Legacy of FDR's New Deal in state can show 2009 path
Posted on Sunday, January 4, 2009
FAYETTEVILLE - When Arkansans attend a football game at Reynolds Razorback Stadium or fish at Lake Atalanta in Rogers, they may not realize they are using facilities that originally were built during the Great Depression by the federal Works Progress Administration.
President-elect Barack Obama is promising a massive public works infrastructure program on the scale of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal's major construction programs were the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, which was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.
In the early 1930s, Arkansas seemed to be on the verge of bankruptcy, the state Legislature had stopped funding the construction of buildings at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and Northwest Arkansas was still a remote region accessible only by dirt roads.
Then, Roosevelt launched the New Deal in 1933. Within a decade, U.S. 71 was paved, UA had eight new buildings and area lakes had been converted into tourist destinations. The WPA alone built 773 buildings statewide.
"The New Deal saved Arkansas from bankruptcy and financed most of the improvements to the state highway system during the Great Depression," according to "The New Deal and Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1933-1941," a 1987 UA master's thesis by Stephen Herman Dew.
Among other things, the New Deal was an attempt by Roosevelt to modernize the South. The New Deal gave Arkansas towns amenities they'd never had, such as auditoriums, band shells and swimming pools.
"Before it was just work - talking care of the kids and picking cotton," said Holly Hope, special projects historian with the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. "It gave them other things to do besides just work."
"I'm struck by how this region was remade by that investment," said Janine Parry, associate professor of political science at UA. "It was substantial. It not only remade the state structurally, but it remade the state's attitude toward government."
Arkansas benefited from the New Deal more than many other states, Parry said.
"Arkansas did comparatively well in the New Deal but only because we were doing comparatively poorly overall," she said.
Also, Parry said, Joe T. Robinson, U.S. Senate majority leader at the time, was from Arkansas.
"He was a very effective figure and one of the central architects of the New Deal," she said.
PWA
Many of those New Deal facilities are still in use today.
Nationally, the Public Works Administration spent more than $6 billion on 34,000 construction projects. The PWA, which existed from 1933-39, provided loans and grants for eight UA buildings:
$1.17 million to build the Chemistry Building, Band Building and Vol Walker Hall, which initially served as the UA library and now houses the School of Architecture.
$751,000 to build a student union (now called Memorial Hall), the Home Economics Building and Ozark Hall (later called the Business Building) at UA.
$307,000 to build Razorback Hall (originally called Gibson Hall) and the University Museum (which now houses the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences).
$50,000 (which was matched with $4,000 from the UA) to build a football stadium.
All of those university buildings are still in use except for the Band Building, which was torn down in 1963, said Charlie Alison, a UA spokesman.
The $464,753 spent to build Vol Walker Hall in 1935 would amount to about $7.2 million in today's dollars, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator. When it was completed, UA's president at the time, John C. Futrall, hailed Vol Walker Hall as "the most beautiful building in Arkansas."
The PWA also provided $100,000 for a sewer treatment facility in Fayetteville and $36,000 to construct the city's Leverett Elementary School.
In all, the PWA provided $900,000 in grants and $1.49 million in loans for Washington County projects, according to Dew.
WPA
Later in his first term, Roosevelt launched the largest job initiative in U.S. history. From 1935-43, the WPA spent $10.5 billion employing 8.5 million Americans who had been jobless. That would translate to about $158 billion in today's currency.
Highway and street construction accounted for the largest WPA allotments in Arkansas, according to Dew.
Besides paving U.S. 71 through Fayetteville, the WPA also paved 9,000 feet of the city's streets. The WPA built concrete bridges to replace wooden bridges that spanned the railroad track along Lafayette and Maple streets. Those bridges still are used today.
The construction of a football stadium was the largest WPA project for UA, Dew wrote.
During 1937-38, an average of 300 men worked on what initially was called Bailey Stadium, named after then-Gov. Carl Bailey. The facility originally provided seats for 12,500 spectators. It has been expanded several times over the years, eventually becoming Reynolds Razorback Stadium in 2001.
WPA workers built Lake Wedington, 13 miles west of Fayetteville, in conjunction with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. They dammed several springs to create the lake. Using native stone and native oak from what would become the lake bed, they constructed cabins, a lodge, bathhouse, pavilion, gazebo and picnic tables. They also planted more than 350,000 seedlings of locust, black walnut and pine on the 4,000-acre tract of overcultivated land.
The WPA created Lake Atalanta by damming Prairie Creek in 1937. Building the 46-foot-tall, 720-foot-long earthen dam was a $120,000 project that kept between 60 and 110 men working throughout the year, according to newspaper articles at the time.
Most of the New Deal programs in Benton County were for infrastructure, said Gaye Bland, director of the Rogers Historical Museum. The WPA built Central Ward Elementary School, which now serves as the core building of Frank Tillery Elementary School, she said. The WPA also built the old Siloam Springs High School, which has since been torn down. Bland said the museum has no records of how much of the city's infrastructure improvements were the result of the New Deal.
Jeannie Whayne, a UA professor of history, doesn't believe the New Deal saved Arkansas from bankruptcy, as Dew writes, "but it certainly helped."
"As an agricultural economy rather than an industrial economy, in some ways we weren't hurting as much as the rest of the country," she said. "But the agricultural program put a lot of money in the hands of a lot of farmers."
In Northwest Arkansas, the New Deal provided jobs where there had been none before.
"In a way, the WPA was really a revolutionary experience for a lot of relatively poor upcountry northern Arkansas folks," Whayne said. "At its best, it put a lot of money in the hands of a lot of ordinary folks. There were a lot more jobs out there than there had ever been before. In rural, isolated communities, there was not a lot of cash out there to begin with."
Even with the New Deal programs, there still were 1,600 unemployed people in Washington County in 1938, according to Dew.
STATEWIDE
Statewide by 1939, the WPA had built 773 buildings, according to "An Ambition to be Preferred: New Deal Recovery Efforts and Architecture in Arkansas, 1933-1943," a 46-page paper by Hope of the state Historic Preservation Program and published in 2006. The WPA reconstructed 587 buildings and 45 additions in Arkansas. About 40 percent of the WPA's construction efforts in the state went toward schools. It built 297 new schools in Arkansas, along with 81 gymnasiums and 34 stadiums, grandstands and bleachers.
To help Arkansans relax and have fun during the dark days of the Depression, WPA workers built 73 tennis courts, 38 athletic fields, 16 playgrounds, 14 swimming pools, eight community auditoriums, four band shells, three fairgrounds and rodeo grounds, two outdoor theaters, two wading pools and a golf course. Field houses, pavilions, shelters and lodges also were constructed by the WPA.
Other Arkansas WPA buildings included 29 public garages, 21 storage buildings, 16 hospitals, five armories, four fire stations and three jails. The number of new "miscellaneous" public buildings was listed at 153.
The WPA also participated in public utility construction, building 11 such facilities in the state, including five sewage treatment plants, three pumping stations, two incinerators and a water treatment plant.
The WPA provided 31 miles of water mains, aqueducts and distribution lines, and 33 miles of sanitary and storm sewers.
The number of WPA workers in Arkansas peaked at 56,351 in November 1938, according to Hope. Total Works Progress Administration expenditures in the state from 1935 to the name change - Work Projects Administration - in 1939 was $70.6 million.
From 1935-39, the WPA paid almost $1 million in salaries to Washington County workers, many of whom were employed updating county codes and maps, according to Dew.
The WPA wasn't all about infrastructure, though. The program also funded the arts, providing jobs to writers, photographers, artists and actors. The project allowed the Washington County library system to open branches in Cane Hill, Elkins, Lincoln, Prairie Grove, Springdale, West Fork and Winslow, all staffed with WPA clerks. The WPA also funded a sewing center and canning facility in Fayetteville as well as a canning facility in Rogers.
Northwest Arkansas also benefited from other New Deal programs. For example, the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works built the Madison County Courthouse in Huntsville; the Civilian Conservation Corps built cabins, lodges, bathhouses and picnic tables at Devil's Den, and worked with the WPA on the Lake Leatherwood dam near Eureka Springs; and young workers with the National Youth Administration built Garfield School.
STIMULUS PACKAGE
Congress, which will begin a new term Tuesday, hopes to have an economic stimulus package for Obama to review shortly after he takes office Jan. 20. David Axelrod, an Obama adviser, has said they hope for something in the $675 billion to $775 billion range. The amount could reach $850 billion after making its way through the House and Senate, according to some projections. Obama hopes the plan will create 3 million new jobs. It covers five main areas of spending and tax breaks: health, education, infrastructure, energy and support for the unemployed and poor.
Economists have been dissecting Roosevelt's New Deal ever since Obama said he wants a similar public works infrastructure program. Experts disagree over how effective the New Deal was at stimulating the nation's economy, but the structures it left behind are monuments to those programs.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
