It’s so easy to take it all for granted, until you realize the debt that’s due, and how, if the heroes of a prior era hadn’t worked so hard, all too often for so little pay, the very building you stand in or the bridge you traverse would be gone.
I heard Gray Brechin speak recently about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. His presentation showed how much of our nation’s infrastructure dates to 1930’s work projects — it was amazing.
It’s one thing to be a kid and go to a city swimming pool which you learn dates to the 30s, because you see a WPA marker stamped into the concrete. Or to your local courthouse or to schools or the public utility, and hear how it was built to make work during the Depression before you go on about your daily concerns.
What Brechin’s slide show did that was so impressive was to line them all up, image and after image, to compress the public works projects together, so to speak, so you got a real sense of just how much was accomplished, and how crucial it was to our prosperity after the war.
The dam-building projects, primarily in the west but also the Tennessee Valley Authority, were crucial in giving this country the energy it needed to run the factories essential to beat fascism. Had this been left to the infrastructure in place in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, our advantage in armaments wouldn’t have been overwhelming; we began at a disadvantage.
It’s easy to look back now, through the prism of our prosperity, and take it all for granted as a public employment project.
But at the time the CCC and WPA were challenged by conservative Democrats and the wealthy, who formed their American Liberty League to attack FDR and his New Deal programs, as budding fasicism similar to that in Europe. The ALL was unsuccessful in stopping FDR, but they did initiate a number of right wing think tanks which since have given rise to the champions of self-interest and selfishness, finally triumphing with the election of Ronald Reagan. And our national infrastructure has diminished ever since.
The ALL criticized the New Deal’s “employ the poor” policies and claimed men would “stand around leaning on their shovels.” Later on, after innumerable large auditoriums such as The Cow Palace were completed, the workers demonstrated with signs quoting the ALL’s sneers about graft and throwing their claims back in their faces — Brechlin’s slides show the men marching with their mocking signs.
In fact, the various New Deal agencies enjoyed an astonishingly low degree of corruption.
Attacked for supposedly endangering capitalism, FDR may actually have saved it. While the world was embroiled in socialism from both the left and the right, FDR worked with private corporations and gave many the contracts to sustain them — Kaiser Steel and Bechtel, for instance, both date to New Deal projects.
Here in Alameda, our city was expanded into the Bay by the “South Shore” project, an immense development run by the Utah Corporation — another benefactor from New Deal largesse.
When Brechlin went to the national library and asked if he could see what they had on WPA projects in California, they told him: “of course! Our parents and grandparents paid for this. It’s part of the public domain.”
The public domain. Something we all inherit and have a right to enjoy.
What an amazing concept. You can read more about the project to inventory all that was accomplished with the New Deal projects here:
http://newdealproject.org/index.html
and about Gray Brechin:
http://www.graybrechin.com/index.html
But mostly I wish I could show you that slide show, dam after dam, school after school, courthouse after courthouse, sports arenas and libraries and city halls, public buildings in parks, towns, and cities. It was amazing. I’ve heard members of the “Great Generation” deliberate about whether the kids of today would be able to fight as they did in World War II.
I’ve no doubt they could — fear is a great motivator. But will we ever again see a generation able to build a national infrastructure to rival what they accomplishe din the 1930s — and during our greatest national Depression, no less?
OmbudsBen 
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