the defense buildup, but by then the cost had risen to an estimated $200 to $300 million, and it was again rejected by the Senate. It was revived yet again during the administration of Lyndon Johnson, this time as a shallower barge canal. This, too, was rejected, and today the only sign of its presence are the tidy frame cottages of Camp Roosevelt, now private homes, and two huge concrete pylons, largely invisible in roadside undergrowth, that would have supported a bridge to carry traffic over the canal.

In New Straitsville, Ohio, the coal fires burning underground grew in notoriety even as the WPA mine crews fought to contain them. Journalist Ernie Pyle supplemented his columns about the fire with a radio report for NBC in which he donned miner’s gear and went underground with a microphone so listeners could hear the crackling flames. Tom Manning of the
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
radio show broadcast from the Lost Run Mine while helpers threw water on the flames to make the fire roar. Mine engineer James Cavanaugh declared the fire licked on January 1, 1940, and the crews packed up and went away.

But beginning sometime in the late 1960s, the work of the WPA gained new attention. It found fresh appreciation and new advocates. San Antonio’s international Hemisfair, celebrating the city’s 250th anniversary in 1968, sparked a restoration of the River Walk. Today, like the Alamo, it is one of the city’s most popular destinations, treasured by tourists and locals alike. In Oregon in 1975, the nonprofit Friends of Timberline formed to bring the lodge’s glory back to life. Since then it has painstakingly documented the lodge’s art and craftwork, preserved and restored furnishings and decorations and replaced others, including parchment lampshades, hand-woven fabrics, and more than a hundred hand-hooked rugs. It is a measure of the group’s success that Timberline Lodge is today perhaps the nation’s chief monument to the WPA. The Mendocino Woodlands Recreation Demonstration Area, one of the forty-six WPA-built camping areas across the country, is being restored by the State of California and is still used for family recreation and environmental education. (The Catoctin, Maryland, camp called Hi-Catoctin is, as noted, the presidential retreat Camp David.) Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, reissued the state and major city guides of the American Guide series in the early 1980s in both hard- and softcover editions, complete with new introductions and art deco covers to evoke the 1930s.

There are many other survivors of the WPA’s building program, great and small. They include swimming pools, golf courses, tennis courts, parks, zoos, animal shelters, yacht marinas, stadiums, baseball parks, libraries, museums, schools, and too many other examples to mention, but the list goes on. So, too, with the services that it originated. It would be unthinkable today if public-school children were not offered hot lunches at their cafeterias.

Much valuable work was lost, the canvases of the easel art division of the Federal Art Project being the first casualties. Thousands of them were still “unallocated” when Pearl Harbor brought the nation into World War II, meaning that they had not found homes on the walls of government offices as had been intended. In the haste of mobilizing in the emergency of all-out war, they were shipped to warehouses for storage. What happened then—or didn’t happen—became the stuff of urban legend in the art world. At some point the paintings were deemed to be expendable. One account had them being auctioned off as scrap at 4 cents a pound. One auction lot of canvases was purchased by a New York plumbing contractor who intended to use them as pipe insulation, but the oil paint on hot pipes “produced an unattractive smell” and the plumbing man sold them to a secondhand store in Manhattan, where artists including Jackson Pollock rushed to buy their works back for $3 to $5 apiece. A
Time
magazine item in 1944 recounted the journey of “bales” of easel paintings from a Flushing, Queens, warehouse to a bric-a-brac shop on Canal Street in Manhattan, where art dealers bought them on the cheap—again, $3 to $5—to clean, mount, frame, and resell. Artist/sculptor Pierre Clerk recounts a story his neighbor on the Bowery, abstract impressionist Adolph Gottlieb, told him in the 1960s. Sometime after the war, Gottlieb, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning decided to find out what had happened to their WPA paintings. They pursued various reports and rumors to a plumbing warehouse on Staten Island, where they found hundreds of canvases stacked according to size. They sifted through the stacks until they were exhausted but found none of their own works, and finally retired to the nearest bar in frustration. Barroom tales aside, there seems little doubt that a great deal of the easel art was destroyed. As
Art Digest
editor Peyton Boswell Jr. wrote, some good art was surely among “the thousands of canvasses…'sold for scrap by the ton.” Audrey McMahon said she was promised that the works would be preserved, and that what happened “is shameful history.”