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Our Last Chance to Record the Voices of New Deal Workers through Oral History

In a recent post for The Berkeley Blog, Professor Robert Reich proposes that the federal government respond to our ongoing recession by initiating a new Works Progress Administration (WPA). Almost seventy years having passed since the closing of the original New Deal “alphabet agencies,” recent oral history interviews can help us better comprehend the ongoing impact of these programs. A major aspect of the New Deal was the creation of over 100 federally-sponsored offices, so nicknamed “alphabet agencies” due to their near-obsessive propensity for acronyms.  As a historian of museums and anthropology I have studied the extensive impact of alphabet agencies (which ran from roughly 1935 to 1943) like the WPA, National Youth Administration (NYA), and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) on museums and science in the United States. Numerous other historians have illustrated how these programs profoundly enriched cultural, environmental, and even intellectual life in the United States. Along with unskilled laborers, the WPA temporarily employed writers, authors, and artists; these programs even hired a deluge of underemployed historians and interviewers who completed oral histories (a story which I can identify with, probably for obvious reasons). These alphabet agencies contributed to museums, in particular, by providing labor with which to organize collections, create card catalogues useful for researchers, and design and built entirely new public exhibits. The youngest workers who were employed by these programs are now between about 85-90 years old. Workers who were hired earlier or joined at above the minimum age are today closer to 100 years old.

In studying the stunning impact of New Deal programs on museums, I continually wondered who these (mostly) young men were. How did they end up finding work in a public works program, and what sort of an influence did it have on their lives? In the case of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the UC Berkeley campus, I was curious about the experiences of the young men working for the museum through the NYA in the 1930s. Was this just a temporary, meaningless internship for them – or was the experience of working with a public works project during the Great Depression something that had actually influenced them in meaningful ways? The focus of my article on museums and the New Deal was how these public works projects benefited museums, but records shedding light on the perspectives of the workers themselves were virtually non-existent and thus their voices faded to the background of my historical narrative. Although critics have lambasted the public work projects of the New Deal as filled with incompetence and wasteful spending, the reality is that these programs left a powerful and lasting mark on American culture that is impossible to measure on a fiscal scale alone. Critics have rightly noted the many shortcomings of alphabet agencies, including the stark inequalities (in terms of both race and gender) in their hiring practices. Nevertheless, archival sources at repositories such as the Smithsonian Institution (which ran its own WPA office for museum projects) indicate that the vast number of public works employees hired during the midst of the Great Depression accomplished a staggering amount of work.  Occasional stories of incompetence and sloth, however, were also present (rumors still swirl around the halls of the National Museum of Natural History about WPA workers stealing nips of alcohol from the countless storage jars preserving the millions of exotic creatures from around the world). In this entry, I would like to consider two recent interviews recorded by the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of The Bancroft Library . Although both of the interviews primarily focus on the period of the Second World War, portions of these interviews also provide great insights into the era of the Great Depression and New Deal. Indeed, because the lives of the many individuals we have interviewed were often filled with rich experiences before and after World War II, our collection offers a partial snapshot of American life in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Importantly, those with lived experiences related to these programs are advancing in age, and it is critical that we record their stories as quickly and efficiently as possible. Historians and journalists have rightly called attention to the fact that members of the Second World War generation are quickly passing away, and we should take a moment to recall that the memories of life before the war—when many of the men and women who lived through the conflict were children and adolescents—are disappearing with them. The two men highlighted in this post—both white and nearly 90 years old— describe in their oral histories their work as part of the agencies. They detail their time working for New Deal era public works programs as benefiting them in the long-term, affording them opportunities to further their education and contribute to society in an inspiring fashion. These things are only clear in distant retrospect, making oral history an important tool in documenting these experiences.

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