The WPA days were a fantastic period in my life. The contribution that I made was not so much as administrator and director of the project as a brash young guy that didn’t worry about his own hide too much.
I knew intuitively that something as great as this couldn’t last. I knew that something that had as many arrows slung at it by the opposition — by the conservative press — that it wasn’t long for this world. Actually, five, seven years was an unforeseen opulence of time — I didn’t realize that it would last that long. I didn’t dream it would last that long. Never got used to it. Never got to the point where I went to bed one night secure in the feeling that it would be there tomorrow morning.
There were all the human emotions that you would find in any human group endeavor, but there was another element — an element of knowing that you were involved with something that was going to live beyond the day of your eulogies and we all felt this. We fostered it and we cherished it. We knew that this was a special time.
We were among the forefront of the people of that era who were pulling out of the tragedy of the Depression something beautiful and something lasting.