Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/103

Chapter Four The American Airlines stunt typified the aggressive promotional activities of the Alamogordo business community, from which had come Tom Charles and the monument itself. In 1940 the chamber initiated another campaign to upgrade the status of White Sands from a monument to a more-prestigious (and better-funded) national park. Nationwide publicity had resulted from a visit to the dunes in December 1939 by Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Albuquerque resident whose praise for White Sands, and for Johnwill Faris' hospitality, reached millions of readers. In March 1940, the chamber petitioned U.S. Representative John J. Dempsey to upgrade the facilities at White Sands, especially its need for more drinking water. Joseph Bursey, state tourism director, and local columnists echoed these sentiments, and circulated a rumor that the New Mexico congressional delegation would introduce a bill to change the status of White Sands. Faris himself became excited at this prospect, as he hoped that the move would elevate his position (and salary). The SWNM superintendent believed that this rumor was nothing more than standard fare from zealous local boosters, but Hugh Miller did praise Faris and his monument staff by saying: "You have a most promising area both from the standpoint of its merit as a national attraction and from the standpoint of revenue which is becoming an increasing factor of influence with the Bureau of the Budget."

Johnwill Faris realized soon thereafter that the "park status" stories had ensnared him, as Tom Charles had warned during the 1938 WPA scandals. At the close of the New Deal, a conservative Congress had reduced spending on the many public works projects that had assisted White Sands with its infrastructure. This also reduced political involvement in the inner workings of the NPS, although conditions in southern New Mexico bucked national trends. The state WPA office inventoried the labor force at White Sands in 1940, finding that two-thirds of the contract workers were Hispanic. These employees stayed on the payroll longer than the federal limit of eighteen months, prompting Hillory Tolson, director of the NPS' Santa Fe regional office, to warn J.J. Connelly, state WPA administrator, that the park service would run out of money for its White Sands construction well before the close of the 1940 fiscal year.

Political interference of a more direct nature involved the persistence of fired WPA carpenter Michael Reardon to regain his job and his reputation. Reardon employed an Albuquerque lawyer, Robert H. LaFollette, who pressed the park service to reinvestigate the WPA "scandal." LaFollette (not identified as a relative of the progressive Wisconsin senator of the same name) believed that White Sands officials had reduced WPA wages arbitrarily, and that Reardon had been punished for testifying to that