Progress and Creativity during the Great Depression

A number of men and women worked here at the Field as part of a unique arrangement during the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency created to employ people on public works projects during the Great Depression. Though you might associate WPA projects with things like building roads and other public infrastructure, it encompassed a variety of jobs based on workers’ backgrounds and skills.

The Museum’s WPA employment force once numbered over 200 people, and eventually, a few were hired on a permanent basis after the program’s official end on July 1, 1940. Some notable examples include: 

Betty Willis, a WPA museum anthropologist, assisted curators with identifying and cataloging the Anthropology Department’s collections. She also conducted research on southwestern U.S. pottery and co-authored the publication Anasazi Painted Pottery in the Field Museum of Natural History.

Another was renowned artist Julius Moessel, whose 18 murals entitled "The Story of Food Plants," are still on display as part of the Plants of the World exhibition on the second floor of the museum.

Taxidermist Frank Gino prepared casts as well as restorations of extinct and fossil birds as part of his work for the Museum, and artist and engraver John Conrad Hansen rendered hundreds of beautiful and accurate scientific illustrations of animals for the Geology Department.

In addition, WPA workers at the Museum carried out scientific research projects and provided clerical work and manual labor. All of the scientific divisions benefited from the large numbers of relief employees assigned to tasks like cataloging, typing manuscript records, filing, cleaning specimens, and mounting photographs. Overall, our Division of Printing was one of the largest employers of WPA skilled labor at the Museum.

As described by Director Stephen C. Simms in the February 1937 issue of Field Museum News, "It should be distinctly understood that this employment of relief workers has been exclusively on the accomplishment of objectives which would not and could not have been undertaken if these people had not been available."

And so, counterintuitively, some museums during this time—including the Field Museum—entered a period of enhanced productivity in the 1930s despite the state of the economy and due to the talented WPA workforce.

References

Anonymous. “This Work Pays Your Community Week,” a nationwide celebration of WPA projects from May 20-25, 1940, The Field Museum mounted a special exhibit showcasing the work of WPA workers at The Field. Field Museum Archives.

Alvey, Mark. "Rediscovering Julius Moessel: Chicago and The Field Museum's Master Muralist." In the Field v. 70 (May-June 1999): p. 2-5.

Brinkman, Paul. “John Conrad Hansen (1869-1952) and His Scientific Illustrations.” Archives of Natural History v. 45 no. 2 (2018): 233-244.

Nash, Stephen E. "The Great Depression Begets a Great Expansion: Field Museum Anthropology 1929-1941." In Shovel Ready: Archaeology and Roosevelt's New Deal for America, ed. Bernard Klaus Means, 67-88. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2013.