Bringing the Texas New Deal into Focus: Record Group 69’s Photographic Collection

Figure 1.

Photograph of WPA officials in Texas. From left to right are H. P. Drought, state work projects administrator; General Robert Lee Bobbitt, chair of the State Highway Commission; and J. Frank Davis, state supervisor of the WPA Writer’s Project. As former chairman of the State Highway Commission, Bobbitt arranged for sponsorship of the publication of the Texas WPA Writers’ Project guidebook and here inspects the first copy of Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State (New York: Hastings House, 1940). All photographs in this article are contained in the collection, Projects in Texas and Other States, ca. 1937–ca. 1941, Record Group 69: Records of the Work Projects Administration, 1922–1944 (National Archives, College Park, Maryland).

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 22, 1932¹

Researchers of New Deal-era Texas who have wrestled with Works Progress Administration (WPA) textual records know the answer to Keith Volanto’s question, “Where Are the New Deal Historians of Texas?”² At a local level, historians of the WPA in Texas comb through county and municipal records that are often brief and lacking in detail.³ At the state level, they hunt for the records of Harry Patrick Drought, the WPA state administrator based in San Antonio (fig. 1).⁴ At the federal level, they struggle to read fading microfilm rolls, now more than seventy-five years old, on which original textual records, destroyed during the 1940s, were placed. Historians of the WPA in Texas wander through a labyrinth of finding aids and records spread over at least three floors of the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. After scouring multiple indexes for fading film rolls, they come upon records that tend to be only spare proposals and summary completions, rather than detailed records, of WPA projects (fig. 2). This is not to say that the WPA left no records or that the only way to access New Deal history is via the WPA’s textual records. But the difficulty of accessing these records does pose an obstacle that must be overcome in the course of researching New Deal Texas.⁵

A more illuminating approach to WPA activities in Texas may come through viewing photographs of the WPA’s projects in the state. In particular, still images in National Archives Record Group 69’s collection encompass these activities quite well. Some photos show well-known efforts like the San Antonio River beautification project and the preservation of La Villita, while others record the toy loan program in which needy children could borrow toys, much like checking a book out from a library. The WPA employed people to organize city records, work in hospitals, survey decorative arts, teach immigrants studying to become U.S. citizens, serve school lunches, erect schools and courthouses, repair worn-out clothes, build roads and highways, landscape roadways, conduct recreational classes, dig irrigation ditches, build swimming pools, lay sewer lines, assist the elderly and infirm, construct airport runways, and excavate archaeological sites (figs. 3–8). Fortunately, the majority of these photographs are labeled, thereby providing researchers with vitally important information such as geographic location, district number, and project number. Many also have a narrative description and identify the individuals in a photo by name and sometimes their role within the WPA.⁶

The photographs give the WPA and its accomplishments in Texas a face. They show us WPA workers who broke rocks, poured concrete, dug ditches, canned vegetables, and cared for the sick. Equally numerous are photographs of finished WPA work—the environment it built—without showing the workers who built it. The absent workers are only implicit as the camera captures schools erected but not yet occupied, empty stadia anticipating crowds, and roads completed for drivers...