FDR created jobs by building things. His New Deal transformed America.

Blueprint America — with American RadioWorks on public radio — looks back at the Great Depression as America again undergoes hard times in the present day with the Great Recession. President Barack Obama has renewed some of FDR’s New Deal thinking — job creation by building.

FDR put people to work by investing in roads, bridges, dams, sewers, schools, hospitals and even ski jumps. The structures that made America the country we live in today.

We go back to some of these projects as a new generation looks forward to the hope of better times.

“Bridge to Somewhere” is an American RadioWorks production as a part of Blueprint America. Produced by Catherine Winter and edited by Mary Beth Kirchner; help from Scott Hunter. The American RadioWorks team includes Kate Moos, Ochen Kaylan, Craig Thorson, Marc Sanchez, Ellen Guettler, Emily Hanford, Suzanne Pekow, and Stephen Smith.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to put people to work by building roads, bridges, dams, sewers, schools, hospitals and even ski jumps. The structures that New Deal agencies built transformed America.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Bridge to Somewhere” is an American RadioWorks production as a part of Blueprint America. Produced by Catherine Winter and edited by Mary Beth Kirchner; help from Scott Hunter. The American RadioWorks team includes Kate Moos, Ochen Kaylan, Craig Thorson, Marc Sanchez, Ellen Guettler, Emily Hanford, Suzanne Pekow, and Stephen Smith.

Blueprint America — with American RadioWorks on public radio — looks at the new New Deal: President Barack Obama wants to create jobs by building infrastructure, but so did another president.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to put people to work by building roads, bridges, dams, sewers, schools, hospitals and even ski jumps. The structures that New Deal agencies built transformed America. ]]> http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/featured/the-new-new-deal-overview/688/feed/ 0 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/profiles-from-the-recession/report-bridge-to-somewhere-civilian-conservation-corp/664/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/profiles-from-the-recession/report-bridge-to-somewhere-civilian-conservation-corp/664/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:38:51 +0000 tom mcnamara http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/?p=664

CCC workers constructing a road, 1933.Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum

If you’ve been to a national or state park, chances are you’ve seen something built by the Civilian Conservation Corps: a wall, a road, a trail, a picnic shelter, a set of steps to a waterfall.

Most of these monuments to the CCC are unmarked. Today, people use them for fun, but they were built by young men who were desperate for work.

The CCC began in the depth of the Great Depression, in 1933. At the time, a quarter of American workers could not find jobs. Many of those who did have jobs did not have fulltime work. People lined up on the street to get bread or soup. Charities were overwhelmed.

Back then, there was no federal welfare and no social security. Local governments provided some help to needy people, but it was meager at best, and they could not begin to keep up with the need as the economy spiraled downward.

In that era, it was assumed that if you were out of work it was your own fault. But as unemployment kept rising, it became clear that for thousands of people, idleness was not a moral failing. They were not working because there were no jobs.

The country’s new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, proposed a dramatic plan. The government would hire thousands of young men and create jobs for them in parks and forests.

Roosevelt suggested the plan the day he took office, in his 1933 inaugural address:

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

“Direct recruiting by the government” was a radical idea. To many people, it smacked of socialism. But Roosevelt insisted that the government had to do something, and he said it would be better to hire people to do useful work than to give them handouts.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was Roosevelt’s own idea. He sketched out a plan for its structure on a notepad on inauguration day. The CCC addressed two of his pet concerns: fighting unemployment, and conservation.

CCC Camps BR-88,89 and 90 pouring concrete walls and top slab in culvert Deschutes Project, Oregon. 1941 National Archives

A few weeks into his presidency, Roosevelt talked about the new Civilian Conservation Corps in a radio address to the country, his second “fireside chat.”

[W]e are giving opportunity of employment to one-quarter of a million of the unemployed, especially the young men who have dependents, to go into the forestry and flood prevention work. This is a big task because it means feeding, clothing and caring for nearly twice as many men as we have in the regular army itself. In creating this civilian conservation corps we are killing two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and second, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress.

It was an audacious plan. Most of the young men the program aimed to help were city boys. They’d never wielded an ax or a crosscut saw. But Roosevelt proposed to send them into the woods to clear trails, fight forest fires, plant trees, and build roads.

Some of his own cabinet members had doubts about the idea of gathering large groups of unemployed city boys. And some people in the rural areas that would receive the recruits were nervous about the plan. Would these young men bring crime to the countryside, or try to date their daughters?

But the CCC wound up earning wide public support.

CCC boys on a construction site. Library of Congress

Hundreds of thousands of young men signed up. By mid-summer of 1933, just a few months into the program, more than a quarter of a million young men were living in CCC camps. The program accepted unemployed, unmarried young men between 18 and 25 years old (later, the age limit was expanded to 17-28), but most of the enrollees were under 20. They called themselves “CCC boys,” and so did everyone else.

The CCC boys got $30 a month; $25 of their pay was sent directly to their families, leaving them with just $5 to spend on movies in town, or gambling in camp.

They lived in tarpaper barracks and ate simple food, but for some of them, it was the first time in years that they’d had three square meals a day. In spite of doing hard manual labor, they gained weight. Expert masons and carpenters taught them new skills. At night, the boys could take classes. Some of them learned to read and write.

The Roosevelt administration published a booklet in 1938 that touted the achievements of the corps. It said the CCC had taken young men from “the congested parts of our cities,” and in some cases saved them from lives of crime:

Losing confidence in themselves over inability to find work, and beaten down at an age when they should normally be getting a start in life, these young people presented a problem of the first magnitude. The worst danger was that many of them would become so embittered and discouraged they would never be able to rehabilitate themselves.

After the CCC’s first year of operation, the booklet went on, “a remarkable amount of work had been done despite the fact that the majority of CCC enrollees were inexperienced and a great many even wholly ignorant of the fundamentals of the work they were doing.” That first year’s accomplishments included planting 98,000,000 seedlings, putting up 15,000 miles of telephone lines, building 25,000 miles of “truck trails” and spending 687,000 man-days firefighting.

Historian Richard Kirkendall says the program did more than simply provide jobs. It also “took young people who would otherwise have been standing around on street corners, and maybe thinking bad thoughts. You know, governments can be overturned. Roosevelt was well aware of that. And he thought in terms of programs like that as way of stabilizing things as well as promoting recovery.”

The CCC was the first and most popular of FDR’s programs to put Americans back to work. And it left a vast infrastructure that Americans still use every day. CCC boys didn’t only build trails and ranger’s cabins in parks; they also built larger things, such as dams, bridges and flood-control projects.

In some parts of the country, the infrastructure the CCC created still supports important economic engines. In Vermont, for example, skiing draws hundreds of thousands of tourists to the state every winter. The ski industry was created by the CCC.

By the time the Civilian Conservation Corps shut down in 1942, more than three million men had enrolled. Many of them went on to careers using skills they had learned in the camps. Former member Lanyard Benoit went on to do carpentry and road work he learned in the CCC. Former member Emerson Baker learned map-making in the CCC, and made a career of it. And former member Herb Hunt, after learning military discipline in a CCC camp, moved on to a career in the Army.

Thousands of CCC boys went on to be soldiers. When the United States entered World War II, the camps emptied out and the boys traded in their CCC clothes for military uniforms. The program was finished.

Among the CCC boys who are still alive today, men in their 80s and 90s, it’s remarkable how fondly they remember the experience. CCC boys still get together at alumni meetings around the country.

Former member Emerson Baker says when he meets another CCC boy, they’re instantly friends.

“We have a basis of commonality that everybody doesn’t have,” Baker says. “Because we all started out with nothing and became something.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Bridge to Somewhere” is an American RadioWorks production as a part of Blueprint America. Produced by Catherine Winter and edited by Mary Beth Kirchner; help from Scott Hunter. The American RadioWorks team includes Kate Moos, Ochen Kaylan, Craig Thorson, Marc Sanchez, Ellen Guettler, Emily Hanford, Suzanne Pekow, and Stephen Smith.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was the first and most popular New Deal program. Millions of young men who could not find work signed up to be part of Roosevelt’s “forest army.” They planted trees, fought forest fires, and built trails and buildings we still use today. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2009/06/wpacccthumb200×100.jpg ]]>

A 1939 survey asked Americans to name the best and worst things President Roosevelt had done. The top

A WPA sewing shop in New York city. Circa late 1930s. National Archives

answer to both questions was the WPA.

The WPA – the Works Progress Administration – was a federal program meant to provide jobs to people who could not find work. Under the WPA, the government paid people to sew clothes, paint murals, can vegetables, cook school lunches, and build everything from hospitals and schools to sidewalks and swimming pools.

It was an idea born of desperation. For two years, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration had been trying to fight the Depression. But various projects meant to provide jobs and stimulate the economy still hadn’t lifted the country out of its economic doldrums.

In 1935, FDR proclaimed that the country was on an “unmistakable march toward recovery.” He pointed out that “for the first time in five years the relief rolls have declined instead of increased during the winter months.”

Still, he acknowledged, “while business and industry are definitely better, our relief rolls are… too large.”

The New Dealers had tried various programs to attack unemployment. They had provided work for hundreds of thousands of jobless young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps. They had launched a big program to build public works such as bridges and dams, the Public Works Agency, hoping to stimulate the construction business and provide jobs. But the PWA’s big projects were slow to get started. It wasn’t employing people fast enough.

The new weapon FDR proposed in the fight against “enforced idleness” was the WPA. It would do smaller projects that could be set up quickly and put people to work right away.

It was immediately controversial.

“It seemed like socialism,” says historian Lorraine McConaghy, from the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. “Many people thought Roosevelt was a dangerous person with dangerous ideas.”

In fact, the idea of a massive government program to hire unemployed people gave Roosevelt himself pause. Many historians argue that he was at heart a fiscal conservative, and he didn’t want to plunge the government into debt. But it seemed to him that the government had to do something.

“The country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” he said in an address at Oglethorpe University. “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

So why not simply hand money out to people? Why a jobs program?

Roosevelt later wrote: “Providing useful work is superior to any and every kind of dole.”

“A lot of people would’ve preferred the dole because it was cheaper,” says sociologist Robert Leighninger. But Roosevelt and some of his advisers “were great believers in the dignity of labor and the insidious sapping of self-respect that came when you were on the dole. And they were also concerned that people would lose their skills and that they would get morose and beat their children, and so forth. And the idea was to give them back their self-respect, give them honest work to do.”

The approach road and rail fence leading to Fort Loudon, Tenn., built by the WPA in 1938. National Archives.

Beginning in 1935, millions of Americans took jobs with the WPA. They launched a huge variety of projects, from tiny to enormous. WPA workers painted murals on post office walls. They brought books to rural areas and ran toy lending libraries for children. They presented plays and wrote music. They worked on archeological digs. They supervised children at nursery schools.

But most WPA workers built things.

Some of the WPA structures are famous: LaGuardia airport; the Timberline Lodge in Oregon; the San Antonio Riverwalk. But most are more humble.

The WPA built or improved 651,000 miles of roads, 19,700 miles of water mains and 500 water treatment plants. Workers built 24,000 miles of sidewalks; 12,800 playgrounds; 24,000 miles of storm and sewer lines; 1200 airport buildings; 226 hospitals; more than 5,900 schools, and more than two million privies.

From the start, critics called many of the projects make-work. The word “boondoggle” made its debut, in the sense of useless work, during the New Deal era. The New York Sun, a conservative paper, ran a column featuring “today’s boondoggle,” making fun of what it deemed silly projects.

Historian Lorraine McConaghy says political cartoons at the time showed “shovel-leaners.” The implication was “that these were not real jobs, these were not real needs, this was socialism. And these public works were bogus projects where you could go out and see people smoking cigarettes and leaning on their shovels.”

Many Americans criticized boondoggles they’d heard about in other places, says sociologist Robert Leighninger. But he says people tended to be happy about the WPA projects that were being built in their own communities.

“One journalist said he was constantly looking for a real boondoggle, but was always told it was in the next county,” Leighninger says with a laugh. “And when he’d get there, he was told it was one in the county further on.”

Many historians say that the benefits of some WPA projects were not evident until the United States entered World War II. Infrastructure built by the WPA helped defense industries. WPA roads and airports allowed troops to move more efficiently.

There is widespread agreement that the WPA – that the New Deal itself – did not end the Depression; the war did. But the WPA did ease the suffering of millions of people. It employed more than eight million Americans. According to the government’s final report on the WPA, “[D]uring the eight years in which the program was in operation nearly one-fourth of all families in the United States were dependent on WPA wages for their support.”

And historians speculate about what might have happened had there not been a WPA. They point out that public officials were worried about what might befall the country if too many people went jobless for too long.

“People sitting around idle were presumably prey to social movements that weren’t very constructive,” says Leighninger. “And indeed there were very serious people who had very serious concerns about some kind of revolution.”

Jason Scott Smith, history professor at the University of New Mexico, argues that New Deal programs helped prevent Americans from turning to “extreme political approaches.”

“It’s worth noting that during the Great Depression, America elects FDR and continues to elect him, while Germany gets Hitler,” Smith says. Smith points out that in other parts of the world, and at other times in history, economic troubles have led people “to turn to extreme solutions. This was a possibility in the United States, and the New Deal did a great deal of work to keep this from happening. It’s always hard to measure things by what didn’t happen … but this should be counted in the New Deal’s favor on the balance sheet of history.”

The WPA was only one of many New Deal programs, and it lasted only eight years. But somehow it is the best remembered. In fact, people often credit the WPA for building things that were actually built by other agencies.

Perhaps the WPA stays foremost in people’s minds because it was so controversial, or because it produced its own advertising campaign: radio programs and posters touting its achievements, along with films such as “We Work Again” and “Work Pays America.”

Or maybe it’s because it touched so many lives. The WPA provided a wage to live on for millions of families. It produced plays and symphonies people went to see. It built schools and hospitals and playgrounds that people are still using today. And its art and architecture are all around us.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Bridge to Somewhere” is an American RadioWorks production as a part of Blueprint America. Produced by Catherine Winter and edited by Mary Beth Kirchner; help from Scott Hunter. The American RadioWorks team includes Kate Moos, Ochen Kaylan, Craig Thorson, Marc Sanchez, Ellen Guettler, Emily Hanford, Suzanne Pekow, and Stephen Smith.

Many people believe the Triborough Bridge in New York was built by the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. But it wasn’t. It was built by the PWA, the Public Works Administration.

The confusion is easy to understand, given the similar abbreviations of the two New Deal programs. But somehow it’s the WPA that gets all the fame. The PWA seems to have disappeared from Americans’ collective memory, even though its structures are all around us, and some of them are enormous.

Aerial view of the construction of the Triborough Bridge, New York. 1939. Courtesy Library of Congress.

PWA workers built the state capitol building in Oregon, the highway linking the Florida Keys to the mainland United States, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, D.C., the city hall in Kansas City, Outer Drive Bridge in Chicago, the Ellis Island Ferry Building, Washington National Airport and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state.

They built thousands of miles of roads, hundreds of sewage disposal plants, and thousands of schools. They built or improved hundreds of airports.

These PWA projects were meant to create a useful and sometimes beautiful infrastructure for Americans to use, but the PWA’s main purpose was to help the country climb out of the Great Depression.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed legislation authorizing the PWA on June 6, 1933, during his first 100 days in office.

Roosevelt and his advisers hoped that by building public works, the PWA would stimulate the construction industry and put people back to work. As a government report said in 1939:

Here was a country with a great and growing need for more schools, more highways, more bridges, more waterworks, more services of all kinds. Here was an army of men willing and able to build them. Here was industry hungry for orders for the needed materials. The idea was to bring all of them together. The job would have to be done some time, why not now?

The PWA was not a work-relief program, like the WPA, which was created two years later. People working on PWA projects didn’t have to be on relief, but the program was meant to help reduce the relief rolls.

Roosevelt said repeatedly that getting people to work was better than giving them handouts.

“The dignity of work sounds trite, but if you read newspapers in the 1930s, everyone talked about that,” says Lorraine McConaghy of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. “They missed a paycheck, but they [also] missed feeling useful.”

The PWA solicited proposals for projects from around the country, and it received some doozies. “One was a rocket to the moon,” says sociologist Robert Leighninger, author of Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal.

“There was the Kansas preacher who thought that this PWA was a program where he could apply for bibles for his community. He didn’t want to build anything, just wanted to spread out bibles. There was a mayor who thought maybe his office could be redecorated with PWA money.”

Workers carry bricks to the PWA construction site of Teaneck High School in New Jersey.Courtesy Library of Congress.

And one applicant suggested building a moving sidewalk across the country.

But Leighninger says most proposals weren’t silly. “Most of them were solid projects like water works and schools, parks and police offices and city halls,” he says.

Some of the projects would be built by the federal government alone, and others were done in partnership with local governments.

The PWA was criticized for being too slow to get started. Part of the problem was that large public works projects require planning before shovels can go into the dirt. And part of the problem was that the program’s director, Harold Ickes, was so scrupulous about vetting the proposals. Leighninger tells the story of Ickes inserting passages of Alice in Wonderland into a proposal, to see whether his staff would read it thoroughly enough to notice. They didn’t, and he let them have it.

PWA projects did not immediately turn the economy around, so Roosevelt turned to other programs, such as the Civil Works Administration, followed by the Works Progress Administration; these programs could do smaller projects that were quicker to set up.

The PWA issued a report in 1939, titled “America Builds,” arguing that the PWA had in fact stimulated the economy. By then it had built thousands of projects, spending billions of dollars on materials and wages. The report estimates that PWA projects used more than one billion man-hours – 1,714,797,910, to be exact. The report said that wages paid on those projects were plowed back into the economy many times over:

A worker gets a PWA job. He receives his first pay envelope. He needs a suit of clothes, so he spends a part of his pay at the clothier. The clothing dealer takes part of the money and pays the jobber. The jobber takes part of the money and pays his manufacturer. The manufacturer pays his workers and buys more cloth from the mill. The mill owner, in turn, takes part of the money and buys wool and cotton, and perhaps more machinery, and so on.

In fact, the report argued that the PWA’s success provided evidence that governments should undertake public works during economic bad times to stabilize the economy.

Historians and economists differ on how much effect the New Deal building programs actually had on the economy. The building programs “didn’t bring the Depression to an end, but they reduced the magnitude of it and enabled people to survive who would have had an impossible or difficult time surviving without them,” says Richard Kirkendall, emeritus history professor at the University of Washington.

Breaking ground on a PWA construction project in Washington D.C. 1933. Courtesy National Archives.

Kirkendall and many other historians also argue that the infrastructure built by agencies like the PWA was essential to the Allied victory in World War II. PWA dams provided electricity to power war plants; its roads and airports enabled troops and goods to move efficiently. The PWA contributed directly to the military, too. It built aircraft carriers, submarines, and military planes.

Many historians argue that the New Deal jobs programs helped preserve capitalism at a volatile time in history.

“It often seemed to me the possibility of some kind of a revolution was there, and these programs were politically significant as well as helpful to individuals and families,” says Kirkendall. “Fascist ideas were circulating in America at the time, as well as socialist. We could have moved in a quite different direction, and I think those programs were helpful in preventing us from moving in a totalitarian direction of some sort.”

After the war, the infrastructure left by the building programs contributed to post-war prosperity, says Jason Scott Smith, history professor at the University of New Mexico and author of New Deal Liberalism.

“This investment in America’s infrastructure is what helps make possible a national marketplace after the end of World War II, connecting regions, building hundreds of airports, building thousands of miles of roads, bridges, sewer systems, you name it,” Smith says.

Smith points out that Americans are still using that infrastructure today, both the huge things, such as bridges and dams, and the smaller things, such as schools and sidewalks, usually with no idea that they were built by the PWA.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Bridge to Somewhere” is an American RadioWorks production as a part of Blueprint America. Produced by Catherine Winter and edited by Mary Beth Kirchner; help from Scott Hunter. The American RadioWorks team includes Kate Moos, Ochen Kaylan, Craig Thorson, Marc Sanchez, Ellen Guettler, Emily Hanford, Suzanne Pekow, and Stephen Smith.