Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews

8. Kathryn Flynn

131 Kathryn Flynn Introduction Kathryn Flynn is the executive director of the National New Deal Preservation Association. She is the author of Treasures on New Mexico Trails (1995), a book that focuses on the art and architecture that was funded by the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA, later the Works Projects Administration) of the 1930s in New Mexico. Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and she was born in Texas. Flynn earned a master’s degree in rehabilitation and psychology and has been a resident of New Mexico for many years. It was while working for the New Mexico State Health Department that she visited the Carrie Tingley Hospital, then located in Truth or Consequences, and saw the wonderful murals painted by Gisella Loeffler in the 1930s. Flynn gradually came to discover other murals painted on or in public edifices throughout the state, and her interest in New Deal art projects expanded enormously. She began working with then secretary of state Stephanie Gonzales in 1991 and produced three New Mexico blue books that focused on murals, art, and courthouse architecture. In 1994, she acquired the necessary nonprofit status to allow her to garner funding to restore New Deal artwork that had been damaged, and thus was born the National New Deal Preservation Association. Kathryn Flynn, photo by author 132 / Economic Depression in the Land of Clear Light Since then, she has become a national authority on the subject. The New Deal WPA funded artists, writers, musicians, and actors to pursue their art forms. In the interview, Kathy Flynn discusses the New Deal, its various components, and its great importance for not only New Mexico, but the entire nation. Kathryn Flynn JL: I want to ask you, could you give an overview of Roosevelt’s New Deal? KF: Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in that man’s shoes for anything . It was a horrible time in our country. Everybody was in total economic dire straits. He [Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR] was sworn in on March 4, 1933, the day before nearly all the banks closed, and on March 5, the day after, he did close all the banks, giving them a bank holiday, which was a desperate situation. He looked at it on the basis that he was wanting to maintain, as I understand, a balanced budget, but came to the reality that that wasn’t going to work, that they had to take this big leap of faith and take on a variety of things to bring the country back from its economic crisis. So they looked at, certainly, some forms of relief for the unemployed because a huge of amount of people in this country, the majority of the people in this country, were unemployed. We were just in this terrible depression. So they first tackled the economics , the bank problems. And in the first hundred days, he passed fifteen bills to deal with this problem. When you think of Congress moving that fast, it’s amazing. Among them were the Social Security Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority, dealing with the electrical problems and damming, controlling of the water. There’s just practically no aspect of our daily lives that they didn’t work toward fixing. I ran across a quotation that Winston Churchill said that Kathryn Flynn / 133 meeting FDR was like popping a cork on the first bottle of champagne . Another thing that Churchill said was, “A country that forgets its past has no future.” And that’s the thing I wrap up every speech with about the New Deal because the New Deal saved this country. I just can’t even imagine where we would be today because the things that were created as part of those projects , we’re still using today. Now seventy-three years old, those sewer systems and those water systems and our transportation systems—there are so many things that are getting old. But we are still using the courthouses, the city halls, the schools, the museums, the libraries , the parks. The CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, planted millions of trees. And the forests that we have in this country today in many cases weren’t there before. Many buildings in our national parks today were created by the CCC. One of the first things done in that first hundred days was to take advantage of two things that we were wasting, our young men...