What’s the Deal?

What’s the Deal?

A look at how—or whether—the New New Deal will reshape the East Bay.

On a wet, gray day last February, a small group of Berkeley historians, architects, journalists, and activists gathered in a corner of the Codornices Park tennis courts to pay their respects to a stone wall.

This being Berkeley, tributes to rocks, walls, oak trees, naked guys, polka dots, and other objects both animated and inert are not particularly unusual or even especially noteworthy. Then again, this being Berkeley, a stone wall is never just a stone wall.

The group of mostly middle-aged academics huddled under umbrellas that February day were not there to simply pay homage to the humble wall’s existence, but to mark an anniversary, to honor an almost-forgotten legacy, and to give the men who built the wall their rightful due.

Raising their glasses of sparkling cider beside two smooth, inconspicuous black markers—one inscribed “1934,” the other “CWA”—that were embedded in the hand-hewn wall, the group toasted: “To the dignity of the workers who gave us these tennis courts, the Rose Garden, and so much else.”

According to the ceremony’s organizer, Steven Finacom, a columnist for the Berkeley Voice and a community historian, the 1930s laborers had pooled what “meagre income” they had to hire an out-of-work stone carver to inscribe the blocks. Digging through the archives of the Berkeley Daily Gazette, Finacom uncovered accounts of the dedication 75 years earlier, in which the foreman of the work crew proclaimed that “the men working under him wanted to leave some memento to the City and the Federal Government for the efforts that had been made to secure work for them.”

Forging ahead: The first two Caldecott tunnels, featuring a 1937 Art Deco facade, were built with New Deal dollars. A future tunnel will be partially funded by Recovery Act monies. Photo by SpiralA Photography.

Today, the markers remain the only known tangible acknowledgment of the contributions of the Civil Works Administration, a short-lived and little-remembered Depression relief agency established in 1933 under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Though the CWA only lasted four and a half months, it managed to amass a vast and remarkable legacy, employing some 4 million Americans who constructed or improved 244,000 miles of roads, 350 swimming pools, 3,700 athletic fields, more than 800 airports, and 4,000 schools. The agency also gave jobs to 50,000 teachers, and to countless musicians, writers, and artists through its work relief programs. In the East Bay, we can thank the CWA for the stone amphitheater in John Hinkel Park, Codornices Park tennis courts, the terracing of the Berkeley Rose Garden, construction of the Eastshore Highway, and dozens of other projects ranging from Oakland sidewalks and storm sewers to the planting of thousands of street trees.

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Three thousand miles away on that very same day in February, the United States Senate was voting on a bill that would ensure such grand-scale public works projects never happen again. The Coburn Amendment, championed by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), directed that no money from President Obama’s proposed stimulus package could go to “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.” The amendment passed overwhelmingly, with “yea” votes coming from, among others, California’s Dianne Feinstein.

The irony was not lost on the group who gathered that day in Codornices Park, and weighed particularly heavily on Gray Brechin, a resident U.C. Berkeley geographer and scholar. For the past five years, Brechin has headed up California’s Living New Deal Project, an undertaking whose ambitious mission is to inventory, map, and interpret the physical legacy of the CWA, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and other New Deal programs in California.

“That these men . . . would have gone to the trouble and expense to leave a marker is like someone who puts a message in a bottle and heaves it into the sea, hoping that someone will find it and know that they are there,” reflects Brechin on a bright spring afternoon in the tennis courts, as he surveys their decades-old handiwork. “These men wanted to be remembered for what they’d done and how well they’d done it. Their craftsmanship shows in that stonework, which has scarcely moved even though the hill is sliding.”

Lovely labor: Oakland’s Municipal Rose Garden is an example of the New Deal’s commitment to creating beauty in public places. Photo by SpiralA Photography.

Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—aka the stimulus package—last February, interest in the California Living New Deal Project has “skyrocketed,” according to Brechin. “Certainly, there are parallels [between the New Deal and the stimulus package]. But I think what the Obama administration doesn’t understand is that some of the money has to be forced into the bottom, not just handed over to the Bechtels and Kaisers of the world, where it will take a very long time to trickle down. It needs to go directly to the workers. Within one month, [New Deal relief projects administrator] Harry Hopkins put 2 million Americans to work.”

Documenting the visible impact of Roosevelt’s programs is the main component of the Living New Deal Project: Its ever-growing searchable online database and map show New Deal sites throughout California, augmented by photos and descriptions of the projects. The website also serves as a clearinghouse for information about the New Deal in California, including testimonial histories from participants. Brechin plans to publish a book about the project’s findings and to mount a traveling exhibition.

Sponsored by the California Historical Society, the California Studies Center, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at U.C. Berkeley, the Living New Deal Project has become something of a touchstone these days as the country grapples with economic Armageddon and pins its hopes on the $787 billion shot in the arm (including $85 billion for California), that some are referring to as the New New Deal.

Comparisons between the two seem inevitable, but any modern-day similarities to Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup” programs may be more academic than realistic. The New Deal cut a wide swath through all sectors of society—bridge builders to mural painters, golf course designers to poets—guided by an underlying philosophy that paid labor would do more to boost the morale of Americans than welfare or tax relief.

It was, in a manner of speaking, change people could not only believe in, but could actually see.

Locally, we can thank the New Deal for projects both utilitarian and idealistic—from the Caldecott Tunnel and the completion of the Hetch Hetchy Dam to the soaring Art Deco stone reliefs of the Berkeley Community Theatre, the Coit Tower murals and the Hayward Plunge swimming pool to the Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, the Bay Bridge and the first four East Bay Regional Parks, the Oakland and Berkeley Rose Gardens, and the Alameda County Courthouse—to name just a small sampling.

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But Roosevelt’s programs went far beyond buildings, parks, and highways. Around the country, the New Deal literally reshaped the American landscape, leaving an immense and enduring legacy from which we are still reaping the rewards. It was WPA workers, for instance, who recorded the oral histories of the South’s last living slaves, and CCC workers, aka Roosevelt’s “tree army,” who planted some 3 billion trees across the United States. The WPA made household names of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and photographer Dorothea Lange. It gave voice to Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and many others through the Federal Writers Project. And its orchestras expanded the public’s musical horizons through free concerts and the first recordings and national performances of American folk and ethnic music.

While the aim of President Obama’s stimulus package may ostensibly be the same, this time around economic salvation feels a little more like “Let’s Make a Deal” than a New Deal. The Coburn Amendment effectively blocks certain forms of stimulation: the final, reconciled House and Senate version of the bill restores $50 million for National Endowment for the Arts grants, but stipulates that only groups that have received federal funding in the last four years can apply; it also upholds the ban on funding for casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses, and swimming pools. Still, federal recovery money is flowing to state coffers, but the process is arduous and complicated.

Far from the simple “honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage” philosophy of the New Deal, city and state agencies not only have to figure out which doors to knock on as they scramble to compete for money, but how to navigate the federal government’s confusing application maze, meet deadlines (most of which mandate that cities must designate the funding to specific projects within 120 days), and ferret out whether they are even eligible for various grants.

The announcement in May that drugmaker Pfizer would provide 70 of its most widely prescribed drugs (including Viagra and Lipitor) for free to people who have lost their jobs somehow epitomizes the different, er, thrusts of the two approaches—not to mention putting a whole new spin on the term “stimulus package.”

Much of the $85 billion slated for California in the rescue plan will end up behind the scenes in infrastructure, not structure; in the extension of unemployment benefits, small business loans, and tax relief, but not in direct work relief; and in job search–related programs, but perhaps not in actual jobs.

A July report from the Government Accountability Office on state spending of federal recovery money showed that while Recovery Act goals may be lofty, the fiscal realities are sobering. Most states, the report noted, are using the first round of stimulus money just to stay afloat—covering budget shortfalls in Medicare and Medicaid, preventing more teacher layoffs, staving off enormous tuition hikes at universities, and plugging up potholes.

“When I was reading about the CWA, I was struck by how quickly and directly the money flowed from the program to workers,” says Finacom. “For example, a city would say it was going to use CWA funds to do street repairs or plant street trees, and 50 or 100 or 200 local men would be hired and literally sent out with picks and shovels to do the work. Today, if federal stimulus funds are being used to repair a street, the city would use them to hire a contractor, who would then bring it to a relatively small team of workers.”

To be fair, the sometimes epic time lapse nowadays between projects deemed “shovel ready” and actual groundbreaking has much to do with environmental impact reports, project review boards, and fair bidding and hiring protocols—practices that mostly weren’t in place during the Roosevelt administration. Plus, says Oakland Department of Public Works information officer Kristine Shaff, “The size of the grants is not the same, relatively speaking, as it was in the 1930s.

“We probably won’t see any huge public works projects now like they had during the New Deal, because the money is coming from a variety of different agencies, and it’s not just going to public works, but to a whole spectrum of urban issues,” she says.

According to the Recovery Act website, a host of local and state agencies—the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Energy—are in charge of determining award grants and contracts, which in turn will trickle down to the state and local levels, which then will potentially benefit everything from school renovations and public housing development to food stamps, nutrition programs for the elderly, and overhauling the nation’s electronic medical records.

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In California, Recovery Act funding is slowly making its way down the pike, earmarked for broad-based projects such as extending the wireless network for Amtrak, developing high-speed rail, updating the electric grid, and fixing crumbling streets, roads, and bridges. Dig deeper into the state Recovery website and you’ll also find funding for things like youth mentoring, Head Start program expansion, salt marsh restoration in San Francisco Bay, and historic preservation at black colleges and universities.

At the local level, municipalities including the cities of Berkeley and Oakland have lined up for their fair share, but so far only a few projects are anywhere close to groundbreaking. One of those is reconstruction of the pavement on University Avenue in Berkeley, between San Pablo Avenue and Sacramento Street, for which the city has already received funding. Construction will begin this fall.

“We’ve also been awarded funds for summer youth employment, which has increased the size of the program this [past] summer,” says Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, spokesperson for the City of Berkeley. “There isn’t much building from the ground up, but we are working on maintaining buildings that serve the public as a whole, or provide housing and other assistance to low-income homeowners.”

Clunies-Ross says that in addition to these projects, the city is pursuing funds to refurbish the public health clinic on University Avenue as well as Amistad House, which houses the formerly homeless. They also plan to expand the weatherization program for low-income housing, and increase community development grants, which go toward affordable housing, services, and jobs.

In Oakland, stimulus grants, many part of larger state formula allocations, have already been received for projects that include installing barriers to reduce pollutants in Lake Merritt and the Oakland Estuary ($3,450,000), and job search and training programs for dislocated workers ($1,805,371). The CalTrans expansion of the Caldecott Tunnel with a fourth bore will also be partially funded by Recovery Act money. Construction is scheduled to begin this month, with completion estimated anywhere between 2013 and 2014.

In scope and ideology, the Caldecott project perhaps most closely parallels the public works of the New Deal. It was the PWA that constructed the original two Caldecott tunnels in 1937, creating the first auto roadway connecting Alameda and Contra Costa counties. And while the fourth tunnel will likely bear little resemblance to the grand Art Deco facade of the first, the Caldecott is one of the few full-scale ground-up building projects seeing fruition under Obama’s New New Deal.

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Still, Brechin and other New Deal historians feel that lost in the stimulus plan is a sense of pride and self-respect that comes from creating something tangible, along with the idea of working together for the greater good of the country.

“You could say computerizing medical records is very important, but you can’t see it happening,” says Robert Leighninger Jr., a sociologist at Arizona State University and author of Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal. “Obviously, things like high-speed rail are going to have a big impact, but I think you also need to put money into public works, so you know the money is being spent, not being saved or pocketed.”

What’s also lacking in the stimulus package, says Brechin, is an emphasis on the value of beauty in public life. Walking through the stately rows of apricot, lilac, and deep crimson blooms in the Berkeley Rose Garden, Brechin muses that this WPA project is probably his favorite in part because, “It is so absurdly superfluous.”

“The New Deal idea that people need beauty, in addition to water systems and roads, was transformative,” he says. “And I think it is directly at odds with forces in today’s government.”

Brechin is referring to conservative critics of the New Deal and the Recovery Act such as economics journalist Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, and Senator Coburn, both of whom contend that Roosevelt’s plan didn’t do anything to lift America out of the Depression, and that public works projects promoting art, music, film, and theater are essentially frivolous.

The partial passage of the Coburn amendment means it’s unlikely that we’ll see Recovery money fueling a resurgence of murals depicting men in overalls drilling while they browse tomes by Karl Marx, as they do on the walls of Coit Tower, but not everyone fighting for arts funding is pessimistic. At a recent California Historical Society lecture titled “The History of Public Funding and the Arts—The Legacy of the New Deal,” a lively group of artists and activists—including a few seniors who recalled the help they received from the New Deal and other government-sponsored programs—debated the future of public art. Panelist Lincoln Cushing, an archivist and author of several books on labor posters, noted that “the challenge today is to turn the stimulus package into something else.

“Technology has changed the mechanism of distribution, but there’s no substitute for working with your hands,” he said. “We need to find ways to integrate that technology with art that will make as big an impact as WPA posters did.”

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Back in Berkeley, Brechin is walking through the Civic Center, pointing out place after place where the New Deal left its imprint: Berkeley High School, the Berkeley Community Theatre, the Civic Center Park, the vibrant murals depicting the founding of Berkeley in the Main Post Office, and on and on.

Midway through the tour, he stops to consider it all. “When I think of the scope—just in terms of knowledge—it’s absolutely phenomenal,” he says. “It was a marriage of goodwill and ingenuity the likes of which we will likely never see again. Unlike what the cynics say, I believe the New Deal brought the country from the 19th into the 20th century.”

As the Living New Deal’s map of California projects continues to expand, it has become clear that Brechin’s ultimate goal has gone beyond building a database, beyond collecting photographs, publishing a book, recording oral histories, conducting tours, and giving lectures.

“I want to uncover the hidden landscape that we all take advantage of but don’t see, to serve as a model and inspiration for a national inventory of the New Deal,” he says. “I think this is the best way to open people’s eyes, to disprove the naysayers, to show what government can do at its very best.

“We could do worse than to take our cues from the California Conservation Corps and the WPA,” Brechin adds. “It wasn’t utopia, but it sure looks like it from here.”

Perhaps in the end, drawing direct parallels between Roosevelt’s idealistic vision and Obama’s more pragmatic one is a little bit like comparing apples to genetically modified oranges. In this era of advanced computer technology, one man’s shovel is another man’s mouse click, and who’s to say that updating the electrical grid is any less valuable to society than building a beautiful electrical substation? True, it’s not change you can see, but perhaps in the end, it will be change you can bank your future on.

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Bonnie Wach is a Bay Area freelance writer and the author of San Francisco As You Like It: 23 Tailor-Made Tours for Culture Vultures, Shopaholics, Neo-Bohemians, Famished Foodies, Savvy Natives & Everyone Else.


DONE DEALS

California’s Living New Deal Project
http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu

Recovery websites
www.recovery.ca.gov
www.recovery.gov

Stimulus projects in Oakland and Berkeley
www.oaklandnet.com/economic_stimulus
www.cityofberkeley.info/manager

Here are just a few of many East Bay sites built or improved by New Deal agencies.

Alameda
Alameda Public Library
High Street Bridge
Park Street Bridge

Berkeley
Berkeley Civic Center
Berkeley High School
Berkeley Main Post Office
Berkeley Rose Garden
Brazilian Room, Tilden Park
Codornices Park
Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School
North Berkeley Branch Library
U.C. Botanical Garden

Oakland
Alameda County Courthouse
Highland Hospital
Oakland International Airport
Rose Garden Park
Temescal Beach House
Woodminster Amphitheater

Other East Bay cities
Caldecott Tunnel (first two tunnels)
Anna Yates Elementary School, Emeryville
Beach Elementary School, Piedmont
Hayward Plunge Swimming Facility

 

Faces of the East Bay