Sarah Baker Munro | The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the New Deal Oregon's Legacy | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 109.2

The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the New Deal

Oregon's Legacy

by Sarah Baker Munro

LOGGING, FARMING, AND MINing — industries that formed the backbone of Oregon's economy — began sliding during the 1920s and plummeted when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Ten billion board feet of lumber had been produced in Oregon during 1929. The following year, demand for lumber weakened because of a decline in construction, and production decreased 25 percent to 7.5 billion board feet.¹ Drought plagued the dry desert and plateau areas of eastern Oregon, wreaking havoc on farm production and causing increased layoffs in the agricultural sector. Oregon's mining industry also experienced a slowdown. As unemployment rose in Oregon, consumer spending declined, reflecting national trends. Nationally, unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1933, and many who remained in the workforce were employed at reduced wages.² Over half of workers were underemployed or unemployed, impacting many Oregonians and leaving some homeless. In Portland, over 330 people lived at one shantytown at Sullivan's Gulch.³

President Herbert Hoover had initiated significant recovery efforts in 1930. Under his leadership, for example, the Federal Reserve System eased credit. Hoover also held conferences in Washington, D.C., encouraging businesses to maintain wages and railroads and utilities to expand construction. He substantially increased the budget for federal public works.⁴ As the Depression deepened due to the ensuing banking crisis, however, Hoover's initiatives proved weak and ineffective. The public blamed Hoover for the economic hardships, naming homeless shantytowns "Hoovervilles." Oregon voters joined the rest of the nation in hoping that a political change would bring economic relief.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president of the United States on March 4, 1933, he launched a barrage of legislation — collectively known as the New Deal — aimed at providing reform, relief, and recovery from the Great Depression. Because Oregon's economy revolved around rural industries that were ravaged by the Depression, Oregon was situated particularly well to benefit from Roosevelt's legislation. During the initial "Hundred Days" of Roosevelt's first term, he introduced and Congress enacted legislation that restructured banking, agriculture, industry, and labor relations. One of Roosevelt's first acts, developed cooperatively by members of both his and Hoover's staffs, was the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which was introduced, passed, and signed into law on the same day.⁵

Major legislation from the Hundred Days that impacted Oregonians also included the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the Public Works Administration (PWA); the Civilian Conservation Corps Reforestation Relief Act, which established the CCC; the Federal Emergency Relief Act; and the Beer- Wine Revenue Act, which affected Oregon's brewing industry. Legislation enacted during 1935, called the Second New Deal, launched the Social Security System and, under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, established the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Collectively, these programs changed the nation, including Oregon, in significant and visible ways.

The public works programs, such as the PWA, CCC, and WPA, created jobs for many unemployed, destitute citizens. Their work dramatically developed or enhanced use of rivers, national forests, state parks, roads and highways, schools, and post offices throughout the state. The year 2008 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the inauguration of Roosevelt's New Deal and is an opportunity to acknowledge its legacy, a bequest that transformed Oregon. An exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society (OHS), Oregon's Legacy: The New Deal at 75, showcases a variety of projects that changed the face of Oregon during the 1930s.

BUILT UNDER THE PWA, BONNeville Dam generated electricity that, starting in 1938, was transmitted to rural regions, some of which had never before been electrified, including isolated farms and towns in valleys throughout Oregon. With funding from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act and in conjunction with the Oregon Transportation Department, construction of bridges along the Oregon coast (the Coos Bay, Siuslaw, Alsea, and Yaquina bridges), tunnels (the Sunset — now Dennis L. Edwards, — Toothrock, and Salt Creek tunnels), and roads and highways (the Wolf Creek-Wilson River highway) opened coastal areas to visitors and improved economic opportunities.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees built trails and campgrounds in national forests and state parks, opening them to visitors. According to U.S. Forest Service records, CCC camps occupied at various times between 1933 and 1942 in the Mount Hood National Forest included Zigzag, Cascade Locks, Dee, Friend, Bear Springs, Summit Meadows (later a WPA camp), High Rock, Plaza, Oak Grove, Oak Grove/ Estacada, and Latourelle. The Timberline Trail, which circumnavigates Mount Hood, was built by CCC workers, who also worked on road construction, ground preparation, and stonework at Timberline Lodge. CCC workers constructed buildings and laid out trails at Silver Falls and Jessie M. Honeyman Memorial state parks, and others. A separate Native American unit from Umatilla worked on a monument to Chief Joseph at Wallowa Lake.

Stonemasons place large boulders on one portal to the Toothrock Tunnel on the Columbia River Highway in about 1937. Works Progress Administration funds supported road building and improvements throughout Oregon.

Located at the U.S. Federal Highway Administration

WPA workers who built Timberline Lodge and a ski lift on Mount Hood expanded the recreational opportunities for skiers and visitors to the Mount Hood National Forest. Timberline Lodge was a dream pursued by Oregon's WPA director, Emerson J. Griffith. Many programs of the WPA in Oregon participated in Timberline Lodge: WPA and CCC workers built the lodge and its surrounding landscape; funds from the Federal Art Project (FAP) furnished and decorated it; participants in the Federal Theatre Project produced theatrical sketches for its dedication and opening, and Federal Music Project musicians played at the same events; and writers for the Federal Writer's Project wrote about the lodge. Griffith personally promoted Timberline to members of the administration in Washington, D.C., by sending them samples of Christmas cards depicting the lodge, news articles about Timberline, and Timberline Lodge, a book decorated with woodcuts by Oregon artists on the Oregon Art Project. Timberline is an icon of the WPA — a lodge for the public in a national forest.

The art collection of Timberline includes work by Oregon's most prominent artists of the 1930s, including C.S. Price's Huckleberry Pickers and three other oil paintings; Howard Sewell's murals Symbolizing Lodge Builders; Charles Heaney's The Mountain; Darrel Austin's Dishwashers, among others; Douglas Lynch's Calendar of Mountain Sports, a series of carved linoleum panels; and Virginia Darcé's Paul Bunyan opus sectile murals. The exhibit at OHS includes original furnishings seen by President and Eleanor Roosevelt when he dedicated the lodge on September 28, 1937, including an armchair built specifically for the president by the WPA woodworking shop under Ray Neufer. Some of the furnishings that reportedly caused Eleanor Roosevelt to exclaim that the craft at the lodge was the best she had seen are also included in the exhibit. Another part of the seventy-fifth anniversary exhibit at OHS offers a glimpse of the work of Oregon artists, actors, writers, and musicians who participated in the Federal Art Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers' Project, and the Federal Music Project.

ON OCTOBER 9, 2004, A LABOR Arts Symposium — Oregon Art During the Roosevelt Era: 1933–1945 — held at the Portland Art Museum brought renewed attention to the art produced under New Deal projects in Oregon. One participant described efforts to create an inventory of New Deal–funded art in the state — in schools, post offices, libraries, and other public buildings — starting from an inventory of art in Portland Public Schools done by a local college student.⁶ Two other participants, scholars William G. Robbins and David A. Horowitz, presented papers that are published here in conjunction with the exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society.

Robbins's overview, "Surviving the Great Depression: The New Deal in Oregon," compares Oregon legislators' responses to Roosevelt's legislation. Senator Charles McNary and Congresman Walter Pierce supported New Deal legislation, but Portland Mayor John Carson and Oregon Governor Charles Martin opposed Roosevelt's reforms. Robbins concludes that the New Deal was generally popular in the West, especially in places where hydroelectric projects tilted the per-capita expenditures of New Deal programs in the region's favor. Robbins specifically describes the impacts of the CCC in the national forests and state parks and of the WPA on bridge and road building and in the arts, projects that are illustrated in the exhibit.

Robbins also emphasizes the sexual discrimination that was commonplace in the New Deal, reiterating Neil Barker's description of "institutionalized sexism in the WPA guidelines."⁷ Since a family could have only one member employed under the WPA, the women's division employed mostly unmarried, divorced, or widowed women. Of the 14,372 individuals employed on WPA projects in Oregon in 1936, 3,172 were women; of those, 2,500 — over 78 percent — were employed on sewing projects.⁸ Women held very few jobs under the WPA, and many who did were employed by the Women's and Professional Project to sew appliquéed draperies, weave fabrics for bedspreads or upholstery, and hook rugs to furnish Timberline Lodge. Other women were trained as domestic workers. Robbins also explains that rural families did not benefit from New Deal programs proportionally and describes people in rural areas as existing on a subsistence basis by bartering fruits, vegetables, and dairy products; exchanging labor; poaching game and fish; and picking berries. He states that the Depression lasted a full decade for many people in Oregon.

Women employed under the Division of Professional and Service Projects in Oregon hook rugs to furnish Timberline Lodge in about 1937. Others wove fabrics for drapery, bedspreads, and upholstery or sewed appliquéed draperies for guest rooms before the lodge opened in February 1938.

Courtesy of Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; on loan from the WPA Negatives Collection

Horowitz delivered a complementary paper, "The New Deal and People's Art: Market Planners and Radical Artists," in which he identifies the major economic and social reforms effected through New Deal programs. In particular, he examines the cultural programs of the FAP, which, he argues, shared the consumerist goals of other New Deal reforms. Horowitz explains that New Deal administrators believed employment should be restored for artists as well as for other workers and that artists could support themselves if patrons existed. He cites Michael Denning's argument in The Cultural Front that involving working-class people in culture was, as Horowitz says, an "act of self-development." Denning states that these "plebeian artists and intellectuals," the political left, were the Cultural Front who had an unprecedented influence on American culture during the Depression.⁹ Horowitz states that New Deal art exhibited a "melding of pragmatism and idealism" that "provides important clues to the way the visual arts provided a bridge between government policy and radical visions." One way the FAP reached out to the public in Oregon and elsewhere was through the creation of art centers.

The work of artists Elizabeth Edmondson and Charlotte Mish in the Curry County Art Center — the smallest art center in the country — is illustrated in the seventy-fifth anniversary exhibit, probably for the first time since the center closed during the 1940s. The Oregon Ceramic Studio (now the Museum of Contemporary Craft) was organized during the New Deal, and the building was constructed with WPA labor. It became a local venue for artists and craftspeople to create, show, and sell their work. Another avenue for putting art before the public was creation of murals in public schools. Horowitz focuses on Martina Gangle, a politically radical artist employed by Oregon's art program to complete school murals, including the ones at Rose City Park School, and to paint wildflower watercolors for Timberline Lodge. Horowitz acknowledges that some of Gangle's other work is politically provocative, including works such as County Hospital, which depicts destitute people waiting for medical care. In another of Gangle's social commentaries, Children of the Poor, a print in the Timberline collection, a hungry mother has placed her child symbolically in what appears to be a garbage can.

Artists painted botanical watercolors native to the Oregon coast at the Curry County Art Center. The Oregon Art Project funded art centers in three Oregon communities: Salem Art Center opened on June 5, 1938; Curry County Art Center in Gold Beach opened in September 1939; and the La Grande Art Center opened in May 1940.

Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

Both Horowitz and Robbins address the psychological devastation dealt by the Depression, and both suggest that New Deal reform offered an opportunity to heal "broken spirits" (Horowitz) and build a nation where "benefits and privileges would be extended to everyone" (Robbins). In a 1939 scripted program about building Timberline Lodge, Ray Neufer, supervisor of the WPA woodworking shop where the furniture and carved detailing were created for Timberline Lodge and Silver Falls State Park, described the workers who joined him: "Most of the men came in from construction projects and they didn't know they COULD do some of the things they did. Most of them had been out of work a long time, then on construction jobs, and they had lost their self-confidence."¹⁰ A significant legacy of the New Deal was that spirit of new-found hopefulness and confidence, a legacy that is reflected in the president's chair from Timberline Lodge, the watercolors from a tiny art center at Gold Beach in Curry County, and other objects and photographs included in the seventyfifth anniversary exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society.

NOTES

The author acknowledges the invaluable support of sponsors of the Labor Arts Forum — the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, Portland Art Museum, and Friends of Timberline — as well as the program participants, and wishes to recognize contributions from Bill and Ginny Allen, Patrick Barry, Marrialyce Blanchard, Margaret Bullock, Jim Carmin, Mark Davison, Robert Hadlow, Megan Hartmann, Jeff Jaqua, Lois Leonard, Rick McClure, David Milholland, Lloyd Musser and many others.

^1.� Ivan Doig, "Counting the Trees," in Early Forestry Research: A History of the Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1925–1975 (Washington, D.C.: Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, November 1977), 10.

^2.� David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 163–66.

^3.� Neil Barker, "Portland's Works Progress Administration," Oregon Historical Quarterly 101:4 (Winter 200): 415.

^4.� Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 54–69.

^5.� Ibid., 135–36.

^6.� A non-profit group in Portland, Friends of Art in the Schools, has recently picked up where the initial inventory left off and is seeking to complete it and to preserve art in the schools from the New Deal and other eras.

^7.� Barker, "Portland's Works Progress Administration," 428.

^8.� Report on Women's and White Collar Project for October, November 18, 1936, Federal Project No. 1 Materials for Oregon (651.3), Records of the WPA (Record Group 69), National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.

^9.� Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), xv, xvii.

^10.�Builders of Tomorrow, a Radio Program prepared especially for the Works Progress Administration of Oregon, program number 15, September 30, 1939, continuity written by Frances Fleming Selleck with research by the Oregon Writers' Project, Oregon State Library, Salem.

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