Seventy-five years ago Congress was finishing up a landmark piece of legislation, a far-reaching jobs program proposed by President Franklin Roosevelt to combat the enormous unemployment caused by the Great Depression. Notable Federal programs including the Works Progress Administration (WPA) date from that time. Although Berkeley was largely still a Republican town then—locals had twice voted for Herbert Hoover for President—that didn’t prove an obstacle to benefitting from Roosevelt’s New Deal. Local facilities from the North Berkeley Public Library to the Berkeley Rose Garden to street improvements and street tree plantings throughout the city were funded by the New Deal, and often built by workers paid directly through New Deal programs like the WPA.

This Sunday, April 11, 2010, the Berkeley Historical Society opens a new exhibit on the local history of the WPA. A free program, with refreshments, runs from 3-5 in the afternoon.

Click here to read the full article

California Living New Deal Project
newdeallegacy.org/PDFfiles/California-Historian.doc

 

Circuit Riding for the New Deal

In our effort to promote California’s Living New Deal project as a collective act of rediscovery of New Deal public works, NNDPA president Harvey Smith and I have developed illustrated talks on that vast and generally invisible legacy. Last summer, however, I developed a mutant variation when asked to give opening remarks to two hundred college presidents from around the country attending the annual convention of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities in La Jolla. The talk is entitled “Another World Was Possible: The Expansion of Public Education During the Great Depression and Its Contraction in Our Own Time.”

 

The talk developed further with the growing unrest of student, faculty, and staff at the University of California as the state’s fiscal catastrophe produced sudden sharp increases in fees, firings, and service cutbacks across the board at UC as well as throughout the state from kindergartens to graduate schools. “There is no alternative” to the wreck of what was once the nation’s finest public education system, we are constantly told. But the New Deal contradicts that glib assertion.

 

“Another World Was Possible” shows some of the hundreds of handsome and modern schools built throughout California during the Great Depression. Entire community college campuses sprang up within a few years to provide working class families with unprecedented educational opportunities. Across the nation, the Public Works Administration erected splendid classroom and laboratory structures, dormitories, athletic facilities, museums, libraries and teaching hospitals, many embellished by WPA artists. As with our New Deal-built roads, airports, dams, and sewer systems, we have been coasting on that cultural infrastructure for over seven decades, unaware of the debt we owe to those who built it or its startling contrast with our own lack of investment in and commitment to future generations.

 

The presentation has only grown timelier with each showing as students and faculty witness what was once possible in an economic crisis far worse than our own. I recently presented it to activists at UC Merced pausing in a long march from Bakersfield to the State Capitol in Sacramento to protest the closing of educational opportunity in California. I then took it on the road, presenting it at Willamette University, the University of Oregon and Lane Community College in Eugene, and Oregon State University in Corvallis. Everywhere I went, audiences were astounded and moved by what I had to show them of what the Roosevelts and those they gathered around them wrought. Along the way, I had the opportunity to visit and photograph often magnificent educational buildings and other structures erected to fight the Depression and lay the foundations for a civilization worthy of the name.

 

One of my favorite movies — the fantasy epic The Golden Compass — posits a multiplicity of parallel universes. The educational legacy of the New Deal is, for me, one of those realities that we should remember and honor. As a committed circuit rider for the New Deal, I go where called to show what we once accomplished so that we can do so again. Our children and self respect deserve no less. 

 

 

Gray Brechin, Ph.D.

Visiting Scholar, U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography

http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu

 

The history of Camp Herms
PDFfiles/PRCampHermsprogram.doc

Carmel

The P.W.A. Restoration Project started with a copper plaque that was put in place with the construction of the 1936 wing of Carmel High School. This wing was built under Franklin D. Roosevelt as a New Deal P.W.A. (Public Works Administration) Program. Roosevelt had sent out federal government representatives to ask communities what they needed. Carmel, which was a very rural community at the time, decided they required a Library and more classrooms. Construction began as Project No. N.Y. 1391 R. and was completed in 1936.

 

Staff and students agreed that this valuable piece of history was in dire need of repair. The P.W.A. Restoration Project was born. The framed wood carvings will be stripped, re-stained and shellac will be applied, the copper restored to its original state.

Staff and students are involved in contacting descendants of people involved in the original construction and funding. This makes the P.W.A. Restoration Project a research program, as well as a restoration program.

 

The program is well underway with Principal Kevin Carroll's ringing endorsement and staff members Chuck Cardillo, John Trimarchi, Allan Finney, Rocco Gasparro and Gary Petagine removing the plaque with gentle hands from the wall.

Staff members Kerry Dowd, John Goldberg, Rob Buccheri, Lou Riolo, John Hildebrand and David Zupan also contributed time and research.

 

Below are photos of the plaque.

San Diego
The Foundation for Teaching Economics will host a program titled “Economic Forces in American History” in San Diego in June. NNDPA board member Price Fishback will give lectures about the New Deal.