American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (47 page)

The brickwork on the administration building had been completed by the time he started work. Ferguson joined a crew of men building the “stairway to the stars,” the ascent to the observation deck. Here the city was gambling on the public’s fascination with the new aviation age. A visitor who placed a dime in the coin slot of a turnstile would gain admittance to a half-mile promenade that gave a sweeping view of the majestic four-engine flying boats alighting in the bay and the thundering silver Lockheed 10s and the larger Douglas DC-3s swooping in over the East River and touching down on runways that began literally at the water’s edge. As the complex came together, its components were best expressed as quantities of cement (1,000 truckloads), asphalt (3 million gallons), underground piping (25 miles), cable (200 miles), and steel (20,000 tons). So frantic was the pace of the construction that it sometimes outstripped the preparation of blueprints, with the result that the hangars did not always jibe with the plans they were based on.

Costs continued to rise, fueling renewed criticism of the airport as a massive boondoggle; it would eventually cost $40 million, of which the WPA’s share was some $27 million. But it soon proved to be a powerful business magnet: American Airlines moved its administrative offices from Chicago to North Beach in 1939. And when the public embraced the airport with the same enthusiasm, La Guardia’s victory was complete. Officials predicted that 150,000 people would attend the formal dedication on October 15, 1939. Instead a crowd of 325,000 showed up, and more would have attended if all the parking lots had been completed. As it was, lines of cars were backed up for blocks into the streets of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Two days after the dedication, proving still further that La Guardia’s vision of the future of air travel was widely shared, 5,000 young women swarmed the new airport offices of American Airlines to apply for twenty available jobs for flight attendants, or air hostesses as they were known then, and within three weeks the airline had opened a hostess training school.

A TWA flight from Chicago was the first to touch down at the new field, just after midnight on December 2. Despite the hour, the twenty passengers aboard were surprised to find themselves greeted by the mayor himself, who shook their hands, welcomed them to New York, and accepted kisses from the stewardesses. Bad weather held up the rest of the day’s flights, but at the end of its first full day of commercial traffic on December 3, the airport was the busiest in the United States. Less than a year later, it was the busiest in the world, the New York City Council had joined the Board of Estimate in naming it La Guardia Field after its champion, and Newark Airport, scorned by the mayor as a New York terminus, was closed to commercial traffic.

La Guardia had described his pet project to Roosevelt as “the airport of the New World.” Another New World vision was attracting even more visitors just a mile or so away. Flushing Meadow Park was a former dump converted by Robert Moses into a graded and landscaped 1,200-acre site that was home to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Here, too, WPA workers toiled, not only on the site and construction of fair infrastructure but also on the WPA’s own building.

The fair opened on April 30, 1939, following by ten weeks a rival global fair across the country: the Golden Gate International Exposition, built on a man-made island in San Francisco Bay. This, too, featured contributions by the WPA, notably a mural, seventy-four feet long and twenty-two feet high, painted by WPA artists under the direction of famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. In New York, fairgoers who could pull themselves away from the clean white spike of the Trylon and its companion orb, the Perisphere, the iconic structures at the center of the fair, or the chairs that took them on a fifteen-minute ride across the United States as envisioned by General Motors in its “Futurama” exhibit, could be reminded of the works program. The WPA building sported fluted art-deco–style columns under a tall modernist facade. The familiar old name “Works Progress Administration” marched across the concave brickwork, and above it loomed a huge Philip Guston mural depicting in heroic style the overalled, smocked, and booted workers for whom the WPA had been a godsend: a mason, a sewing room worker, a surveyor, a concrete driller. They leaned intently to their jobs against a backdrop of white clouds, and where flesh showed it was taut and muscled. Guston had called it “Work—The American Way,” and it evoked the scenes that Art Project muralists had painted in schools and other public buildings all across the country. A second Guston mural appeared inside, featuring more workers and a mother—or perhaps a WPA home health aide—holding a child.

Inside, the building’s exhibits showed off the WPA’s work in art and writing, landscaping and conservation, recreation and construction, sewing rooms, and disaster relief, including the 350,000 workers who in various ways were fighting the renewed drought that was then scorching parts of the Midwest. A display made the point that the WPA’s building and infrastructure work “helps Anytown USA keep abreast of modern American standards.” In case a visitor failed to connect that modernization to his own hometown, another room contained a state-by-state compilation of major WPA projects. One showboard, seeming slightly defensive, told the viewer that “out of every 20 American workers only 1 is on WPA.”

The fair’s overall theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” and its crystal ball forecast a progressive future. “Democracity,” another catchword of the fair, implied that the world was evolving toward an inclusive cosmopolitan democracy.

That admirable vision, however, had already fallen into peril, for the dogs of war were on the prowl. Within half a year of the fair’s April opening much of the world was at arms, with democracy among the victims. Japan’s Imperial Army had surged across large swaths of China in the undeclared war that had raged since 1937. The Japanese had taken Kwangsi province in the south all the way to the border with French Indochina—later Vietnam—and was confronting the Soviet Red Army in Manchuria near the Korean and Siberian borders.

In Europe, Hitler’s lust for conquest had proven time and again to be insatiable despite English and French efforts to placate him short of war. Having annexed Austria and blustered and threatened his way to a takeover of the Czechoslovakian border region known as the Sudetenland, he had dropped all pretense of legitimacy and invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In the third week of August, to guard his eastern flank, he signed a mutual non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia. Then on September 1 came the move that brought events full circle. German troops and tanks struck across the border of Poland, the invasion drawing declarations of war from its English and French allies and plunging the European continent back into the nightmare from which it had awakened twenty short years earlier when the world war ended. World War II began.

And with the formally declared war in Europe came debate in the United States. It was not a new one; it was an intensification of the one that had been going on ever since President Woodrow Wilson took the country into the world war in 1917 to make the world “safe for democracy.” Afterward, he supported the creation of the League of Nations as a body of world governments whose purpose was to mediate disputes and ideally to bring an end to wars. But these events had stirred a deep strain of American isolationism. Many of its citizens wanted no part of world affairs. The unsettling passions of people who spoke strange languages, worshiped strange gods, and followed strange customs, who massaged their grievances and enshrined the hatreds they had nursed for centuries—these were not for the forward-looking, business-oriented citizens of the United States. Isolationist sentiment said it was better that the country defend its borders and let the rest of the world take care of itself. This sentiment had kept the country out of the League of Nations, and contributed to the defeat of the Democrats in 1920 by a Republican ticket headed by the unimpressive Warren G. Harding, whose slogan was “a return to normalcy.” Now, with America’s allies again at war in Europe and democracy under renewed attack by fascist powers, the United States was again torn between isolationism and involvement.

The argument would go on for many months. In the meantime, how the WPA would be affected was unclear. If the isolationists had their way, enforcing a strict neutrality, the agency could expect to continue largely as it was, its construction program perhaps shifting to defense work in border and coastal areas, at least until the fitful economy finally started breathing on its own again. Given the performance of the last seven years of New Deal depression fighting, when and even if that might happen was far from certain. It had not been that long ago that Harry Hopkins was talking about a permanent WPA. But if America was able to unleash its industrial strength on behalf of its allies, turning out a range of goods from arms to food supplies, then the unemployed might finally be able to return to private jobs.

Deputy commissioner Howard Hunter, speaking at a news conference in Harrington’s absence on August 31, as the German tanks were massing at the Polish border, said it would be “pure guesswork” to predict the effect of a European war on relief employment. How the WPA would reintegrate its workers into a resurgent private economy also remained to be seen. Hunter did speculate that the WPA would of necessity become more flexible, moving workers into jobs where they were needed. “We have a very good index of the people on the WPA as to their training and qualifications, and if any group of industries or any particular industry were in need of either skilled or unskilled workers, I think we could get our people off the rolls into those jobs,” he said.

The labor pool to which Hunter referred was several million strong, people who either were currently working for the WPA or had done so in the past. They were a huge resource with a wide variety of skills. They had needed the work provided by the government in order to survive. Now it was possible to think, with war raging in both hemispheres, that they might be called upon to return the favor if dreams of peaceful isolation crumbled and the United States was plunged into a fight for the survival of democracy and, indeed, its very life.

PART VIII

WPA: WAR PREPARATION AGENCY

In the years 1935 to 1939, when regular appropriations for the armed forces were so meager, it was the WPA workers who saved many Army posts and Naval stations from literal obsolescence.

—
THE ARMY AND NAVY REGISTER, MAY
16, 1942

1. NO MILITARY WORK

W
hen Congress passed the relief appropriation for the then-new WPA back in the spring of 1935, the bill contained a provision against military spending: “No part of the appropriations…'shall be used for munitions, warships, or military or naval matériel.”

Republican senator William E. Borah of Idaho was among those primarily responsible for this provision. A progressive on domestic matters, he had long ago shed the internationalism that had prompted him to vote for sending American troops to fight in Europe in the world war; he was now a leading isolationist. He had voted against the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations on the grounds that they would entangle America in European politics, and more recently, he had helped pass the Neutrality Act of 1935, which among other provisions prohibited arms sales to nations at war, no matter whether they were the aggressors or were defending themselves against aggression. The embargo received almost unanimous support in the light of the Senate Munitions Committee hearings that began in 1934 under Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. The aim of the special committee was to investigate charges that arms makers and their bankers had conspired to draw the United States into the world war. In ninety-three hearings conducted over a period of eighteen months, the munitions interests were painted as greedy war profiteers bent on filling their coffers with “blood money.” Nye failed at his goal of nationalizing the arms industry, but the hearings left lawmakers averse to any overseas commitments, and Congress had renewed the Neutrality Act in 1937 over Roosevelt’s objections. Borah, Nye, and their colleagues believed, with most of the country apparently agreeing with them, that denying the government the capacity to make war was tantamount to securing peace. “Fortress America” would defend its borders, but it would not reach out militarily beyond them.

In fact, isolationist sentiment was so strong that in 1937, Representative Louis Ludlow, an Indiana Democrat, introduced a constitutional amendment that would submit a declaration of war to a national referendum unless the country was invaded. Roosevelt protested that this “would cripple any president in his conduct of our foreign relations” and tempt hostile governments to believe they could violate Americans’ rights and get away with it. Critics likened it to calling a town meeting before dispatching the fire department to a fire. But national polls showed that 73 percent of the people supported it, and it emerged from committee in January 1938 with strong backing; only some all-out presidential lobbying sent it to defeat by a thin twenty-one-vote margin.

The view that America could ignore the world and isolate itself behind the protective oceans that flanked its coasts alarmed the White House. Roosevelt had sought to dent the appeal of isolationism as early as the fall of 1937, when Hitler and Mussolini were deep into the buildup of their war machines and Japan already had invaded China. Homeward-bound from the northwestern trip during which he had dedicated Bonneville Dam and Timberline Lodge and visited other federal projects, the president appeared in Chicago on October 5. The occasion was the opening of the WPA-funded Outer Drive Bridge, the final link in a thirty-mile boulevard along the Lake Michigan waterfront. But as he addressed the crowd at the noon bridge dedication, the president went beyond the usual script stressing federal largesse and the benefits of public works. Instead, in this heartland where the isolationists were strongest and Robert McCormick’s
Tribune
relentlessly attacked all things Roosevelt, he spoke about “the present reign of terror and international lawlessness” outside the United States.

He named no names, but even casual followers of world events would have understood that he was talking about Japan, Germany, and Italy, and even General Francisco Franco’s right-wing rebellion against the elected government of Spain, which Hitler had aided that April by raining bombs on Guernica in the Basque country and killing some 1,500 civilians. Such aggressions, he said, had reached the point “where the very foundations of civilization are seriously threatened.

“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others.

“Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.”

Quoting novelist James Hilton’s best-selling novel
Lost Horizon,
he raised the specter of “‘a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, will rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing will be in danger, every book, every picture, every harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless, all will be lost or wrecked or utterly destroyed.’”

Speaking directly to the isolationists, he said, “If those things come to pass in other parts of the world, let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization. If those days come,” he continued, quoting again from Hilton, “‘there will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. The storm will rage till every flower of culture is trampled and all human beings are leveled in a vast chaos.’” Nor, he added, would there be escape “through mere isolation or neutrality.”

He compared the spread of violence to an epidemic of disease: “War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared.” The only answer, as in an epidemic of disease, was for peace-loving nations to “quarantine” the aggressors, isolating them to protect the 90 percent of humanity they threatened.

The quarantine speech, as it became known, was front-page news and the beginning of a long campaign by Roosevelt to force the isolationists to look at hard realities. The
Washington Post
called it “perhaps the most momentous utterance of his career.” For all of its borrowed eloquence, however, its effect was doubtful. “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there,” he reportedly said later.

But if he seemed ineffective in public, he acted in private. Roosevelt had no doubt that war was on the way and that when it came, airpower would be a key to victory. In March 1938, coinciding with Hitler’s annexation of Austria, he sent Harry Hopkins on a closely guarded mission to the West Coast, where America’s airplane manufacturing industry was concentrated. Traveling with Colonel Arthur R. Wilson of the Army and Lieutenant Colonel Donald H. Connolly of the Corps of Engineers, who was the Los Angeles–based WPA administrator for southern California, Hopkins toured aircraft factories to assess their capacity to build military airplanes.

His trip resulted from information Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the assistant chief of what was then the Army Air Corps, had given to the president. The United States military had fewer than 2,000 planes, most of them obsolete, and only 1,650 pilots. Seventeen B-17 bombers were on order, but they were not due to be delivered until the end of 1938. Germany, Arnold briefed the president, had 8,000 fighters and bombers in its rapidly expanding air force. Moreover, in commanding a roundtrip flight of ten B-10 bombers between Washington and Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1934, Arnold had demonstrated by the distance of the flight that enemy bombers might have a similar range, so America was not necessarily safe from an attack by air.

When Hopkins undertook his mission for the president, he and Colonel Wilson, who was the liaison officer between the Army General Staff and the WPA, already had a working relationship. Hopkins shared the view of Roosevelt and the military that some of its legitimate needs were being denied by Congress. The president had put in his budget request for the 1938–39 fiscal year a request for a billion dollars for a “two-ocean Navy.” Even the isolationists could not deny that warships could be used to defend America, and the president got his naval appropriation. But Hopkins later recalled that about the time Roosevelt sent him to make his California survey, when the president said the country needed to add planes—he set the number at 8,000—as well as battleships, “everybody in the Army and the Navy and all the newspapers in the country jumped on him.”

All this meant that well into 1939, American airpower continued to lag far behind Germany’s. Not only did the United States have many fewer airplanes, the ones it had did not perform as well. In December 1938, the head of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics pleaded for more research money to develop planes equal to the German Messerschmitt and the new Heinkel fighter; the Heinkel could fly at 440 miles per hour, while no American or English plane could top 400 mph.

But in his last months as head of the WPA, Hopkins had been doing what he could, in public and behind the scenes, to repair the situation. In little-noted remarks in San Francisco on September 20, 1938, he said he would like to see more national defense projects performed by the WPA. Later that same year, after meetings with Wilson and General George C. Marshall, the head of the Army’s War Plans Division who was appointed deputy chief of staff in October, Hopkins secretly authorized the use of several million dollars in WPA funds for making machine tools to be used to produce small-arms ammunition.

At the same time, the National Youth Administration, the education and training program within the WPA, was launching a program to help solve a serious shortage of aviation mechanics, who would be vital in wartime. Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson had sent a memorandum to Roosevelt on August 12, 1938, saying that War Department studies and conversations with aircraft manufacturers indicated “that one of the most serious problems as regards national defense will be found in a shortage of skilled workmen. Specifically, I anticipate that the shortage of airplane mechanics, both for the construction of aircraft in the civilian manufacturing plants as well as for the maintenance of planes in service with the armed forces, will be perhaps the most difficult problem of all.”

Both England and Germany, he wrote, were turning out 5,000 trained aircraft mechanics every year. Here, too, the United States was far behind; airplane manufacturers and airlines would not spend money training more workers than they needed, and aspiring mechanics usually could not afford to pay to attend trade schools out of their own pocket. Johnson asked the president to direct the War Department to launch a comprehensive training program that involved government agencies, including the NYA, the CCC, and the Department of Labor.

Three days later, Roosevelt sent Hopkins a memorandum asking for his recommendations on the matter. By October, he went public, speaking at a news conference about the need for “a very large additional number of aviation mechanics” but adding that he was not yet ready to announce specifics of a training program. Before the end of the month, however, Aubrey Williams had given the White House a proposal to use NYA resources to set up a wide range of vocational training courses that could support military needs. It envisioned a system of schools in urban centers, as well as residential centers that brought together youth from isolated rural areas. The training, Williams wrote, “will include blacksmithing, electric and acetylene welding, sheet metal, simple pattern-making, foundry and machine tool practice, auto mechanics, electric motors and wiring, plumbing, steam-fitting, blue-print reading and draft.”

The best students would graduate to regional centers for intensive training in mechanics and the metal trades, and a technical institute for master mechanics would incorporate the needs of the army and navy into its training program.

A feel of urgency accompanied these covert explorations and public pronouncements about the need for more airplanes, more ships, more mechanics, more defense projects. Still, it was not as if the country was starting from scratch to rebuild its military capability, despite the isolationist rule in Congress. Indeed, even with the restrictions placed upon it, from the very beginning the WPA had been working on the military complex to prevent installations from falling into decrepitude and disrepair.