WPA in Florida

It was 1930, and the mood in Florida was bleak. Once a beacon of optimism, the state now lay in economic ruins. It had been pummeled by the real estate bust of 1926 and devastated by the Wall Street crash three years later. Crushed lives and dashed dreams haunted the Dust Bowl, but bad things weren't supposed to happen in sunshine states.

Hundreds of Florida-owned banks and corporations had failed. Agriculture had fallen victim to under-consumption, overproduction, the Mediterranean fruit fly, and the cattle tick. Mullet fishermen threatened a strike unless they received 3 cents a pound for their catches. Steel skeletons, once symbols of the Florida Boom, now rusted. The fortunes of John Ringling, Carl Fisher, and David P. Davis were dashed on the rocks of speculation and bankruptcy. Tax revenues and income had plummeted. Vast sections of the state had been sold for back taxes.

By 1932, new construction had virtually ceased. In Jacksonville, officials warned that 24,000 citizens faced starvation; the unemployment problem in Pensacola, said U.S. Sen. Duncan Fletcher, was “perhaps larger than any other community in the U.S.”

Revolutionaries stalked the land, or so politicians feared. In Miami, the Dade County Unemployment League warned, “You can drive us into revolution or give us relief.” In many places, signs appeared: “Warning: Do not come here seeking work!” “Hobo Expresses” escorted transients to the nearest county and state lines.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) pledged to Americans a “New Deal” at the 1932 Democratic Party convention, a quarter of Floridians were unemployed. Elected by a landslide in November 1932, Roosevelt came perilously close to never fulfilling his promise. Three months later, as the president-elect began to speak to a large crowd at Miami's Bayfront Park, an Italian anarchist named Giuseppe Zangagra fired shots, barely missing Roosevelt but killing Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. Roosevelt's inspiration derived not from a deep-seated ideology, but rather from his confidence and consuming faith, his gift of empathy, and his willingness to experiment. A pragmatist, FDR was willing to test the limits of government; a leader, he believed that the presidency was a pulpit.

Before the New Deal, there was no social security for the aged, no guarantee of banking deposits or rights to organize a union, and no federal relief for farmers. Right-wing critics branded Roosevelt a socialist, while the Left never forgave him for preserving private enterprise. The stakes were immense: America in the 1930s was poised on a hinge of history, precariously balanced between fascist dictatorships and social revolution.

Put simply, the New Deal ameliorated the worst of the Great Depression and offered hope to many who had lost all faith in the American way. Promising relief, recovery, and reform, the New Deal injected the federal government into family lives, the job place, even the theater.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) recruited 50,000 men aged 17 to 23 to plant trees and build parks. Pay was $30 a month, of which $25 went to their families. The nucleus of today's Florida state park system stands as a CCC
legacy: Florida Caverns, Torreya, Fort Clinch, O'Leno, Hillsborough River, the Highland Hammock, and Myakka River state parks.

But no New Deal program left a greater legacy than the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It came about in 1935, when, for all of FDR's fireside chats and daring, the New Deal had stalled. In spite of massive infusions of federal funds, unemployment remained alarmingly high. The courts checked Roosevelt's agenda. Demagogues were on the march: Huey Long, Dr. Francis Townsend, and Father Charles Coughlin threatened Roosevelt- and threatened American democracy, itself. The election of 1936 loomed.

With the bravado of a lion and the cunning of a fox, Roosevelt outflanked his opponents. On May 6, 1935, FDR established the Works Progress Administration by executive order. In August, FDR signed the Social Security Act, unfurling the Second New Deal.

Roosevelt appointed trusted aide Harry Hopkins to head the WPA. Imbued with ample measures of idealism and cynicism, the former social worker understood that the new program promised much but threatened many.

FDR envisioned the WPA to be the centerpiece of a massive $5
billion appropriation (then the largest single appropriation in American history). The program was designed to employ as many workers as cheaply as possible-not to distribute the money as handouts. “Give a man a dole,” Hopkins said, “and you save his body but destroy his spirit.”

“What I am seeking is the abolition of relief altogether,” announced the president. But critics quickly ridiculed the WPA as standing for “We Piddle Around.” Most Floridians were grateful for such “make work,” even at $55 monthly wages.

The WPA's legacy includes 651,000 miles of road and 78,000 bridges (notably the Overseas Highway connecting Miami and Key West). The WPA laundry list- and the agency did construct laundries!- is simply stunning: commercial airports for Pensacola, Miami, Tampa, Marianna, and Melbourne; a Boy Scout camp in Bartow; a storm shelter for Belle Glade; shuffleboard courts in Fort Lauderdale's Stranahan Park; an armory in Lake City; a new jail for Jefferson County; an athletic field in Monticello; a football stadium for Orlando; a TB sanitarium in Woodsmere; a student union building at the University of Florida; sewing rooms for the women of Arcadia; a new Leon County High School in Tallahassee; a mattress factory in Carrabelle; a new campus for St. Petersburg Junior College; a women's dormitory for Rollins College; a post office for Miami Beach; and a fire station for Coral Gables. Bankrupt Key West essentially became a New Deal client, with new construction, an extensive art project, and other improvements that transformed it into a tourist destination.

The New Deal also extended a hand to rural communities reeling from the Depression. In 1932, there were nearly 54,000 Florida farms that were not wired for electricity. But a freshman congressman from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, championed the Rural Electrification Program, which helped brighten the harshness of rural life in Florida and in many parts of the country.

The most ambitious rural experiment in Florida occurred in Madison County in North Florida- an area hit especially hard by the collapse of the cotton economy following World War I. In 1935, the WPA launched the $1.5 million Cherry Lake Rehabilitation Project. Officials selected 500 families residing in Tampa, Jacksonville, and Miami, and moved them to a 15,000-acre communal tract they called Cherry Lake Farms. The refurbished Hinton house, an 1839 plantation, became headquarters for the nonprofit company. Workers constructed a lumber yard, a cane mill,barracks, a new school, an auditorium, and a cooperative store. Families residing in the 170 cottages enjoyed telephones, electric lights, and running water from worker-owned utilities.

The WPA's most significant legacy is not brick and concrete, however, but the remarkable outpouring of arts and culture- especially at a time when bringing culture to the people was considered politically and socially explosive. Fusing culture and democracy in a relief program seemed revolutionary; but idealism and fear came together in a series of daring experiments.

Federal Project Number One- popularly known as Fed One- consisted of five major programs: the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers' Project, and the Historical Records Survey. These put people in the arts and humanities to work. When asked about the wisdom of hiring unemployed Shakespearian actors, Hopkins quipped, “Hell, artists have got to eat just like other people.”

Florida's unemployed teachers, journalists, actors, sculptors, dancers, and artists found new callings under the WPA. Never again would so many writers and folklorists canvass the bayous and back roads in search of ex-slaves, Cuban cigar makers, Pensacola Creoles, Bahamian Conchs, Greek spongers, Minorcan descendants, Kissimmee cow hunters, and just plain folk.

The Florida Writers' Project employed about 200 people who worked feverishly to complete so much that archivists are still adding manuscripts to a mountain of papers. It was ably directed by the accomplished author Corita Doggett Corse, who deftly balanced personalities, politicians, and deadlines.

Myriad WPA publications promoted the state, but the most notable achievement was Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (1939). Written with verve, the Guide is still carried in the glove compartments of many cars. Six decades later, many passages ring with authenticity:

Politically and socially, Florida has its own North and South, but its northern area is strictly southern and its southern area definitively northern. In summer the State is predominantly southern by birth and adoptions, and in winter it is northern by
invasion….

To the visitor, Florida is at once a pageant of extravagance and a land of pastoral simplicity, a flood-lighted stage of frivolity and a behind-the-scenes struggle for existence. For the person with a house car, it is a succession of trailer camps and a vagabond social life. For the Palm Beach patron, it is a winter Newport made up of the same society, servants, and pastimes….

Ten thousand miles of roads that crisscross the State have streaked it with what might be described as roadside culture and commerce, with each section revealing a characteristic quality…Agrarian preoccupations turn from corn, cotton, and tobacco to alligator and lion farms, reptile ranches, botanical gardens, and Indian villages.

Not every observation, however, will sound familiar to today’s readers. Tallahassee's red-clay streets, according to WPA writers:

Intersect many paved thoroughfares, and horse-and-mule-drawn vehicles are not uncommon sights…Parked along the high curbs are shining motors with liveried chauffeurs, and rickety farm wagons acting as carry-alls for produce, groceries, and brown-faced children. Hitching posts and watering troughs still survive.

WPA writers described 1930s Destin (population 25) “as an old and well-known fishing resort.” In Orlando (population 27,730), “Sidewalks are narrow; traffic signal lights bear the admonition 'Quiet.' Fruit-juice stands and used-car lots, some in landscaped settings, appear between tall, year-round hotels, theaters, and department stores.”  The Guide warned tourists, “Here and there are the 'pitches' of palm readers and astrologers; but to maintain the contrast, long stretches of uninhabited pine woods intervene with warning signs, 'Open Range- Beware of Cows and Hogs.'”

The guide also captured the realities of 1930s life. In La Belle, travelers encountered “primitive one-story cabins with palm-thatched roofs…Kerosene lamps light these houses, and home-cured hides are sometimes used as bed 'kivers.'''

WPA cultural projects ranged from recording Lebanese lullabies in Jacksonville to bringing the opera Aida to Apalachicola and constructing an art gallery in Key West. Art centers opened in Milton, Bradenton, Daytona Beach, and New Smyrna Beach. Pensacola, Jacksonville, and St. Petersburg sponsored Negro Art Centers. The Jacksonville Civic Orchestra, composed of 52 musicians formerly on relief rolls, played to enthusiastic crowds. In one experiment, inmates at Raiford State Prison learned to paint. Harry Sutton, a celebrated artist and supervisor of the Jacksonville Negro Art Center, offered art lessons for local youth.

Curtains closed and actors bowed at the conclusion of the 900 performances sponsored by the short-lived, but lively, Florida Theater Project. Tampa was home to the state's only Negro Theater Unit as well as the nation's only Spanish-language acting troupe. Wildly popular, Ybor City's Latin immigrants adored the performances at the palatial Centro Asturiano Theatre, but the U.S. Congress voted in 1937 that aliens could not work on WPA projects, thus robbing the troupe of its actors.

The decade of the 1930s profoundly altered the course of American and Florida history. Events changed the relationships among states, citizens, and the federal government. Popular doctrines of rugged individualism gave away to an acceptance of Washington's role in Americans' lives.

American writers and artists keenly shaped, and were shaped by, the 1930s. The popular slogans “Art for the Millions” and “People's Art” reflected new sentiments and relationships. The WPA represented what critic Lewis Mumford called “the cultural rediscovery of America.” Prior to the Great Depression, terms such as culture and civilization meant European arts and letters, imported music, and theater. Historian Warren Susman insisted, “the single most persistent theme to emerge from the bulk of the literature of this period…was 'the people.'” Florida's Hurston may have summed it up best, “Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human
living.” Floridians, too, rediscovered Florida.

Featured in Issue 25- Nov/Dec 2005

This article is reprinted from FORUM, the magazine of the Florida Humanities Council, a nonprofit organization that sponsors public programs exploring Florida's history and cultural heritage.