William G. Robbins | Surviving the Great Depression The New Deal in Oregon | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 109.2

Surviving the Great Depression

The New Deal in Oregon

by William G. Robbins

IT WAS A SPECIAL MOMENT IN time, a gathering place on the arid northern rim of the Columbia Plain where more than twenty thousand people came to hear President Franklin D. Roosevelt speak in August 1934, during the early construction stages of Grand Coulee Dam. When it was completed, the president predicted, the gigantic project would help "develop" the Far West and provide opportunity for common folk, people suffering from want and hardship. But Grand Coulee and the lower-river Bonneville projects were much more; they were visible symbols of the New Deal's propensity for social innovation and experiment — the administration's hasty and sometimes disorderly planning strategies to seek a way out of the nation's economic and social crisis. Despite its sometimes helter-skelter approach, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration marked the emergence of a vastly expanded federal presence in the American West. Triggered by the demoralized economic conditions and wrenching poverty of the Great Depression, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of an activist federal government, an effort at centralized planning to advance the public good.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt travels from Bonneville Dam to Timberline Lodge to dedicate the lodge on September 28, 1937.

Located at the U.S. Federal Highway Administration

In subsequent addresses on the development of the Columbia River, Roosevelt praised the rehabilitative social, economic, and environmental benefits of such work — the amenities that cheap electrical power would bring to all citizens, an end to the ravages of downstream flooding, and the irrigation of arid, unproductive lands. There were still other dimensions to the New Deal's influence in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest — and that was vested in the government's willingness to engage in public works projects to create jobs, and to regenerate local economies, to use federal moneys to serve the needs of its less-fortunate citizens. Roosevelt's overwhelming electoral successes in the West — he carried every Western state in 1932 and 1936 — provides some indication of the enormous popularity of New Deal projects in the region. It also attests to the skills of a powerful political personality, a man whose appeal bridged social classes. In his four successful campaigns for president, Roosevelt ran ahead of other Democratic candidates in Oregon and the Northwest, garnering an average of 20 percent more votes than other Democrats on the same ticket.

The top fourteen states in per capita federal expenditures were all in the West. There was another interesting twist to the New Deal story in the region: although many Western political leaders greeted federal relief with skepticism — and this was especially true in Oregon — the general public was largely enthusiastic for newly established agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and, later, the Works Progress Administration. The state of Oregon mirrored the rest of the nation with its bank failures, bankruptcies, business foreclosures, and high unemployment. Amid the general demoralization of the American economy and the lengthening unemployment lines, President Herbert Hoover — a graduate of Stanford University and the first president from the West — insisted that charities and local communities should care for the destitute. Portland's political and business leaders were in agreement with the president in opposing direct relief.

The economic collapse, however, was colossal, completely overwhelming local relief agencies. County and local taxes went delinquent, making it difficult to pay public employees, including teachers. Desperation, protest, and, in some instances, direct action were the order of the day. In the City of Portland, "Hoovervilles" appeared along the Willamette River: one hundred people were living under the Ross Island Bridge; more than three hundred were bivouacked in Sullivan's Gulch; and another large group lived at the old Guild's Lake site. Fearing social disruption in the summer of 1932, Governor Julius Meier wrote President Hoover: "We must have help from the federal government if we are to avert suffering ... and possible uprisings."¹

When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933, 40,000 Portlanders were on relief and 24,000 people had registered with the local employment bureau. In Multnomah County, a group of labor progressives organized an Unemployed Citizens' League. In Coos Bay, residents formed Workers' Alliances to speak for the unemployed. The Portland League and others like it organized the unemployed into urban cooperatives and made appeals for public works projects. Portland's establishment treated the League with contempt, as a group of people looking for handouts. Mayor Joseph Carson, voted into office in the same election that brought Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency, told local business leaders that his administration would not be looking to the federal government for charity. Through his long tenure in office, Carson opposed public power, and during the West Coast dock strike of 1934, the mayor gave his full support to waterfront employers. Carson's language became even more inflammatory in opposing Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA). With the support of a majority on the City Council, Carson also fought efforts in 1938 to form a City Housing Authority, with one of his councilmen arguing that public housing was akin to "unadulterated Communism entirely" and would depress housing values.²

In contrast, other Oregon politicians — Republican Senator Charles McNary and Democratic Congressman Walter Pierce — enjoyed cordial relations with President Roosevelt and fully participated in pushing through Congress the most famous schedule of reform legislation in American history: the Civil Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Farm Credit Administration. Both men also supported the Social Security Act of 1935, with Pierce disappointed only in its inadequate provisions for old-age pensions. Oregon also elected Democrat Charles Martin, a conservative who opposed unions and anything that he considered radical, to the governor's office in 1934. Martin, who became a stock character for ridicule, was an anti-New Dealer, opposing public power and all New Deal programs. The Democratic Party refused to endorse Martin for a second term in office.

Despite the opposition of Portland's political leadership and Oregon's governor, New Deal programs were immensely popular in the state. Perhaps the most celebrated, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), operated camps all across the state, providing modest wages, food and shelter, and productive outdoor work for young men. The CCC eventually included American Indian tribes in its programs. Before the Second World War made the CCC redundant, the agency employed thousands of "boys" in forty-nine camps across the state. (There were no women in the CCC.) Young men worked in forestry and conservation jobs, building roads, trails, shelters, lookouts, and providing foot soldiers for a vastly expanded labor force for fighting forest fires. Among the more notable and lasting public venues constructed with CCC labor were Silver Falls State Park, east of Salem, and Jessie M. Honeyman State Park on the central coast. CCC and WPA workers also built Timberline Lodge on the southern slopes of Mt. Hood and the Oregon Department of Forestry buildings in Salem.

When the Roosevelt administration used the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935 to establish the Works Progress Administration, the initiative launched the largest, most significant, and most controversial of all New Deal programs. The WPA was the most visible of all government relief efforts, and before it was dismantled in 1942, the agency employed more that 8.5 million people nationwide. The WPA's chief function was to provide people with pride and a small income when there were few employment prospects anywhere. The agency's larger achievement was to lessen the potential for social disorder and to assure that the basic framework of America's capitalist economy would remain intact following the Depression.

WPA workers constructed the artfully crafted bridges over Oregon's coastal streams and estuaries. Designed by Oregon's famous highway engineer, Conde McCullough, the still standing and aesthetically pleasing bridges offer visual testimony to both design and engineering expertise and workers' skills. When it was completed in 1936, the 1,700 foot cantilever bridge spanning Coos Bay was the longest in the Pacific Northwest. Because of its vaulting height to allow ocean-going ships to pass underneath, the engineering blueprint for the bridge involved complicated planning, lay-out, and design strategies. Work on the Coos Bay and other bridges also provided employment for a large number of people. When the coastal bridge network was completed, it vastly quickened travel along Oregon's Highway 101, eliminating slow and laborious ferry crossings operating on the many streams and estuaries.

The WPA put more than 25,000 people on the federal payroll in Portland during its existence, employing citizens to work on projects large and small. To maximize its potential for direct relief, the WPA shied away from heavy construction equipment and relied on hand tools for most of its work tasks. Local projects included Portland's Rocky Butte Scenic Drive, Portland Municipal Airport (the most significant effort in Multnomah County), and hundreds of small-scale enterprises such as the now controversial rock wall along Johnson Creek. One of the WPA's more significant public works involved improvements to Macleay Park in Portland's west hills, where laborers cleared brush and built an extensive trail system.

The WPA hired Portlanders to build the Wolf Creek and Wilson River highways, construction projects that greatly speeded travel to the coast. The WPA also hired skilled Portlandarea artisans to produce ornamental wrought iron for a variety of public buildings and places across the state. These included straps, hinges, handles, and other items made specifically for Timberline Lodge. The University of Oregon and Oregon State University also display some of this magnificent wrought-iron workmanship.

Among Oregon highway engineer Conde McCullough's most technically challenging bridge designs is the 17,000-foot cantilever bridge spanning Coos Bay. Completed in 1936, the structure is sufficiently high to allow ocean-going ships to pass underneath.

Located at the Oregon Department of Transportation Collection

In still another initiative, the WPA supported Portland musicians to put on public performances around the city, including the Portland Art Museum and Marylhurst and Reed colleges. The Federal Arts' Theater and Writers' projects were other activities that attracted a good deal of attention — and controversy. The agency hired actors, writers, and artists for civic and public projects. WPA workers inventoried historical materials in county courthouses, and the Writers' Project produced the Oregon Guide, a descriptive narrative of the state's history, its physical landscape, and its cultural heritage. Many public buildings in Oregon still display WPA-funded artwork and murals, such as one visible in the Ontario post office.

Although WPA-funded work included women, they comprised only a small percentage of overall agency employment. Federal, state, and local administrators operated on the assumption that useful and productive work primarily involved construction jobs, traditionally the province of males. While Eleanor Roosevelt and a few others spoke out on behalf of WPA employment for women, "institutionalized sexism in the WPA guidelines," writer Neil Barker argues, "made most women ineligible for work relief."³ Moreover, women able to obtain relief work were placed mostly in sewing-related jobs, housekeeping, or serving school lunches to needy children. Portland-area women also found WPA jobs through the household service-training program, a closely supervised, class-based plan that provided domestic labor for the city's elite families.

In Portland and Oregon's lesser urban centers, people muddled through the depression years, birthing fewer children, living in multiplefamily households, surviving on sporadic and part-time employment, and doing occasional work-relief jobs. In the outback — where families still practiced semi-subsistence lifestyles — barter, labor exchanges, and the timeworn practice of poaching fish and game usually meant enough food on the table. Family members frequently exchanged labor on neighboring farms and ranches for fruits, vegetables, and dairy products. Across most of Oregon, supplies of wood for cooking and heating were readily accessible, and wild fruits, especially black berries west of the Cascades, were seasonally abundant and easy to preserve.

The Great Depression remained a fact of life in Oregon for a full decade and began to ease only when war orders slowly began to energize the American economy. Despite improved conditions in the late 1930s, the WPA continued to provide employment for a large number of workers in the state's more heavily populated counties. Other public works projects employed an even larger number of people at marginal wages. Although the pay was low, federally subsidized work enabled citizens to earn a modest income at a time when job prospects were few. Throughout the 1930s, the number of people receiving some form of direct relief remained high. Such help included support for dependent children and seniors, surplus food, and a category referred to as general assistance. Despite the variety of New Deal work-relief programs, the economy moved unevenly through partial recoveries and slumps for the remainder of the decade.

As for Portland at the end of the Depression decade, urban historian Carl Abbott describes "a city that had ceased to grow."⁴ Portland had also grown older during the decade, a trait reflected in its declining number of school-age children. But those population characteristics were transitory, subject to watershed events such as the Second World War, a profoundly dramatic and transforming period in modern American history. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought an end to years of unemployment and stagnation, and workers accustomed to long periods of unemployment suddenly found themselves sellers in a buyers' market.

The Works Progress Administrations' Federal Music Project supported free public musical performances, providing small stipends for out-of-work musicians. The Portland Symphony performed at various public venues around the city, including the South Park Blocks.

Located at Oregon State Library

But the New Deal left lasting legacies — which have seemingly been under attack ever since, especially during the twenty-first century. Although New Deal reforms have proved endlessly contentious, and although not all of the social experiments were successful and lasting, the social vision and common purpose of New Deal reform was pointed toward building a nation whose benefits and privileges would be extended to everyone. In an August 1934 address at Glacier National Park's Two Medicine Chalet, President Roosevelt observed that the great construction projects in the American West would benefit the entire citizenry, with the "objective of building human happiness."⁵ The president shared some of that vision when he dedicated Timberline Lodge on the south slope of Mount Hood in September 1937. A bronze tablet on the second floor balcony overlooking the parking lot commemorates the event:

Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood National Forest dedicated September 28, 1937, by the President of the United States as a monument to the skill and faithful performance of workers on the rolls of the Works Progress Administration.

NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was presented before the Labor Arts Forum on the Art of the Roosevelt Era at the Portland Art Museum, October 9, 2004.

^1.� Meier is quoted in Neil Barker, "Portland's Works Progress Administration," Oregon Historical Quarterly 101:4 (Winter 2000), 415.

^2.� Carson is quoted in Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 117.

^3.� Barker, "Portland's Works Progress Administration," 428.

^4.� Abbott, Portland, 109.

^5.� The speech is quoted in Richard L. Neuberger, Our Promised Land, Introduction by David Nicandri (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1938, reprint 1989), 90.

Suggested Readings (Robbins)

    Neil Barker, "Portland's Works Progress Administration," Oregon Historical Quarterly 101:4 (Winter 2000).
    Jewel Lansing, Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851–2001. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003.
    Richard Lowitt. The New Deal and the West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
    E. Kimbark MacColl. The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1915–1950. Portland: The Georgian Press, 1979.
    William H. Mullins. The Depression and the Urban West Coast 1929–1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
    William G. Robbins. "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Emergence of the Modern West," Journal of the West, 34 :2. (April 1995), 43–48.
    William G. Robbins, Oregon, This Storied Land. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2005.

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