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Article Excerpt
On May 27, 1937, Alexander Fried, music critic for the San Francisco Examiner, reported on contention within the Federal Music Project (FMP), a small but highly visible part of the WPA's massive public works program of the 1930s. "Discord has ripped asunder the concord of sweet co-operation in California's WPA," Fried wrote, describing the firing of San Francisco supervisor Ernst Bacon by the program's state director, Harle Jervis. (1) Bacon, a respected composer of concert music, had headed the city's relief project from its inception in the fall of 1935.
Other dailies ran similar stories: "Bacon Asked to Quit in S.F. Federal Music Project Crisis," headlined the Chronicle. "Reinstate Him!" yelled an editorial in the News. (2) The media encouraged Bacon's resistance to Jervis, who was one of the country's few female state FMP directors. An unsigned editorial in the weekly Argonaut spouted misogynist venom, revealing just one subtext of the controversy. Bacon had been "dismissed from his position by one of these political women who have come to the front since the suffrage was conferred upon them, one of these political women who, day by day, in every way, are causing intelligent persons to lose faith in American democracy." (3) The Argonaut also was defending one of its own: Bacon had earlier served as its music columnist for fourteen months.
Locked out of his office by Jervis's order, Bacon nevertheless pulled together a series of accusations against her, which he sent to everyone from local reporters to Eleanor Roosevelt. He charged that Jervis was trying to wrest artistic control from him, had little experience as either administrator or musician, aimed to impose business practices and personnel from Los Angeles on San Francisco, favored foreign-born musicians, prioritized budgets over artistry and relief, spent money recklessly, and fired musicians of quality in favor of efficient bureaucrats. He demanded an immediate, independent investigation.
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The response from project officials was, by comparison, muted. Jervis merely noted Bacon's "administrative inefficiency." She told Fried, "I don't want to issue statements hurtful to Mr. Bacon. Please say we just didn't agree. I tried to work with him. I couldn't. I asked him to resign. He wouldn't. So I released him." (4) Jervis's supervisor, FMP national director Nikolai Sokoloff, issued a similarly vague response through his own supervisor, Ellen Woodward. Bacon's "ability as a musician has not been questioned," wrote Woodward in answer to many inquiries. "The State Director was [simply] acting in the best interests of the efficient operation of the Project." (5)
Despite Fried's perception of "sweet cooperation," California's FMP operation had actually been dissonant for quite some time. In fact, when Bacon was first appointed, Sokoloff's assistant had reported that he was "hard to advise." (6) The local struggle between Bacon and Jervis looms larger than the conflict between two strong-willed individuals, however. It raises questions about the overall objectives and operation of the FMP and highlights fundamental concerns that plagued the federal government's first (and largest) leap into formal support of the arts--including lack of organizational models, decisions about who and what type of music should receive federal subsidy, competing goals of unemployment relief and artistic excellence, cultural bias, and clashes with the musicians' union over pay rates, working hours, and the hiring of nonrelief professionals. In fact, a project that began as a way to give hope, self-respect, and a modest living to a desperate population at times seemed in danger of sinking under the weight of its own internal conflicts.
Notwithstanding these formidable obstacles, the FMP did achieve its basic goals: putting unemployed musicians to work and providing a great deal of music to large, new audiences. It also gave many performers and composers the professional experience they would use (to the benefit of us all) after 1945. Reorganized after 1939 (renamed the WPA Music Program with authority transferred, for the most part, to the states), the project remained active for another three years. Profiting from earlier administrative blunders, it later served as a useful model for establishing the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. This essay uses the San Francisco FMP as a case study to illuminate the tensions and achievements, failures and successes of an ambitious program that attempted for a short but intense period to bring federal support to musical endeavor. (7)
THE FMP AND ITS PRECURSORS
Established in the summer of 1935 and funded in early September, the Federal Music Project constituted one of four arts programs within the WPA grouped under Federal Project Number One (known simply as Federal One). The others were the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Art Project, and the Federal Writers' Project. The WPA, as the focal point of Roosevelt's New Deal, took shape only after a series of less-aggressive employment programs had proven woefully inadequate. By the mid-1930s, local entities could no longer meet their traditional responsibility to provide a dole for impoverished families. Consequently, such subsistence programs were superseded by national projects designed to give useful work, and therefore dignity, to the unemployed. An alphabet soup of agencies had preceded the WPA: FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration, from May 1933 to the end of 1935), CWA (Civil Works Administration, December 1933-March 1934), and, in California, SERA (State Emergency Relief Administration, March 1933-August 1935). (8)
The short-lived CWA was largely a construction program, but limited arts support was possible locally through its recreation and education wings. In January 1934, for example, Kajetan Attl, harpist with the San Francisco Symphony, secured a CWA appropriation to engage fifty union musicians for seven weeks. Serving as director without remuneration, he formed an orchestra that played free concerts throughout the city. (9) This appropriation did little to remedy the huge unemployment problem, however. In February 1934, the president of San Francisco's Local 6 wrote that a thousand musicians--40 percent of the union's membership--were unable to find work? (10)
By May 1934, a larger program run by the union through SERA offered additional jobs: a hundred musicians were employed by June and nearly double that number by October. SERA's San Francisco units included an orchestra (Attl); a musical theater group (Bacon); a chorus (directed by Giulio Silva); a thirty-six-piece concert band (under Phil Sapiro); and an eighteen-member "novelty" orchestra (i.e., dance band). (11) Tension within the musical community was evident at the outset. Bacon, who had moved to San Francisco in 1927 and established a strong reputation as a composer and a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory, had submitted his own SERA proposal in collaboration with Venetian-born conductor Gastone Usigli. (12) However, union control of the SERA program meant that Attl landed the most desirable assignment, that of orchestral director. Bacon, who was nonunion, swallowed his pride at being assigned a subsidiary role, but attempted nevertheless to establish a musical theater company. He held auditions and submitted qualified names, but was frustrated when only a handful of those he selected were approved. Two months after SERA's inception, he resigned, citing not only his "disappointment and humiliation," but also his support for the project's aims and his high regard for choral director Giulio Silva. (13)
Silva had come to San Francisco from Parma, Italy, in 1926 to head the vocal program at the San Francisco Conservatory. Though developing his SERA chorus involved bureaucratic difficulties "comparable to walking on stilts through a mud flat," (14) he managed to build the ensemble from eleven members to more than a hundred in the first year. Few of them had managed to find outside employment by the time the FMP was organized in 1935.
By avoiding professionalism in its performances, the SERA project circumvented one of the major pitfalls that later beset the FMP: competition with private organizations. SERA ensembles did not strive for professionalism. "Our best musicians, thank goodness, manage to make a living without welfare aid," wrote Fried, commending the program while noting that Attl's orchestra "did not pretend to first-rate symphonic standards." (15) Fried's comment was a relatively polite affirmation of SERA's low artistic quality. Musicians in these ensembles (which performed mostly at schools, army bases, and hospitals) were paid one dollar an hour; work was distributed according to the number of the musician's dependents. Rehearsals were not funded, further assuring poor performance.
THE SAN FRANCISCO FMP: ORGANIZATION AND MAJOR PLAYERS
Early in September 1935, FMP national director Nikolai Sokoloff arrived in San Francisco to confer with California officials on setting up the newly authorized project. (16) Although he had lived in Cleveland and New York for seventeen years, Sokoloff had experienced San Francisco's explosive musical politics--and its history of competition between semiprofessional and professional orchestras--through a bruising conflict two decades earlier. In 1915, he had moved to the city and become embroiled in the San Francisco Symphony's highly charged search for a new conductor. Local patron Cecilia Casserly offered to underwrite the conductor's fee if the symphony hired Sokoloff, (17) but instead its board chose the more experienced Alfred Hertz, who had conducted the German repertoire at New York's Metropolitan Opera for more than a dozen years. The following year, Sokoloff became the director of the semiprofessional People's Philharmonic, whose board chose to compete with, rather than supplement, the symphony. (18) The new arrangement was short lived, however, for the People's Philharmonic collapsed in July 1917 after the symphony instituted annual contracts requiring players to decline competing engagements during its season.
In the same year, Sokoloff left San Francisco, though he managed to maintain a cordial relationship with Hertz. In 1918, he founded the Cleveland Orchestra and directed it through the 1932-33 season. His community outreach work there drew the attention of the National Federation of Music Clubs, a major player in the establishment of the FMP. Sokoloff's appointment as FMP national director in July 1935 thrust him into a highly political position and one in which he exerted a major influence on American concert life. When he assembled his all-star national advisory board that fall, he included among its twenty-five members his former rival Alfred Hertz, who had retired in 1930. (19)
Considering Bacon's work in developing a SERA proposal and his strong reputation as a composer and pianist, it is hardly surprising that Sokoloff tapped him as San Francisco supervisor in September 1935. Born in Chicago, Bacon had taught piano at the Eastman School in Rochester, New York, and had served as assistant conductor of the Rochester American Opera Company. He came to San Francisco in part to study with composer Ernest Bloch, who headed the San Francisco Conservatory from 1925 to 1930, but also (as he later recalled) simply because he and his first wife fell in love with the city after a visit. (20) San Francisco welcomed Bacon with open arms. When his Symphony in D Minor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, the press heralded him as a native son.
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Sokoloff also honored the work of Kajetan Attl by appointing him regional director for northern California and six northwestern states. Attl had no objection to supervising Bacon, but resisted the idea that Bacon serve as both San Francisco supervisor and orchestra conductor. As supervisor, Attl suggested...
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