Butte County gets a New Deal

On the banks of Big Chico Creek, where the university campus meets Children’s Playground and Bidwell Mansion, lies one of Chico’s most striking, and least recognized, architectural and historic treasures: Bidwell Bowl Amphitheater.

The amphitheater is wrought from local stone and incorporates the creek itself into its structure. Moss and lichen settled on old stone walls add to its grandeur, only partly diminished by intermittent broken wood seating planks, graffiti scribbles and a bite-shaped chunk missing from the main wall.

More people pass by than stop to appreciate the amphitheater, and most who do use it—students seeking quiet study space, older children escaping eyes of parents and police—couldn’t tell you anything about it, even its official name.

But, to those who know its meaning, a humble, inconspicuous plaque reading “ERECTED 1938 WPA” speaks volumes about who built it, for whom it was built, and why it is here.

Michael Magliari, a history professor at Chico State, met this reporter at the site one recent morning to talk about the Bidwell Bowl and the era that birthed it—the Great Depression. The conversation, though rooted in events that occurred at least 70 years ago, couldn’t have been more timely or telling in its relationship to modern politics.

“There’s a lot of lessons we learned from the Depression,” Magliari said at one point, shaking his head, “that have been completely forgotten. Or, at best they’ve been half-heartedly applied.”

These lessons, much like the buildings erected for the people, by the people, and the services that employed, fed, clothed, housed, entertained and educated millions during a dark hour in our nation’s history, need to be remembered, lest they disappear forever. And they are especially relevant today, as we struggle through another difficult economic era.

The Works Progress Administration (later called the Works Project Administration), or WPA, was one of many government organizations created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide work relief for America’s 13 million unemployed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Funded by the Federal Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, and following goals started by an earlier body, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the WPA existed between April 1935 and June 1943.

It was one of several work relief projects constituting an alphabet soup of government agencies including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the aforementioned FERA, and many others. The WPA remains the best remembered for its lasting contributions to America’s physical infrastructure and progressive programs that encouraged art, music, education, theater and helping the poor. The WPA also included a youth component, the National Youth Administration, to provide work and financial relief for high-school and college students.

Work sometimes overlapped among these organizations or is, in retrospect, wrongfully credited to one or another. Most large-scale projects employing thousands—such as the building of Shasta Dam—were overseen by other agencies, with the WPA focused on construction and other projects for local labor.

Harry Hopkins, an FDR adviser, was the primary architect of the WPA, and both men were strongly opposed to putting the unemployed on the dole, feeling it robbed them of their dignity and allowed useful skills to deteriorate. The WPA placed value on civic-works projects, self-help cooperative programs and immediate employment over direct relief, though that was also provided. Social-welfare and arts programs created by the WPA formed the foundation of many services still existing, in other forms, today.

Many WPA buildings and works survive in various states of use and repair. For every structure with a WPA plaque there are thousands of unmarked miles of roads, bridges, sewer lines and buildings across the nation; for every WPA mural that graces America’s post offices and municipal buildings, hundreds have been painted over, stolen or otherwise lost. Many of the programs were scrapped as rapidly as they popped up, run by citizens without benefit of efficient record keeping, or folded into other agencies as America geared up for World War II; even much official documentation is lost or hard to find.

What does exist, in structure and spirit, tells the story of a remarkable chapter of history, around the nation and here in Butte County.

The Great Depression hit Butte County harder than it hit many other parts of the nation. In his History of Butte County, Joseph McGie estimates local unemployment in the 1930s at 30 percent or more, compared with national peaks of around 20 percent.

These figures were compounded by the flow of migrants from Dust Bowl states who saw California as a land of greater opportunity, many of whom landed locally seeking agricultural work. An FSA migrant-labor camp on the Feather River near Gridley housed 600 souls, and other camps existed at Woodson Bridge and other nearby locations.

Other migrants set up unsanctioned tent cities near larger communities. Paul L. Roberts, editor of the Sandy Gulch News, described Chico’s 4-mile-long, 40-foot-wide Tent City of 200 transients, mostly “Dust Bowlers,” along Lindo Channel in October 1938.

Hundreds of banks failed during the Depression, including one local bank, Peoples Savings and Commercial Bank of Chico. It was liquidated in August 1933, and depositors received only a portion of their funds back two years later. In 1933, devalued U.S. dollars were replaced by local Depression scrip, currency printed by the Chico Chamber of Commerce.

That same year, Butte County saw its first major federal work-relief actions. In late November, President Roosevelt pledged to employ 4 million Americans by Christmas with CWA and SERA (state extensions of FERA) work projects. Butte County received $95,000 and immediately put 60 men to work doing mosquito abatement near Oroville and Durham. Just over a week later, 651 men started working throughout the county.

All but 1 percent of workers on these projects were supposed to be local, but “local” is a relative term; migrants staying in government-run camps were granted residency after two weeks. This was a source of contention for longer-term residents. It was also sometimes ignored by local authorities, and, according to McGie, unrest ensued when workers at the Gridley camp were denied residency.

Meanwhile, the new programs were having a big impact. “We have been very fortunate in being able to secure approval of work projects that have been needed since the city’s organization,” said S. J. Norris, city engineer of Oroville. “In most instances, the work that we have secured would not have been done in our lifetime. All of our work is of a useful and lasting nature.”

Five years after the start of the WPA, an October 1940 Oroville Mercury-Register article runs down a partial list of accomplishments in Butte County: 76 miles of streets and highways, 345 culverts, 40 miles of road drainage, 10 miles of sidewalks and curbs, construction or remodeling of 29 public buildings (including at least three schools and a county hospital near Thermalito), three large public swimming pools, 18 miles of water mains, three miles of sanitary sewers, 258 privies, two miles of forest trails, 200 feet of levees and embankment, 6,000 feet of retaining walls and revetments, 20 miles of irrigation systems, and Oroville and Chico airport improvements. The airports themselves were earlier CWA projects.

Plans for what would become Bidwell Bowl were announced in November 1937. Chico City Engineer Frank Robinson designed it, and the federal government matched $3,403 in funds paid by the Chico Park Commission and provided WPA labor and materials.

Some work projects farther up Big Chico Creek, in Bidwell Park, predated the WPA, including PWA and CCC road projects. By 1935, most park projects were run by the WPA. Improvements still visible today include the concrete lining of Sycamore Pool at One-Mile Recreation Area, pathways and roads throughout the park and the diversion dam near Bear Hole, which created Horseshoe Lake.

Similar work occurred at parks in Oroville, including the construction of tennis courts, a swimming pool and bathhouses, one of which has been repurposed into a museum at the Oroville Nature Center.

The WPA constructed Citrus Elementary School, which opened in August of 1936. On May 10 of this year, the school celebrated its 75th anniversary. To honor its foundation as a public work, classes at the school committed to service projects revolving around the number 75 (75 miles of busing offset by biking on field trips, 75 cans of food or articles of clothing donated to local service organizations, etc.).

Pam Wear, who served as volunteer coordinator for the Citrus anniversary, was able to find the building’s original blueprints by Chico architect Chester Cole as well as other tidbits, but she found history on WPA projects harder to come by. WPA and PWA funds and labor added improvements to Chico High and other district schools, but it’s hard to discern what exactly work was done and what still exists. Even the district headquarters—formerly Linden School—may have been a WPA project.

Though no official records of this were found, the late Mrs. Araks Vartabedian Tolegian, a 1938 graduate of Chico State, offered some insight in a 2008 letter to Chico Statements magazine: “Linden School on 7th Street was supposed to be built for eighth graders, but because of the Depression, only half of it was built, for only four grades. It was never completed, and to my eyes, it looks ‘half done.’”

Other local building projects include a municipal building in Biggs, construction of Paradise Elementary, McKinley Elementary in Gridley, and some parts of the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds.

Newspapers commonly reported how much employment was generated, even if the jobs were small, from two men working to flatten land for a school to be built to 61 men working on the road through Big Chico Creek Canyon. According to the Gridley Herald, by January 1936—just months after its inception—the WPA employed 1,063 men and 47 women in Butte County on dozens of separate projects.

Workers were generally paid between 60 cents and $1.10 an hour and worked 30 hours a week. WPA jobs lasted from weeks to years, with most ensuring three months of employment. In 1938, Butte placed second among Northern California counties in WPA employment.

Some projects crossed county lines and were done with other agencies, making full accounting even harder. The California Department of Forest and Fire Protection credits CCC and WPA laborers with constructing more than 300 lookout towers and houses, 9,000 miles of telephone lines, 1,161,921 miles of roads and trails and numerous fire stations and administrative buildings in California between 1933 and 1942, with much of the work establishing the Ponderosa Way firebreak through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains, an essential line of defense to this day.

The element that most distinguished the WPA from other federal work initiatives was its focus on art, music, theater, writing and preserving historic documents. These five directives were collectively known as Federal Project Number One. Surviving public murals—mostly pastoral, folk-art scenes of working people—and art-deco public-service posters are some of the most enduring images in the WPA legacy.

In addition to visual art, the WPA published books, held art exhibits and created music-education programs. WPA-employed composers wrote symphonies, and writers wrote plays, sometimes performed by WPA-employed actors and musicians. Jackson Pollock painted murals, Orson Welles directed plays and Woody Guthrie wrote songs about the Grand Coulee Dam, all on the WPA’s dime, with the understanding that these works would remain the property of the government and the American people.

Locally, the WPA sponsored programs that provided 150 musical instruments and instruction—free of charge—to interested adults in Chico and Oroville. Three employees were charged with collecting historical documents to be sent to centers in Sacramento and San Francisco, where they were compiled by writers at the Federal Writers Project of Northern California into one of the first comprehensive histories of Butte County. One hundred copies were printed and distributed to area schools.

A woman named Sidney Robertson is responsible for one remarkably preserved example of “Federal One” programs, the Northern California Folk Music Project. Robertson, an ethnographer and protégé of famed musicologist Charles Seeger (father of the famed Pete Seeger), directed the program from an office at UC Berkeley. She and a handful of field agents recorded more than 35 hours of music onto 12-inch acetate discs. One-third of the songs are in English, the rest in more than a dozen other languages, preserving a snapshot of the diverse demography of Depression-era California.

Robertson recorded more than 100 performers where she found them, from mariachi bands at San Joaquin Valley weddings to workers at a CCC labor camp at Shasta Dam.

“How does one find songs?” she wrote in a paper about the project, which was titled Folk Music in California. “They are everywhere at hand … one man in Shasta County offered to ‘out-sing the gas tank’ if he might ride along to Fresno.”

Locally, the Janet Turner Print Museum at Chico State has several non area-specific WPA public-service posters in its collection. Though these were in storage and unavailable in time for this article, Catherine Sullivan, director of the museum, did have several WWII War Bonds posters available. After the WPA folded, she explained, other government programs continued to employ artists.

“Things are done differently now, but the foundation of what we have today with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) really lies with the WPA,” she said.

Sullivan said WPA art was also relevant for promoting the American Realism style evident in its murals. The Turner’s works are viewable by prior arrangement, and Sullivan plans to include pieces in a winter exhibit called Issues: Political, Social, Gender.

More local WPA programs were geared toward education, vocational skills and serving the needy. Sewing programs with centers in Chico, Oroville and Gridley and satellites in smaller towns employed scores of women to make everything from school band capes to clothing for the poor. When the center almost shut down due to lack of funding in 1937, the “Needle-Thread Girls” staged protests, and the program continued until 1942.

When the Oroville Mercury-Register reported the closure, it noted the Oroville center at Lincoln and Montgomery employed 60 women in 1941. That center went from producing 2,710 garments in 1937 to 75,000 garments in 1941.

Through WPA programs, a woman in Gridley taught citizenship classes to immigrants and illiterate adults. Women did clerical work in city halls, repaired books in college libraries and worked as housekeeping aides. Men inspected citrus crops for white flies and mapped mining claims. More workers started the first public lunch programs for schoolchildren, served as lifeguards in Bidwell Park, and compiled information on “atypical and physically handicapped” children to expand future educational programs. When torrential floods struck the North State in 1937-38, 27 WPA laborers got the dirtiest cleanup job—burning hundreds of dead cattle with driftwood and crude oil.

The Wildcat, Chico State’s newspaper, weekly reminded college students—many of whom worked for up to $30 a month—about National Youth Association deadlines. Even elementary-school children who otherwise couldn’t afford to continue school were paid $6 monthly to clean and garden after school and on weekends.

WPA projects were often labeled “boondoggles” by critics. When a 1939 survey asked Americans the best and worst things FDR had done, the No. 1 answer to both questions was the WPA. Analyses of projects aimed to prove the dole was cheaper than “make-work” programs. The WPA, the New Deal and FDR were labeled leftist by conservative critics, just as such accusations are leveled at President Obama and his 2009 stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“These programs were very controversial, because the government was taking an unprecedented role in intervening in the economy and providing jobs for people directly,” Magliari explained. “So there was some fear that this was too socialistic. But people were hurting during the Depression, and they couldn’t sit around and wait for the market to correct itself. Something had to be done.”

Magliari said the scope of the crisis and FDR’s strong intervention alarmed many people, but his policies didn’t usher in the threatened socialist regime. Most depictions of FDR as a leftist, he said, were cheap political shots playing upon public fear.

“Roosevelt was no socialist. He was for an active government, but he wasn’t a rigid ideologue of any kind. He was a pragmatic politician open to experimenting with any kind of government action that would work,” he said.

Magliari further contended the success of the New Deal programs undermined the appeal of the communist and socialist parties in America, which had gained strength in the Hoover years, before large-scale government intervention.

He said the effectiveness of today’s stimulus plan compared to the New Deal boils down to one thing: money. “Obama didn’t spend enough. Neither did Roosevelt. He certainly lifted us off the bottom, but ultimately it took World War II spending to get us out of the Depression. You really need to have some massive short-term spending to get the economy back up on its feet.”

Are we ready for a new New Deal?

“Yeah, sure,” Magliari said. “We’re still in rough shape, and I think the economy could use a major infusion of federal stimulus money to get revved up.” He also said FDR had the blessings of a united Congress, unlike a frustrating lack of cooperation displayed as the government confronts today’s crisis.

Magliari said Obama’s administration should not be deterred, just as FDR’s wasn’t: “Roosevelt had all the same names thrown at him. They didn’t stop him, and they shouldn’t stop the federal government today. When people need help, they need help.”