Excavating New Deal California
“What was I thinking?” I ask myself whenever I reflect on that time, five years ago, when
San Francisco’s Columbia Foundation notified me that it had given photographer Robert
Dawson and myself a seed grant to document the physical remains of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) in California. Hubris doesn’t begin to describe what we had
proposed to do.
The plaques and markers left by the WPA on sidewalks, public restrooms, and
Berkeley’s beloved Municipal Rose Garden had long intrigued me, though I did not then
go out of my way to hunt them down. I knew that the WPA was a massive public woks
program set in motion as a part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat
the poverty, desperation, and potential revolutionary violence of the Great Depression,
and I knew that another New Deal agency — the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) —
had planted and cared for the nation’s forests and built rustic structures and trails in our
parks. But I knew nothing about the PWA, CWA, FERA, REA, and RA, All of those
long-forgotten “alphabet soup” agencies attacked the Depression in different ways, and
all left artifacts which we use every day without knowing we are doing so, or to whom
we should be grateful. We stand on the shoulders of giants — not only Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt and the ingenious men and women whom they gathered around
themselves, but millions of usually anonymous workers who transformed the nation in a
few years of economic calamity before they turned their energies to fighting the Second
World War. A contact told m early on how “Growing up in the 1930s, in retrospect,
seemed like a renaissance period with so many useful and handsome public facilities and
buildings being built…. I am sure that there was much economic distress during the
period, but to me, the many civic projects brought a feeling of well being and optimism
which I have not experienced since.” I have heard many such counter-intuitive
testimonials since then from people who lived through the Roosevelt years.
I believed then that the New Deal was all about centralization in Washington, D.C., so
surely I’d find the records for it neatly filed and accessible at the Library of Congress
and/or the National Archives. A few trips to the nation’s capital were sufficient to
convince me that I was wrong on all counts. WPA filing cards are not very informative
and were “preserved” after the war on some of the worst microfilm I have ever had the
misfortune to strain my retinas. Public Works Administration (PWA) reports were also
microfilmed, but used a dauntingly complex filing system and are so voluminous that no
one but a young doctoral student could hope to get a grip on them. If the CCC records for
the work done at thousands of camps exist anywhere, they would be similarly
intimidating. But many of the records — like so much of New Deal art — appear to have
been lost or destroyed over the decades since the full employment demanded by a major
war effort abruptly killed the New Deal public works programs.
Fortunately, the National Archives has preserved many boxes of roughly organized
archival photographs of New Deal public works. I photographed and scanned hundreds of
images that began to reveal the magnitude of what we’d undertaken — and the projects
those photos document only scratch the surface of what was done in California alone. Yet
more fortunately, Robert Leighninger, Jr. in 2007 published his indispensable book LongRange Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal. It clearly and patiently
explains all the New Deal public works agencies and how they changed during the brief
years of their existence in response to the whipsaw of political and budgetary pressures
exerted on the Roosevelt administration. The result of twelve years of research,
Leighninger’s book not only names many hundreds of projects around the country but
suggests how much work remains to be done to reveal the extent of the iceberg of which
we see only the tip. Harold Ickes, the head of the PWA, said in 1939 as he broke ground
for Friant Dam: “Even those of us in Washington who are responsible for carrying out
orders sometimes lack comprehension of the mighty sweep of this program.”
Among the many initiatives I discovered the WPA undertook were archaeological digs
and historical restorations and recreations. The project became an analogous effort: an
ever-expanding excavation that began revealing a buried and lost civilization. This was
not, however, a civilization engulfed by the jungles of Guatemala or the sands of Egypt
but our own. It’s everywhere and only about 75 years old.
The task of documenting all New Deal public works in one book was clearly impossible,
nor would many of those projects photographed unused and under unfavorable weather
and lighting conditions interest many except for hardcore New Deal freaks like I was
becoming. I named it California’s Living New Deal Project (CLNDP) to emphasize the
fact that although they are less than eight decades old, many of the projects remain in
daily use by countless people whose parents may have dismissed them as “boondoggles.”
As the CLNDP grew, others with greater administrative skills than I possess came to its
rescue, engineering a collaboration between the California Historical Society and UC
Berkeley’s Institute for Research in Labor and Employment (IRLE), and the Department
of Geography (where I have an office as a Visiting Scholar.) Librarians Heather Lynch
and Elizabeth del Rocio Camacho built a sophisticated website that contains an evergrowing database of projects that spatially express themselves on a map of California as
color-coded Google information points, each containing documentary data and, wherever
possible, contemporary and archival photos.
With the help of another grant from the Columbia Foundation, CHS hired Project
Manager Lisa Ericksen who has worked for the past two years as the project’s
ringmaster. Among many other initiatives, Lisa invited historians, archivists, and other
interested parties from around the state to attend workshops in Berkeley and San
Francisco. Attendees constitute a network of informants feeding information from their
areas to UCB research assistants who check them for accuracy and enter them into the
CLNDP data base and map. Since much of the evidence for New Deal public works is
not at the National Archives but in local histories, newspapers, municipal records, and
scrapbooks — as well as the memories of those seniors who lived the Depression —
knowledgeable informants are crucial to mapping New Deal California. They are also a
means to actively involve hundreds in the fascinating detective work of assembling
history from scratch.
The CLNDP only grew timelier as California’s economic condition deteriorated into the
what press and pundits routinely dubbed “the worst crisis since the Great Depression.” I
discovered that the New Deal frequently did precisely the opposite of what we are doing
to kick the economy out of that depression: while Governor Schwarzenegger was closing
California’s State Parks in a futile effort to balance the state’s budget, I found that their
improvements and very existence — and those of the East Bay Regional Park District and
many national parks and forests — was largely the result of the availability of CCC labor.
WPA workers improved every public park in San Francisco as well as planting thousands
of street trees now in their maturity. They also built San Francisco’s and Berkeley’s
Aquatic Parks and recreational marinas throughout the state. In addition, the urban streets
and sidewalks and rural roads that are now falling apart and the bridges falling down
were often constructed by laborers whose wages in turn recycled into the economy,
refloating it from the bottom rather than waiting for trickle down.
New Deal agencies similarly came to the aid of public education from kindergarten the
university level. Scarcely a small town in California lacks a school built or improved by
the WPA or the PWA; many of the new schools replaced ramshackle, crowded, and
inadequate structures with modern fire- and earthquake-resistant facilities that boasted
science labs, libraries, cafeterias and kitchens, athletic facilities, and multi-use
auditoriums that quickly became community centers. A panel of architects tasked by
President Roosevelt to select the best PWA projects in the country flatly stated that
“Some of the best architecturally outstanding buildings in all types may be found in
California,” but singled out the state’s public schools for special praise.
Additional confirmation to that effect came to me when a 77-year old man wrote me after
hearing about the CLNDP to say that his 1938 Watsonville elementary school “had
features we would never have enjoyed if the local taxpayers had to foot the bill.” His high
school, with its redwood basketball arena, “was the pride of all who attended Watsonville
High School.” He recalled the joy of hearing live classical music played by a WPA
Symphony Orchestra in that auditorium; I sent him a photograph that I’d scanned at the
National Archives of school children enjoying that concert. He responded that “I’m sure
I’m somewhere in that crowd in the rear of the auditorium.”
In less than six years, WPA labor and PWA funding built entire campuses such as the
community colleges at Santa Rosa, Long Beach, San Francisco, Pasadena, Santa Barbara,
Fullerton, and Los Angeles. The PWA built a state-of-the-art orthopedic school for
crippled and malnourished children in San Francisco’s Mission District. Not only did the
Sunshine School feature ramps and elevators now mandated by the ADA, it was richly
embellished with elaborate Spanish tiles, stenciled ceilings, and Moorish light fixtures,
Such aesthetic considerations were no accident: “Everything possible has been done to
create the most cheerful possible atmosphere in order to encourage the children to forget
as far as possible their disabilities,” noted the authors of the report on the best PWA
projects.
New Deal agencies employed thousands of teachers, educational aides, librarians,
nutritionists, bookbinders, conservators, translators, and recreational supervisors. They
built public libraries, museums, zoos, and educational visitors’ centers in parks. The
National Youth Administration (NYA) provided work-study jobs so that students could
complete their education as well as vocational training. CCC “boys” reconstructed
Mission La Purissima Concepcion in Lompoc from the ruins left by an earthquake, and
WPA workers restored General Vallejo’s home in Sonoma, leaving no marker that they
had done so.
The WPA’s Federal Art Project (FAP) commissioned artists to embellish existing and
new schools with murals, sculpture, and easel paintings. Some of that artwork — such as
Jacques Schnier’s gigantic relief of Saint George slaying the dragon of ignorance on
Berkeley High School — are accessible to the public. But security concerns have
rendered many New Deal works — such as a magnificent wood inlay panorama of
Bakersfield at East Bakersfield High School — invisible and unknown and thus at risk of
loss and destruction. California’s public schools represent a vast and largely unknown
reservoir of art created during the Great Depression. The CLNDP relies upon teachers,
principals, and custodians to alert and send us photos of paintings, sculpture, and even (as
at San Jose’s Hoover Middle School) stained glass windows hidden within their schools.
(Another federal agency — the Treasury Section of Fine Arts — was responsible for the
murals and statues in post offices and other federal structures.)
New Deal agencies built few prisons but many schools in the belief that it is far better
and cheaper for the nation and communities to educate their young rather than to punish
them. Deeply concerned with juvenile delinquency at a time when job prospects for
young men were even bleaker than now — as well as foreseeing the need for leisure
activities once the economy improved — the WPA built public tennis courts, ball parks,
golf courses, and swimming pools still in heavy use. In San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Park, it built public stables, a model yacht clubhouse, and one of the finest flycasting
facilities in the country, thus making available to everyone sports activities previously
available only to the well-to-do. Near the summit of Mount Tamalpais State Park, CCC
work crews moved lichen-encrusted boulders to create the open-air Mountain Theater,
while in the Oakland hills, WPA crews built the Woodminster amphitheater with a
magnificent water cascade and fountains dedicated to California’s writers.
Far from being boondoggles, these innumerable projects represent the prodigality of
imagination and compassion unleashed by the New Deal. A woman involved in the
Federal Theater Project told me that those few years constituted “the most creative period
in American history.” The CLNDP continues to collect the stories of those who were
present and to map the contributions that they made to their future and our present.
And now, it is going national: the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and
Museum in Hyde Park, NY has acquired the CLNDP platform in order to begin a national
New Deal inventory that will involve thousands of Americans rediscovering and mapping
the lost New Deal landscape of their own nation. As a lifelong Californian, I’m proud to
say that, like so much else, it started with the Golden State.