The WPA

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I can't seem to upload an image from my computer, but here is the location of the WPA-built post office in my home town, the one with the "socialist realism" bas relief.
Use Google Earth to see:
40°31'07.66" N 79°50'32.93" W

As long as you have it visible in Google Earth, scan a little to the left. You'll see Maryland Avenue. It is paved in yellow bricks, as are a number of other streets in the town. This, too, was a WPA project, one on which my father worked. He told the story of how one summer day, while paving a street in bricks, he suffered a sun stroke. Ever after he wore a hat. I guess I have that sun stroke to thank for my attachment to hats.

 

[MikeKardec]

The post office in my home town was built as a WPA project in 1941. I can still picture a bas relief, in the style which is best described as "socialist realism" showing factory and farm workers with bulging muscles holding hammers and sickles, on the interior wall near where the wanted posters are hung. I guess no one in the 1950's connected this with Soviet ideology or it would surely have been taken down.

I think that was also done with the wonderful, now restored, 360 degree mural in the Pan Am seaplane terminal at La Guardia. No one is sure if it was considered "communistic" but it was painted over by the Port Authority in the 1950s ... highly suspicious!

Though today people tend to discount the communist influence in the WPA, my Dad's old boss in the Oklahoma WPA was not only an "American" communist but went on, I believe, to be the Washington Correspondent for Pravda. Other than the fact that they were "social programs" I'm not really sure there was any plot or plan to get communists into the WPA, probably they just gravitated there. Party membership up until the 1930s did not seem to be the big deal it became after the war.

 

[MikeKardec]

Another thing the revisionist historians leave out about the WPA is, Roosevelt was not a fool, he new he had agitators on both sides, Stalin loving Left Wingers and Mussolini, (he was bigger then Hitler at the time,) loving Right Wingers. He knew, millions of young unemployed males, is not good, idle hands as it were. The more he could put to work the better, less time to listen to the radicals on the two extremes. Say what you want, it did work.

It would be a good idea in many locations TODAY!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think that was also done with the wonderful, now restored, 360 degree mural in the Pan Am seaplane terminal at La Guardia. No one is sure if it was considered "communistic" but it was painted over by the Port Authority in the 1950s ... highly suspicious!

Though today people tend to discount the communist influence in the WPA, my Dad's old boss in the Oklahoma WPA was not only an "American" communist but went on, I believe, to be the Washington Correspondent for Pravda. Other than the fact that they were "social programs" I'm not really sure there was any plot or plan to get communists into the WPA, probably they just gravitated there. Party membership up until the 1930s did not seem to be the big deal it became after the war.

Those were the days of the "Popular Front" and "Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism." Thousands of people read The Daily Worker the same way you'd read the Daily News. Millions of people felt the New Deal was moving too slowly and accomplishing too little, and many of these people gravitated to what Earl Browder was saying -- which was that the Far Left could best accomplish reform by acting in a broad coalition with other parties, rather than attempting to "take over the country" thru revolution. He was aided in this by the fact that many people considered such a left-oriented coalition the best defense against European-style Fascism, which was also on the move in the US in the persons of Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith., Lawrence Dennis, William Dudley Pelley, and Elizabeth Dilling.

The Popular Front lasted almost thru the end of the thirties, and then collapsed overnight when the Hitler-Stalin Pact was announced. Most CPUSA members and sympathizers abandoned the movement at that time. Notably, when the Red Scare began after the war, old-time Popular Fronters ironically referred to themselves as "premature anti-Fascists."

Even some of the hardline red-baiters of the postwar era came to that view after taking the opposite position in the thirties. Walter Winchell was one of the loudest opponents of Stalin in 1950 -- but in 1945 he'd been urging Americans to embrace Russia as a friend in the postwar world.

 

[Bugguy]

But I am willing to overlook every single one of those, and any other flaws for one big reason: the WPA kept my grandparents alive in 1937. And it kept a lot of other peoples' grandparents alive, too.

Ditto...

Growing up in the 50's, we used the CCC barracks in Devils Lake State Park (Wisconsin Dells) as our summer Boy's Club camp. That entire park exists today because of the CCC/WPA. Our family still hikes the original trails.




(images from Wisconsin Historical Society)

 

[Stearmen]

It's amazing how these 70+ year old structures are still bringing so much joy to so many!