The Living New Deal Around Us
By Gray Brechin
On a February afternoon in 1939, Dorothea Lange photographed workers marching up Market Street for a City Hall demonstration against Congressional cutbacks in funding for the Work Projects Administration (WPA.) In San Francisco as elsewhere, reactionary enemies of President Roosevelt’s New Deal such as the Hearst newspapers accused the WPA of wasting taxpayer money and providing a refuge for slackers. One of the marchers carried a sign that answered such charges with a question: Was the Cow Palace Built Leaning on Shovels?
Until I saw that photograph in the Library of Congress, I did not know that the Cow Palace was WPA. As with so many other useful and beautiful artifacts those workers left for us, there is no marker on the building identifying it as a New Deal creation. San Francisco and the Bay Area are rich with such monuments to the hard work of the many whom FDR’s public works agencies saved from starvation, crime, and despair. Looking back at the end of his life, Joseph Danysh, who oversaw the WPA’s art programs in Northern California, said “We were among the forefront of the people of that era who were pulling out of the tragedy of the Depression something beautiful and something lasting.”
They weren’t, as critics also charged, just raking leaves: they were building a civilization worthy of the name. Along with utilitarian facilities such as the San Francisco and Oakland airports and the one on Treasure Island (which they also built), they constructed recreational facilities such as the Berkeley and San Francisco Aquatic Parks and marinas, the San Francisco Zoo, the magnificent amphitheatre, cascade, and fountains at Oakland’s Joaquin Miller Park. They built the casting pools and lodge, the model yacht club, the civilian and police stables, and the tennis courts in Golden Gate Park, while they were improving every other park in San Francisco and probably in the East Bay as well. They planted 15,000 street trees in Berkeley alone. They did not, as some websites claim, construct the Golden Gate Bridge but they did build the approaches to it on either side of the Gate. They built new or strengthened existing reservoirs, laid water and sewer lines, paved streets laid sidewalks, and erected retaining walls, seldom leaving a marker that they had done so. And although the federal music, theatre and writers’ projects are long gone, the artists WPA employed left a wealth of sculpture and mural paintings that provide us aesthetic delight as well as a window into their time.
Unlike the Obama stimulus plan, the New Deal agencies attacked the Depression in a variety of ingenious ways. The Public Works Administration (PWA) under Harold Ickes gave grants and loans to contractors who hired workers to build such landmarks as the Bay Bridge and the Caldecott Tunnel, San Francisco’s old Federal Building and Mint, the Alameda County Courthouse, and many schools still in use after almost 75 years of hard use. When it became clear, however, that such trickle-down programs would not work fast enough to alleviate the misery of widespread joblessness, FDR created the WPA in 1935 and put it under the administration of social worker Harry Hopkins. WPA workers, like the young men enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, were paid directly by the federal government to do everything from digging ditches and repairing toys to be loaned out at libraries to poor children to composing and conducting symphonies. WPA teachers even taught workers about their history and rights. Those direct transfusions of money into the arteries of local economies did much to refloat the national economy as well as the spirit of the millions who might otherwise have surrendered to despair or risen in revolt.
Those workers built exceptionally well: the fruits of their labor have enriched the lives of subsequent generations for three quarters of a century even as we forgot the debt we owed them. They wanted to be remembered, and we should do so. Amidst this nation’s many military monuments, we owe it to them to erect another to the veterans of the peacetime armies that inspired leadership once mobilized in a war against depression and for the common good.
