The flowering of public construction and employment during the New Deal that many people believe saved America during the Great Depression offers lessons for today far beyond architecture, says Gray Brechin, who has launched a treasure hunt to locate and share the riches of the New Deal.

Researcher Brechin, from UC Berkeley’s Geography Department, told delegates at the CFT Convention that lavishly funded right-wing think tanks have since the 1970s been trying to kill what remains of the New Deal. Nonetheless, he admires the message Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered during an era of economic collapse, especially “when the president we have now has nothing to peddle but fear itself.”

Brechin was referring to the oft-quoted line from Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in March 1933, by many measures the depth of the depression, when he told Americans, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The “Alphabet Agencies”

Roosevelt responded to the fiscal crises of the 1930s with The New Deal, creating an alphabet soup of new agencies that hired millions of destitute citizens and built thousands of infrastructure projects, from schools and libraries to public parks, many of them still in use today.

For example, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) hired 3.5 million young men “to redeem the land and themselves,” Brechin explained, by sending them into the woods and mountains to plant trees, build parks and roads — employment that saved many of them from starvation and crime.

The Civil Works Administration (CWA) hired 50,000 unemployed teachers and sent many of them to rural schools whose districts could not afford teachers. Within two months, the CWA put over 4 million unemployed Americans to work, 41 percent of whom were women, which Brechin called “a remarkable proportion for the era.”

The short-lived CWA became the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that built schools, colleges, amphitheaters, recreation facilities, roads, airports, public spaces, bridges and dams. In addition, the WPA’s Federal Arts Project put thousands of unemployed artists, musicians, writers, actors, and photographers on the federal payroll,

producing public projects ranging from murals to state park guidebooks.

 “They built an enormous number of schools, museums, colleges, and libraries, and few prisons,” Brechin said. “They knew it was cheaper to educate people than to punish them.

This is not the way we do things today.”

Lessons from the New Deal may be useful for the country’s present financial woes, Brechin suggests. The nation is “bankrupt because the military is bleeding the United States white. We can’t have another New Deal until we deal with the vampire of the military-industrial complex.”

Brechin lamented the present trends towards cutbacks in libraries, parks, day care, public health and public safety and the continuing deterioration of infrastructure. “When you don’t pay taxes, things fall apart,” he asserted. “It is seldom spelled out what the cost will be for cutting taxes — but something has to give. We have to put together the dots of how our public services are being massacred. For example, California schools go from being the nation’s best to among its worst.”

Best friend to education

Roosevelt gave immense attention to public education, and he saw that support as the path to an enlightened citizenry. The schools, colleges, and libraries were built to last. Brechin, an art historian as well as a geographer, reeled off the names of dozens as he flashed slides of buildings and architectural artwork.

 Many were part of a large school rebuilding campaign in Los Angeles County following the Long Beach earthquake of 1933.

“But what has amazed me is that it didn’t stop there,” Brechin continued. “It seems that every small town that I visit in the state has at least one school from that period, and large cities have dozens of them.” Often these public structures were decorated with large mosaics and murals that showed working people, at a time when workers had never seen themselves in public art.

Unions of that era helped win many gains of the New Deal. “Because of the power and the pressure of the unions,” Brechin explained, “Roosevelt went much further than he would have otherwise. Because of the massive wave of strikes, including the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, there was a general feeling that revolution was breaking out. Roosevelt knew he had to take pressure off the system — and the New Deal jobs program did that.”

Brechin described the Roosevelt administration as the best friend unions ever had in the White House. FDR told labor leaders that they had to create the political pressure for his administration to help workers recover from the Depression, and they did.

Reflecting on the remarkable accomplishments of the New Deal, Brechin concluded, “How in far worse economic times could we achieve so much? These guys were not just building porta-potties. They were building a civilization.”

Was your school or college a New Deal project?

The Living New Deal Project has catalogued hundreds of New Deal sites and mapped them on the project Web site. Research Fellow Gray Brechin eventually wants to catalogue every county in the state. Brechin urged educators to use the Web site as a resource and asked them to enlist their students as fellow treasure hunters to help locate New Deal projects that have been lost because they never had markers or their plaques have been removed. Many of the schools are no longer open to the public so Brechin and his collaborators often rely on employees in those buildings. He urges school employees to send information and digital photographs of buildings and artwork to the project for entry and mapping.

- By Malcolm Terence, CFT Reporter