Boston

A second chance to shine

After years of neglect, mural again graces post office wall

 

Kathy Hannigan, a sales and service associate at Clarendon Street post office, stands
next to “Mail for New England," a mural painted during the Great Depression.
(Michele McDonald for The Boston Globe)

 

By Brian R. Ballou

 

It was a summer in the 1930s, and sunlight gleamed off rooftops and reflected from the calm surface of Boston Harbor. A family took it all in from their balcony overlooking the water, their attention focused on several large ships.

That moment in time was captured on a mural by Stephen Etnier, one of hundreds of artists across the country picked by the federal government in the late 1930s to early ’40s to depict characteristic scenes of their region for display in post offices. The Boston Harbor mural, shaped like an upside down “U’’ to frame a doorway, was a part of a New Deal project that employed artists to decorate new federal buildings.

Etnier’s work, titled “Mail for New England,’’ was displayed for decades at a branch post office in Everett. But in 1981, when that building was sold, the mural was taken off the wall, rolled up, stuffed into a tube, and put in storage at the Boston General Mail Facility on Dorchester Avenue.

Over the years in storage, the historic mural suffered damage from water, rodents, and neglect.

But in early 2005, postal employee Brian Houlihan came across the painting and alerted Dallan Wordekemper, the federal preservation officer for the United States Postal Service. The mural was sent to Parma Conservation in Chicago, which began to restore the artwork in late 2008.

“Mail for New England,’’ one of 1,200 New Deal murals created for post offices around the country, now has a new home, adorning a wall of a new post office branch in Boston’s Back Bay, at the corner of Stuart and Clarendon streets. Postal Service officials plan to celebrate the installation of the mural today at a ceremony with Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

“These pieces are a part of American history, so it thrills me whenever we’re able to find another one,’’ Wordekemper said. “It’s important that we work to preserve them, because they capture life as it was many years ago, and that’s important to the next generation.’’

The Boston Harbor mural is one of nine that Wordekemper’s office has restored over the last seven years. As the piece was being restored, Postal Service officials tried to find a location for it.

Meanwhile, in the Back Bay, a post office branch on Stuart Street had been sold in 2006 and demolished to make way for a condominium complex and a restaurant, Post 390. The neighborhood post office branch was briefly relocated to St. James Avenue, and then, in November, moved to a new building at Stuart and Clarendon, where the architects had designed a wall that could house the unusual doorway-shaped mural, which is 12 feet high and 12 feet wide.

Etnier died in 1984. His son, John, lives in Maine, and viewed the mural for the first time Wednesday, in a video e-mailed to him by the Globe.

 

“It’s so gratifying to see this work, and to know how much time and care went into its reinstallation,’’ he said.

 

“Dad was best known for his paintings of the water, harbors, and shoreline, so the ‘Mail for New England’ painting is very representative,’’ he said. “He sometimes described his style as ‘romantic realism,’ and, looking back, I think that’s a good description.’’

 

Robert Kerr, supervisor of customer service at the Back Bay branch, offered a simpler description, saying, “It’s a really nice piece of art and we’re happy that it’s here.’’

 

Other New Deal murals have had similar odysseys, and many of the murals are too large to hang in today’s small post office branches. One work that had wrapped around a post office in Monrovia, Calif., has been moved to a library there because there are no suitable walls at post offices in the area.

 

Brian Ballou can be reached at bballou@globe.com.

A point of personal privilege, if you please.

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the death of the greatest president in the history of the American republic. Please take a moment and reflect upon the life and legacy of FDR as the nations of the world assemble today in Washington, D.C. for President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit, the largest gathering of world dignitaries since FDR's intended hosting of the conference which initiated the United Nations (he died several weeks before the conference convened in San Francisco). In this spirit, I share with you the following article...

Roosevelt's influence echoes today

Athens Banner-Herald

Published Sunday, April 11, 2010

Monday marks the 65th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs. He was only 63, but he had been president of the United States for 12 years and 32 days, longer than any president before or since. But years and days were not the real measure of his remarkable influence and life.

On the day he became president, the United States was broken and suffering, with an economic system that had failed millions of its people; with enemies abroad already plotting and preparing for war; with our cultural and financial foundation shifting uneasily from agriculture to industry, from rural to urban.

On the day Roosevelt died, the United States had become the most powerful nation in history. It had survived economic depression and a terrible world war, and perhaps most important, Roosevelt's policies had built an economic structure that assured a better life for its people in the future.

By whatever political label an American claims today - Republican, Democrat, independent, liberal, conservative or libertarian - he or she lives and has thrived in the nation that Franklin Roosevelt made.

Most Americans, of course, do not remember the time before Roosevelt was president. They do not remember an America struggling to enter the modern world, or to create a middle class worthy of the name.

Indeed, they scarcely can conceive of a time without the promise of Social Security for the elderly and the infirm; of no unemployment payments for those suddenly left without jobs; of no minimum wage; no 40-hour week; no restrictions on child labor; or the later offspring of Roosevelt's vision such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and, just lately, a broader federal health care coverage.

Without those programs, the current economic downturn would have been worse than the Great Depression; more Americans would have suffered because more are older, and more live in cities, dependent on those cities' coordinated services.

Roosevelt and the New Deal transformed the Southern states more than any other part of the nation. The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of his favorite projects, and it was a model for the dams and hydroelectric plants that made farming more productive and lucrative and less labor-intensive.

Before the New Deal, the South's roads were muddy and narrow; in rural areas houses were lighted only by candles, mail came sporadically, disease was a frequent and deadly presence, and schools were few and far between. For most Americans, life was hard, and often brutal.

Those were the good old days a few voices call for. They don't remember them and they would be appalled if they had to live them.

Were Roosevelt and his policies popular? As mentioned, he was elected president four times. In 1932, he carried 42 of 48 states. In 1936, he won the largest popular vote majority in history to that time and carried 46 of the 48 states. In 1940, running against the two-term tradition, he still won 449 electoral votes to 82 for Wendell Wilkie. In 1944, although obviously ill, he won 432-99 in the electoral vote.

It should also be noted that in Roosevelt's elections, few blacks voted, nor as many women as today, and fewer poor people cast ballots.

Roosevelt's legacy provided Harry Truman with a presidential victory in 1948. Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican elected president in 1952 and 1956, had been chosen by Roosevelt to lead the invasion of Nazi Europe. In most policies, Eisenhower carried through Roosevelt's ideas - including the great interstate highway system, which was the ultimate Works Progress Administration project.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, elected in 1960 and 1964, also were Roosevelt heirs.

On this 65th anniversary of his death, it is important not to forget or to revise what Roosevelt's policies meant to the nation and to the world. He made mistakes, of course, and could be deceitful. But as he reminded us in one of his greatest speeches:

"Liberty requires the opportunity to make a living - a decent living by the standard of the time, a living which gives a man not only enough to live by, but something to live for ... .

"Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes ... but better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."

• Millard Grimes of Athens is a longtime Georgia newspaperman and author of "The Last Linotype: The Story of Georgia and Its Newspapers since World War II."

Joseph J. Plaud, Ph.D., B.C.B.A.
Email: plaud@fdrheritage.org
Website: http://www.appliedbehavioralconsultants.com

Lectures At Harvard

NNDPA board member Price Fishback will give a talk titled “In Search of the New Deal Multiplier" at the Harvard University Macroeconomics Workshop on October 4.

 

He will also speak on “The Rise of Social Insurance and Welfare” at Harvard's Workshop on Justice, Law, and Economics.