American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (37 page)

4. WPA CUTS AND THE “ROOSEVELT RECESSION”

B
y that summer, as the court plan was in its final throes, the cuts in the WPA rolls that Harry Hopkins had forecast to Congress at the beginning of the year had come to pass. Unemployment had ticked up in March after reaching a depression-low 14 percent, although the warm weather had brought its usual increase in private jobs. Hopkins’s fund request for the fiscal year starting in July 1937 reflected an improving job picture: he had asked for only $1.5 billion for the WPA, less than a third of the original work relief appropriation of $4.8 billion just two years earlier. This would allow him to keep WPA employment at 1.65 million, a little above the summer low. The employment situation was far better than it had been. Still, 7 million people continued to be out of work.

Since the death of Roosevelt’s close longtime political advisor Louis Howe the year before, Hopkins had grown closer to the president. Howe, gnomish, sickly, and politically astute, had devoted his career to Roosevelt’s electoral fortunes ever since his early New York State activities; within the presidential circle only Hopkins offered a similar combination of loyalty and advice untarnished by a personal agenda. Hopkins had tried to warn Roosevelt in advance that trying to sell the court plan on the basis of efficiency would not fly since the court calendars were not that crowded, although afterward he dutifully spoke in favor of it. Now the president would test his loyalty again.

Roosevelt had looked at declining unemployment, industrial production that was almost back to the levels of 1929, and increased farm income and decided from these bellwethers that the depression was on its way to being whipped and it was time to cut relief spending. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. had a hand in this conclusion. He argued that only a balanced budget and an end to deficits would convince businesses that the economy had regained enough stability to warrant new investment, which would spur a rise in private jobs. More relief spending would have the opposite effect, causing them to hold back because they feared the additional spending would lead to inflation and higher taxes.

Against this policy stood the views of Hopkins and others, including his economic advisor Leon Henderson and Federal Reserve Board chairman Marriner Eccles, that cuts in relief spending would effectively turn off the spigot of pump priming and send the nation into recession. Although the budget theories of John Maynard Keynes were not then widely known, their views reflected Keynesian thought. Hopkins in particular believed that purchasing power in the hands of consumers was a more powerful economic force, at least in the current emergency, than the sound national credit engendered by a balanced budget. He favored continuing deficit spending to stimulate the economy, a case he was arguing more frequently, and vocally, within the administration.

But Roosevelt kept pushing for spending cuts and savings. On top of the reduced WPA budget, he wanted local and state governments to increase their contributions to projects for which they sought WPA-paid labor. “More contributions please!” the president wrote Hopkins, urging that he immediately press project sponsors to shoulder 30 percent of project costs. Some members of Congress wanted it to be even more. Local sponsors had contributed 9.8 percent to the costs of their WPA projects in 1936, and by 1938 it would be up to 20.8 percent. Although Hopkins was beginning to move in the president’s direction, he opposed making the local share a strict demand on the grounds that many of the smaller state and local governments could not afford the additional spending; if so, projects would fold and they would have to lay off workers.

Hopkins had gone after his $1.5 billion appropriation for the new fiscal year with a vengeance, lobbying mayors, governors, and sympathetic senators and representatives in a blizzard of phone calls and office visits. The seasonal cuts, and the suggestion in his budget request that these would be more or less permanent, had already set off protests among WPA workers. As usual, the leftist factions concentrated in New York were among the most vocal; 7,000 of them in the New York arts units staged a one-day strike on May 27, 1937. And while Hopkins was reconciled to the lower appropriation and the lower rolls, he was determined to resist cuts that went beyond what he recommended. He did not believe that either the WPA or the country would be served by cutting the employment program even closer to the bone, which set him against an increasingly hostile anti–New Deal bloc in Congress.

He won the day, but his victory came at a cost. His relations with congressional conservatives, never warm, cooled further. When Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina asked Hopkins if he could get along on $1 billion for twelve months, Hopkins snapped, “I can, but the unemployed couldn’t.” Some members resented the ease with which he moved in and out of Capitol Hill offices, courting those he chose to and ignoring others. Some, especially from the low-wage South, disliked his support for a minimum wage. His sharp tongue, his resistance to patronage appointments in the WPA, and the continuing rancor over the court-packing battle spilled over, and when the House passed its version of the appropriations bill, it added language cutting Hopkins’s salary from $12,000 to $10,000.

It was a petty action designed to send a message. The
Baltimore Sun
ascribed the move to “a frantic hatred” of Hopkins caused in part by his opposition to “earmarking” WPA funds—that is, specifying the individual projects on which they could be spent. Earmarking was a thinly disguised effort to turn the WPA appropriation into a feast of pork, in which members of Congress would swap favorite projects among themselves regardless of the local unemployment rolls. Hopkins emerged victorious from this scrape, too; the bill called for the $1.5 billion to be spent in broad categories, and within those categories, Roosevelt and Hopkins had discretion. They included highways, roads, and streets ($415 million); public buildings and other public projects ranging from parks, airports, and utilities to pest eradication and flood control ($630 million); women’s and professional projects including the arts programs ($380 million); and the National Youth Administration ($75 million).

And the final bill also restored Hopkins’s full salary, although
Washington Post
columnist Franklyn Waltman summarized the extent to which he was accumulating enemies: “It was a pleasant sight,” he wrote, “to see someone slap that smartalecky Harry Hopkins down.”

It was not a time for Hopkins to gloat, however, for he had devastating matters on his mind. His wife, Barbara, had been diagnosed with breast cancer early in the year, and by the end of June, when Congress approved the WPA funding, the disease was well advanced. Hopkins was splitting his time between Washington and New York, where Barbara was receiving treatment, and a retinue of friends and retainers assisted in caring for their little daughter, Diana. When they learned that her case was hopeless, Hopkins and Barbara left New York for a final late summer stay in Saratoga Springs. They returned to Washington soon after Labor Day, and at the beginning of October she entered Garfield Hospital, where she died early on October 7 with Hopkins at her bedside. Barbara Duncan Hopkins was only thirty-seven, and she was the love of Hopkins’s life. They had been together for barely six years, he adored her, and he blamed his various failings for her death. Nor was Hopkins well himself. His duodenal ulcer had developed into something more serious and he suspected cancer, but he had allowed himself no time to confirm this during Barbara’s final months.

Members of the administration rallied around him in his grief. Hundreds sent sympathy cards. Florence Kerr, who in addition to heading the Division of Women’s and Professional Projects in the Midwest had been his classmate at Grinnell, returned to Washington to help look after Diana. Harold Ickes set aside his hostility and invited Hopkins to spend time at his farm in Maryland, an invitation Hopkins accepted, bringing about a temporary truce between the two. Hopkins apparently moped much of the time that he was there, but as Ickes later told Robert Sherwood, “Harry was an agreeable scoundrel when he wanted to be.”

Meanwhile, the economy was not showing the resilience Roosevelt had hoped for, or that Hopkins’s budget request had contemplated. Many of the workers laid off in the seasonal cutbacks had been unable to find jobs in the private sector. Pleading letters arrived on the desks of mayors and governors as the cuts took hold. Mayor Robert S. Maestri of New Orleans was a typical recipient, and he dutifully championed the causes of the unemployed with relief and WPA officials:

Mr. Richard R. Foster
Director of Public Welfare
Soule Building
New Orleans, Louisiana

Dear Mr. Foster:

This letter will be handed to you by Mrs. Josephine Maestri [she was apparently unrelated to the mayor], who has been connected with a WPA sewing project as a seamstress’ helper. Mrs. Maestri has been dropped because of reduction of funds.

I will appreciate it if you can have this lady reinstated. She is alone in the world and has a daughter to support. The small amount she has been receiving is all that she has to live on. I will appreciate your personal attention in this matter.

Sincerely yours,
Robert Maestri, Mayor

By August, when the rolls dropped below 1.53 million, the cuts had produced more protests. David Lasser, the president of the left-wing union called the Workers Alliance of America, made up of WPA employees and relief recipients, led 2,500 of his claimed 400,000 dues-paying members to Washington, where they camped at the Washington Monument. Hopkins met with Lasser twice in two days, and the meetings probably were more interesting than other events on Hopkins’s calendar, since Lasser was a man of many parts. Before he founded the Workers Alliance in 1935 and started agitating for more work and better pay for WPA workers, he had founded the American Interplanetary Society and written a book,
The Conquest of Space,
that proposed rocket-propelled space travel. He turned to labor advocacy after deciding “it is necessary to remake the Earth before delving into life on the moon.” But on the subject at hand, Hopkins refused to promise that WPA employment would expand, and Lasser appealed to his members for contributions to a political action fund to take the union’s case to voters.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve board was acting at cross-purposes. Although its chair, Eccles, favored a continuation of pump-priming relief spending, the Fed also wanted to ease business fears about inflation, so despite the stagnant job market it tightened credit by increasing bank reserve requirements. This was the opposite of pump priming; it took “some water out of the spout.” The new payroll taxes for Social Security removed an additional $2 billion from the pockets of consumers, and the WPA job cuts did still more to keep potential buyers away from retail counters.

Industrial production, which had struggled to a peak during the spring, started to fall; by October it had dropped 14 percent. The stock market, after fighting its way to 194.4 in March, also declined, incrementally at first and then more drastically in August and September. The New York Stock Exchange sought to halt trading and close the exchange after a sharp early September sell-off, but WilliamO. Douglas, who had replaced Joseph Kennedy as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, rejected the request. Then, on a single day, October 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 7.75 percent of its value and the Standard and Poor’s index 9.12 percent. More than half a million Americans in private jobs were thrown out of work in that one month alone, 2 million by the end of the year, and what Republicans gleefully called the “Roosevelt Recession” was a fact.

5. THE ROOSEVELTS AT TIMBERLINE

T
he recessionary signs were deepening, but were not yet acute, when the president and first lady embarked on a two-week trip to the Northwest in early fall. Although 1937 was not an election year and the trip was billed as an inspection tour, it had a political feel. Bloodied in the court fight by a majority of newspapers—he was convinced that 85 percent of them were “utterly opposed to everything the administration is seeking”—and still angry, he wanted to bypass them and their sniping columnists and connect directly with the people. He had called a special session of the Congress for later in the fall to revisit wages-and-hours and other legislation that had stalled during the court battle, and he hoped to generate momentum for the bills he wanted to push through. Perhaps most important, he wanted to call attention to the lavish investment in jobs, public works, and public benefits the nation’s citizens had financed with their tax dollars at some major dams and building sites.

The presidential train left Hyde Park on September 22. It reached Iowa the next afternoon and started making whistle stops, the president emerging onto the rear platform to observe that the corn was a “little bit taller” than his corn back in the Hudson Valley and that looking over the country “at first hand…'is the right thing for a president to do.” The stops continued into Wyoming. In Cheyenne, Roosevelt reminded his audience that the government had spent “a great deal of money in putting people to work” building, among other things, thousands of airports and schools. In Boise, Idaho, after a two-day stopover at Yellowstone National Park, he said meeting the American people gave him renewed strength like Antaeus, the Greek giant of mythology who drew strength from contact with his mother the earth. Indeed, the crowds that gathered seemed to Roosevelt to be larger than ever, and to have lost none of their affection. He gave the glad hand to senators, governors, and local politicians, though he also signaled displeasure with some—Montana’s Wheeler was one—who had opposed him in the court fight. There were visits to WPA parks and anti-erosion projects, irrigation projects sponsored by the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of Interior, and PWA-funded buildings, and then the presidential party headed west to Oregon.

Here he began a series of stops that put the magnificent vision of the New Deal on full display. At eight on the morning of September 28, the train rolled to a halt in Bonneville, on the Columbia River forty miles east of Portland, and the party shifted to a motorcade to inspect the Bonneville Dam and locks, a $51 million joint effort of the Public Works Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers. Bonneville was precisely the value-laden project Harold Ickes envisioned spending work relief money on. Its navigation lock, then the world’s largest single-lift lock, would extend shipping 188 miles upriver to the Snake River inside Washington State; it would provide irrigation water for arid eastern Oregon; and its hydroelectric turbines would generate 580,000 horsepower of affordable electricity to feed aluminum plants operating in the area as well as rural consumers in Washington and Oregon. What was more, $3.2 million of its cost had gone into fish ladders that would allow Pacific salmon to reach their upstream spawning beds.

The president spoke of navigation and electricity in his brief remarks at Bonneville. Then the party headed south in a motorcade to Mount Hood, Roosevelt and his wife in an open car wrapped in blankets and robes. It was less than twenty-five miles as the crow flies, but more than sixty skirting the mountain to the west, and by the time they arrived at Timberline Lodge in the early afternoon of September 28 they were cold. Eleanor was ushered to one of the rooms to get warm, while the president chatted with E. J. Griffith, the Oregon WPA administrator, and took stock of the crowd from the balcony above the main entrance. Two or three hundred people were standing around the south front of the still-unfinished lodge, many of them masons, carpenters, and craftspeople who had been working on the structure nonstop since it had gone “under roof” the previous December. More watched from the large dining room windows behind him, and from a viewing platform built for the occasion. Still, Roosevelt probably wished the crowd were larger, given the semi-political nature of his trip and the cost of Timberline. It had ballooned to $1 million and counting when road building and landscaping were figured in and because Harry Hopkins kept saying yes to Margery Hoffman Smith’s arts-and-crafts proposals. The president was to give the lodge its formal dedication now, although its opening was still four months away. Just to reach this point had stretched the WPA work crews, and the artists and craft workers, to their limits.

Even after the lodge was roofed, outdoor work had continued. A small crew of quarriers working in snow trenches that were over six feet deep cut granite for the interior stonework and loaded the stones into canvas-tented truck beds. At the lodge itself, carpenters nailed on shingles, clapboard siding, and board-and-batten to complete the exterior walls ahead of the rising snowdrifts. The masons working on the headhouse roof to complete the main chimney labored with only a wooden shelter to protect them.

The jobs of the road-clearing crews were among the most dangerous on the mountain. It was easy to lose men in a blizzard, and back in January two had gone missing. Only after a suppertime roll call came up two names short did the workers turn out to form a human chain to search the road below the lodge. Remarkably, they found the men still alive and brought them back to safety. Down at the camp, Albert Altorfer kept two men and sometimes three busy chopping wood for the cookstoves. His head cook, responsible for rousing the kitchen crew to start the morning meal, discovered that a bucketful of snow was good for waking up men who clung to the warmth of their cots in the predawn cold.

While carpenters, plumbers, and electricians completed their tasks within the lodge, other workers devoted themselves to the architectural and decorative flourishes. Ray Neufer’s woodworking shop handled an array of tasks. Men carved old cedar telephone poles into newel posts with eagles, beavers, squirrels, and other animals at the tops. Other carvers shaped ram and buffalo heads that would be part of the exterior decoration. Still others rendered “Native American” petroglyphs to decorate interior doorways; their designs were cribbed from the Camp Fire Girls handbook. Cabinetmakers working under Neufer built most of the lodge’s furniture, including tables, chairs, beds, and dressers. In the blacksmith shop, Orion Dawson directed workers, including Henry Moar, as they built wrought-iron gates, lamps, and chandeliers, as well as straps, knockers, and handles for the lodge’s heavy wooden doors.

Back in Portland, Hoffman Smith had WPA craft shops humming at full speed, with women hooking and weaving rugs and bedspreads and upholstery fabrics. She also commissioned art to support the frontier and outdoor themes that were part of the lodge’s brawny Western beauty. Douglas Lynch, the Portland muralist, would use linoleum to carve and then paint scenes of camping and fishing for the coffee shop walls. Modernist C. S. Price painted large-scale western scenes on canvas. Karl Fuerer, who had spent his career reproducing old-master paintings, did watercolors of local wildflowers for the guest rooms that would bear their names (although the Skunk Cabbage Room would later be renamed to improve its occupancy rate). A room intended for wood storage was turned into the Blue Ox Bar, with art by Virginia Darcé based on the Paul Bunyan legend. When the lodge was finished it would be, inside and out, a salute to the people of Oregon: their ingenuity and their surroundings.

In the days before the Roosevelts’ arrival, the Timberline architects had received a new rush commission: based on sketches sent by the White House, they were to build a podium for the president to speak from. Linn Forrest described it as “like an apple box, with a couple of handles for him to hold onto and a seat like a bicycle seat to sit on.” This, and the plywood sheeting requested by the White House for the ramp up to the balcony where he would speak, brought home to Forrest the efforts made by the president’s team to disguise the extent of his paralysis, a subterfuge at which they were now expert.

Roosevelt made his way to the podium midway through the afternoon, with Eleanor looking on, warm again after the cold ride. It was a clear, sunny day, and before them lay the magnificent fifty-mile view down the Cascade Range to Mount Jefferson. The president spoke briefly, saying the lodge and projects like it would attract more recreational users to the national forests and quoting from the dedication plaque; it was “a monument to the skill and faithful performance of workers on the rolls of the Works Progress Administration” and “a place to play for generations of Americans in the days to come.”

Rooms had been prepared for the presidential party. Neufer’s woodworking shop had even designed a special armchair for the president, and Griffith tried to persuade them to stay overnight. But the Roosevelts were traveling with their daughter Anna, her husband, John Boettiger, and their two young children, and they were eager to get to Seattle, where the Boettigers lived. After they left, the frantic pace of work continued, so as to ready the lodge for paying guests in February 1938.

And before those first guests arrived for their skiing, and for the views downrange from the dining room where they ate 75-cent veal chops and 50-cent beef jardinière polished off with coffee and 15-cent huckleberry pie, there was a lively party for the WPA-paid construction workers. As they milled around their former workplace they were both awestruck and bereft. It had been an extraordinary experience. “They were doing something that was really creative and they could see the results of it, and it was their building, their lodge,” said Hoffman Smith afterward. “A lot of those men cried. I wouldn’t have believed they could be so moved but they literally cried, thinking that the project was over.”