Much has been made of the similarities between today’s economic downturn and The Great Depression. Pundits have, for example, labeled the current era “The Great Recession.” And the facts seem to bear that out. Fifty-five percent of Americans in the workforce have lost their jobs, suffered a pay cut or seen their hours reduced since 2007. By comparison, unemployment alone reached 25 percent in the 1930s. There is, no doubt, a relationship between the two. TIME magazine illustrated that relationship when, just after the 2008 election, the publication put Barack Obama on its cover in a classic Franklin Delano Roosevelt pose, right down to the cigarette holder. The title crystallized the message: “The New New Deal: What Barack Obama can learn from FDR, and what Democrats need to do.”

There are other similarities, too. The hard-luck stories from then and now are more or less the same. And the pictures tell the story.

Then: The Great Depression

Roy Swinford, a worker for the Works Progress Administration in Chicago, laid down 45,000 bricks a day. He kept a crew of 20 men busy at top speed to supply him with bricks. (Source: New Deal Network)

Now: The Great Recession

Kevin Light, a project superintendent with the Washington State Department of Transportation, supervised the City of Washougal’s SR-14 Pedestrian Tunnel stimulus project. In an interview with his employer, Light said, “this project enabled us to continue working and bring employees back to work.” Light’s grandchildren, as he put it, will one day be able to look at the tunnel and say that he built it. (Source: Washington State Department of Transportation)

Then: The Great Depression

Bridge builders working on a Public Works Administration project in Chicago. (Source: New Deal Network)

Now: The Great Recession

Bridge builders working on a stimulus project in Seattle. (Source: Washington State Department of Transportation)

Now: The New New Deal

Of course, Congress and the Obama administration implemented a type of modern New Deal in the form of the 2009 Recovery Act, a $787 billion government stimulus program. While much of the money was in tax breaks, some $150 billion went to infrastructure programs like those in Washington State (see the state department of transportation’s Flickr page for more “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”-like documentation of their state’s stimulus dollars at work). Those projects were, as the president has said, intended to put Americans back to work.

As the midterm elections approach, many will ask: Did the stimulus work? Considering that the jury is still out even on the New Deal, it’s hard to tell.

Then again, an announcement just weeks ago from President Obama may be telling. Obama said that another $50 billion in stimulus-like government spending on infrastructure projects will likely be needed as this “Great Recession” continues. Just don’t call it “Stimulus Part Two” — the president has been careful to avoid using that rhetoric again.

Movements to advance American infrastructure, since the beginning, have been brought on by times of national crisis. In an extended interview from Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City, Eric Rauchway, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, makes the case that it was the Civil War that set the stage for the Transcontinental Railroad; that it was the Great Depression that made possible the public works projects of the New Deal. But, will the current American crisis — the Great Recession — advance infrastructure again?

THE CIVIL WAR MADE IT POSSIBLE TO BUILD THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

The Monkey System or Every One For Himself || “Walk in and see the new improved grand original American System!” says Henry Clay (far right). The cages are labeled: “Home, Consumption, Internal, Improv”. This 1831 cartoon satirizing Clay’s American System depicts monkeys, labeled as being different parts of a nation’s economy, stealing each other’s resources.

The country’s first national plan to see fruition was put forward in 1829 by Henry Clay, the U.S. Secretary of State, when he called for an “American System.” Using the nationalist sentiment of a United States that followed the War of 1812, Clay proposed a government program to standardize and bring together the nation’s agriculture, commerce, industry and infrastructure. The System: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other internal improvements, eventually including the railroad, to further develop the country.

“Golden Spike” – the ceremonial final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, was hammered on May 10, 1869 in Promontory Summit, Utah.

It was this American school of thought that President Abraham Lincoln ultimately took up, implementing in 1862 the Homestead Act, granting 160 free acres to each family that could farm them, and the Pacific Railway Act (the Transcontinental Railroad), connecting rail from coast to coast. As a result, Americans moved west — settling along rail lines where they could work the land. And with settlers came commerce and, soon, industry — new communities were built. But, it was not until the crisis of the War Between the States that such Acts could pass. In 1856, a similar bill to the Pacific Railway Act never made it out of committee as the Senate lacked a consensus. What was different just six years later was a united Congress — with seven States seceding from the Union — led by a president making the argument for uniting the country again — and the Transcontinental Railroad, eventually, would do just that. In less than ten years, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America were connected by rail.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION SET THE STAGE FOR THE PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS OF THE NEW DEAL

In reviewing the programs of the New Deal in 1939, a government report said:

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?

After the Stock Market crashed in 1929, American unemployment soon rose to 25 percent. That number peaked in 1933, the year in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. There are just as many historians and economists that credit FDR’s New Deal policies with ending the Great Depression as there are that say they only made it last longer (A 1939 survey asked Americans to name the best and worst things President Roosevelt had done. The top answer to both questions was the WPA.)

By an unknown artist, 1936 || National Archives

While the country did not return to 1929 GNP levels for over a decade and still had an unemployment rate of about 15 percent in 1940, the New Deal — through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA)and the Public Works Administration (PWA) — put out of work Americans back to work and, at the same time, modernized a national infrastructure largely still of the last century — bringing running water and electricity to rural areas and putting in place the framework for what would later become the Interstate Highway System.

The WPA, for example, 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.

AND, THE GREAT RECESSION WILL…

When Congress passed President Barack Obama’s plan to stimulate the national economy in Feb. 2009, infrastructure projects, above all others, were supposed to be the fastest-acting pieces of the $787-billion package. While much of the law went to cover tax cuts, some $110 billion went to general infrastructure and energy improvements — of which $27 billion went to highway projects and $8.4 billion went to mass transit projects.

But, the effect has been up for debate.

As of July 10 of last year, for example, more than 3,600 of the 5,600 road projects approved by Washington — including six of the 10 largest approved projects — had not been been started. Lawrence H. Summers, the president’s top economic advisor, said the program shouldn’t be judged by short-term results — “the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs is expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010.”

President Obama, with Vice-President Biden, signing the stimulus bill into law last February in Denver. || Photo: The New York Times

Still, the White House calculates that every $1 billion spent on highway work will create 11,000 jobs, directly or indirectly. Private estimates are as high as 35,000 jobs per $1 billion.

At the same time, the Government Accountability Office recently found that 9,200 stimulus recipients reported no job creation, despite receiving a total of $965 million. Almost 4,000 other stimulus recipients, who are still waiting to receive funding, reported creating or saving more than 58,000 jobs. The end result: the ineffectiveness of tracking the stimulus — especially in job creation tied to infrastructure spending — will bring into greater question any future attempts of similar investments.

A second stimulus plan — a $154 billion jobs creation package — is in the waiting on the Senate floor. Though passed by the House in December, it was only by a vote of 217-212. The bill, entitled “Jobs for Main Street,” will spend $27 billion on highway projects and $8.4 billion on mass transit projects. Sound familiar?

All of this comes as the economy lost another 85,000 jobs at the end of last year — and the national unemployment rate remains at 10 percent.

Sources: American Public Transportation Association, The Associated Press, Government Accountability Office, The Los Angeles Times, National Archives, ourdocuments.gov, United States House Appropriations and Ways and Means committees, United States Senate, United States Senate Appropriations and Finance committees, The Wall Street Journal

This paper was commissioned by the Regional Plan Association in 2007 for the Rockefeller Urban Summit, and is courtesy of America 2050.

Robert Fishman

Professor Fishman teaches in the urban design, architecture, and urban planning programs at the University of Michigan. He has authored several books regarded as seminal texts, on the history of cities and urbanism including Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977). His most recent work is on exurbs.

Professor Fishman is also a featured interview in Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City.

1808 – 1908 – 2008: NATIONAL PLANNING FOR AMERICA

National planning in this country is widely believed to be an un-American activity, an exercise in bureaucratic hubris best left to the French. In fact, national planning is as American as the family farm, the transcontinental railroads, the great hydro-electric dams of the South and West, and the interstate highway system. Not only were these and other characteristic elements of our culture and economy the product of national planning; the federal government itself was created in large part to overcome the barriers to national planning that existed under the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, I would argue that no other nation has been so profoundly planned as the United States.

In this paper I will discuss the two great “campaigns” of national planning that have profoundly shaped this country: the 1808 “Gallatin Plan” of roads and canals whose themes guided long-term federal policy through the 19th century, and Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 set of conservation and transportation initiatives that guided the 20th century. My purpose is not merely to correct some myths about American history. As we approach the centennial anniversaries of these two great plans, we might ask: What elements in our tradition of national planning are still valuable and powerful? Where is the new vision for 2008 that can build on the achievements of 1808 and 1908 to reshape the nation over the next century?

The first great national plan bears the name of Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, although his 1808 “Gallatin Plan” owed as much to Jefferson himself as to Gallatin. It embodied perhaps the most revolutionary vision of any national plan: the creation of a truly democratic society through the planned settlement of a whole continent. The sale of federal lands would be organized to produce a society dominated by independent farmers, and this new continent of citizen-farmers would be connected to thriving cities and their world-wide markets by a federally-financed network of roads, and canals (and later railroads) to form the world’s most productive economy. This vision dominated the 19th century, reaching its climax during the Civil War years when Lincoln definitively linked the Jeffersonian ideal of the citizen-farmer to the new technology of the railroad. The 1862 Homestead Act promised 160 free acres of federal land to any family that would farm it, while massive federal land grants to the railroads financed a national rail system that opened up millions of acres for settlement.

Indeed, it was the very success of the Jefferson/Gallatin vision through the 19th century that prompted the second campaign of national planning, which began exactly a century after the Gallatin Plan in 1908 with Theodore Roosevelt’s great conservation initiatives. Haste had made waste, a whole continent of it, as the runoff from bare slopes denuded by massive timber cuts had turned fertile valleys into floodplains; eroded soil bankrupted farmers and choked rivers; plowing of semi-arid land threatened dustbowls; and a poverty-stricken rural population streamed into the already-overcrowded cities. Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” meant a re-assertion of “the common good” as the motive for national planning. This meant a coordinated effort led by the federal government at the scale of the great river valleys. Forests in the highlands would be protected (or replanted if necessary) to restrain flooding; agriculture reformed to minimize soil erosion; the great rivers tamed by dams that would also provide hydro-electric power. In the West, the dams would collect water to irrigate millions of acres and thus spur a new era of homesteading. If the railroads had concentrated industry and population in the cities of the East and Midwest, a new federal system of navigable inland waterways, irrigation and cheap electric power would reinvigorate the economies of the South and West to create a national balance of prosperity and equity.

As with the Gallatin Plan, the 1908 Roosevelt vision exercised its influence over the long term, eventually drawing on new technologies like the regional electric power grid and the automobile superhighway to achieve its ends. The climax of this era’s national planning came in the 1930s, when the New Deal responded to the droughts and dust bowls that accompanied the Depression with a heroic coordinated program of hydroelectric dams, rural highways, electrification and farm subsidies that saved the South and West from catastrophe and made possible their resurgence after 1945. Perhaps the greatest legacy of New Deal national planning is one that is rarely acknowledged: the interstate highway program. Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of an efficient national system of inland waterways to break the monopoly of the railroads was realized on land with the interstate highways that Franklin Roosevelt first envisioned in the late 1930s (and that Dwight Eisenhower finally funded in 1956.)

The interstates completed the regional restructuring that was implicit in the 1908 vision, helping to shift population from the rail-dependent cities of the East and Midwest to Sunbelt regions where systems of federally-financed infrastructure (water, electricity, roads, ports, housing) made possible the explosive growth that has re-shaped this country over the last sixty years. Of course, it is part of the mythology of the South and West today that their growth is due to private enterprise and “rugged individualism.” The great paradox of national planning is that Americans have practiced it so successfully while continually claiming it doesn’t exist.

Indeed, one might argue that the remarkable power of planning in this country is proportional to the strength of the barriers it must continually overcome. These include the continent-spanning scale of effective national planning; the centrality of private property and its rights in our economy and culture; and the federal system of government itself with its complex division of powers. National planning in this country has therefore always been innovative and opportunistic, exploiting the flexibility in the federal system to bypass opposition while constantly seeking new coalitions of stakeholders that can advance the goals.

When, for example, federal initiatives on the Gallatin Plan in the 1820s-1850s were stymied by the conflict between North and South, the initiative passed to the states that actually built the canals that Gallatin had envisioned. In the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt announced his 1908 conservation initiatives at a White House conference that brought together all the nation’s governors with members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and even included such “stakeholders” as the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the populist William Jennings Bryan. Moreover, to carry out the initiatives, the federal government drew on the expertise and support of the great cities, where organizations like the Chicago Plan Commission and the Regional Plan Association of New York had already amassed the planning skills that national planning required.

Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the first to recognize the special character of American planning in his classic Democracy in America. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he observed that the country lacked the top-down government bureaucracies that carried out planning in France, and yet, in the United States, much more was actually accomplished because the relatively open American system encouraged citizen activism and cooperation. “Democracy,” he wrote, “does not give the people the most skillful government, but it produces what the most able governments are frequently unable to create: a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it, and which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders.” [1]

1808: THE GALLATIN PLAN

Albert Gallatin

When in 1908 the Inland Waterways Commission published its landmark Preliminary Report, the volume that would set so many of the goals for American national planning for the rest of the 20th century, its authors included as an appendix the 1808 Gallatin Report. [2] This was not mere antiquarianism. Albert Gallatin’s Report on Roads and Canals had not only achieved over the course of the 19th century the deep influence on the country that the 1908 conservationists hoped to achieve in the 20th; but Gallatin’s Report remained in 1908 (and, I would argue, still in 2008) a model of long-term strategic thinking tied to national policy. The plan clearly identified a set of key infrastructure investments for the federal government, and related those investments to what were perhaps the two most important “policy goals” in the history of the early Republic. The first was Thomas Jefferson’s determination that the vast lands controlled by the national government beyond the borders of the original thirteen states be sold under conditions carefully designed to create a nation of independent small farmers. The second was George Washington’s determination that the newly-settled lands in the American interior be linked to the markets and Atlantic ports of the East Coast to ensure that the United States remained prosperous and united.

Indeed, one might say that not only the Gallatin Plan but the federal Constitution itself derived directly from Washington’s conviction that the new nation must have the capacity to engage in national planning. One of his greatest concerns after the victory over the British in 1783 was that the new nation might break apart because of the physical barriers to effective trade and communication, most notably the great barrier of the Allegheny Mountains that, in an era of water transportation, cut off the western territories from the port cities on the Atlantic. As he wrote to Jefferson in 1784, the settlers already streaming into the fertile Ohio Valley could market their products only by a water route from the Ohio River to the Mississippi and ultimately to New Orleans, then in Spanish hands. Similarly, the settlers along the Great Lakes would have to find their “natural” outlet through the St. Lawrence and British Canada. [3]

Washington’s solution to this problem was a coordinated system of canals and portage roads across the Alleghenies, especially one that would connect the Ohio River to a navigable Potomac River; Jefferson replied to Washington’s concept with the enthusiastic concurrence that “Nature then has declared in favor of the Potomac, and through that channel offers to pour into our laps the whole commerce of the Western world.”4 But nature required human assistance, especially canal locks around the Potomac’s five major waterfalls, and Washington soon discovered that even his preliminary efforts to extend navigation required a formal treaty between Maryland and Virginia and elaborate approvals from other states and from the Continental Congress. To settle this dispute Washington convened a meeting between Maryland and Virginia legislators at Mount Vernon in 1785; their dissatisfaction with the barriers that the Articles placed to interstate commerce and “improvements” led them to convene the Annapolis Convention in 1786 to which leaders from the 13 states were invited; the Annapolis Convention then issued the call for a Constitutional Convention to meet in Philadelphia in 1787. The Constitution is thus in a real sense a charter for national planning; the Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce to create, in the words of the preamble, a “more perfect union.” James Madison in his Federalist Paper #14 specifically defended the new Constitution as forming a government that would unite the country through new roads and canals. Nevertheless, the debts and conflicts accompanying the new federal government postponed such national planning until Thomas Jefferson’s administration. Although Jefferson, as we have seen, agreed with Washington’s goals, he had his own strong motives for a national system of roads and canals.

From the early 1780s, when the Continental Congress had won control of all the land in the western territories not in the original 13 states, Jefferson had seen this vast unsettled landscape as the potential site of a truly democratic society. He too put forward a plan perhaps even more ambitious than Washington’s: to sell the land in small units for family farms that would be the economic underpinning of a political democracy. He realized that the difficulty for such sales was a subtle one: the inability in an unsettled wilderness to provide clear title and boundaries to small plots. His solution had all the simplicity and rigor of the Enlightenment: a vast land survey to map the whole Western territories on a square-mile “continental grid” oriented to the cardinal points of the compass. Once the base-points had been scientifically established, every inch of land could then be accurately mapped and subdivided. Land to be sold would be grouped into “townships” six miles by six miles (the local political unit for the new territories), and the 36 square-mile “sections” that made up a township would be sold either as complete sections (640 acres), half (320) or quarter-sections (160 acres, thought to be the smallest unit that could support a family). Thus, with a simple set of measurements that even a neophyte surveyor could carry out, Jefferson proposed a “national plan” for a democratic society.

But this plan was incomplete, for exactly the reasons that Washington had foreseen: the lack of a transportation infrastructure to get crops to market. The Gallatin Plan in effect put Washington and Jefferson together: a national system of roads and canals would open up vast land tracts for sale by the federal government; the revenue from these sales would pay for the new infrastructure; and the Plan would ultimately create a new egalitarian society. The Plan therefore had two main components: (1) a set of roads and canals to improve transportation along the Atlantic coastline, including a north-south national turnpike road (the earliest version of Interstate 95) and canals cutting across Cape Cod, New Jersey from the Raritan to the Delaware, the Delmarva peninsula, and the Dismal Swamp to shorten intercoastal shipping routes; and (2) the more difficult, expensive but vitally necessary canal and road systems over the Alleghenies. Here Gallatin proposed four: an all-water route in New York State via the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers to a new canal to connect with Lake Ontario; and three water-and-road routes where the eastern river would be made navigable as far west as possible, and a road to carry goods the remaining distance over the mountains to a western river. These “hybrids” included Washington’s beloved Potomac with a road over the mountains to the Monongahela and Ohio; the Susquehanna and Juniata with a road connecting to the Allegheny; the James River with a mountain road to the Kanawha; and the Savannah River with a mountain road to the Tennessee. [5]

The Gallatin Plan, 1808, as reconstructed in D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. II (1993).

Having advanced a truly national vision, Gallatin was remarkably flexible about the exact federal role in these projects. All would be “private-public partnerships” with the federal government advancing loans or purchasing stock in the canal companies. His hope was that in each case federal funds would overcome the limitations of the private capital market to permit the rapid and coordinated completion of all these projects. That hope was not fulfilled. The War of 1812 drained away (as wars tend to do) the federal surplus that Gallatin hoped would be available for infrastructure. More seriously, the great divide between slave and free states made a truly National System (as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams styled their later versions of the Gallatin Plan) impossible.

Here the supposed weakness of the federal system – its division of powers between the national government and the states – became an unexpected strength for national planning. With the federal government deadlocked, the states took the initiative, led by New York. Governor DeWitt Clinton saw the possibility of a canal far more ambitious than Gallatin’s: a 363-mile link through the Mohawk Valley between the Hudson River at Albany and Lake Erie at Buffalo. With strong support from New York merchants, this remarkable technological achievement was completed in 1825. In the absence of the other canal-road systems that Gallatin had advocated, the Erie Canal profoundly changed the political economy of the nation. As Washington had recognized in the 1780s, the “natural” route of commerce in the vast Mississippi Valley ran through St. Louis and New Orleans. Although New Orleans was now part of the United States, the nation’s river system still seemed to dictate that the nation’s greatest port city – the port that gave access to the vast commerce that would flow down the Mississippi – would be the great port of the slave system.

The Erie Canal in effect turned the nation’s commerce a full 90 degrees. The greatest natural port on the Atlantic – New York – now had direct water access through the Great Lakes into the heart of the very territory that Jefferson had designated for free settlement. Moreover, the Erie Canal gave a new meaning to a swampy village on the shores of Lake Michigan that happened to occupy the narrow ridge between the lake and the headwaters of the Illinois, a river that drained into the Mississippi. The village was called Chicago. With the Erie Canal, Chicago became the key central point on the continent, drawing goods from throughout the Mississippi River basin and transferring them to the Great Lakes system, the Erie Canal and the international trade of the port of New York. Thus the “commerce of the Western world” poured not into New Orleans, as Washington and Jefferson had feared, or into the Potomac ports like Alexandria as they had hoped, but into the capacious lap of New York. With other states joining the “canal boom” touched off by the Erie Canal, Gallatin’s and Jefferson’s national plan was realized in different form and by different actors. But the federal government regained its direct power over national planning in the 1860s, when the secession of the Southern states in the Civil War broke the deadlock that had paralyzed the national government. With the strong support of Abraham Lincoln, Congress in 1862 passed the Homestead Act that awarded 160 free acres of federal land to any family that would claim and farm it. In the same year Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the first transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869).

Lincoln in effect brought to fruition the work of national planning that Washington, Jefferson, and Gallatin had begun. The Homestead Act was Jefferson’s 1784 Land Ordinance on steroids. Further, Lincoln tied this new tide of settlement to federal support for the most powerful technology of the 19th century: the railroad. The massive federal land grants that financed the completion of the national rail grid in the second half of the 19th century accomplished what Gallatin’s proposed federal loans and stock purchases never could: the rapid and coordinated completion of a national transportation system that completed the Gallatin vision at a scale and in a form that Gallatin himself could never have imagined.

Nevertheless, the very power of this alliance of the homesteaders, the railroads, and the federal government had unintended consequences that vitiated much of the democratic idealism that underlay the 1808 plan. The millions of acres of railroad land grants meant that most settlers in fact bought their land from the railroads, a process that concentrated wealth in the hands of an urban elite and left many farmers in a state of dependency that Jefferson would have abhorred. Moreover, the railroads became the leading players in an economy of extreme speculation, exploitation and waste that consumed whole forests, tore up fragile prairies for unsustainable farming, and polluted whole river systems. This was not what Gallatin had planned. After 100 years, his vision had run its course, to be replaced by a new national planning initiative.

1908: NATIONAL CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

The most decisive two days for American domestic policy in the 20th century were arguably May 13-15, 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt convened a “Conference of the Governors of the United States” at the White House. A year earlier, Roosevelt had proclaimed, “the conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem that underlies almost every other problem of our National Life.” [6] In his call to the Conference, he drew the conclusion that “unless we solve [the conservation] problem, it will avail us little to solve all others. To solve it, the whole nation must undertake the task through their organizations and associations, through the men whom they have made specifically responsible for the welfare of the several States, and finally through Congress and the Executive.” [7] To carry out what Roosevelt understood was a new national plan, he had resolved to bring together at the White House Conference not only the governors of the forty-six states and four territories, but also leading members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, government bureaus, learned and professional organizations, and the press. Only by the cooperation of all these “stakeholders” could Roosevelt forge the new relationship between the federal government, the states, and the public that the plan required. [8]

President Theodore Roosevelt (first row, center), governors and other notables in attendance at the White House Governors Conference, May 15, 1908. Notables in the first row include Andrew Carnegie (fifth from left) sitting next to William Jennings Bryan (sixth from left). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is seated fifth from right. From the conference proceedings (1908).

The agenda for this unprecedented meeting was set by a now-forgotten document whose unpromising title was the Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission. And yet this 1908 publication, more than any other, initiated the new era in national planning that would supersede the exhausted principles of the Gallatin Plan and offer a vision for the 20th century. This Report not only translated the progressive ideals of the conservation movement that had been building over the last decade into a coherent framework for national action that would put the “common good” over private profit. But the report also encapsulates a highly strategic understanding among the scientists who were its authors and the politicians who were its sponsors that the inland waterways were the strategic site for a comprehensive effort in national planning that had the power to conserve natural resources and bring prosperity to the neglected regions of the United States.

First, the rivers, as George Washington intended in 1787, are undeniably in the public domain – public resources for navigation and clean water, but also public menaces in conditions of flood and pollution. And, as government and hydrologists and foresters like Gifford Pinchot well understood, to “regulate” a river basin to prevent disastrous flooding meant conservation measures reaching far into its watershed: to the uplands where healthy forests alone could retain water; to the agricultural plains where scientific farming could prevent disastrous soil erosion that bankrupted farmers and choked rivers; to the industrial cities where proper sewage treatment could prevent pollution. Controlling a river also gave important positive benefits; a great dam not only held back flood waters and ensured safe navigation, but it also generated cheap electrical power for the surrounding region and stored fresh water for the irrigation of millions of arid acres. Finally, the clean, controlled, well-dredged riverways could serve as transportation corridors, efficient alternatives to the railroads with their “monopoly” rates. [9]

We have since learned the many environmental costs of dams and irrigation projects, but to Theodore Roosevelt and the other Progressives a great dam signified a triumph of the wise and daring use of advanced technology in the public interest. For them, the dams were the central monuments in a program of what we would today call “sustainable economic development” at a regional scale. A pervasive theme that would extend from TR’s “New Nationalism” to FDR’s New Deal was that the 19th century alliance of the federal government and the railroads had fostered “monopolies” that had concentrated development in the great industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest and, through discriminatory freight rates and other disincentives, had reduced the South and West to mere “colonies” providing cheap raw materials. This economic exploitation had in turn encouraged the inefficient exploitation of natural resources, as poor farmers were forced onto marginal lands, lumbermen overcut forests, and miners pillaged mineral resources to supply the great cities. Conservation for both Roosevelts and other Progressives thus meant fundamental economic reform to break the monopoly power of the railroads and the “trusts” and spread economic equity throughout the country.

The distribution of potential sites for dams and electric power generation through many of the poorest areas of the South and West seemed an almost providential circumstance for the national economic restructuring that was at the heart of the conservation ideal. The Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission had already put forward a detailed blueprint for focusing the national conservation effort at the scale of the river basin. The Governors Conference was intended to re-shape the federal government to operate effectively and in cooperation with the states at that scale. The Conference Declaration called for the creation of a permanent National Conservation Commission which would work closely with parallel state commissions as the national planning body for the conservation movement:

We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil-wash shall cease…that the waters should be so conserved and used to promote navigation, to enable the arid lands to be reclaimed by irrigation, and to develop power in the interests of the People; that the forests…should be preserved and perpetuated; that the minerals…be so used to prolong their utility; that the beauty, healthfulness, and habitability of our country should be preserved and increased; and that the sources of national wealth exist for the benefit of the People, and that monopoly thereof should not be tolerated. [10]

Despite the idealism, science, and political power that lay behind this Declaration, the new era of national planning it announced would be marginalized for the next twenty-five years. The successful implementation of the public dam-water-and-power concept at the appropriately-named Roosevelt Dam over the Salt River near Phoenix was completed in 1911, but Roosevelt’s successors mistrusted the use of federal planning power he had championed, and the private electric utilities in particular proved to be bitter enemies. As with the Gallatin Plan, the Roosevelt “National Conservation” plan fell victim to a deep split in American society, in this case over the proper boundaries between private and public enterprise. Only the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam begun in 1931 escaped this deadlock. And, as in the Gallatin Plan, the full potential of the plan was only realized decades later after a national trauma had broken the federal deadlock: for the Gallatin Plan, the Civil War, for national conservation and development, the Great Depression and the coming of the New Deal.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 20th century thus played Abraham Lincoln’s 19th role as the leader who finally implemented the national plan with the federal resources and authority it deserved. The combined environmental/economic crisis that reached its climax in the Dustbowl that consumed the western prairie states swept away opposition. The Tennessee Valley Authority took up the exact vision of the Inland Waterways Commission and made coordinated conservation/development planning the keynote of New Deal policy. And TVA was the template for a national effort of forest and farmland preservation and rivershed planning that saved the most devastated regions of the country from disaster. [11]

This dramatic map of “undeveloped water power areas” suitable for hydro-electric dams shows clearly the federal dam program as a development tool for “undeveloped” regions of the South and West.

With the enthusiastic support of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a veteran Chicago conservationist and progressive, Roosevelt even revived the 1908 idea of a national planning office in the form of the “National Planning Board,” better known under its 1939 title as the “National Resources Planning Board.”12 To lead this national planning effort, Roosevelt chose his uncle, Frederic Delano. This was no nepotism, for Delano had been deeply involved in urban and regional planning since his days as a railroad executive in Chicago. He had been a main sponsor of Daniel Burnham’s monumental 1909 Plan of Chicago. After moving to New York City in 1912, he brought with him the Chicago regional planning ideal, and helped to initiate the 1920s Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, serving as the first chairman of New York’s Regional Plan Association. Delano’s colleagues on the National Resources Planning Board had also been deeply involved in city and regional planning: political
scientist Charles Merriam had been the leading advocate for regional planning in Chicago and planner Charles Eliot II had played a similar role in Boston and Washington, D.C.

These city and regional connections were no coincidence. Just as in the early 19th century when the states took up the task of canal building when the federal government was deadlocked, so in the early 20th century, the nation’s urban leadership took up the task of planning for the new society, but at the city and regional level. The Chicago and New York plans were the best existing models for long-term intensive planning for conservation and development. These plans projected and coordinated massive infrastructure development for clean water, clean air, road and rail improvements, even the conservation of “forest preserves” and open space at their edge. Now this expertise would be used for national conservation and development.

This carry-over from the region to the nation was perhaps most clearly seen in the New Deal’s national highway planning that initiated the interstate highway system. Although the federal government through its Bureau of Public Roads in the Agriculture Department had been subsidizing rural “farm-to-market” roads and other projects since 1916, road-building through the 1930s had been primarily a city, county, and state responsibility. But, as we have seen, the 1908 Inland Waterways Commission had already identified an unbalanced transportation system dominated by railroad monopolies as a major source of economic inefficiency and regional imbalance. By the 1930s a new possibility for an alternative national transportation system had eclipsed the inland waterways: the express or “superhighway.” In 1937 Pennsylvania had taken the lead with its plan for a toll-financed Pennsylvania Turnpike, designed to be the 20th century equivalent of the Erie Canal and thus to funnel the east-west automobile traffic of the nation through Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Turnpike inspired a vision of a national network of “superhighways;” at Frederic Delano’s urging, FDR in 1938 charged the National Resources Planning Board and the Bureau of Public Roads with planning such a system. [13]

The resulting national highway plan, first published in 1939 under the title Toll Roads and Free Roads, was the equivalent of the transcontinental railway plans and land grants of the Lincoln years.14 The seemingly irrelevant title in fact was the key to the plan. After extensive research, the Bureau of Public Roads concluded that toll roads like the Pennsylvania Turnpike would be viable only in the heavily-traveled routes of the Northeast and Midwest. A system of toll superhighways would thus reinforce the dominance of those regions and perpetuate the pattern established by the railroads. This went counter to the national purpose that had been established since 1908 of using a new system of transportation to spread growth through the nation. So the Bureau of Public Roads and the National Resources Planning Board strongly advocated a true national system of “free” interstate highways as a key tool for balanced national growth. The map of a 33,000 mile national system published in Toll Roads and Free Roads thus became the key document for 20th century American national transportation planning, although implementation was delayed by World War II and the inevitable conflicts over funding until the 1956 Interstate Highway Act funded the 41,000-mile system proclaimed at the time as “the largest construction project since the Pyramids.”

The first map of a national interstate highway system. From Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939).

Just as Lincoln in the 1860s had allied the federal government with the most advanced technology of the time – the steam locomotive – to promote the settlement of the nation, so FDR had allied the federal government with the hydroelectric dam, the regional electric grid, the internal combustion engine, and the superhighway to develop the South and West. Bringing the most advanced 20th century systems of power and transportation to the relatively “backward” regions of the country was indeed wonderfully effective in re-structuring the geography of population and economic growth. Indeed, I would argue that this massive exercise in national planning gave American capitalism its “second wind” after the Depression and World War II, and has been the most important initiative in creating the country we know today.

CONCLUSION

As I have tried to show in this paper, national planning in the United States is difficult but it works. Twice in our history our leaders have managed to overcome the inevitable constraints – regional and sectional divisions, private-public conflicts, divisions of power, the sheer magnitude of the task of transforming a continent – and crafted national plans whose visions have had the galvanizing power to coordinate action over the long term. I have used the dates 1808 and 1908 as shorthand for these two great national efforts.

In October 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt led an extraordinary study-tour of the Mississippi aboard the USS Mississippi. Accompanied by his Chief Forester and conservation visionary Gifford Pinchot and the members and staff of the Inland Waterways Commission, Roosevelt saw first-hand the results of wanton destruction of forests and the inevitable soil erosion, flooding, and rural poverty that followed. Where Mark Twain in the 1850s had recorded a bustling commerce carried in hundreds of paddle-wheelers, the group saw virtually no river transport at all, due in large part to railroad policies that suppressed alternative and more efficient means of transportation. Discussions aboard the Mississippi inspired Roosevelt to disembark at Memphis to issue the call for the 1908 Governors Conference that would begin a new era in national planning. The conference, Roosevelt observed, “ought to be among the most important gatherings in our history, for none have had a more vital question to consider.” [15]

A century later, we await a new vision and a new call.

President Theodore Roosevelt and then Chief of the Forestry Service Gifford Pinchot aboard the U.S.S. Mississippi on the historic 1907 cruise down the lower Mississippi undertaken by the Inland Waterways Commission that led to the 1908 Governors Conference. || Source: Library of Congress Conservation Collection

ENDNOTES

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard D. Hefner (New York: New American Library, 1956; original published in 1835 and 1840), p. 108.

[2] Albert Gallatin, Report to the Senate on Roads and Canals [April 1808], reprinted as Appendix 17 in Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), pp. 535-581.

[3] Washington to Jefferson, March 15, 1784, Jefferson Paper, “American Memory” website, Library of Congress.

[4] Jefferson to Washington, March 29, 1984. op. cit.

[5] Gallatin Report, pp. 535-560. See especially Michael J. Lacey, “Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth Century Legacy,” in Robert Fishman, editor, The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000). Pp. 89-146. Anyone who knows this remarkable essay with more than a book’s worth of thought and research, will recognize my debt to Lacey, who served as Director of United States Studies at the Wilson Center.

[6] Theodore Roosevelt, Address to the National Editorial Association, June 10, 1907. Roosevelt Papers, American Memory Website, Library of Congress.

[7] Theodore Roosevelt, “Call to Governors Conference, Memphis, October 3, 1907. Loc. Cit.

[8] Proceedings of a Conference of Governors in the White House, Washington, D.C. May 13-15, 1908 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909). Henceforth cited “Governors Conference.”

[9] Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission, pp. 1-32.

[10] Governors Conference, p. 193.

[11] Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots (New York: Harper Torchbacks, rev. ed. 1966).

[12] Alan Brinkley, “The National Resources Planning Board and the Reconstruction of Planning,” chapter in Fishman, editor, The American Planning Tradition, pp. 173-192.

[13] John H. Crider, “$8,000,000,000 Highway Project Wins Encouragement of Roosevelt, New York Times, Feb. 7, 1938, p. 1.

[14] Toll Roads and Free Roads (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939).

[15] Theodore Roosevelt, “Call to the Governors Conference,” loc. cit.

———————————————————————–
AMERICA 2050 is a national initiative to meet the infrastructure, economic development and environmental challenges of the nation as it prepares to add about 130 million additional Americans by the year 2050.

For more on America 2050, visit www.america2050.org.

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.

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“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.

What has often been referenced as a new New Deal, similar to initiatives instituted during the Great Depression, the following is a breakdown of federal funds from Congress’ economic stimulus devoted to projects or spending that is related to or will affect infrastructure in the U.S.

[Education] [Energy] [General Infrastructure] [State Block Grants]

EDUCATION
$47 billion	Though much of the funds are dedicated to prevent cuts in state aid to school districts, there is flexibility to also use the money for school modernization and repair.
ENERGY
$5 billion	To weatherize modest-income homes.
$11 billion	To develop the “smart electricity grid” to reduce waste.
$13.9 billion	In subsidized loans for renewable energy projects.
$6.3 billion	In state energy efficiency and clean energy grants.
$4.5 billion	To make federal buildings more energy efficient.
GENERAL INFRASTRUCTURE
$27 billion	For highway and bridge construction and repair.
$8.4 billion	For mass transit.
$8 billion	For construction of high-speed railways.
$1.3 billion	For Amtrak.
$4.6 billion	For projects for the Army Corps of Engineers.
$4 billion	In public housing improvements.
$6.4 billion	For clean and drinking water projects.
$7 billion	To expand broadband Internet service to underserved areas.
STATE BLOCK GRANTS
$8 billion	In aid to states to relieve budget deficits.

Sources: American Public Transportation Association, The Associated Press, House Appropriations and Ways and Means committees, Library of Congress (W.P.A. images), Senate Appropriations and Finance committees, The Wall Street Journal

The U.S. Conference of Mayors last week said 11,391 infrastructure projects worth $73.2 billion in 427 cities are waiting for federal government support. If funded, the mayors’ group said more than 800,000 jobs in 2009 and 2010 would be created.

This call comes at the same time of a similar call from the National Governors Association for a federal government investment in state infrastructure projects.

A state by state list of projects in waiting was also recently published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials – “50 states and the District of Columbia listed more than 5,000 highway projects totaling $64.3 billion that are ready to go if Congress were to include money for them in an economic stimulus plan.”

But local municipalities are wary of receiving federal dollars, once they are disbursed, through state governments. The mayors said the money for projects would most likely be delayed as 41 states are dealing with severe budget shortfalls – the money could go to fill budget gaps instead of to fund needed infrastructure projects. As a result, the impact of President-elect Obama’s proposed economic stimulus could be greatly undermined.

The State Government budget crisis is only getting worse

Minnesota recently announced that its projected $1 billion budget shortfall quadrupled to $4 billion – every publicly funded service in the state, including infrastructure, will most likely face cuts.

And in California, “in as few as nine days, nearly $5 billion worth of public works projects in the state, including schools, roads and bridges, could be halted or indefinitely delayed – leading to the loss of thousands of jobs,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The state, unless it resolves its budget, could actually run out of money early next year.

Oversight

But what is almost more concerning than the economic burdens of local governments throughout the country is the question of how to prioritize infrastructure projects and needs. For example, just because a road in ‘City A’ has received approval to be expanded, why should it receive federal dollars over a study on the expansion of mass transit in ‘City B?’ The road in ‘City A’ will create jobs now, but the mass transit study in ‘City B’ will provide more realistic transit options in the future?

Nick Taylor, author of “American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A.,” in an Op-Ed in The New York Times on Dec. 9, writes, “The plan by Barack Obama to attack unemployment by putting people to work on roads, bridges, schools and new energy projects sounds like a version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. If Franklin D. Roosevelt is Mr. Obama’s model, and if the president-elect wants to avoid the disorganized hodgepodge that the financial bailout seems to be so far, then he should look to the structure created for the W.P.A. in 1935 to select the best plans for renovating the country’s outdated infrastructure.”

That structure was a three-step process:
- Infrastructure project applications were first screened by the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration).
- Then, an advisory committee of government officials and representatives of farm groups, labor, business and the United States Conference of Mayors identified redundancy among the applications. The most cost-effective projects were given priority.
- The third step was a division that kept track of projects through their completion.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D – Conn.), similarly, wants to create a national infrastructure bank with a bipartisan board of directors, to be run by an executive appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The bailout of U.S. financial institutions this past month is similar to actions made in the New Deal era. According to The New York Times on Oct. 13, “The nearest precedent for the Treasury plan… are the investments made by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the 1930s. The agency, established in 1932, not only made loans to distressed banks, but also bought stock in 6,000 banks, at a cost of $1.3 billion…” Though Herbert Hoover commissioned the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, it was FDR that used it as the basis for his New Deal programs that put Americans back to work and, at the same time, expanded the American infrastructure.