Florence Kerr interviews, 1963 Oct. 18-Oct. 31

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Florence Kerr interviews, 1963 Oct. 18-Oct. 31, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

FK: Mrs. Kerr
HP: Dr. Phillips

FK: We just begun to hear about Works Progress, and it was a very odd name. It always was. Works Progress Administration - nobody knew what that meant. It was a very, very odd name. I don't know where they ever picked it up. It seemed to me that it hid more than it revealed, but he had had the appropriations when he got out to Grinnell that time. Congress had appropriated four and a half billion dollars for the unemployment projects administered by Mr. Hopkins. The townspeople couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe the figure. They couldn't believe it because it was just too big, too big, too big. Harry, Robert and I were at Fred's house for cocktails in 1935 and he was talking about the program. Chet Davis wasn't there. I wish he had been, but he wasn't there. I was somewhere else. Hopkins said (this was by the fire) "The President told me last week that he wants to hurry this work program and get jobs for unemployed musicians and artists - people like that. God, if I've had trouble before, what do you think I'm going to have now? But it's the thing to do". "Well, are you trying to fit skills into jobs, workers into various skills?" I thought he wanted a retraining problem because workers have been shelled out of what they have been doing because of surplus. At that time I was on the governor's unemployment committee. We didn't do much. We just met. We deplored the situation, asked the legislature to do something to me, very casually, about coming in and doing something about the project, things like this. I didn't know anything about it, so with that he left. It was a month or so after that he called me from Alabama. I was then up at Hanford McNeider's hangout, and you know how the McNeiders hated the New Deal.

HP: Oh, boy!

FK: I thought that was very interesting. Hopkins said, "Come on into Washington. I want to talk to you." Well, I had always been most friendly with Harry, as I would be with my next door neighbor, and I was utterly unprepared for the zones and the ring within rings within rings of Washington because when I got there getting to Harry Hopkins was about as hard as getting to the President. I holed up at the Dodge Hotel and then somebody by the name of Al called me at the hotel -- whoever he was. I never heard of Al before. I didn't have any idea who he was, it sounded like a woman's voice. That's as far as I could tell, and she said "Get yourself out of that Dodge hotel as fast as you can! Come up to the Mayflower." Which I did, and it was days before - -

HP: That's a wonderful way to be met: "Get yourself out of the Dodge Hotel!"

FK: Yes, and I was really in a daze. That was my first trip by air, and I remember I came on American Airlines and the pilots wore holsters and firearms for the protection of the mail. We landed at that little - funny little airport down there at Marietta, but it was great days. I got up to the Mayflower Hotel. I tried to find the Walker Johnson where the headquarters were, and still I couldn't see harry. Harry had asked me to come. I wasn't going to talk to anybody else. They asked me to talk to Aubrey Williams and I wasn't interested at all. And I wasn't interested in Ellen Woodward. Where was harry? Well, harry was just incommunicado. I couldn't see him for a long time and I finally decided - - well, I got told that Ellen Woodward would be my boss, so I hung around and finally I did see Harry, and he was terribly involved in all of this. They were just starting the NYA and he said, "I don't believe you belong in the Women's Division, I think you belong in the Youth Administration. I think maybe I'll tell Ellen Woodward you better work for Aubrey Williams." Well, I didn't know about that, but it was all news to me. I didn't know what NYA was going to do. I didn't know what Ellen Woodward was going to do. I didn't know just - what - nothing. Then he said, "No," he said, "that would cause friction, that will cause trouble, Mrs. Kerr. I can't do that. I've told Ellen Woodward that I have the woman for the Midwest states, and you'd better stay put." On that basis I was assigned the Chicago region, thirteen states, and I went out there and met Howard Hunter, who was the regional director, and started in.

HP: With no more orientation than this?

FK: Well, with practically no orientation, practically nothing. I hd some idea that the FERA had started a work program and the first thing I worked on was to find out how much property FERA had around, sewing machines and stuff like that, which they would turn over to the new work program. Sometimes they were very cooperative. Sometimes they weren't. Well, it was at least something to talk about when I went into the states. Like "How many machines do you have?" "Have you any inventory on material?" It wasn't much of a handle, but it was the only one I could use.

HP: That's marvelous!

FK: Oh, gee whiz, gee whiz. I soon found out that I got along better if I always talked to the man first. Of course I had - there was a state director, but they were so suspicious of what this was all about. "It was bad enough to put these men to work, but these God-damned women that have no skills, no nothing, and the rangle-tangle of broken down ministers and half-politicians who couldn't work anymore." That stuff was dumped in our division. We had the women of the "patient project," they called it. So we never, never stood very high in the esteem of any state administrator. About the only person that I would except from that would be Dale Greenwell out in Utah, because he was a most unusual chap and he saw the philosophy of the work program and the fitting of people to skills, and so on. He would work, you know, give up a portion of his time to try to find out what would be the best thing to do for Utah. Consequently, Utah had an excellent school lunch program early, and when the art project came along, which it did right away, he welcomed that too. He worked very hard, particularly on the Music Project, and he tried to get Bernard Devoto to come out on the Writers Guide, but Bernard wouldn't have it. He wouldn't buy that at all. He said that you never were any good as a writer and that you wouldn't buy that at all. He said that you never were any good as a writer and that you wouldn't do it. Why do you shake your head?

HP: It's an incredible set of circumstances - the way something unfolds. This is the kind of information that isn't available in any form, and yet it is part of the story.

FK: It's part of the climate in which we worked. Well, I remember that Jake Baker was put in charge of the Art Project. Do you know Jake Baker?

HP: Yes, I do.

FK: He had the professional projects, and Mrs. Woodward had the work for unskilled women, mostly sewing jobs. So that went on. Then there came this rift between Hopkins and Baker. Baker wore black shirts to the White House. Harry didn't like that because it kind of bent the air. When you dress like that the President sort to bristled at that, you know. If he was going to embarrass him at the White House he was just going to get rid of him, and sooner or later he shelled him out. He offered the direction of the arts projects to me at that time, and my husband said, "Please, Florence, don't do that!" I was to leave the women's division and take over, and I just didn't do it. It was given to Ellen Woodward. I don't think Ellen Woodward knows that, but it wouldn't make much difference to her now. So it was transferred from Jake Baker to Ellen Woodward, and about that time - it was very obvious that they were going to fall flat on their faces if they weren't protected as far as a quota and appropriations were concerned - they were federalized.

HP: Yes.

FK: You know, that was certainly a thorn in the side of every state administrator. Here was an amount of money over which he had no direct control, and a chunk of employment over which he had no control - all managed from Washington. "You may have so many musicians. You may have so many and you use the money for that! You just don't get the money for anything."

HP: Right. This is Federal Project Number I?

FK: Federal Project Number I, yes, which was subdivided into the Writers, the Music, the Art, the Historical Records, and for a while we had the HABS, the Historical American Building Survey. But that was finished up. It didn't last too long. Well, when it was federalized, then I tell you the liaison work really got tough.

HP: Did it?

FK: Oh, sure, but meaningful. You see, you had a leverage - that is, we had a leverage.

HP: Yes, you had it.

FK: And without it we never would have gotten off the ground anywhere, with the possible exception of two or three cities. You would say, "Well, you can refuse it, but you want to increase your quota, your state quota." They would take it, and they really had a lot of headaches, the state administrators did, and of course that was the point at which the reporters came swarming in and there were bad appointments, bad administration, lousy work, and oh, God, you just looked and looked and looked for a bright spot, but federalization was necessary to the life of that project. There was no doubt about it. Then they - about that time Henry Alsberg and Luther Evans came at each other, so they were separated - the Writers Project and the Historical Records. I want to say I have never seen such an administrator as Luther Evans. He was terrific. He was autocratic. His hands were in everything. I don't know how he ever found the time, or strength, or energy to read al the reports he required of his field man, or his state director, but right down the line he knew what everybody was doing. He had that project just like that, and of course Henry Alsberg was Henry Alsberg.

HP: Yes. Lovable - -

FK: Lovable and just - oh, he and I got along just beautifully up to the place where he went off. This is skipping. Do you want me to do this chronologically?

HP: As it comes, pursue an idea.

FK: Henry Alsberg and I were great friends when I was out in the region. I really liked him, and I liked to spend time with him. I liked to listen to him. I liked to hear him - you know, just talk. He was a great talker, and I knew he wasn't much of an administrator, but he had Reed Harris and later Larry Morris, and they were devoted Lieutenants. They tried to keep the payroll straight and the employment records straight and all the paper work with which Henry bothered himself not at all. Henry was a perfectionist, you know, he threw away the first year and a half work of the Writers Project because he recognized it as a bad outline and a bad framework. You can't do the state guides that way. Nobody else but the Federal all over again. Not quite all wasted work, but we worked everything we had according to this new outline. Then he had this what I considered excellent outline for the project. Have you read it?

HP: No, I haven't.

FK: Well, they all have the same outline. Every single state had the same outline. That was Henry Alsberg's idea. So he knew good work, and he knew what he wanted. That went along and he gave entirely too many more contracts to Random House than he did to any of the other publishers and we began to hear from the other publishers, "What's going o here between the central government and Random House?" By that time they were saleable items, you see. Well, I came in here as Assistant Commissioner in the beginning of 1939 and by that time Henry Hopkins was Secretary of Commerce - that abortive chapter in his life.

HP: Yes.

FK: Francis Clark Harrington was the head administrator of the WPA who had been an honor student of the Army Engineers Corps and he had been director of operations and I had known him. He took me, not because he liked me or knew me very well. He took me because Harry told him, "That's the person," and Mrs. Roosevelt said, "Now, I think you had better take Mrs. Kerr for the - - ? Ellen Woodward had been appointed by FDR to be Molly Newsomes' successor on the Social Security Board.

HP: Yes.

FK: So, there was a vacancy created and I think if there hadn't been a vacancy created there would have been a very difficult situation there. I don't believe Harrington and Woodward would have worked together happily. They would have worked together, but it wouldn't have been a very fruitful association. So I came in and with a brand new administrator and a very new point of view. I remember in one of our early talks Harrington said to me, "You know, Florence, I don't believe we can make a decent work program for more than two million people." I said., "What will you do with the others?" "Well, they can go on relief." I said, "That's just bot the basis on which we get money from Congress. We get money on the basis of such unemployment as there is, and it is our problem to expand the work so we can take them all in." " Well, maybe so," he said, "but have you seen the project out on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago?" I said, "Many times". He said, "It just makes me sick - just makes me sick." _____the men were standing like this, you see, white washing the walls of these underpasses. The reason was that they were getting $55 a month, and nobody get $55 a month unless they were downing their uppers. The alternative was to put them out on some of these great Parkway Extension Programs and just kill them off. You see, they would die of exposure, or whatever - I don't know what all. I had a great time getting permission to make windbreakers on the sewing project so they could be issued to the WPA workers, but I didn't have a complete victory on that. It was done state by state, and when the state administration was willing to do that, we could issue windbreakers to the workers, but in the other states it was a strict interpretation. If you were off relief, you had no right to anything other than your WPA wage - none. This was all according to interpretation. Well, to come back to Henry Alsberg. We went up there to testify for our appropriations, and of course congress kept us on very short tether. They would always give us part of the year's appropriations and then say, "You can always come up for a deficiency." Well, you knew well that they meant, "you are going to come up for a deficiency because that will give us another chance to give you a good going over."

HP: That's right.

FK: "We'll use the whiplash on you." Which they did and so Harrington was new and I was new and we went u there to present our case. I had a real soft spot in my heart for Clarence Cannon, who was Chairman of the subcommittee, John Tabor, Wigglesworth, and some others fuss at me for awhile, then he would say, "I'll take the chair now."

HP: To the rescue.

FK: To the rescue of a damsel in distress and I knew what he was going, and everybody else knew what he was doing but that's the way it worked. Well, we got up there that day and John Tabor started in on the Writers Project. Well, I thought they were in for that, but I knew it was a nest of extreme radicals that, you know, worked on the New York Writers Project. That wasn't it at all. He had taken it out on Alsberg. He had a copy of the Nation for, oh, it must have been six or seven years back, and in the "Letters to the Editor" in the back pages of the Nation there was a letter from Henry Alsberg. I'm sure he wrote this rather clever letter in which he suggested as a prison reform that the inmates of Federal penitentiaries be allowed to set up self-government. Nobody paid any attention to it. It just was a kind of a little intellectual whimsy. Can't you imagine Henry Alsberg doing It?

HP: Yes.

FK: I think, "Well, that's a cute idea. I'll fiddle it out and see, you know, what happens." Harrington just got pale, just pale and the - - ohhh, I didn't know anything about the letter, but I told him that I wouldn't pay any attention to it, since I knew the man. Well, what did I think of Alsberg? I thought he had done a very distinguished job. Harry did a very good thing. So when the session was over and we got back to the Walker Johnson, he sent for me and he had been so courteous and affable up to that time. He stood by me and he said, "This is an order. You fire Henry Alsberg!"

HP: Wow! That was a crushing thing.

FK: Just dreadful. I said, "It's a going concern, Colonel." "I'm not discussing it with you. You're to get rid if that man. I don't want to hear his name again." That's what happened.

HP: Holy smokes!

FK: The Project had enough momentum within itself by that time. They had this framework to work on, so we did get all the state guides out. I remember the one in Missouri was extremely hard to handle. Nat Murray was the administrator down there and he was very high in the councils in regard to the Prendergast organization. There was a chapter on the political complexion of the state - a very good, straight-forward statement about how machine-ridden Missouri was, particularly Kansas City. Blankety blank, he wasn't going to have anything. He was just not going to have any. I said, "You can't stop it. You just can't stop it. We can't have a row of forty-eight state guides and Missouri just vacant." "Why? Why isn't Missouri there?" "Because the guide said something against Prendergast." "You can't do that. You've got to swallow this pill." Well, he wouldn't do it. He absolutely wouldn't do it. I said, "You can't stop it." "I'll see about that," he said. But of course I had some help on it. By that time I rarely ever saw harry except outside on other things and I said, "Harry, just call Nat Murray sometime and tell him to get off his high horse." I don't know when he did it, but he must have done it. We got the Missouri state guide.

HP: What did you do when you walked in to see henry Alsberg? I mean, how can you make something palatable with his suggestions?

FK: I couldn't. I called Henry in to see me and he was just frightened. He trusted me, he really did. He did trust me, I think. He may not say so now, but he did then. Anyway, we were on friendly terms and he used to send me extra copies of the Guides. I would always get one as soon as one came off the press. Even when I was out in the Region I would get a box of books from henry Alsberg. Well, I didn't know any other way to do it, but just to tell him what had happened. Well, is there any other way?

HP: No. None.

FK: Just the way it happened.

HP: Cold turkey.

FK: Cold turkey. I said, "Some devil," and he knew. Maybe it was Wigglesworth. Some snake in the grass, you see, had done some research on Alsberg to find something that would sound discreditable to the Republican members of the subcommittee, and Alsberg knew that. He said, "Don't think anything about it." It looked so ridiculous, so completely ridiculous that he refused to take it seriously. I said, "I'm afraid this is the end, henry." He said, "O, no, no, it isn't." And he left me. I said, "Well, I'll go back and talk to Harrington again. I didn't want to, but I'm not promising him I can do it because this was as much as my head was worth to talk to him about it because he was so furious. He was scared - you see, he wasn't used to Congress. What Harry would have done is to say, "So what."

HP: Yes.

FK: But Harrington didn't know how to say "So what" to a Congressman. Harry always went on the principle that you never apologized to a Congressman. NEVER! You did it, and you did it because it was the right thing to do and by gosh, you're glad you did, now what can you do next? Don't ever say, "Well, I wouldn't do that, Mr. Congressman." He never said that. NEVER!

HP: That's no way to operate.

FK: No way to operate with Congress, but you couldn't tell that to Harrington.

HP: I see.

FK: Because he is a military man and he saw it just one way, and he saw it very intensely, believe me.

HP: Well, his training was in such fashion as to make him obsequious to the mighty.

FK: That's right, and anybody in authority and certainly the people who held the purse strings in his book were the authority. They carried the tune. Well, it was a very unhappy severance when Henry had to accept the fact. He was just heart-broken.

HP: Crushed.

FK: He loved the Project, and of course I think he felt I was a weakling and everybody else was a weakling and we never did have a director that amounted to a hill of beans after that. It was carried by the state, by the quality of the state project.

HP: It's rather surprising that in the design of the state projects originally no provision was made for publication.

FK: Yes, it is. It wasn't very business-like from that point of view. It really wasn't.

HP: but it was only in the light of the work that was done that lent itself to publication, but it put the burden on administrators to find the means for the sponsor ship or the interest to gain publication.

FK: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and what a difference there was. For instance, out in south Dakota people went along just because they had to. There was no faith in it at all, and they got some State Library Commission, State Board, or something to be the nominal sponsor. So they ordered five hundred copies. Now, of course, to get an original South Dakota State Guide is worth something, extremely rare.

HP: Yes, yes.

FK: And, I - - -

HP: Well, there was no provision made for what happened to the royalties - that is, it was a very difficult problem.

FK: Yes, yes it was.

HP: As to when you get a collective group - -

FK: There was no contract drawn up.

HP: No.

FK: That's Alsberg - well, it was my fault too. It was everybody's fault, but we didn't foresee what we had. We didn't know that we had an extremely.

HP: Well, the program - purpose of the Writers Project wasn't really to make a profit, but to put them to work, and in this sense the - -

FK: And that's where we stopped, and when these other problems came up, why, it was all loose ends.

HP: Yes.

FK: But we began, all of us, to realize, when people like Archibald MacLeish was so anxious to keep it going. He wanted the originals there, and so on.

HP: Out in Chicago when you first went out there as regional director on these programs, when Public Art Project Number I began, were there any continuing carry-overs or hold-overs for the musicians, or writers or the artists?

FK: You mean after the program was over?

HP: No. When it was first introduced - the Public Works Project Number I, and you went out in Chicago, the regional area, was there then in existence any programs for artists, writers - -? There was not? Oh!

FK: There was a Treasury Art Project, but that was back here. It wasn't out in the Midwest. We started from scratch.

HP: And, moreover, the Treasury Department program was on the basis of some competition. There was no competition on the - -

FK: No, we started and processed those workers just as we did the general worker. They were on the relief rolls as employable, and, of course, I've always felt that one of the weaknesses of the WPA was that we drew our labor supply from relief offices. It should have been from the employment offices. If we had worked with the U.S. Employment Department, you see, and the State Employment Offices, some of the stigma that always attached to a WPA worker would have been removed. I've always felt that Aubrey Williams had something to do with that because he felt that it was only because of their extreme need, proved by the fact that they were on relief rolls, that we could get the Congressional appropriation.

HP: Yes.

FK: So you see, there was a read honest-to-goodness difference, honest difference of opinion, and Aubrey's point of view prevailed. Senator Lehman talked to me about that once and said he sat down at this typewriter and pecked out a letter by hand to Harry, begging him to use employment offices instead, but I don't know if Harry ever read the letter.

HP: Hum - -

FK: It hurt Lehman's pride a little that he got no response from Hopkins, you know, and his place wasn't taken either. No, we had to start from scratch. In the Midwestern states, of course, we had two excellent programs. One was in Chicago and one was in Milwaukee. The one in Chicago had a very good art unit, and the subdivision there was a group of Negroes. They weren't too good. They did posters and they did murals and they were really very talented and, of course, a muralist would go around and things like that. So they had a lively art project. After they got on the Project they just turned their backs o the rest of the world. They just worked in their own medium, and so on. They set up a little gallery on the North Side and that was a going concern. I was very proud particularly - - -

HP: Yes.

FK: - - because they were mostly young men. That was a bright spot. The Theater Project in Chicago - Hallie Flanagan had nothing but scorn for it. It was not much better than burlesque - what was the name of that man? How could I forget it? He was kind of a broken-down producer, and someone who was the head of the project, and he worked up this Hot Mikado.

HP: Oh, did he?

FK: Yes. Oh yes - again with Negroes, and it was really an experience in the theater to sit there and see the Mikado start off just according to classic procedure and then, along about five or six minutes after the start, the chorus began to swing and it just broke away into this jazz piece. It was simply delightful. Every audience - well, it caught you. It became very popular.

HP: yes, I know.

FK: Very popular, but you see, we had very low prices.

HP: that's what it was for.

FK: It was given at the Blackstone Theater which would have been dark if it hadn't been for the WPA foolishness.

HP: Is this Harry Minturn?

FK: Yes, that is the man. That is the man.

HP: Harry Minturn.

FK: Harry Minturn, and Harry couldn't see him for nothing. He didn't have new ideas; he wasn't aggressive, he just had this one cute idea, so the rest of it was warmed-over Broadway plays and stuff like that.

HP: Well, as regional person you had how many states then?

FK: Thirteen.

HP: Thirteen! It must have put you on the road quite a bit.

FK: I was on the road a great deal - a great deal of the time. I don't know how much, but I did it. That regional job was exhausting, and how much could I do there? I was supposed to act as liaison between the Washington office and the states, and to interpret one to the other.

HP: Yes.

FK: And in talking to Washington I would be brutally frank. I just said anything I wanted to say because, as far as Ellen Woodward was concerned, she wanted it straight, not frosted over. And when it came to interpreting Washington to the state administrators, I couldn't be as frank, and I wasn't.

HP: That's the diplomatic tightrope that you walked.

FK: It certainly was, certainly was, and I have no idea how well I walked it, or how, but walk it I did.

HP: Yes.

FK: And I had a great variety of people to work with. Some were a headache. I had a state director out in Kansas that was an absolute weirdie. She was so funny. She was a next-door neighbor to William Allen White in Emporia. She was really a real odd-ball. The tendency of the Democratic politician was not of a very high order. Of course, I inherited her and I had to keep her. This was part of my job - - you know, you had to work through such, and I got awfully discouraged.

HP: I'll bet you did.

FK: Awfully discouraged. Another thing that I always worried about was this great mass of unskilled women. They couldn't all be given sewing jobs, for Heaven's sake, we didn't need that much sewing. What to do? How to break it up?

HP: Hum.

FK: Of course, the school lunch project - I can't say too much about, but the cooperation of the Department of Agriculture, because through the surplus commodities and so on, we got the school lunch project started.

HP: That's been a growing concern even to this day.

FK: Yes, but the WPA doesn't get much credit for it. But the WPA during its existence, eight years, met the payroll and did the training and fought the early battles. They really did! I tell you, we really had some battles on the school lunch project, but you don't want to hear about - -

HP: Certainly, I certainly want to hear about the administration of the WPA from the regional point of view. Well, I 've skipped about. I told you the essence of it; that I was very frank with Washington and not so frank with the states. I did learn the techniques of pressure. Well, I did. Of course, if there happened to be a program in a certain state, then I didn't go to Congress or anyone. I went to the sponsors and I said to them, "Paychecks won't go out next Wednesday if you don't say something about it, or do something about it". And they did it. They would raise - they would raise Ned if they thought the school lunches were going to be stopped, or something else. They would say, "More damned fuss made about one little old canning project down in southern Alabama!" Well, that was the way we did it. We did it through the sponsor. I learned that. I learned how to work with sponsors, but they had a stake and the more they fought for their program, the more they would understand it and the better support we would have for the future.

HP: Yes, yes.

FK: And it did work. So maybe I did that. Others did it too, but I did it over and over again because the Midwest was not favorable to the WPA - that is, they were not favorable. They would follow FDR for the first hundred days, but after that they cooled off very rapidly and the press was horrible out there! The Chicago Tribune. We didn't have much press out there.

HP: I would imagine that part of the test was a search, a continuing search for personnel to implement a program.

FK: Oh yes, oh yes, we had that ten percent not on relief which was our salvation, you see. For instance, on the school lunch project, to get some really good young woman, home economist who could go in there - this gal Eleanor Lee, who was on the Post, she was the Food Editor of the Washington Post and was the state dietitian for the state of West Virginia.

HP: Oh, was she?

FK: And she and I talked about the program a great many times because she said that's where she learned food values and how to stretch a dollar, and how to use dried milk and all that stuff.

HP: yes.

FK: So that was it, and of course I did have a few really tough battles on top personnel. I never did dislodge that woman in Kansas, as hard as I tried, but I did make some changes. And that was hard. Some I had inherited from FERA, some had been handed down by the Democratic National Committee man, and so on. And you see, the Democratic party in the Midwest - - I'm a Democrat and always will be - - but the Democratic Party in the upper Midwest was not - I mean, they just didn't know the good people. They weren't in touch with them. The nice people of the community were all Republican.

HP: Yes.

FK: That's a broad statement, but you know what I mean.

HP: Yes, I know when you're looking for local support - -

FK: When you're looking for local support and want somebody good to head up your outfit.

HP: Sure, sure, for the psychic influence.

FK: Yes, and if you could get somebody of real stature to take the job and stand for it, it would have helped a lot. But it wasn't easy to do. You see, I was in the regional office from July 1935 to the end of 1938.

HP: Yes, yes. Then when I came down here that awful mess from the Federal Theater Project was practically over and done with.

HP: That was the - Senator harry Byrd mentioned in a rollicking lampoon of some kind - - ?

FK: Well, it was a little more direct than that. Byrd was in it, but Andrews of Florida was in it and he was another fellow who was caught straight between the eyes. They had this living Newspaper, which I thought was a very interesting techniques and we were awfully proud of the Living Newspaper. We thought it was a contribution to the performing arts, and they had some scenes in which people impersonated members of Congress and spoke lines which people had spoken on the floor of the Senate right out of the congressional Record, WORD for WORD. Of course, it made them sound like the biggest fools that ever walked, and Hallie thought she could do that and come up in a couple of months and get an appropriation. It just doesn't work that way, and the people who were lampooned might turn mad: "We just don't have to take that kind of nonsense from this blankety blank outfit up in New York. Probably it is mostly Communists anyhow."

HP: Yes.

FK: And Hallie, I think, will always feel very bitter because she was not permitted to go up to the hill and lobby for her own project. She is a very persuasive person. She is still living, but quite ailing, and - - but she is quite a gal.

HP: But part of the trigger of the destruction of the Federal Theater project was the Dies committee, that is - -

FK: Oh, yes, the Dies Committee - yes, oh, yes, Martin Dies, and who was that fellow from West Virginia? Colt?

HP: Rosh Holt?

FK: Whether he was a one-termer down there, he carried the hall down there in the Senate, and they had Ellen Woodward up there. I never appeared before the Dies committee, but, yes - - Worker's Alliance, and it was concentrated and a good deal of its strength was in New York city. They got after that, and Mrs. Flanagan had had a Guggenheim to study the Moscow Art Theater, you know.

HP: Well, that's - -

FK: And I remember when this man from West Virginia held up the book and said, "See, it's got a red cover!" He did, he did.

HP: That's unpardonable!

FK: Unpardonable, and you can hardly believe it happened, but it did. Well, now do you want me to go back to the regional job?

HP: Yes, I wondered how the - there is one project floated - the Index of American Design.

FK: Yes, oh yes.

HP: And there is a story on it. I wondered how that emerged in the regional area.

FK: Oh, it did extremely well in the East, and then they had a unit in Ohio which was good. It didn't get so far in the West or Far West because the early American didn't have the same feel. It was, I think, an outgrowth of Holger Cahill's work with Mrs. Rockefeller on that Folk Art Museum down in Williamsburg. Cahill was an idea person too, but a sort of a gentle dreamer type. The Index of American Design was his - his contribution.

HP: there is a woman mentioned by the name of Ruth Reeves in conjunction with this origin. Now I don't know anything about it - -

FK: I don't know Ruth Reeves.

HP: No. Well, in any event it is a superb thing.

FK: It is, and it was superbly done. I had my office in the Walker General. I had one wall that I think was interesting, just beautiful. The original, of course. They went to the Library of Congress.

HP: Hum - - they're really gorgeous things.

FK: They are gorgeous and they're executed - I don't see how they could be any better, do you?

HP: No.

FK: What they did with the textures of fabrics, wood, metal.

HP: It would appear on a - - certainly have indicated on the Writers Project why there was a design program outline which came from the central office which those who worked in this field, you know, had formed the purpose and procedure which was to follow. Now, I would assume that the same thing was true of the Index of American Design.

FK: yes, yes.

HP: that is, from the point of view of approach wherever your work was done.

FK: Yes, yes, and there was a - they just didn't copy of anything that was old. It had to be of some importance and significance that was not left entirely to the local people, but they had, I must say, a good deal of non-relief labor.

HP: Yes.

FK: The Index of American Design - the non-relief labor in those days, you see, got very little pay. They might not be technically from the relief rolls, but they did need the employment very badly.

HP: Yes. Was there much attention, other than the lunch program, paid to children - art teaching to children?

FK: There were children's - Chicago had that. They had art classes for children and they were very popular. Then, I didn't tell you about the work done in Milwaukee where there is this tradition of arts and crafts and - am I using up too much tape?

HP: No, but you go ahead. I'm going to have to put another reel on. Are you getting tired?

FK: No, no. The State College was the sponsor, and the Art Department of the State College took on the active supervision of the arts project there. It was Wisconsin, but particularly in Milwaukee. It grew and then they had a beautiful project there. They got space, and they got middle-aged women whom they trained to do certain things, and they made some dolls. I have one of those. Would you like to see one of those Milwaukee dolls?

HP: Why sure.

FK: they did block printing way and above the best in the country, the very best. Everybody was so jealous of Milwaukee.

HP: While you're getting the dolls I'll put anew reel on, right? [BREAK IN INTERVIEW ]

HP: With respect to these dolls which you've shown me. Is this the Walker Art Center in Milwaukee?

FK: No, it's the State Teachers College, and Miss Broadbent was the sponsor. She was responsible for the beautiful work and she taught these women, who really were recruited in the sewing rooms, how to make these - the bodies, feel how firm that is - a wonderful piece of workmanship.

HP: What intrigues me is where did she obtain the material. This didn't come off the project, did it?

FK: The material? This? The Federal government.

HP: Really?

FK: We gave all the yardage for the sewing rooms, so we gave the yardage for this. We met the payroll. We met the non-relief part of it. The sponsor usually furnished the space, some technical supervision if we could possibly get it, which was true in Milwaukee. The sponsor did give the teaching, but we bought all this. All of it. You don't know how - - well, look at this. I had children - they just loved these Albuquerque, they have a certain substance. Marshall Field thought very highly of these dolls, but when they went into manufacturing costs it was too much. They couldn't get - the retail price would have to be around $35, and they couldn't sell them. They couldn't sell a doll for $35.

HP: When you found in a region like this a project that had local leadership and drive and dynamo in it and developed momentum and created interest and following, were you able to take wisdom from that and plant it in other places?

FK: Oh, yes. Oh, my - at least we could try! And we did.

HP: That's what I meant.

FK: We made up sample kits of everything they made on this project and sent it to every arts and crafts project in the thirteen Midwest states. Now they made dolls all over the place: never as good as these dolls, but they made lots and lots of dolls which were given out to the local - I'm sure they did lots of good. I don't have a sample of it, but one of the other states worked out a very light weight doll, just a matter of ounces. It had little yarn here and a cute little dress and they issued those to children's hospitals for children who were too sick to play, but who could get a little comfort and something out of these. They were a great success, these little hospital dolls that were made on these projects. That was an outgrowth of it. Iowa tried very hard to get some designers out there so they could make these little block prints for hangings, and so forth. They did a very handsome set of curtains for the Governor's mansion, I think, under the inspiration of this Milwaukee project.

HP: So it did snowball where you had local interest.

FK: It didn't exactly snowball, but it certainly did bring up the standards of the region because of the fine work done. And the carving, I have some of it here.

HP: I know Jay du Von yesterday told me that the Writers Project in Iowa in pursuing folklore, folk songs and various aspects within the outline as prescribed by Washington, found it useful through various Chambers of commerce and so on to publish little brochures. Of course, this put a premium on the creative ability of the local director to farm this out and that somewhere along the line he was asked to share what this experience had been in Iowa with other states in the region where they ran into difficulty, or didn't have imaginative bent or the know-how as to how he'd done it. It was like a haring of profits.

FK: Yes, yes, there was a lot of that. I remember jay did that, and on the strength of that he was brought first to the region, stayed there very briefly, then went on to be Larry Morris's assistant in Washington. Later he became my administrative assistant. I found him an extremely interesting man to work with. I wonder what jay thinks about the WPA now.

HP: He thinks it was the period in which opportunity was given to keep skills, ideas, creativity, originality, however bizarre, alive. I'm paraphrasing his view and I have perhaps more spirit in what I am saying than the careful way in which he would announce it, but virtually an American renaissance, a sharing of appreciation beyond the mere keeping of skills alive and the opportunity for talent.

FK: Yes, well, I think that's every word true. And such interesting ideas would be batted up to you. Maybe I can tell you a couple of anecdotes on FDR. When I came here as Assistant Commissioner I was supposed to keep - well, Harrington was very ill at east at the White House. I don't mean to say that I felt just folksey, but I didn't feel as ill at ease as he did, so it was my job to be the liaison over there, and I reported over there actively every week. I never got over the butterflies in my stomach when I had to go into the President's office because sometimes he would be affability itself and sometimes he wouldn't. One day he said to me, "I know what you ought to do. What we ought to have would be tree-lined highways all over this country. We've got all these roads, this system of highways." He was just playing with these "lovely tree-lined highways. Now instead of having these old biddies sitting around in the sewing rooms, why don't you have them plant trees? Take a wheelbarrow of dirt, a shovel and whatever you need and go out and plant a tree." I said, "President Roosevelt, I could do that, but you wouldn't be elected next time if I did."

HP: Really! What did he say to that?

FK: Oh, he just threw back his head and howled. He said, "I wouldn't?" I said, "No, you wouldn't. That's against the American mores for women to go out and do that heavy labor, digging a hole. If you sponsor that, you couldn't be elected next time." Well, that's the kind of talk he really enjoyed, but he dropped the idea of having women plant trees. He knew. It was a kind of left-handed way of letting me know that he knew the problem of the unskilled woman had not been solved. It never was - the middle-aged woman who couldn't do much of anything. When WPA was liquidated, though, it was a great satisfaction to me that several sewing projects, one in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, were taken over in to by the Navy to make stuff for the Navy. Out in Los Angeles, a very large project was taken over by a parachute factory that had a government contact. There they had several hundred women who could operate power machines, because that's one of the things we introduced gradually from hand sewing to treadle machine and then to power machine.

HP: this was really a rehabilitation program.

FK: It was rehabilitation, retraining, and so on. Around St. Louis, of course, they went into the overall factories. When employment picked up, why they had a skill. I never will get over how quickly we went from a labor surplus to a labor shortage. When war came all of a sudden labor was at a premium and - -

HP: The scene shifted.

FK: Oh! The shoe on the other foot. The other story I wanted to tell - what was it? Oh, another one of the FDR Projects. This Music Project. Once in a while he'd pick out something to talk to me about. "This Music Project - I don't think it's getting out to the people enough. I don't think it's being heard of quite enough. There isn't enough community service in it. I tell you what you ought to do. You ought to see that every town one night a week ropes off a block and gets the local WPA band, or whatever their music is, and have a community dance and have them dance in the streets."

HP: What did you say to that?

FK: Well, I didn't tell him - I wasn't as saucy as I was about the other idea. I said, "Thank you for your interest," or something like that. I didn't feel it. But you know that would make you feel as though the President was very trivial in his attitude. I don't think he was.

HP: Well, it's comparable, I think, in a mind that spins and sends off sparks, some are brighter than others, and so on.

FK: Yes, and some of them aren't - well, they're hardly sparks at all.

HP: It's not quite comparable to Alsberg's letter on self-government for prisoners. But it's in that tradition, is it not? "I don't have any other detail, I don not face your problems which are the deliberate day by day running of business, but what about this as an idea?"

FK: "Can't you - couldn't you - maybe you could try this - maybe you could try that." You weren't supposed to be too scared by the fact that he said it, so you had to go out and do something about it, which I didn't do.

HP: Well, was Sokoloff much in evidence here in Washington?

FK: Oh, yes, and he was in evidence out in the regions, too. He did a lot of traveling. Nicolas Sokoloff. I never understood him very well. I felt much closer to Alsberg and Cahill. He did some work, but he really never got his professional attitude in hand. He went to some rehearsals in Chicago and was terribly upset at the backward performance turned in by these fellow, who, you know, just hadn't handled their instruments long enough to do what they should do. He always wanted a national symphony. He had dreams of getting the best, you see, and bringing them here under Federal sponsorship and having a national symphony, but we never could do that. Of course, Aubrey Williams and Stokowski almost did that with the NYA Orchestra - you know, it toured South America. Boy, did they put the money into that! It was very costly - too costly - money was no object when they were recruiting those young people for that orchestra.

HP: I would suppose that the problems involving musicians were somewhat different than those involving a writer who can sit I his own corner and write.

FK: yes, it had a problem of space, rehearsal halls and all that sort of thing. One of my vivid experiences in the region was going to see Petrillo. You see, he was head of the Musicians Union and the object of fear and detestation by some people. I was young in the job and I didn't know enough not to do things that I thought of doing, so instead of clearing it all over the lot, I pinned my hat on one day and went over to see Petrillo. The project was not prospering. Of course, I had some bargaining. He wanted employment. He wanted to get as many of his union members in the music union as possible so they could keep on paying union dues, and so forth. He had his stake in it and I had mine. I'll never forget, I stayed there quite a while and we talked and talked and talked and talked very frankly about the unemployed musician and what he could and should do. I told him that he would have to let down some of his bars that he wouldn't go into a place, you know, that used any recorded music and all that - jobs are too scare. Well, what was I willing to do, and so on and so forth. I made him an offer about increasing Illinois employment and seeing what I could do up in Minneapolis where the situation was very bad indeed. I said, "Can't you just look the other way?" "No," but he did. That's the only way we could get jobs for musicians. They couldn't hire out to d a municipal thing because of his strict rule. I know Minor, who was administrator said, "Oh, if I had known you were going over to see Petrillo, I certainly would have gone with you. I thought, "Thank God, you didn't know" because it was much better - just direct person to person. And he had a big Scott radio on, a beautiful machine, and he had that monitored 24 hours a day. He had that silver thing in his throat. You see, we'd been taken for a ride, thrown out in the - - the gang. He was undoubtedly a Capone lieutenant.

HP: Certainly.

FK: Sure, and he had done something he shouldn't do. They rolled him and threw him out for dead, and he'd come back - and he was so scared if he got a cold and he wouldn't shave if he got a cold, and you could see the whiskers on his jaw and his face.

HP: He talked Dutch, though.

FK: yes, he did. He did, and he didn't seem to question my - well, he may have thought I didn't know too much, but he didn't question the fact that I could do what I said I'd do, that I didn't have any axe to grind. So he did that . I saw Prendergast - I'm talking now about my regional job. I bearded Petrillo and then I went to see Prendergast in Kansas City. That was the only time in my life I ever got frisked. There were quite a few people in the outer office and they said he was very much afraid of women - Prendergast was - he thought that some woman would shoot him. He had that fear.

HP: He must not have been kind to his mother.

FK: HE probably wasn't. He thought one woman would take a pot shot at him. That I remember. I was really frisked, but I had no concealed weapons. So I went in to talk to him. Oh, he was loosely fat, oh, just terrific. He wouldn't let me talk about what I wanted to talk about for quite a while. He wanted to talk about Reed and what had gone on with him, you see - he used to be in Iowa and then came down to Kansas City and he talked about that. He spoke very admiringly of the Administration, and so forth. Finally, I just said why I had come to town: "Mr. Prendergast, we've just got to do something about this Kansas City sewing project." He said, "I don't know anything about it." I said, "Well, won't you please find out something about it, if you don't know, because we have these hundreds of women sitting around hemming dish towels by hand. It's a disgrace." He said, "Well, what do you want?" I said, "I want 300 Singer Sewing Machines and I want the contribution of a sponsor." He gave them to me, eventually, not that afternoon, but we got them. Those were the things you did in the region - a few of them. I'm not telling you about all the disappointments I had, the things that didn't go well, the things I tried which flopped and the compromises I had to make, the discouragements - a lot of them.

HP: Well, I think you have indicated that there was a search for personnel with whom to work and this was a testy thing always.

FK: Always, somebody to run a project - interviewing him, writing and jerking up the local people.

HP: With get up and go as to how to manage it - this kind of thing - plus the complex political context in which the whole thing had to run over which you didn't have nay control and through which you had to operate and work. And I've heard from other sources that the Missouri situation, the St. Louis situation was really something. Even with art they were willing to accept art project provided, what they meant by art was paint the walls of their buildings, so that you had to work through limitations.

FK: Yes. Well, you know - oh, you know the man who build the Pentagon - Somerwell - said to me one day, he said, "They say I've got to have an art project here in New York City." I said, "Yes, you do." He said, "I want to tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to knock out the whole business, except for a unit which will have for its job architectural ornamentation. There are a good many buildings in prospect, and whatever they need in the way of ornamentation the Art project can provide, and the rest of it - out!" I said, "You can't do that." "I can too," he said. I said, "Oh no you can't." He said, "Do you mean I've got to keep this?" I said, "Yes, sir!" He said, "Well, I'll see about that." Harrington told him he could not do that. It was too touchy a place and too prominent a spot and his touchiness had to be forgotten.

HP: Well, the art in general in New York City received a bad press.

FK: Very.

HP: But his outspokenness and his narrowness with respect to the problems of artists also received a bad press, that is, there must have been continuing pressures, I would assume, from Washington that there had to be some withdrawal of the Number. You know, there was always this playback as to whether we would have an appropriation, or whether we would not have an appropriation. You've indicated that Congress kept you in a position so that they could give you a good going over twice a year or more.

HP: But his outspokenness and his narrowness with respect to the problems of artists also received a bad press, that is, there must have been continuing pressures, I would assume, from Washington that there had to be some withdrawal of the number. You know, there was always this play back as to whether we would have an appropriation, or whether we would not have an appropriation. You've indicated that Congress kept you in a position so that they could give you a good going over twice a year or more.

FK: Yes - very short - yes - yes.

HP: So he announced in effect that he was cutting - paring back 33 1/3 percent - something to that effect. Well, you know, by this time artists had been working with a continuity of wage. They had a common employer they somehow or other became more social and collective-minded than they had ever been theretofore, talking about common problems, and so on, but there were organizers in there for other purposes, too, but I mean artists generally had something which they hadn't had therefore, and so they organized.

FK: Yes, that's right.

HP: And they had voices on all conceivable topics, you know. But Somervell was - -

FK: It was lively, it was lively. And those people - they were young people who were in absolute despair when they started. They married and they established a home and they became citizens in the best sense of the word before the project was over. They took a very, very upset generation and steadied them down. I don't think there's any doubt. I know it.

HP: Yes. You know they developed a kind of interest in the very process which had aided them, so when somebody mentioned 33 1/3 percent, this was a mathematics they weren't prepared to accept. It was like creating a kind of vested psychic interest that you would not see destroyed and so they sat in Somervell's office.

FK: Until he locked the doors.

HP: Right! But he had - -

FK: He was a very, very difficult man, very able.

HP: Oh, very able. But a military tradition does not necessarily grant a hearing.

FK: No, it doesn't, he and Harrington didn't see eye to eye, thank God! I mean Harrington outranked Somervell and pulled rank on Somervell when he had to. He did, he really did, and that's the only thing that kept Somervell behaving even as well as he did.

HP: I have no reason to suppose that he had other than a desire for an efficient management on the whole.

FK: I don't believe he did either, but that much made him very, very tough.

HP: He overlooked the fact that he wasn't dealing with peas in a pod, he was dealing with human beings.

FK: And human beings - I really don't think he much approved of human beings. We had a row with them on the school lunch project.

HP: Oh, did you? In New York?

FK: Oh, yes, oh, yes. Margaret Botcher went up there. Of course she was the national dietitian, and she went up there to look into it because I'd been having reports that the children were just turning their faces away from the - oh, it was just such unpalatable food; the same lunches and they stuck to them day after day after day. Somebody - you know, there was just dirty work somewhere around there because they had enough. There was no excuse for that kind of thing. So Margaret Botcher, who was a tall Texan blond, went up there - she feared neither God nor man - and she looked into this and read the menus and visited the projects and she made up her mind that she had a real case and a real cause, so she went to see Somervell. She called me to see if she should go. I said, "Absolutely." Somervell called me and said, "Who is this Botcher you sent up?" Well, you know, that was one of his pleasantry remarks. They sat across a conference table and Margaret Botcher said they had this big book document of the school lunch project, you know, all the paper forms we went through. We certainly did our share to initiate the century of paperwork, and Somervell couldn't find this place in this, so he spun the thing across the table to Margaret and it hit her smack bang in the stomach and said, "Find it for me!" She spun it back to him and said, "Find it yourself!"

HP: Good for her! Good for her! He sounds very much like a man who would say to you in the midst of a discussion, "When my mind is closed, it's closed!"

FK: Yes, indeed. Well, we had a project visiting day and we got pretty good reports from all over the country, but I got sinking letter from Somervell about what a silly infantile idea it was and it was just an interference with the operation of something that wasn't needed. It wasn't working too well anyway. I incorporated that in my report to Harrington. But Harrington understood Somervell. Really Somervell was honest about that; He thought having project sponsors and things come in and look at an operation, going in to see the library project, or to see the school lunch or something was just silly. And he wouldn't do things like that.

HP: He sounds like a man who fundamentally didn't like his own kind.

FK: Yes, I don't believe he liked - he was very unhappily married. His wife died, and I understand that his second marriage was happy, very happy. Of course, he did the Pentagon just splendid. And that man Mitchell was WPA Employment Director, you know, and Somervell said that nobody had a better way of keeping track of where people were - their address and the facts about them than the employment division of WPA, so he took over their facts about them than the employment division of WPA, so he took over their procedures and used it in the army, which he did, and Mitchell did it for him. I think if Harrington had lived he would have had at least the opportunity to do what Somervell did. It was his untimely death that cleared the way for Somervell's very rapid advance.

HP: How much did you get into the Historical Records as a regional person?

FK: Well not too much, because of this Luther Evans technique. By George, I didn't have to worry much about it! I knew who the people were and saw them when I'd go into the state offices, but they had these clear explicit directions from Luther Evans. You knew exactly what you had to do by the end of the next pay period. You never saw such a good layout of work as he gave them - real direction. And so when he came out to the region, which he did quite often, he really was a master at firing the incompetents and getting somebody to take their places. He would clear up his personnel problems in - -

HP: In no time at all.

FK: Yes. He was effective, very effective, Luther Evans was. Wasn't always well liked. He was feared, but he really did the job.

HP: By comparison Eddy Cahill, while a more likable person, was less effective, or within the - well, let me dilute that.

FK: Entirely different approach - just entirely different. Cahill, the content of the program and what the people wee trying to do and what the trends were - he wasn't an administrator to compare with Luther Evans. Luther Evans was the best of the lot, way and above the rest.

HP: Well, stories I've heard would indicate that Cahill because of his previous experience had a kind of litmus paper approach to people and could soak up what they were saying and absorb it.

FK: Yes, I think that's a very shrewd observation - he could. I think maybe he was better as a historian of the project than he was as a director of the project. But he knew - oh, he had a richly-stored mind, and he had contacts. When the national art show was here he had the man at the head - Taylor - came down and publicly laid his hands on Holger Cahill and blessed the project. He knew how to do the gallery thing. He got his people exhibited, I think, very well indeed - very well.

HP: Oh, yes. And one of the great consequence of this whole thing was a system of community art centers for the kind of sharing of a total experience which but for him would not have been there.

FK: Yes, yes. I think his philosophy was very, very good.

HP: Yet he was hesitant to deal with situations that were ugly.

FK: He hated to fire people - to have any unpleasantness.

HP: The history of any collectivity is the history of some sparks somewhere.

FK: That's right. And he would just kind of disappear. There were times - you know, he suffered acutely form insomnia for awhile. He had pleasant relations with the directors of the other art projects, but not close.

HP: I am told he would sort of come in out of the wings with a small group of people. He could rub shoulders with the boys and he could - - -

FK: Mildred Holtzauer - she was with him almost constantly. She later married Jake Baker. Yes, he did have a coterie.

HP: He could let his hair down with the boys, but he found difficulty in standing up in front of a large audience. It was a frightening kind of thing for him.

FK: Yes. And the state administrators and all - I think he just thought they were the bane of this life - and they mostly were. I mean, they just weren't there to make his life happy.

HP: I don't know whether this is a kind of intemperance, or an impatience that he might have had, too. Because, you know, the science of getting things done sometimes is your ability to hang on, stand on the position you've taken and let other people worry about theirs, and suddenly circumstances alter so that you find chinks in the armor somewhere, and this is the steady and continuous process of negotiation. Whether he had the physical stamina for that I don't know.

FK: Well, I think he was doing all right. And the Community Art Centers were successful. His national showing was an outstanding success. He did some fine programs on radio that got a good response. Whenever that happened, you know, that would soften up - you know a good word for WPA was treasured, oh, it was treasured! So I would say that he was pretty successful - pretty successful.

HP: The task was complicated by the organizations of artists. Yet he was friendly.

FK: he couldn't get along with Ned Bruce.

HP: Well, Bruce had a wholly different concept.

FK: I know he did, and he just couldn't see Cahill. No, he just felt that Cahill just cut across all the things he'd hoped and dreamed about - spoiled it.

HP: Well, there's a feeling I think that Bruce's standards for him, as he understood it, were important. Cahill's was to put people to work first and worry about the content later.

FK: Kingman was born and raised in San Francisco and he did that on the project. Cahill always thought highly of Kingman, especially the early Kingman, not what he's doing now - the Hallmark cards, and so on, but he must be making pots of money. I think he is.

HP: Was there ever any attempt in the regional area to offset the kind of hostile press?

FK: Well, yes. It was done - Howard Hunter - did you ever meet Howard Hunter? He was the regional director. He was my boss in the Chicago office and Ellen Woodward was my boss in the Washington office. They didn't get along too well. So I was used to being in between. I was in between all over the lot anyhow. So that didn't make too much difference, but he felt, you know, that he wasn't effective; he'd give out interviews, but they never got any play at all. We didn't get very much favorable publicity in the papers. We'd get these routine notices that the Federal Government appropriated funds for the dam at Lake ? And what not. They'd get that kind of publicity and still do; that's going on right now. The Senators and the congressmen and the State Administrator would have their pictures taken, and we'd get that kind of publicity. We were routine all over the regions. They never missed a project of any size whatsoever, but I never felt that that really made friends for us. That was just more proof that we were spending a lot of money. I can't honestly say that while I was on the regional staff that I think we ever did anything effective with the press. I did have one - there were some columnists on the Chicago News that visited projects and wrote in their columns human interest stories about housekeeping aids and stuff like that. But they didn't come to grips with the philosophy of the program.

HP: Did you get any self-support from personal knowledge of the effect that the program had on those who were participating in it?

FK: Oh, lots of that - just lots of that.

HP: Well, it helped in a way I would think to compensate for the absence of public relations.

FK: Oh, yes, it did. There never was a time that I didn't have a feeling that this project was just a lifeline to a lot of people, and you know, little conversations about this.

HP: Well, anything that was casually said about the effects can be said in a very brief way, but a meaning full y on the part of the person who was a participant.

FK: Yes, yes. Like this story that came up from Georgia about the woman - - well, the statisticians decided in the state office that a project for less than 5 people was inefficient to run." I think you can prove that up to the hilt. If you haven't got any more employment than that you'd better return them to the relief rolls and forget about it." Well, this was a combined school lunch during the school year - and of course school lunch, though a terrific service to the community, isn't a very big employment project. This woman was working by herself, and she got her dismissal notice, you see, her little pink slip saying that after the next day she was through. But the garden was full of tomatoes, you see, which had to be used, and they had been raised for the school lunch project for the next winter. She stuck the dismissal notice in her apron pocket and went over to the canning kitchen, and when Blache and I went to see her that afternoon there were baskets of tomatoes on the floor. She was scalding them - had kettles heating - just a big operation of canning tomatoes, canning them by the 100 quarts, and she said, "I don't care what the slip says, we're just not going to waste these tomatoes." The next time we had a national meeting of the administrators with flourishes and footnotes and what not I told that story, and I said, "Damn the statisticians who just don't know the score! That woman understood the employment problem a good deal better than anybody in the state office up here. And she salvaged an operation just because she had character and sense." I said, "Don't say that an employment of five isn't worthwhile until you know what those five are doing!"

HP: It's a good story.

FK: It is. Well, it's true - it's absolutely true! The front of the place where the project had quarters was locked. Blanche and I went around to the back door and there she was, just stewing away on that hot summer afternoon canning tomatoes like made because she knew it was wrong to waste those tomatoes; they had been raised for the school lunch project and they had to be on the shelves. There were a lot of stories like that. I remember in a library project up in Wisconsin a woman took me tone side and she said, "I've bee a widow for so many years and the children are such and such an age and this next pay period the supervisor's going to give me an intermediary raise." That meant she went from 55 to 63 dollars a month. She was pretty proud of that because she wasn't getting the minimum wage. She was getting 63 dollars a month. I gathered she had been accustomed to consulting with a social worker about every our of the ordinary expenditure, so I probably looked to her like another social worker, which I'm not, and she said, "Do you think it would be all right for me to spend that $8 and whatever I add to it to buy a pair of corrective shoes?" Then she showed me her feet. They were just dreadful. She just needed a support for her ankles, you know, and she was just crippling along on perfectly horrible shoes, and she said, "They'll cost 20-odd dollars. Those corrective shoes are expensive. I've got the $8 and I think I can make it if you think - - " I said, "By all means get the shoes, get the shoes, and if anybody says you shouldn't, just stick out your tongue at them and say you earned the money.

HP: So by '38 the atmosphere in the nation had switched. We had gone through a - -

FK: They were not scared any more.

HP: No. We'd gone through a period of organizations - the Wagner Act had been sustained. As a nation we had put on the shelf for all time the question of whether people could organize, or could not organize, but deeper than that the difficulties that were looming abroad suddenly came back in focus. I wonder in the regional atmosphere in '38 whether there was any way to anticipate continuance of the program in keeping with the new atmosphere. It may have still contained crises from the point of those who were on the project, but saleable and marketable as an idea to an institution like congress. Was there?

FK: Oh, yes. You just put your finger on it. From '38 on it was very much more difficult to sustain the case for the number of unemployed that remained in the country, much harder to get the appropriations and they were cut. Beginning in '38 they were cut, and they continued to be right to the end. I don't see but what from the national point of view that was a proper thing. Don't you think so? I remember that Jay du Von and I talked about this one weekend out at his place in Manassass and he said, "Do you suppose we could use a kind of fire sale technique and take the people who aren't ready for much of a job in at the front door, train them and then out the back door they'd go into this war preparation work?" It was a whole would look upon the WPA as a proper agency to re-train the labor supply. We might be able to do it and in certain cases we have, but we are always considered an emergency stop gap, aren't we? And the sooner we could get rid of the WPA the better. So I don't believe you can use WPA in that continuing way." We used to talk about that. We were conscious of the fact that employment was opening up. I remember the administrator of the WPA I in North Dakota and he said to me, "Are you going to make a talk at this meeting of state administrators?" I said, "Yes, I'm on the program for such and such a time." He said, "Well, you know what I want you to say? I want you to say that we're just like Old Man River - he just keeps going along." Well, I didn't quite say that, but I did show them by charts that the shift in employment had been marked in the last 12 months and that now more than half of the program - something like 60% was women and professional people, and that the other group had moved over into the labor market.

HP: I wondered, you know, because - -

FK: Now does that anser your question?

HP: Yes, because there's a certain feature about the warm and the familiar. You're a regional director and there's this desire to keep this alive. One becomes identified with it, and while facts may vary, there's a reason for it. It's like a ? Proposition instead of a reasonable one. I wondered about that.

FK: Oh, yes. Oh, yes - there was a lot of that in the WPA: "don't stop us now we're just getting going and we're doing such - - Don't stop this library program. I don't care what the - - This library program has got to go on. This housekeeping aid has got to gon on - the school lunch mustn't be stopped." All that kind of thing. The service for the service's sake, not for the employment. Of course, people didn't want to lose their jobs and all. Did you see that in your - I don't know how much research you've done on that, but I made a talk in New York once and the New York Times picked it up, in which I said I thought the WPA should be liquidated. Di you see that?

HP: Yes, I saw the item in the New York Times.

FK: When I got back I got a call - "What the heck had I been saying, "and I said what I had been saying that we were moving from labor surplus to labor shortage, and harry said, "would you like to draft a letter for the President to sign?" I did, and he signed it. Quite a famous letter.

HP: Well, you know, the original context of the WPA was emergency - a need.

FK: Yes, it was emergency. The country was in a bad way, a very bad way, so bad that people were frightened, really frightened. They weren't frightened at WPA.

HP: Well, there were no invasions of grocery stores by Longshore-women with their Longshoremen and who's going to quarrel with a Longshoreman who picks up the necessaries at A & P. There were no farmers standing around in a forced sale for a foreclosure, and this is a frightening thing where constituted authority must meet this kind of sullen resentment.

FK: I know that happened at the Winterset. Now that I look back that was gone. You know what the politicians say, that when a farmer has wrinkles in his bell he's a Democrat, and when the wrinkles smooth out he's a Republican. Of course, there was a lot of that in my home state of Iowa. Individuals like my uncle who was saved - it was all very well for awhile. But I think they were reverting - reverting. The sense of emergency disappeared completely. I just don't know how WPA got its appropriation in the lat couple of years. It was momentum and local pressure, and so on.

HP: Were they imaginative out in the local areas in attempting to relate WPA to the emergency now on an international scale?

FK: Well, I don't think so. I don't think that we did nay leading or teaching. Our work was essential and we were proud of it, but our day was done. It was time for something else to come and take its place. That kind of leadership we didn't have. Harrington was dead and there was eleven months of no administrator at all and then Howard Hunter was put in as a stop-gap. I can't imagine Howard Hunter saying anything. He didn't have the voice. As far as the local reaction to it was concerned, that again was spotty. I think down there in Los Angeles they did a fine job of selling it on the hoof, so to speak, like the power sewing project going to the parachute factory. And lots of places where all of a sudden, when the government contracts began to hit the locality and they needed 300 or 400 extra workmen quick, fast, where did they go? To WPA because that was the only place that had that many people around. And so the absorption was very rapid. But the kind of leadership you're describing, I don't think it was there. I think that thinking may have been in the minds of a few people. I think Tom ? Saw it, but I think Howard Hunter would have disciplined me plenty, except he found out that I had White House backing.

HP: Well, this is a process then of retreat that you described from '38 on when coming to Washington, that is, retreat from - -

FK: From the high point.

HP: Well, from facts which are now discernible, namely - -

FK: Well, retreat from the point of view of emergency, but I would say that the curve went up as far as the quality of work done on the projects was concerned. It did improve. I really think so, don't you? So the reason was dwindling, but the performance was improving.

HP: But the sale of this commodity now vis-a-vis Congress was rough, terribly rough.

FK: Yes, it was.

HP: so that you almost stared a kind of forced liquidation in the face.

FK: Well, I did. I just knew that it was inevitable as - - well, the day was over. Well, when you were the small end of the program and all of a sudden you became the big end of the program, what were the other people doing? Gone into the labor market. What else could you conclude? But vested interest certainly showed its hand.

HP: In a wholly different way.

FK: We've done a good job, why should we be - and these people are doing fine community services, and why should that all be stopped. Maybe it started as an employment problem, but it's now a community service program and it should be kept as a community service program. Some of the people fought it pretty hard - some above the table and under the table, trying to save their jobs, trying to save their programs. It wasn't vicious. You could understand it, but it was a losing fight. It had to be.

HP: Well, did you remain here until it was in fact liquidated?

FK: No, I went over to the FWA in about '30. The Lehman Act was passed then and I had charge of the maintenance and operation funds for the Lehman Act, which was the war impacted areas, you know.

HP: Yes. And the health thing.

FK: Yes, well, the health centers. We also had day-care centers for the children of working mothers.

HP: Sort of like a forerunner of the Hill-Burton Act; it was also construction too, wasn't it?

FK: Yes, yes, it was construction because they built roads and schools and hospitals and sewers and everything that was needed.

HP: Sure. The movement of population to industry.

FK: Yes, and where the local tax base was absolutely inadequate. I remember the processing of the funds for what they called the Quinton Iron Works, which was Oak Ridge, you see, because there was a huge maintenance - a huge construction grant made and then my part of it came along with maintenance and operation. There was an interesting sidelight to that because they were recruiting the personnel for Oak Ridge from Westinghouse and du Pont to get the young scientists, and they were young men with young families. They refused to go down there if their children had to go to the small town schools in Tennessee, which - you know what their educational standards would be and what the teachers' salaries would be. So that was agreed to, so in Oak Ridge the schools had a salary schedule and a curriculum standard way above any of the standards of Tennessee.

HP: New wrinkles all the time.

FK: New wrinkles all the time. Nothing ever smooth. They were just tumbled around.

HP: You know, a clash of social forces fluidly operating on a - - though all of them related to the essential purpose that was abroad in the land it hat period and yet still conveying interest.

FK: and just as the people didn't know why they were out of work in the beginning, they were almost equally like weeds before the wind when the war came along. The forces were so much better than the individual.

HP: Well, interestingly enough, there is a comparison between the early 30's and early 40's and that's this emergent doctrine of necessity, namely, that for years in the 20's the government should do just as little as possible and let harmony emerge from this conflict of personal interests. But suddenly there was this doctrine of necessity that we must do something. Well, usually is it true in '30 and '39 that is what really shifted the wind was by '38, even though we ere saying peace with one hand, with the other we were getting the tools ready just in the event.

FK: Yes, starting Lend-Lease.

HP: So this was the doctrine of necessity again.

FK: Using the power of the Federal government first at thome and then abroad.

HP: Just supporting the vast construction works. It's really the movement of people to a new area with all the attendant problems which public health, and so on, sewers, air pollution and the rest of it.

FK: I got to smell Henry kaiser during that time.

HP: Oh, did you!

FK: Was he a - - gee whiz, what a guy! There was a time when I think FDR was seriously considering appointing him the economic - I think the papers called it "czar," but economic coordinator. And who did he finally select? Of course he didn't select Kaiser. That impossible Jimmy Byrnes, who didn't know from nothing about business. I don't know why he ever - well, he must have been losing his grip on personnel by about that time. He really made some very odd appointments: Stetmains in State; Byrnes as economic czar.

HP: I think on some respects - look he put Biddle in there as Attorney General, but he had Sam Rosenman in the White House. He had a personal attorney. He had a personal economic person, and he had his own State Department. He was it. So perhaps working through lesser people was far better than working through, let's say, Secretary Hull or Robert Jackson, so that - -

FK: but it made a mixed - -

HP: And the proliferation of government agencies one on top of another.

FK: And let the best man win. That was cruel - a cruel way to administer. Mile Perkins certainly thought so.

HP: This was in BEW - Economic Warfare. Well, there were so many people and institutions that had a piece of that kind of pie that it didn't make for smoothness because you didn't have the time to work out the procedures to smooth them. And Milo Perkins, I think, really did have to walk the plank.

FK: Oh, he did.

HP: So did Biddle for that matter, ultimately. And for reasons which were not wholly on the surface.

FK: I know. I know.

HP: Well, as you look back on this WPA era I suppose you had rare experience and excitement that - -

FK: I did. I felt that I was completely caught up in it. I had no - I was so engrossed in what I was doing - just swimming for the shore, never knowing if I'd get there. I just don't know how I had the courage to start out on some of these trips and to face up to some of them - I really don't. I look back on - it's the courage of I don't know what. But there was never any lack of interest, nor any lack of belief in the importance of what I was doing. I was thoroughly convinced that I had to get it done, had to get it done the best way I possibly could. When I came down here, some people asked me if I liked Washington and I said, " I haven't seen it. I haven't look at the it." I didn't. I couldn't.

HP: You didn't have time.

FK: I didn't have time. I just zipped back and forth and then did what - you know, if I went out socially it was because of something connected with the job. If I had official invitations, why that's all I did, and the rest of the time I worked: Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, and not with any sense of martyrdom, just couldn't get to the office fast enough to try to get on top of whatever it was that was on top of me. And then the feeling - of course I missed Harry like everything because we didn't have inspiring leadership. We had directions, but we didn't have inspiring leadership, but there were a lot of us along the line that I think knew what it was all about and I certainly wasn't alone I my attitude. There were just hundreds of us that were completely sold on the idea of work vs. The dole. We believed in it, and if we possibly could we wanted to make a success of it.

HP: Well, it's that kind of spirit that sustained you through difficulty, and there were difficulties.

FK: constantly! We never were without them. We were just snowed under with difficulties. We never had an easy time; never on much of any front.

HP: No, but every situation would be a unique one anyway, dealing with different personalities.

FK: Different personalities and a different background, and the states with attitudes about their prerogatives. I often thought of what Paul Appleby used to say: "I'd leave everything to the Stats, but their lines."

HP: A shrewd one.

FK: I thought so. If we just abolished state lines we would be all right and then they could just talk, but we wouldn't have these - - -

HP: These very weird jurisdictional claims.

FK: Oh, just without much rhyme or reason. And you're up against that.

HP: Well, did you get a deeper spell for patience? - it's harder to be patient than to be driven by a sense of dedication.

FK: I didn't understand your question - did I get what?

HP: A better spirit as a consequence of this experience in patience where you had to work through such a - - - -

FK: Well, you know, I was just like a man on a tight rope. I couldn't talk about patience or anything. I just had to stay up there, didn't I? So I don't know whether it was patience or luck or - - Harrington taught me a few things. He said, "Now you have two major jobs. One is liaison with the White House. The other one is testimony on the Hill for the appropriations, because you have to be the spokesman for your program - I can't be." I kept those two things, and then my staff had to process those projects and know whether - all about the day to day operation - whether it was good, bad or indifferent. When I kept those two things in mind - I had to let the white House know what I was doing and why and why and why, and I had to be ready for Mr. Wigglesworth and Mr. John Tapor and people like that. So I don't know whether I was patient or not. Is that what you mean? Why should I have patience?

HP: Well, I mean when you ran into difficulties where known problems take time.

FK: Well, I accepted difficulty as just the natural order of existence. After I'd been in it six months I didn't expect anything but difficulty, and oh, so many difficulties. Every time we started a new program, every time we closed down one - that was the normal atmosphere in which we did our work. Of course there were very fine people working then to whom I was devoted and who I trusted a lot. I absolutely trusted them - ad to. John N. Grierson used to get figures for me when I'd go up on the Hill, and I'd say, "John, if you send me the wrong figures I'll just make a horrible fool of myself and you."

HP: I was thinking of when you start from scratch, as you did in Chicago, and you establish an instrument, a means whereby you can gain some insight as to what you have to work with by way of people. Then the sort of frontier work you do in the states in an effort to get the thing established where communication - your understanding is what they hear and when they do not hear what you're saying because they have their own interest to convey and working out some means whereby this is going to be good beyond the two of you to the people for which it's designed - this is what I meant by patience and perhaps a kind of perseverance.

FK: Well, I believe I have that. I believe I did. I don't think I ever doubted but what we would get something done, and I think I really did understand what the President and Hopkins meant when they established FERA and why they changed it to WPA. I was grounded in the philosophy of the program and the background and the reasons for it and had quite a little insight into some of the quips, and so on, that went back and forth between those two men before the CWA legislation was passed, and why FDR did not want to repeat England's experience, and so on. That was great source of strength; don't you think it would be to anybody?

HP: Oh, sure.

FK: Just that you knew why there was a WPA. He never questioned why, nor the necessity for it, nor the absolute urgency of that necessity. So that much does give you a certain steadiness.

HP: Sure. In any event, when you had to speak with those who had not had your orientation and background you were in a position at least to design and fence in what it is you wanted to say.

FK: I used to talk - to wax very eloquent about the importance of the job we were doing. Sometimes I think I got it across. Sometimes I didn't. I don't know. You can't tell, but I certainly tried.

HP: And the proof of one's ability to get across the footlights is in the pudding that someone else eats in this instance. And this is why I think that while the press was certainly vicious with reference to what was going on, the individual recipient of an opportunity under this project was again a kind of stimulant to further effort.

FK: Oh, yes, yes. I remember Marian and I were driving back to Chicago one night and I said, "who do you suppose is the happiest person in Illinois?" She said, "Somebody who got on the WPA, who got a job today." You know, when you've had nothing but a handout and they assigned you to a job and you had to work - wee reporting for work - it was a happy moment. The happiness may not have been long-lived. They might have got dissatisfied later, but the satisfaction of being put to work must have been an intense satisfaction. Many people said, and I said, that very few family problems wouldn't be solved by having the breadwinner of the family have a steady income - that straightens out homes: a job, a worthwhile job, a steady income.

HP: That was the thought.

FK: That was the philosophy and I really didn't forget it. I talked about it when it was old hat. I still talk about it because, you see, that was great stuff in the early days, but not later on.

HP: Well, you could understand the shift in circumstances later on.

FK: Yes, I could. Oh, I could feel it when I'd be over at the White House. They were nice to me personally, but that employment program! Huey Long was right when he said that nobody could get anywhere in politics who ever had anything to do with the Relief Program. You just write that down in your copy books. If you administer relief you're dead politically. And you are; no ifs, ands, and buts.

HP: "We're glad to see you today, but we're quite busy on other problems."

FK: yes. Well, one day the President said, "I think Florence has the orneriest administrative job in town." I said, "I think she does too." "Well, let's give her some minor diplomatic post." Well, it never happened, but they just felt sorry for me when they thought about me at all in those days, but they were kind to me - yes. I went up to Hyde Park every summer. Of course, Eleanor Roosevelt didn't ever take such - she was interested in continuing community service and was worried about what would happen. It was ideal for the communities to take over their own housekeeping aid and their own school lunch and their own nursery school projects and library extension and all the rest of it, but would they? Mostly they didn't. Some did. Most didn't; they were dropped! But you see, in a war situation it wasn't missed.

HP: No. The headlines changed. The interest changed. We had 22 million men and women in the armed forces.

FK: Yes, and all of a sudden Rosy the Riveter was the hero and we had to worry about her.

HP: The whole complex changed.

FK: It certainly did. And that makes it very hard now to go back and make WPA seem real and vital, which it was at the time.

HP: The context is almost unknown except by the participants. I talked to some artists who never had it better. A real creative person who wasn't selling. There was no market for what it was he had in mind to say, the statement he wanted to make, and suddenly this is the Elysian fields. It enabled him to continue with his originality because no heavy hand was put upon him from the point of view of directing what he should or should not paint.

FK: no, or say - and you know we got some real, real extra dividends out of it. There's a volume put out by the Virginia Writers Project called the Negroes in Virginia, and it's a classic. Of course, it takes it up just to a certain point, but that's a fine bit of historical writing. Just a fine piece of work. One of the offshoots of the Virginia Writers project.

HP: Sure. I think people in almost any community learned more in the way of identification with their state and their section within their state as a consequence of the project than they would have without the project. They had reason to sustain their parochialism. They could take a tour of their own section that's warm and familiar and see things which perhaps they had overlooked for years.

FK: Yes, and how odd it is that the chapters on which we spent so much money are the least valuable chapters - the tour chapters, What good are they now? The Maps they're just practically of no use whatever. But the general chapters are just as good as ever. You know, during the end when I felt much freer in talking with the State Administrators I asked them, "How many of you state administrators would like a complete set of the state guides?" Up went every hand. Well, I said, "You just go out and buy'em. I don't have enough to give you. But if you're smart, every single one of you who've administered a state program ought not to fail to have in his personal library the complete set. Now you go out and get'em." the boy from South Dakota - he had no faith in his project so he only ordered 500 and thought it would be awful hard to get a Sough Dakota project, but you put the pressure on him. Well, I think several of them did. Of course, when they put their hands up they felt, "Well, within the next 60 das she will ship to all of us a complete set of the Writers Project." But of course I didn't have that kind of money. Another thing that maybe was a minor virtue, there was very little rascality. Very little. There was a couple of administrators up in New England that pocketed some funds that didn't belong to them, but honestly - it just was remarkable. No sticky fingers. Nobody thought of cheating.

HP: Well, it wasn't a 9 to 5 proposition.

FK: Never.

HP: It was an 18 to 24 hour day.

FK: It was, it absolutely was - summer, winter, spring and fall.

HP: And it had to be done yesterday, like - that kind of urgency.

FK: It certainly did. You had to make some kind of a decision NOW.

HP: On the basis of almost wholly inadequate information, but you had to make it.

FK: Yes, but there are only two answers to a problem: yes and o, and you choose one. Gee, I don't know - I don't know where we got the - but we decided right a lot of the time.

HP: By and large I think so.

FK: Most of the time we did. Some of the people who came in for very ignoble reasons really turned in a better job than I would ever have thought they were capable of. There was something about the bigness of the concept and yo don't matter, but this national situation is terrible and you contribute to make it better or not. They would straighten out.

HP: I think sometimes when you're conscious you're an example you're inclined to be a better one.

FK: I think you are. Some bad political appointments turned in pretty good jobs. You can't tell. Sometimes the technicians will give you a bad steer just as well as the politicians.

HP: Besides there's no rule of thumb that I know of in knowing before the experience what's going to transpire.

FK: No. It's like choosing a President. You are always taking a vote. You can't help it.

HP: I know, you don't know what the detail is. Neither does he when he's running.

FK: No. Neither does he.

HP: Well, it's like choosing a wife. It's like choosing a career.

FK: Yes, it's a gamble.

HP: And there's not much in the way of elbow room, but that's all you can do.

FK: That's all you can do. And you find yourself able to make a success of what looks to the outsider as though it couldn't succeed. By George,it does. It really happens. You know, MacLeish had this idea - you probably know about his calling together people like Edwin Cammon and Van Wyck Brooks and John Steinbeck and one or two of the composers proposing that out of the Federal Art Project they establish an Art Academy - Academy of Fine Arts. He really was all ablaze for that idea. But there again we were heading into a war period and he couldn't get any hearing. I'll bet you that every time there's been a political convention that somebody has had a set of mimeographed pages to distribute to the members of the Platform Committee proposing a Department of Fine Arts in the Federal Government. Usually it's some unknown congressman from New York, but it's been done over and over and over again. And nothing came of it.

HP: The time isn't ripe for it.

FK: Well, when it's ever going to be, I don't know. Maybe that isn't the answer. I don't know. But verve and drive and momentum and devotion - oh, Harry was a wonderful leader - just a wonderful leader. That kind of a wry funny way he had of saying things, you know, that had all kinds of punch, and he was so fearless in a man-to-man combat that they were afraid o him in a way. He was really quite magnificent.

HP: He did certainly shut up some reporters who were after him on the subject of boondoggling artists, and so on, and he said, in effect, quite quietly, "We employ carpenters, plumbers in our Works Program. They're hungry, and we find work for them, put them to work. We do the same for artists because they're hungry too." Boondoggling had nothing to do with it. The purpose was quite clear. I mean this was a kind of soft, but right down to the bone.

FK: Yes, down to the bone. Have seen this book put out by ? Called Minister of Relief?

HP: No.

FK: Would you like to see it?

HP: Yes.

FK: He didn't know too much about - - - END OF TAPE

HP: You were indicating the idea of the plan for liquidation.

FK: Yes, I think the circumstances were that I was spending the weekend with Jay and Mary, his then wife who later died. His idea was that we had - what had been surplus labor was in the process of becoming a very essential part of the labor force of the country, but they could come in the front door of WPA and go out the back door of private employment. It actually happened in the case of a good many, many projects. I've cited a few to you - sewing rooms in the Brooklyn navy yard went over in to to the Navy and the Los Angeles sewing rooms went to the parachute factory out there, and the Missouri programs went over because of the use of women trained in the use of power machines. Well, that would mean that we would quickly liquidate just as much of our personnel as we could, and we could have whittled it down fast, you see, if we could have gone on an active selling of the whole project program, but I think by that time people were completely fed up with WPA. They wanted to forget it! That had all the earmarks of the depression and failure of the economy to meet the challenge. They just didn't want to be reminded that there ever had been a WPA, or the need for WPA, and when Leon Henderson came into the Office of Price Administration I talked to him about it. He said, "We just can't touch WPA. We can't ouch it because it's relief, it's unemployment, it's breadlines, it's Hoover Mills, it's boondoggling, it's inefficient work, it's high labor cost and no result s from it," and all the long list of charges. Leon Henderson said, "I wouldn't touch it and I don't think any other administrator would." That was out. Maybe it was a fanciful idea, but I know that in six months we could have reduced the labor force in an orderly and good way, but we were never permitted to accept these things that happened locally. Locally it happened, but we never got it embodied as a national policy.

HP: How receptive was the WPA Administration here to this idea?

FK: Oh, you see we had gone eleven months without an administrator after the death of Harrington, and there was just an acting administrator, which was a measure of the lack of interest and the lack of support at the White House. Nobody bothered to even look up and appoint an administrator for us. It was a very bad period for us and indicative, of course, that the President had lost his interest in WPA - just lost it. He was in the war effort then, and he was completely in the war effort and he would not be pulled back to consideration of our problems at all. When after eleven months, and sort of by default, Howard Hunter was appointed administrator, the deputy became the administrator, but you see,he didn't have any stature or standing. It wasn't his fault. Maybe if he'd had real backing - he was a bright fellow and able and devoted to harry Hopkins, just idolized him, but he didn't have a chance. So as far as the WPA was concerned I got no support. I just didn't get anywhere with it, not anywhere at all. I talked to Hunter and was rebuffed and then, if course, we were in the midst of what really was the terminal period. People were just leaving the projects, as they should have, for private employment all over the place, both the men and women. So the liquidation came about in another way, rather disorderly, disorderly.

HP: Well, was Mrs. Roosevelt of any help?

FK: Yes, she was. She never lost her interest in training and retraining. And you could talk to her about training and retraining any time, and she could always see you and she was very, very appreciative and I think told her husband about the power machines and what a good thing that was. She enlisted me in an idea she once had. She had an idea of a sort of draft of women power comparable to the draft of man power, so I used to go there evenings and we'd try to draft a form, you see, for every woman to come and register - every woman (phone interruption - "Will you take that Ellie mac? Will you answers that, please? If that's Freddie, I'll handle him.") That also didn't get anywhere, working on this national draft of women, mobilizing the woman power of the nation, and she was very much interested in that. No, she never seemed to completely lose her interest in WPA because they were always people to her. One of the jobs that we had was to answers the mail that came in. She farmed it out to other agencies, too. If it was a farmer's wife, that went to the Department of Agriculture, but we got a large mail from her every week to anser, needs - and leftovers of one kind and another, and so forth, and she just dumped those all in our lap. She said to me, "You won't write form letter, will you , because if you do, I'll just take it away from you, because I'm going to have form letters sent out to these people!"

HP: good for her! Bless her heart!

FK: Oh, yes, she was something, really, and yet that was quite an administrative burden, but it was very good for the Washington office - very good for the people on our staff to have to draft a letter - you know, which wasn't a bland statement of policy and "thank you for your interest, sincerely yours." They didn't dare write it that way.

HP: Dehumanize nothing.

FK: Harrington told me, and I wrote a great many letters for him when I first came here and I wrote in the first person and active voice, which I prefer, don't you? And he said, "No, indeed. You write in the third person and passive: ‘it is thought, not I think'". It's West Point. It's the Army. It's the engineer.

HP: It's in keeping with the theory, "don't commit yourself, committee yourself."

FK: Lovely! Exactly - committee yourself! What was it? What did somebody say? He didn't understand how Jesus Christ ever accomplished anything because he never belonged to a committee. I think Harrington thought protection. Also he was trained. That was his habit of thought, his habit of behavior, his habit of correspondence, and he wasn't going to have me write these brisk little confidential, "I appreciate that so and so is a so and so, but you don't say so" things! I learned, too, you know.

HP: Oh, yes, that's one of the great things about this period - America's capacity for growth and learning.

FK: Yes, and there was an amazing amount of it - you know, people who took on the job with a kind of oh, "I'll stay 6 months," and then get so interested in what they were doing. A great many people wanted to stay in the program. One of the hardest parts of the program to get the local people to let go of was nursery schools.

HP: Was it?

FK: Oh, yes. They wanted to keep the nursery schools. They weren't sufficiently well established that they were financially secure. They were not financially secure. They had to have that Federal payroll and a good deal of federal supervision, but they were locally popular. When I went over to the Federal works Agency and had the maintenance and operation end of the Lehman Act to administer, which was loans and grants, that was one of the first things that we looked into - how many of the nursery schools we could keep because they strategically located with many of them in the places where there was a big new influx of population, like Milledgeville, Georgia, and places like that. Now you told me last week that you wanted to ask me some questions.

HP: Yes, I thought maybe it might be useful, since I ran upon a collection of names, for me to indicate who they are and it might help you to either put an incident in its context or reveal more by way of something specific that people might have handled. Now these are state directors: Illinois, George G. Thorpe - do you remember him?

FK: Yes, I remember him. I remember his wife, Sylvia. I remember what he looked like. I think he had a lot of ability. He got mixed up in a marital business which did him nothing but harm, and after that I didn't see too much of him. But that's all general - - what kind of incidents do you want me to tell about Thorpe?

HP: Well, as a regional director in Illinois, you had 10 states to watch - 13 states to watch. There's two things I would suppose, namely, there was the state institution itself, plus the Federal Project #1 which by-passed the state - that is to say, they had no discretion as to how the funds were to be spent. They were earmarked from Washington.

FK: The quota was earmarked, the funds were earmarked, but at the same time the states were directed to find space. They usually officed them,so they couldn't disown them, and they didn't. That had its problems, too.

HP: Well, Illinois - - the administrator was Charles E. Minor. I gather he had certain holdovers, or was he appointed for this work?

FK: He was a holdover, and just an average guy. He wasn't very up to that job.

HP: Not a whirling dervish in ideas.

FK: Oh, no, mercy not! And a little timid about a lot of things. Nice enough fellow, but that was the day that Kelly and Dunham and -

HP: Didn't help matters.

FK: - and he was in awe of both Mayor Kelly and of Dunham. The first time I visited the regional office n Chicago the reliefers were picketing the regional office and signs were against Dunahm and Kelly. They just ignored Minor. The charge was that they were getting all this Federal money, but the reliefers weren't getting jobs, and it was true. It was awfully slow shifting over, setting up the projects and getting the men on the payroll, which is what they wanted. The whole thing was to get on the job and get their name - that's what they wanted and it was awfully slow.

HP: Get money into their pockets.

FK: Yes, that's right, and the prospect of having it regularly.

HP: Right. They'd worry about the design later on,but the first thing was a crash program.

FK: that's right, and I suppose you've heard this story about this idea, and I think that again came from the White House probably from some evening conference between the President and Harry, that they ordered every single WPA person to have a paycheck by Thanksgiving - you see, whether they had done a day's work or not they were to get that paycheck by Thanksgiving. It was a lovely sentimental idea, and it was done, but oh, I tell you, some of the local resistance was fierce! Yes it was. They didn't have the jobs ready. They didn't even have the wheel barrows or the chalk lines, or anything for the boys to go out on the farmers' market road job and yet they had to issue them a paycheck. That just seemed - you know - doing everything backward, and I remember the district director down in St. Charles county in Missouri said,"this will just give the Works Program a very bad name, very bad. This is just a handout, nothing but a handout and can't something be done to persuade Mr. Hopkins that this is a great mistake? You don't pay people for work they haven't done."

HP: he misunderstood the psychic lift, didn't he?

FK: Absolutely. He could not see any reason why Washington wanted anything like that done - but Washington ruled ever the whole business and the checks went out and they were delivered. There were a great many dramatic stories about getting the check out the day before, and so on and so forth. Now somebody in the press should have picked that up and either approved or disapproved of it. But they were disgusted. It didn't get much support.

HP: Not at all?

FK: Well, no, not to amount to anything.

HP: You were busy at the game of feeding people and not worrying about public relations.

FK: I was busy about getting a room, getting enough sewing machines, getting enough chairs, and when the relief offices really got going they referred people to us in droves. In Cleveland they sent out word that applications for the sewing project would be received at a certain time and they said 8 o'clock. It was so blurred it looked like 5 o'clock instead of 8 o'clock and there was a crowd, a big crowd of people down there at 5 o'clock, and some of the women fainted before time for the doors to open. It was rugged - it really was. So were busy, terribly busy, but on administrative details. Well, now, Thorpe - he was an able fellow. He was a sculptor, but I don't feel that he - yet he was sympathetic to the people on his project and he did have some very able people, both white and colored.

HP: In the Women's and Professional projects, Mrs. Mary G. Moon.

FK: yes, she's been my friend from that day to this. She was a holdover from FERA. She was a social worker. A great many social workers I didn't get along with too well because they looked upon people as clients and case histories and things like that, but Mary Moon wasn't that way. She was a very incisive, direct person and she got the respect of Dunham's candidate, and so when they were told they would have to take Mary Moon and couldn't have Walter Roy - he was a very able chap, too; he was head of the Recreation department in Chicago and he'd worked closely with the City hall and he knew his way around very well, but we couldn't have Walter Roy. We had to have Mary Moon, but she was good. She got the respect of - there was no nonsense about her.

HP: She could call a spade a spade.

FK: Yes, and she had the respect and liking of the people who worked with her. Yes, I think she was one of the best.

HP: Well, that's Illinois. Last week we talked something about the theater project in Chicago - this was Mintern whom we've already talked about, but do you remember the Albert Goldberg who was director of the Federal Music Project?

FK: Yes, I do. I remember him. He was Jewish and he really was a writer, a music critic. He was good. I think he was a very good buffer between Sokolov and the music units in Chicago. He told me that the morale would drop as soon as Sokolov came - that he could build it back up. Goldberg and Mary Moon were good friends. Goldberg was - what shall I say - industrious. He was working.

HP: A stem winder.

FK: Yes, he was. He had ideas and he was always pressing the Washington office for twenty more jobs, or so much more. He was good. He is now music critic at the Los Angeles Times, I think. He went to the West Coast after WPA was over, but he worked hard. He was good. Thorpe worked, too, but not as effectively as Goldberg.

HP: Was his assessment of the appearance of Sokolov on local morale an accurate one?

FK: I think very much so. Very much so.

HP: Isn't that interesting! Is there any reason that you'd care to risk as to why this was so? The personality of the man?

FK: You see he would act as guest conductor, we'll say, for an orchestra and be obviously dissatisfied with the performance. That's what he did - "You're just not any good," or "you're not much good."

HP: And he conveyed this?

FK: Oh, indeed he did! Of course he did! He certainly did!

HP: He overlooked the fact of apparently bringing musical joy and appreciation beyond the - -

FK: He knew that and he would probably pay lip service to it, but the inner core of his mind and philosophy was that music is not to be tampered with. When you play, you should play well - that was Sokolov.

HP: he had a carefully tuned ear.

FK: Yes, he did. He married while he was National Director a very fine woman who was - what was her title? I've forgotten. It had something to do with music teaching, and I always felt that she had a a good influence on him. But of course the formative years of the project had come before that. Now, Sokolov was good, you know. He really was a musician. There's no doubt about it. We got out to Seattle once and he wired back and he said he'd like to take six months annual leave because he saw a symphony orchestra out there in Seattle, and he wanted to be their conductor for a while. So he would leave the project for six months and give full time to that Seattle Symphony.

HP: It's kind of hard to have musical standards so high that one conveys distaste with the efforts of those who were - -

FK: Yes, it is, it is. It's unfortunate. It's unfortunate for Sokolov because he couldn't have been too happy. He knew that he had a job to do. He knew what that job was because he was not stupid. He was a bright man. And yet there was this other streak.

HP: That's interesting. The human story.

FK: That's right.

HP: Well, thee's a John P. Frederick who was the writer.

FK: Yes, John P. Frederick. He was Illinois, wasn't he? I haven't thought about him for a long time. I saw a lot of him for awhile. He tried to patch up things after Alsberg left. That was cruel and awful really, and Frederick knew exactly what happened. Quiet chap. I wonder if he is still living, do you know? I don't know. I don't think he is. I'm trying to remember something about Frederick. I found him very sympathetic to the idea of the Writers Project. Of course he didn't touch Alsberg's master plan which was the outline of the guide. It was just a holding operation.

HP: There's Howard E. Colgan in the Historical Records Survey, and there's a story somewhere in the division that sprang up between up between the Writers Project and the subsequent development of the Alsberg - -

FK: Oh, yes, Alsberg and Luther Evans. They just had all they could do to keep from scratching each other's eyes out. That was a real personality clash, and Alsberg thought that what Luther Evans was doing was pretty picayunes and unimportant anyhow, but he wanted it, you see. He wanted administrative supervision of this Historical Records Project because they are all empire builders and the more activities they have in their projects the better it is for them. And Alsberg certainly didn't want to give up Historical Records, but he wanted it to be minor. He wanted ti to be housed over here in a corner somewhere and make no fuss - "don't bother me, because I have more important things to consider," and it was getting