Book examines the New Deal’s effects on South Florida
Book examines the New Deal’s effects on South Florida
By MIKE WALKER
"The New Deal in South Florida : Design, Policy, and Community Building, 1933-1940"
edited by John A. Stuart & John F. Stack, Jr.
Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2008
The New Deal was one of the most innovative and complex Federal programs ever designed and left a lasting impression on the landscape of the United States long after the Great Depression
years. President Franklin Roosevelt and other planners of the New Deal saw it as a response both to poverty and to the new directions taken by America as the nation moved into a modern age and its more rural and remote areas were often slow in catching up.
Places where electricity was rare or water supplies were low or where housing had not been able to meet the needs of workers were often the first to gain the attention of the Works Progress Administration projects while cities that demonstrated their own needs for increased utility services, post offices, and other civic devices also were a focus of the WPA. Between the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal employed thousands who otherwise would not have had jobs during the Great Depression while improving much of the landscape of America. Though not without their critics, these programs were central to the evolution of America into the nation she is today.
"The New Deal in South Florida" is a most interesting book: a collection of studies and essays by experts on both the political and design-oriented aspects of New Deal era projects and edited by both a professor of political science and a professor of architecture, this book seeks to examine how the New Deal affected South Florida both in terms of socio-political impact and architectural legacies. While this approach may seem odd, it is in fact a wise mechanism for investigating the New Deal's influence on all levels while also making room to explore the beautiful and sleek Art Deco architecture of the Miami area built at the time. The political aspects of vast differences in wealth in the greater Miami area and the need to address issues such as health care and public housing are concerns that still are germane to Miami's socio-political status today. In example, John Stuat's chapter "Liberty Square: Florida's First Public Housing Project" examines the high challenge of creating affordable housing that also met with good social values and was of innovative architectural design. As the Great Depression placed many Americans in dire straits, artists, architects, and other creative types also found themselves without work and many who are now regarded as leaders of their time worked in some capacity for the WPA. The stunning, modern, murals found in post offices and government buildings of the period were an example of the emphasis placed on the visual arts and also the ability of the WPA to locate serious talent for its projects.
South Florida prior to the 1930s had evolved from a no man's land to a vacation paradise for the wealthy but not without a lot of serious and interesting gaps in between. From Julia Tuttle's efforts to bring Henry Flagler and his railroad through Miami to Flagler's own grand designs to connect the Florida Keys via rail in the 1930s, the scions of industry ruled South Florida until they too ran out of funds. Some of the greatest architects of the era such as L. Murray Dixon built some of the grandest hotels in the nation on Miami's South Beach - these hotels for the most part still stand today and most have been renovated to their previous glory and serve as posh resorts once more. The sharp contrast between architectural icons such as Dixon's hotels and the lives of sharecroppers to the south at Homestead and to the northwest at Belle Glade denotes the social complexity of this era. Zora Neale Hurston's seminal novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was written and set in this area and captured much of the Black experience during these times; Hurston herself was a major force during the period in literature and journalism and represented a new class of educated, highly-literate, African Americans in a changing nation.
Despite the leaps in progress some would claim as the results of the New Deal, we can still locate poverty and its ills in places like Belle Glade and Clewiston and in fact, the agricultural industries of these locales appear in many ways to have changed little since the 1930s. "The New Deal in South Florida" helps us understand why such is the case as it deals with the complicated labor and industrial issues faced by a changing Florida and the political mechanisms of the New Deal to attend to such concerns. As Florida had during the 1930s a growing population yet was still very rural and had a shorter history as a state than many other eastern states (and a lot less investment in public infrastructure), in many ways it was the ideal place to experiment with the application of New Deal programs. In Stuart's chapter "Constructing Identity", Stuart, the architecture professor, writes up a masterful account of how the economic and political forces in South Florida pushed together for the need for new, innovative, architecture and how needs such as those for schools presented new and perhaps unexpected challenges to planners and designers. A telling aspect of this situation was the work of Lorena Hickok, a journalist who was employed to document the advanced status of Miami and all its new construction yet who often betrayed her own misgivings about the role tourism in Miami via her writing. Some of Hickok's comments on northern drivers on the streets of Miami read as if they could have been written just yesterday instead of in the 1930s.
Marianne Lamonaca's chapter on murals of the era in South Florida post offices and government buildings is really a gem of writing about both the artistic and political concerns involved in such public works of art. Lamonaca's essay traces the desire of mural planners and artists to represent as varied aspects of Floridian life as rural mailmen to Seminole lore and how in doing so, marginal aspects of Florida were at once moved into the public eye but in such a way that added romance and stereotypes to their conception. The power of Lamonaca's approach is that she has unearthed many of the debates over funding and other issues that went on behind the scenes of the expansive murals we have today. Likewise, Stuart's work on hotel and other construction projects in Miami showcases not only the Art Deco aesthetics of the time but how wealth was represented by architecture and how in a time of general economic agency fading fast, these buildings met with both awe and sometimes scorn.
The entire volume in fact is composed of writing along the lines and caliber of Stuart's and Lamonaca's: while written by leading scholars and involving detailed research and an academic approach, "The New Deal in South Florida" is a book that is easy to read and should appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of modern Florida. Unlike many niche works of historiography, this book seems aimed at both a specialist readership and a general one. The authors and editors have done a fine job of seeing that each chapter contributes something unique to the overall picture and also that these chapters do not really cover the same aspects as each other. Moreover, the editors have ensured that ample illustrations including many new photographs taken by the authors (Stuart's own photos are an exceptional contribution) were included to help explain the visual nature of the design aesthetics concerned.
Overall, "The New Deal in South Florida" is an astoundingly varied and comprehensive contribution to the literature on the New Deal era, the WPA, and associated labor and social concerns. It is also a rare look at how the New Deal was a single and strong instrument for building South Florida as we know it today and how much of the unique architecture and visual arts of this region had their collective roots in the New Deal and its programs. The editors and the University Press of Florida took something of a chance in bringing together arts historical scholarship with sociopolitical concerns but it was a chance that really has paid off in this book. "The New Deal in South Florida" should find a wide readership with those interested in Florida
and its modern history.
MIKE WALKER is a writer and journalist who lives in Gainesville, Florida. He writes about natural and social history for this and other news media. He may be contacted via email at: cloudrace@prontomail.com
