And now, a big hand for a hand up

Paul Weideman | The New Mexican

5/1/2008 - 5/2/08

During his campaign for president during the Great Depression in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a program that would put unemployed young men to work on conservation projects in rural areas. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, and established the Civilian Conservation Corps 17 days later.

It was fast action during hard times — and action that paid huge returns for those men and the nation. Among the Corps' outstanding legacies are the hundreds of buildings constructed in state and national parks.

"The CCC boys had their work cut out for them," writes Kathryn A. Flynn in her new book,
"There were no electric saws and power hammers in those days, just strong backs, handsaws, picks and shovels, and mules for transport over rugged terrain. Campsites, trails, and roads were all built by hand largely with existing materials in the area: rocks and timber."

At Bandelier National Monument, CCC crews used those materials to build some 30 structures, as well as furniture for the buildings and roads to get to them, between 1933 and 1941. It was quite an achievement, and most of the beautiful buildings are still in use.

These wonderful examples of "parkitecture" by the CCC — the grand National Park Service building on Old Santa Fe Trail is another — are just one part of Roosevelt's New Deal initiative. When you spend time with Flynn's book, you get a real appreciation for the genius behind the president's gallery of programs designed to help Americans regain their footing during very hard times.

Not only are many of those programs still with us, but it's hard to imagine this society without them. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protects our money in banks, is one. Another is the Federal Communications Commission, which was founded to regulate use of the radio spectrum and expanded as television, cable, and satellite communications came into being. "And Social Security, for gosh sakes," Flynn said in a recent interview. "Most people are not aware of where all these things came from."

The New Deal is probably best known for the buildings and other structures erected not only by the CCC but also by a host of other programs. In Santa Fe, there's the 1934 Don Gaspar Bridge, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the state's first rigid-frame bridge, which was constructed with funds from the New Deal's National Recovery Municipal Program.

The Public Works Administration, another FDR program, was responsible for the New Mexico Supreme Court Building in Santa Fe and six structures for the New Mexico School for the Deaf. Hoover Dam; the gold depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky; and the Immigration Station Ferryhouse at Ellis Island, New York, also were built with PWA labor. The Works Progress Administration built the National Guard Armory building and scores of Santa Fe construction projects for schools, roads, sewers, parks, and bridges.

Flynn's book is fun to peruse because it's so rich in imagery. It reproduces the famous 1936 Dorothea Lange photograph Migrant Mother and answers the question of what became of its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, by pairing it with a later photo of her and her grown children. Lange was part of a photography program of the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. In the book, Flynn mentions that another photographer, Russell Lee, was assigned to document the Hispanic lifestyles of New Mexico. "There are lots of pictures that were taken all over, in Pie Town and Truchas and Trampas and Mora, a whole series by the FSA photographers," Flynn said. "I think they [publisher Gibbs Smith] wanted a very colorful book, and they got that. If it was just about New Mexico, I would have had a lot more color photographs, but many of those we used were old, black-and-white images from the Library of Congress and the National Archives. All the New Deal posters are very colorful, and so are the post office murals, including one in Truth or Consequences.

"There are six New Deal murals by William Penhallow Henderson in the federal courthouse, and there are two stone sculptures by Hannah Small Ludins in the entryway of the city library. There's a New Deal mural by Olive Rush in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library and [there are] frescoes by Will Shuster in the courtyard of the New Mexico Museum of Art."

Many of these works were created by local artists (who also included Jozef Bakos, Gene Kloss, and Eugenie Shonnard) under the auspices of the Federal Art Project. "So far I've documented 167 artists in New Mexico who received New Deal funds to create visual art," Flynn said. The Federal Art Project ended in 1943.

Another of the New Deal programs that's still going is the Historic American Buildings Survey (mistitled "Historic Architectural Buildings Survey" in the book) that was established to provide work for Depression-era architects, draftsmen, and photographers. More than 250 surveys have been done in New Mexico. Among those in Santa Fe County are the Borrego House, the grade school at Loretto Academy, Two Mile Reservoir, and the Pueblo of Tesuque.

The Roosevelt administration paid a lot of attention to New Mexico in doling out New Deal resources, according to Richard Polese, Flynn's collaborator on The New Deal. That had something to do with the state's Indian and Hispanic cultures and its reputation for art, he said. But Flynn wanted to represent the whole country in the book, as she had already covered the scene from a more local perspective in her 1994 book Treasures on New Mexico Trails: Discover New Deal Art and Architecture, which she is updating.

In April, Flynn was notified that she had been selected for a state Heritage Preservation Award, which she will receive during a ceremony on Friday, May 2. (The event, held at the Scottish Rite Center, 463 Paseo de Peralta, is free and open to the public, but reservations are required; call 827-6320.) She was chosen in recognition of her work on New Deal heritage. Her interest began in 1991, when, as editor of the New Mexico Blue Book, she began looking for New Deal art to illustrate the publication and was concerned that it was getting harder to find those materials.

The National New Deal Preservation Association, on which she serves as executive director, was formed after Flynn convened 85 people from all over the United States for a 1998 conference in Santa Fe. "I was deputy secretary of state, and we had a task force to determine what New Deal public buildings were in the state," she said. "We began looking at courthouses, then we looked at paintings in the courthouses, and that took us to post offices and other public buildings. We hired an art conservator to travel the state and prioritize these resources, and then we started raising money for restoration, conservation, and preservation." At this point the association has been able to spend about $500,000 toward those ends.

"This all evolved into a nonprofit organization and now we have chapters across the country," Flynn said. "They're doing things to show off New Deal resources and the CCC workers. There were 3 million CCC workers in the country and 54,000 in New Mexico, and there are about 3,000 alumni left nationwide and a few dozen in our state. With this 75th anniversary, we're trying to find these people and thank them publicly."

"Kathy is a marvelous researcher with a real appreciation for what the New Deal meant to America, and I joined her in that," Polese said. "You don't have to look too far beneath the surface to see what that era meant to so many people, including my parents."

Polese, author of the 1991 book Discovering Dixie Along the Magnolia Trail: The Day-by-Day Travel Guide to the Best of the Deep South, performed rewrite work on the text of The New Deal. "I basically helped Kathy make her book more approachable and to emphasize certain people who were significant."

Polese has a small building in his yard on Cerro Gordo Road that he says was an innovation of the Works Progress Administration. "It was a stinkless outhouse. I use it as a toolshed," he said.

Then he talked about bigger things. "The Tennessee Valley Authority, which started off as a New Deal program, literally transformed the South. They started off with coal-oil lamps, and they ended up with washing machines and radio. And the Rural Electric Administration. You know, those rural electric co-ops still serve a big part of New Mexico, and the New Mexico Rural Electric Cooperative Association magazine, Enchantment, has the second-highest circulation of any periodical in
the state."

The spirit and heart of the New Deal and all the people it helped has impressed Polese. "So many of those guys who worked for the CCC went straight into the military after Pearl Harbor, and they had developed skills that were so useful," he said. "We hear complaints these days about a lot of the infrastructure in this country starting to get a little shopworn, but much of it was built in the New Deal era, and that was 75 years ago. That says a great deal about the remarkable quality of the work those people did.

"And look at the government's pitiful response to Hurricane Katrina. That would never have happened during the Roosevelt era. FDR would have had a major project there to bring New Orleans back. He showed us that giving people a hand restores their dignity and their faith in themselves."