Above: Florence Kerr, right, 1935. Photo by the Minneapolis Star, provided courtesy of Newspapers.com, and used here for educational, non-commercial purposes.
Florence Kerr (1890-1975) was an administrator in the WPA during the entire life of its existence and, at one point--as chief of the Women's and Professional Division (1939-1943)--oversaw the work of 400,000 workers on a wide variety of projects, like art, sewing, nursing, school lunches, and archaeology. After her stint in the WPA, she was the director of the "War Public Services Division" of the Federal Works Agency. In this capacity, she supervised public works expansion (schools, sewers, childcare, etc.) in communities all across the country that were becoming overwhelmed by new defense industries and new defense workers during World War II. After the war, she was an executive with Northwest Airlines, and the first vice president of the Woman's National Democratic Club in Washington, DC.
Florence Kerr is a forgotten New Dealer, but she shouldn't be. Her life's accomplishments are pretty extraordinary.
During an oral history interview in 1963, Kerr recalled Harry Hopkins and his departure from the WPA at the end of 1938:
"I missed Harry like everything because we didn't have inspiring leadership [after 1938]. We had directions, but we didn't have inspiring leadership... oh, Harry was a wonderful leader - just a wonderful leader. That kind of a wry funny way he had of saying things, you know, that had all kinds of punch, and he was so fearless in a man-to-man combat that they were afraid of him in a way. He was really quite magnificent."
Above: Left to Right - Ella G. Agnew, director of Virginia's WPA Women's and Professional Division; Izetta Jewell Miller, regional (i.e., multi-state) director of WPA's Women's and Professional Division; William Smith, Virginia's WPA administrator; and Florence Kerr, national director of the WPA's Women's and Professional Division. Kerr is showing a model that highlights various types of WPA work. Photo by The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia), 1940; provided courtesy of Newspapers.com and used here for educational, non-commercial purposes.
"To me, at least, the question of a WPA job for an unemployed and destitute musician, clerk, teacher, nurse or draftsman is more than a question of figures in the budget of a fiscal year. It is a question of what kind of civilization we have, what kind of civilization we want, what kind of civilization we are willing to struggle for and hand to our children. If this is indeed a dying civilization, if we have no hope for the future, if it is not worthwhile to make any effort, then what we are doing in our WPA projects has no significance. But if we believe in the future, if we have faith in democracy, if we are working together in the common cause of a better America, then our humblest WPA projects are at once an act of faith and a practical contribution to the cause that we serve."
--Florence Kerr, quoted in "Costs of Constructive Peace Work Less Than That of War, Says WPA Official," The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia), April 25, 1940, p. 6.
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