Gray Brechin is a historian whose appearance and giddy erudition suggest he might be Truman Capote’s long-lost twin. When I visited him at his UC Berkeley office recently, he excitedly showed me sepia-toned photographs of a lost civilization.
The grandeur of this bygone society’s public monuments was unrivaled. There was a glorious open-air theater, bathhouses designed as citadels, and a majestic “Temple of Honor” dedicated to past and future writers. Even mere secondary schools were built to rival Byzantine temples. A school for crippled and malnourished children was covered in Spanish tiles, its stenciled ceilings hung with chandeliers, and filled with the era’s finest in handcrafted furniture.
“They said at the time that it was deliberate, because they wanted them to take their minds off their afflictions,” says Brechin, describing the Mission District’s Sunshine School for disabled children, which was built in 1936. The Byzantine-esque school is George Washington High School in the Richmond — “an Art Deco Acropolis,” he says. The writers’ temple is the now-well-worn Woodminster Amphitheater in the hills east of Oakland.
This lost society Brechin describes reflects the intensely public-spirited America that existed in the years during and following the New Deal, when workers built thousands of exquisite monuments to public life, and Americans responded by rebuilding the country during and after the Great Depression.
Brechin and a team of researchers have spent years creating their Living New Deal Project, seeking out and chronicling the often-forgotten works of the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Writers Project, and the other “alphabet agencies” that transformed America’s landscape during a decade that straddled the 1930s and ’40s.