FDR - Jean Edward Smith [224]
The Corps of Engineers’ support for WPA was scarcely disinterested. Just as the CCC program brought many Army officers into contact with the New Deal, the WPA gave a fresh lease on life to the Corps in its battle with Secretary Ickes for control of the nation’s rivers and harbors. “You’ve got to remember that you’re always fighting for position,” said Clay. “It seemed to me that the best way we could establish ourselves was to make ourselves helpful. Frankly, I would have to admit that if we hadn’t felt that Mr. Ickes was trying to give us trouble, we might not have thought of going to Mr. Hopkins.” And as Clay—whose father had been a three-term U.S. senator from Georgia—knew very well, in Washington one hand washes the other. “In our subsequent conflicts with Mr. Ickes over flood control, Mr. Hopkins was definitely on our side.”91
In the first year of its existence the WPA put more than 3 million people to work, and over a span of eight years it employed upward of 8.5 million while pumping some $11 billion into the economy. Projects ranged from make-work undertakings of little lasting value to the construction of schools (5,900), hospitals (2,500), parks (8,000), playgrounds (13,000), and highways (572,000 miles). The WPA restored the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, constructed Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood, and ran a pack-horse library in the hills of Kentucky.92 Hopkins funneled money into the arts and entertainment as well. The Federal Music Project sponsored dozens of symphony orchestras, jazz groups, and native ensembles. The Federal Theatre Project brought plays, vaudeville acts, and puppet shows to many who had never seen a stage production. In four years WPA-supported theater played to audiences that totaled more than 30 million. The Federal Art Project employed at one time or another some 9,000 of the 40,000 registered artists and craftsmen in the country to teach their trade, restore objects of art, and paint murals (often controversial) in public buildings. “Some of it was good,” said FDR, “some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive: All of it painted in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.”93 Many of the artists had little talent, but the program also gave a helping hand to some who would achieve international renown, such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Perhaps the most successful cultural endeavor was the Federal Writers Project, which put writers to work preparing the American Guide Series, an encyclopedic and still useful set of guidebooks to each of the states and major cities. The writers included Conrad Aiken, John Cheever, and Richard Wright, whose “Uncle Tom’s Children” won Story magazine’s first prize for a story by an FWP writer.94 The outpouring of literature under the sponsorship of the WPA was “one of the most remarkable phenomena of the era of crisis,” wrote the critic Alfred Kazin. “Whatever form this literature took … it testified to an extraordinary national self-scrutinizing.… Never before did a nation seem so hungry for news of itself.”95
Throughout its existence the WPA was a lightning rod for criticism. As director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and CWA, Hopkins, the former social worker, had been remarkably nonpartisan. But a national work relief program with an initial $4.8 billion budget inevitably fell victim to party politics. When Congress amended the Work Relief Bill to require senatorial confirmation for appointees earning more than $5,000, Hopkins realized his apolitical days were over. “They told me I had to be part