Fall 2018

Rekindling the Spark of the New Deal
Last month, at our first-ever conference,“Women and the Spirit of the New Deal,” we welcomed writers, artists, scholars, labor leaders, elected officials, and activists to UC Berkeley to partake in the lessons, inspiration, and practical wisdom to be found in the unsung “she-roes” of the New Deal. More and more women today are following in their footsteps–taking leadership in government and civil society, working for social justice, health, education, and the environment. Might this spark a return to the kind of leadership women brought to the New Deal?

We hope you will be inspired by the stories in this edition of our newsletter and those you’ll find at our ever-expanding website, Livingnewdeal.org logged a record half million visits in 2018!

The New Deal spark is catching fire! As always, thank you for your generous support.

In this Issue:


A Firebreak Runs Through It

In the wake of the most catastrophic wildfires in California’s history, Donald Trump accused state officials of shoddy forest management and recommended that the state’s dying forests should be raked. “Very important,” he said, to take care of the forest floor. Oddly enough, the New Deal’s enemies accused WPA workers of raking the forest as a synonym for boondoggling the taxpayers’ hard-earned cash.

Popular Science Magazine, 1934

Popular Science Magazine, 1934
Black line on this map shows the location of the 800-mile fire break then being built to create the man-made barrier, which will be known as Ponderosa Way.

President Franklin Roosevelt knew a good deal more about forestry than his current successor. He described himself as a grower of trees, and historian Douglas Brinkley, who called him the Forester-in-Chief, ascribed the inception of the Ponderosa Way to him. FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1933, and in 1934, CCC workers began to cut a north-south firebreak and access road—by some accounts up to 800 miles long—through the rugged foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. The Ponderosa Way project employed 16,000 CCC men building bridges, laying culverts, and grading the road to create a barrier to keep wildfires in the scrubby lower elevations from reaching timber at mid-elevations. It was the CCC’s largest project in California.

CCC Enrollees Help to Control a Fire near Angeles National Forest, California

CCC enrollees work to control a fire, 1935
Angeles National Forest, California

FDR regretfully ended the CCC’s immense labor force in 1942 during the mobilization for World War II. The decline of the great California firebreak began almost immediately. In 1949, the federal government turned it over to the California Department of Forestry (CDF), which showed scant interest in maintaining it. At one point, the Ponderosa Way partially reverted back to federal jurisdiction, but no public agency much wanted the orphaned firebreak or remembered the purpose for which it had been so painstakingly built. It became discontinuous and, in many places, disappeared.

In 2007, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) attempted to get some other agency to take responsibility for it. The CDF in Butte County told the BLM that what remained of the road might be useful for public access but it did not consider it vital for fire protection. Local resident Richard Faulkner, who at the time was living in the woods outside town, told a local newspaper, “For years now there hasn’t been any maintenance on this road of any kind. I want them to fix the road and maintain the bridge. I think it is very important from a fire standpoint.”

Ponderosa Way South over the North Fork of the Calaveras River

Ponderosa Way South over the North Fork of the Calaveras River
CCC bridge built in 1935. The deck was destroyed by the Butte Fire in 2015 and never repaired.
Photo Credit: Craig Philpott Courtesy Craig Philpott

When the Camp Fire, considered the worst wildfire in California in more than a century virtually erased the town of Paradise last month, few knew that the lengthy CCC firebreak transected the town. Like so many other public works bequeathed to us by the New Deal, it is a relic of a lost civilization that we neglect at our own peril. Whether the Ponderosa Way could have saved the town or offered an evacuation route may never be known.

 
Ponderosa Way, North fork of the Mokelumne River, Amador and Calaveras Counties, California.

Ponderosa Way, North fork of the Mokelumne River, Amador and Calaveras Counties, California.
After the road deck was destroyed by fire, Ponderosa Way leading up to it was abandoned. It fell into disrepair and was deemed unsafe.
Photo Credit: Craig Philpott Courtesy Craig Philpott

Ponderosa Way Bridge crossing the North Fork of the American River Placer County, California.

Ponderosa Way Bridge crossing the North Fork of the American River Placer County, California.
Pony truss bridge built in 1935. It is still open to traffic.
Photo Credit: Craig Philpott Courtesy Craig Philpott

 
Gray Brechin is a geographer and Project Scholar of the Living New Deal. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.

WPA Model of San Francisco Restored at Last

Author Gray Brechin restoring the model, 2018

Author Gray Brechin restoring the model, 2018
In 2010, Gray discovered the then 70-year-old WPA model of San Francisco was in storage at a UC warehouse and began advocating for its public display.
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

As I was scanning photos of New Deal public works at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, I was startled to run across one that showed the dedication in 1940 of an enormous wooden model of San Francisco. WPA workers spent three years building the 37 X 41 square-foot, 3-D replica of the city for planning and educational purposes.

The New Deal wrought huge changes to the Bay Area—the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, the airports, the East Shore Highway, and Caldecott Tunnel, (not to mention the locally financed Golden Gate Bridge). Planners understood that bigger changes were on the way to which the city’s hilly topography and constricted site presented unusual challenges. A model would also give scores of people jobs.

WPA Workers Putting together the scale model, 1938

WPA Workers
Putting together the scale model, 1938
Photo Credit: Courtesy the San Francisco Planning Department Archive at the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Jointly sponsored by the federal government and the City of San Francisco, the model could be used for planning a subway down Market Street (later BART and MUNI lines) as well as freeways to connect the bridges and the city with the Peninsula (later blocked by the Freeway Revolt.) It was only briefly on display in a lightwell of City Hall before wartime activities evicted it, eventually finding its way to a warehouse at the University of California, Berkeley, where it remained, in 16 large wooden crates, until last summer.

Dedication of WPA model at City Hall

Dedication of WPA model at City Hall
The WPA formally presented the map to the city on April 16, 1940
Photo Credit: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration. (Public Domain)

Deena Chalabi, the Curator of Public Dialogue at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, introduced me to the Dutch conceptual artists Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol (collectively Bik Van Der Pol) who were intrigued by the possibility of returning the model to the public and using it for stimulating dialogue about the city’s past, present, and future. With the invaluable assistance of Stella Lochman, the museum’s Senior Program Associate of Public Dialogue, the model was transferred from the East Bay to a San Francisco Public Library facility with enough space to uncrate it. Over the summer, volunteers meticulously cleaned decades of dust from its dozens of component sections, marveling at the detail, technical ingenuity, and subtle coloration that emerged.

Restoring the WPA model

Restoring the WPA model
Volunteers carefully cataloged and cleaned the model, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Photo Credit: Gray Brechin

Thanks to Bik Van Der Pol, SFMOMA, and the San Francisco Public Library system, the model will be back on display this winter at 29 branch libraries throughout the city where locals can view their own neighborhoods in miniature as they looked in 1940. After that, it will hopefully be reassembled in its entirety at the SFMOMA contemporaneous with a special exhibition of Diego Rivera’s Pan-American Unity mural that he created for the 1939-40 World’s Fair on San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The model will then need a permanent home. It would make a superb centerpiece for the New Deal museum that the Living New Deal hopes to build in the city that the model depicts.

Close up. The model of San Francisco reflects the city as it was in 1939-1940.

Close up
The model of San Francisco reflects the city as it was in 1939-1940.
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

St Anne of the Sunset Church

St Anne of the Sunset Church
Corner of Funston and Judah
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

Overlooking Playland-at-the-Beach

Overlooking Playland-at-the-Beach
The amusement park was demolished in 1972
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

War Memorial Opera House and Herbst Theatre

War Memorial Opera House and Herbst Theatre
Van Ness Avenue
Photo Credit: Susan Ives

Gray Brechin is a geographer and Project Scholar of the Living New Deal. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.

Women and the Art of Treasure Island

“I am quite open and unashamed in my liking for expositions—“
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, opening broadcast for the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, February 18, 1939

Postcard, Treasure Island, 1939, Golden Gate International Exposition at Night

Postcard, Treasure Island, 1939
Golden Gate International Exposition at Night

Thanks to FDR, at least six of the American expositions of the 1930s received generous federal funding. The Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE), 1939-1940, was originally to be a celebration of the recently completed Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges. As plans progressed, the idea grew to encompass the countries and cultures of the Pacific—with San Francisco as the gateway.

The WPA and PWA paid to build the site in San Francisco Bay that became Treasure Island, as well as its three permanent Art Moderne airport buildings. The island was publicized as the site for a world’s fair (temporary) and an airport (permanent). But GGIE president Leland Cutler wrote that President Roosevelt “was intensely interested in both airport and a national defense site on San Francisco Bay.” In spite of public outcry, it was really no surprise when the Navy seized Treasure Island in 1942 for the war effort.

Treasure Island Map. The map appeared in the guidebook to the fair 1939

Treasure Island Map
The map of the fairgrounds was the work of a woman artist, Ruth Taylor White.
Photo Credit: Wikicommons

Thankfully, the WPA funded art as well as artillery, and the federal government funded many art programs, particularly in the Federal Building and in the Palace of Fine and Decorative Arts. The GGIE was also progressive in its employment of women artists. Of the thirteen local artists commissioned to convey the fair’s theme in the “Court of Pacifica,” more than half were women: Adaline Kent, Helen Phillips, Ruth Cravath, and Cecilia Graham each created three of the twenty “Pacific Unity” sculptures, and the Bruton sisters—Helen, Esther and Margaret—created the huge “Peacemakers” relief mural.

Lulu Hawkins Braghetta designed the GGIE’s giant relief “Path of Darkness” in the Temple Compound, and Helen Forbes and Dorothy Puccinelli painted the four “First Garden” murals in the South Towers. Six sculptures can be seen today at the entrance to the Treasure Island Museum in Building One, including two of Helen Phillips’s “Pacific Unity” sculptures.

Art in Action

Art in Action
Golden Gate International Exposition, 1940
Photo Credit: Herbert "Bud" Stewart, collection of Treasure Island Museum

As vice-chair of the Art Committee in 1940, architect Timothy Pflueger was in charge of all of the activities and exhibits that filled the massive Hall of Fine and Decorative Arts. His big success in 1940 was “Art in Action,” a “theater of the arts” where visitors could observe and interact with artists at work. With Helen Bruton as manager, the program included at least 50 local artists—painters, lithographers, sculptors, and weavers among them.

Most celebrated among these artists was Diego Rivera, who arrived from Mexico to paint his third and largest San Francisco fresco, “Pan American Unity.” Riviera’s colorful 22 x 75-foot mural required an army of assistants, including painters, plasterers, pigment grinders, and a cook. Largely overlooked are Rivera’s painting assistants, several of whom were women. Ely de Vescovi, Thelma Johnson Streat, and Mine Okubo were artists in their own right. Rivera’s chief assistant was Emmy Lou Packard, who met Rivera on a family trip to Mexico and developed a lifelong association with him.

Court of Pacifica

Court of Pacifica
Many sculptures here were created by the GGIE’s women artists

World War II interrupted plans to install “Pan American Unity” at a new library planned for City College. The mural spent decades in storage. It was finally installed at the college’s Little Theater, a space much too small for it. A new performing arts center planned for the campus will provide a more suitable venue. In the meantime, the mural will move to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective in 2020.

Treasure Island no longer belongs to the Navy. The city is developing it into “San Francisco’s Newest Neighborhood.”

View a 1939 newsreel about the “Pageant of the Pacific”.

The Golden Gate International Exposition celebrates its 80th anniversary in February of 2019. Please visit https://www.treasureislandmuseum.org/ for information about upcoming events.

The Peacemakers, Court of Pacifica

The Peacemakers, Court of Pacifica
GGIE relief mural by sisters Helen, Margaret, and Esther Bruton, is 144 feet long by 57 feet in height.
Photo courtesy: Treasure Island Museum

“Flutist,” by Helen Phillips

“Flutist,” by Helen Phillips
One of six restored GGIE statues that have been relocated to Building One on Treasure Island.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Art and Architecture SF

Lulu Hawkins Braghetta at work at the Court of Pacifica

Lulu Hawkins Braghetta at work on her Cambodian-inspired bas-relief, "Path of Darkness.”
GGIE, Court of Pacifica
Photo Credit: Treasure Island Museum

Artist Diego Rivera and Assistant Emmy Lou Packard

Artist Diego Rivera and Assistant Emmy Lou Packard
Golden Gate International Exposition, 1940
Photo courtesy: Diego Rivera Mural Project

“Pan American Unity”

“Pan American Unity”
Riviera’s masterpiece was completed in 1940. For a close up view and a key: https://riveramural.org/fullmural
Photo Credit:
Photo courtesy: Diego Riviera Mural Project

US Postage stamp Commemorating the GGIE

US Postage stamp
Commemorating the GGIE
Photo Credit: Wikicommons

Anne Schnoebelen serves on the board of the museum and is a historian of the GGIE and its role in San Francisco art history. She manages the Treasure Island Museum’s “Little Island, Big Ideas” monthly lecture series and lectures about the GGIE throughout the state, as well as giving tours at Coit Tower for SF City Guides. [email protected] Blog: treasureisland1939.com

Clabe Wilson and the WPA

Leora and Clabe Wilson, Dexter, Iowa, July 22, 1934.

Leora and Clabe Wilson
Dexter, Iowa, July 22, 1934.
Photo courtesy: Joy Neal Kidney

My grandfather, Clabe Wilson, was an Iowa farmer. During the slump in farm prices after WWI, he lost his farm. Clabe, my grandmother Leora, and their seven kids ended up in the small town of Dexter. He hired out to work on farms, but as the Great Depression deepened, farmers couldn’t afford to pay for help.

In the summer of 1930, his daughter, Doris, was nearly 12. She spent her free time in the upstairs bedroom she shared with a younger sister, where she read and read in a wooden rocking chair, leaning against the open window to get a breeze that sultry summer. That was the year Dexter’s first public library–with 100 donated books–opened in Allen Percy’s law office.

By the next summer, Clabe got a job in Redfield at the brick and tile plant. But he had lost blood during an operation and was weak for months so couldn’t work much.

Main Street, Dexter, Iowa

Main Street, Dexter, Iowa
The top of the two-story building was removed and the materials reused to create a town library on the first floor
Photo Credit: Courtesy Joy Neal Kidney

In 1933, because so many Americans were out of work, President Roosevelt’s New Deal was set up. Funds were granted to the states to operate relief programs to create new unskilled jobs. Such jobs were make-work programs to hire jobless men during the Great Depression. Yes, it was more expensive than to hand over welfare payments (called the “dole”), but men were embarrassed and ashamed by taking unearned money. They would rather earn it by working.

Clabe hated having to apply for a government relief job. At first he was turned down because he had two sons in the Navy. The two older boys had joined up because there was nothing for them to do in Iowa. They sent home $5 or $10 a month from their meager wages. Their mother said the money was a real godsend, that the coal they bought with it one winter kept them from freezing.

Dallas County News, Adel, Iowa, May 10, 1939

Dallas County News
Adel, Iowa, May 10, 1939
Photo Credit: Courtesty Joy Neal Kidney

Clabe was finally hired by the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA), doing roadwork. Later he worked sixteen hours a week for the WPA keeping the Dexter town pump oiled.

After 1934 the library was moved from Mr. Percy’s office to a room at the town hall. That fall Clabe and his daughter Doris spent late hours working on corn at the Dexter Canning Factory.

Doris graduated Dexter High School in 1936–the same year the library became tax supported and reorganized under Iowa library laws.

Dexter Town Library, Constructed by the WPA

Dexter Town Library
Constructed by the WPA
Photo Credit: Courtesy Joy Neal Kidney

In 1939 a WPA project was approved to remove the second story of the building that had once housed the Chapler-Osborn Clinic. The men–including Clabe Wilson–were hired to reuse materials from the second story for a Library Hall, which included a library, and also a community room with a kitchen and dining area.  

Seven years later, Doris married my father, a Dallas County farmer who had volunteered for the Army Air Corps in WWII. In the early 1950s, they bought a farm south of Dexter. Their daughters regularly used the Dexter library. When I was in high school and needed more about the Bronte family for a term paper, a Dexter librarian introduced me to the wonder of ordering free books through the Iowa State Traveling Library.

Today, a bench commemorating the WW II service of Clabe Wilsons’ five sons sits right outside the same brick building their father worked on decades ago.

Commemorative WPA Plaque, Dexter Library

Commemorative WPA Plaque
Dexter Library
Photo Credit: Courtesy Joy Neal Kidney

Bench outside the town library. In memory of the five Wilson brothers, who served in WWII.

Bench outside the town library
In memory of the five Wilson brothers, who served in WWII.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Joy Neal Kidney

Joy Neal Kidney is the keeper of family letters, pictures, combat records, telegrams, research, and casualty reports. Born to an Iowa farmer who became a pilot and flight instructor during WWII, and an Iowa waitress who lost three of her five brothers during that war, she spent her childhood in a farmhouse with a front porch on Old Creamery Road south of Dexter, Iowa. A graduate of the University of Northern Iowa, she has published two genealogies as well as dozens of essays. She lives with her husband, a Vietnam veteran, in a house with a front porch in the suburbs of Des Moines. Her stories can be found at joynealkidney.com