The Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

After World War One, veterans were offered a service bonus payable in 1945. And that was a fine and good thing, but along came the Great Depression and many of the veterans, displaced by the economic hard times, lobbied Congress to pay the bonus sooner. In 1932 thousands of them demonstrated in Washington D.C. They set up a camp and there they stayed. President Hoover eventually ordered the marchers out of the city by force. It wasn't a pretty sight.
The next year the marchers returned and President Roosevelt persuaded many of them to take jobs building the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys.
While working on this project, they were hit by a hurricane on Labor Day, 1935. It was the most intense hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States. 164 Keys residents were killed that day, along with 259 veterans. The stories from this storm are gripping and I won't go into them here; there are several books that do a better job of it than I could in a little blog entry.
How does this relate to our area? It doesn't really, except that some of those bonus marchers stayed at my mothers house in Washington D.C. all those years ago, and every Labor Day I wonder if any of them made it out of the Keys alive.

Top Photo: The 1935 Hurricane memorial on Upper Matecumbe Key, Florida. Bottom Photo: Florida Keys at sunset, both Canon EOS 20D.

History Research: It’s a New Ball Game as Free Websites Provide Digital Copies of Wills, Maps, Newspapers, and Photos

(WoCCP) In this rapidly expanding world of online information, lots of helpful data is often just a few keystrokes away. The amount is exploding exponentially as a number of for-profit digital publishers, such as Ancestry and GenealogyBank, have taken the lead in making vast amounts of material available instantly. Beyond these excellent data aggregators, there are some free, open source repositories which are helpful too. Since they’re not as well-known, we thought we’d mention a few here in case you’re struggling with fee-based research overload. Continued

Photo: Photograph documenting WPA Project Number 272. Typed text on label on back of photograph reads: Works Progress Administration of Maryland, Division of Operations. Havre de Grace, Harford County. Resurfacing city streets - showing section of Washington St. completed, curb, gutter, and surfacing. (Pratt Library)

Caught Out of Time

(NYTimes) One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, historians have the benefit of a perspective not accessible in earlier remembrances. One interesting angle is to look at older histories of the war, tracing its place in our national consciousness and rediscovering details that take on new relevance today.
Fifty years ago, as the Civil War centennial got underway, Robert Penn Warren wrote of the struggle as if it were an ancient epic, one that “affords a dazzling array of figures, noble in proportion yet human, caught out of Time as if in a frieze, in stances so profoundly touching or powerfully mythic that they move us in a way no mere consideration of ‘historical importance’ ever could.”
It seems impossible that voices from what Warren calls our “Homeric period” could survive into the age of audio recording, yet a small number have. The perspective on the Civil War that might seem most elusive is in fact the most tangible: that of enslaved children. Thanks to the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, and the careful stewardship of the Library of Congress, voices of onetime slaves who lived well into the 1930s are now just a few clicks away. Continued

Photo: PP78.47 – Slave house on Webster land (Route 136 between Calvary and Cresswell), Harford Co., Mason. Neg Z8.467.B6; dup/copy neg Z6.1550.B6. (Maryland Historical Society)

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

(LoC) - On April 8, 1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the work relief bill that funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program (renamed the Work Projects Administration beginning in 1939) employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. The WPA employed skilled and unskilled workers in a great variety of work projects—many of which were public works projects such as creating parks, and building roads and bridges, and schools and other public structures. The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was one of several projects within the WPA created to employ people with skills in the arts. Other arts projects included the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Theater Project. When these projects were created, they were known collectively as Federal Project Number One—or more informally, “Federal One.” Among the well-known writers employed by the Federal Writers’ project were Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, and Richard Wright. Continued

Photo: John Collier

Morris Louis

(Wikipedia) Morris Louis (Morris Louis Bernstein) (November 28, 1912 - September 7, 1962) is a United States abstract expressionist painter, one of the many such painters to emerge in the 1950s. From 1929 to 1933, he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (now Maryland Institute College of Art) on a scholarship, but left shortly before completing the program. He worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Continued

Photo: Wikipedia

New dinosaur park yields fossil for 9-year-old girl

(Baltimore Sun) Maryland's new dinosaur park near Laurel has been opened for public prospecting on just two Saturday afternoons so far, and already one of the visitors' finds is headed to the Smithsonian Institution. On Saturday, a 9-year-old girl from Annandale, Va., picked up a small fossil bone that experienced dinosaur hunters say probably was a vertebra from near the end of a meat-eating "raptor's" tail. Continued

Photo: WPA

National Art Week: American Art for American Homes

Hey, remember when it was patriotic to buy art? Well it was.

Photos: WPA/LoC

A New Deal: The First 100 Days

(LoC) - June 16, 1933, marked the end of the first hundred days of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Those one hundred days were a period of frenetic activity.
Following his inauguration on March 4, Roosevelt immediately sought to stem the financial panic that had begun with the stock market crash of 1929 and to restore public confidence. He started by closing the nation's banks on March 6. On June 16, 1933, FDR signed the Banking Act, which separated commercial banking from investment banking and established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He also signed the Farm Credit Act, the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act (which created the Public Works Administration). Continued

Photo: National Park Service

Food Bloggers of 1940

(NYTBR) - ... Writers fanned out across the republic to document — via field reports, essays, stories, poems, recipes and interviews — what academics have taken to calling “foodways.” Among the topics covered were New York soda-luncheonette slang, Georgia possum cookery, Minnesota lutefisk, geoduck clams in Washington State, Montana’s fried beaver tail, Colorado food superstitions (“You will receive mail from the direction in which your pie is pointing, when it is set down at your place at the table”), a Choctaw “funeral cry” feast and “a Los Angeles sandwich called a taco.” Throughout 1940 and 1941, raw copy flowed into Washington, D.C., where it was farmed out to rewriters — including Nelson Algren — for shaping into book form. Then came Pearl Harbor. The Federal Writers’ Project — “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state,” as W. H. Auden described it — morphed into the Writers Unit of the War Services, and “America Eats” went down as a war casualty. Continued

Photo: "Serving up the barbeque at the Pie Town, New Mexico, Fair," Octorber 1940, Russel Lee (FSA/OWI/LOC).

Arbor Day

"By 1907, Arbor Day was observed in every state in the Union, principally through school programs. Through these celebrations, schoolchildren were urged to consider the planting of a tree as a patriotic, even pious, act, as well as a sound investment and a contribution to community aesthetics." Continued

Photos: WPA (Library of Congress).

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

(LoC) - On April 8, 1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the work relief bill that funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program (renamed the Work Projects Administration beginning in 1939) employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. The WPA employed skilled and unskilled workers in a great variety of work projects—many of which were public works projects such as creating parks, and building roads and bridges, and schools and other public structures.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was one of several projects within the WPA created to employ people with skills in the arts. Other arts projects included the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Theater Project. When these projects were created, they were known collectively as Federal Project Number One—or more informally, “Federal One.”
Among the well-known writers employed by the Federal Writers’ project were Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, and Richard Wright. Continued

Photo: John Collier

New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer

GREENHILLS, Ohio (NYTimes) - When people talk about green architecture as though it were a new movement, Greg Strupe laughs. Mr. Strupe lives with his family in one of the country’s first green towns, built during the Great Depression by unemployed men and women and championed by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
This 1938 village, along with Greenbelt, Md., and Greendale, Wis., was created to move struggling families out of nearby cities and into a healthier, more verdant environment, with shopping, recreation and nearly 200 small modernist apartment buildings and houses surrounded by a forest. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

STATE BY STATE: A Panoramic Portrait of America

(NYTBR) - ... Taking as their inspiration the state guides published by the Federal Writers’ Project during and shortly after the Great Depression, Weiland and Wilsey assembled 50 of America’s finest writers and asked them to contribute essays on the same general theme: why my state is special — or not. The result is a funny, moving, rousing collection, greater than the sum of its excellent parts, a convention of literary super­delegates, each one boisterously nominating his or her piece of the Republic. Continued

The Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

After World War One, veterans were offered a service bonus payable in 1945. And that was a fine and good thing, but along came the Great Depression and many of the veterans, displaced by the economic hard times, lobbied Congress to pay the bonus sooner. In 1932 thousands of them demonstrated in Washington D.C. They set up a camp and there they stayed. President Hoover eventually ordered the marchers out of the city by force. It wasn't a pretty sight.
The next year the marchers returned and President Roosevelt persuaded many of them to take jobs building the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys.
While working on this project, they were hit by a hurricane on Labor Day, 1935. It was the most intense hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States. 164 Keys residents were killed that day, along with 259 veterans. The stories from this storm are gripping and I won't go into them here; there are several books that do a better job of it than I could in a little blog entry.
How does this relate to our area? It doesn't really, except that some of those bonus marchers stayed at my mothers house in Washington D.C. all those years ago, and every Labor Day I wonder if any of them made it out of the Keys alive.

Top Photo: The 1935 Hurricane memorial on Upper Matecumbe Key, Florida. Bottom Photo: Florida Keys at sunset, both Canon EOS 20D.

Places Captured in Time, but Not Frozen There

WINTHROP, Wash. (NYTimes) - They were still wearing Stetsons and spurs, not the tight cycling shorts you see these days, when a writer dispatched by the federal government during the Great Depression reached the end of the road here in the North Cascades.
Winthrop — population 365, altitude 1,765 feet, the town at the “end of hard surfacing” — was soon committed to paper, as were thousands of other rural outposts and urban areas across the country in the 1930s and ’40s.
Writers, photographers and editors, some as famous as Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty and others long forgotten, earned as little as $20 a week to produce a series of travel guides about America. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

Independence Day in the 1870's

In an American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 interview, Miss Nettie Spencer remembered the Fourth as the "big event of the year. Everyone in the countryside got together on that day for the only time in the year." She continued,

There would be floats in the morning and the one that got the [girls?] eye was the Goddess of Liberty. She was supposed to be the most wholesome and prettiest girl in the countryside — if she wasn't she had friends who thought she was. But the rest of us weren't always in agreement on that…Following the float would be the Oregon Agricultural College cadets, and some kind of a band. Sometimes there would be political effigies.

Just before lunch - and we'd always hold lunch up for an hour - some Senator or lawyer would speak. These speeches always had one pattern. First the speaker would challenge England to a fight and berate the King and say that he was a skunk. This was known as twisting the lion's tail. Then the next theme was that any one could find freedom and liberty on our shores. The speaker would invite those who were heavy laden in other lands to come to us and find peace. The speeches were pretty fiery and by that time the men who drank got into fights and called each other Englishmen. In the afternoon we had what we called the 'plug uglies' — funny floats and clowns who took off on the political subjects of the day…The Fourth was the day of the year that really counted then. Christmas wasn't much; a Church tree or something, but no one twisted the lion's tail. - Library of Congress

Photo: Russell Lee, 1941, FSA/OWI

American-Made

A New Deal: The First 100 Days

(LoC) - June 16, 1933, marked the end of the first hundred days of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Those one hundred days were a period of frenetic activity.
Following his inauguration on March 4, Roosevelt immediately sought to stem the financial panic that had begun with the stock market crash of 1929 and to restore public confidence. He started by closing the nation's banks on March 6. On June 16, 1933, FDR signed the Banking Act, which separated commercial banking from investment banking and established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He also signed the Farm Credit Act, the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act (which created the Public Works Administration). Continued

1935: Executive Order 7034 creates the Works Progress Administration

(Wikipedia) - The Works Progress Administration (after 1939 Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest New Deal agency, employing millions of people and affecting most every locality, especially rural and western mountain populations.
It was created in April 1935 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential order, and activated with congressional funding in July of that year (the U.S. Congress funded it annually but did not set it up).
It continued and extended relief programs similar to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) started by Herbert Hoover and the U.S. Congress in 1932. Headed by Harry L. Hopkins, the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. The program built many public buildings, projects and roads and operated large arts, drama, media and literacy projects. It fed children and redistributed food, clothing and housing. Continued

Catoctin Mountain Park Visitor Center (Maryland), under construction in 1941 by WPA workers. Photo: NPS