"He put Americans back to work building things we still use."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union Address to Congress, January 1936:
If these gentlemen believe, as they say they believe, that the measures adopted by this Congress and its predecessor, and carried out by this Administration, have hindered rather than promoted recovery, let them be consistent. Let them propose to this Congress the complete repeal of these measures. The way is open to such a proposal.
Let action be positive and not negative. The way is open in the Congress of the United States for an expression of opinion by yeas and nays. Shall we say that values are restored and that the Congress will, therefore, repeal the laws under which we have been bringing them back? Shall we say that because national income has grown with rising prosperity, we shall repeal existing taxes and thereby put off the day of approaching a balanced budget and of starting to reduce the national debt? Shall we abandon the reasonable support and regulation of banking? Shall we restore the dollar to its former gold content?
I hear that it is naïve to compare then to now. Such a different world, such a different mentality. How much has changed?
Shall we say to the farmer, "The prices for your products are in part restored. Now go and hoe your own row?"
Shall we say to the home owners, "We have reduced your rates of interest. We have no further concern with how you keep your home or what you pay for your money. That is your affair?"
Shall we say to the several millions of unemployed citizens who face the very problem of existence, of getting enough to eat, "We will withdraw from giving you work. We will turn you back to the charity of your communities and those men of selfish power who tell you that perhaps they will employ you if the Government leaves them strictly alone?"
Shall we say to the needy unemployed, "Your problem is a local one except that perhaps the Federal Government, as an act of mere generosity, will be willing to pay to your city or to your county a few grudging dollars to help maintain your soup kitchens?"
Shall we say to the children who have worked all day in the factories, "Child labor is a local issue and so are your starvation wages; something to be solved or left unsolved by the jurisdiction of forty-eight States?" (This is different, only by degrees. We now outsource our child labor to other countries.)
Shall we say to the laborer, "Your right to organize, your relations with your employer have nothing to do with the public interest; if your employer will not even meet with you to discuss your problems and his, that is none of our affair?"
Shall we say to the unemployed and the aged, "Social security lies not within the province of the Federal Government; you must seek relief elsewhere?"
Shall we say to the men and women who live in conditions of squalor in country and in city, "The health and the happiness of you and your children are no concern of ours?"
Shall we expose our population once more by the repeal of laws which protect them against the loss of their honest investments and against the manipulations of dishonest speculators? Shall we abandon the splendid efforts of the Federal Government to raise the health standards of the Nation and to give youth a decent opportunity through such means as the Civilian Conservation Corps?
Members of the Congress, let these challenges be met. If this is what these gentlemen want, let them say so to the Congress of the United States. Let them no longer hide their dissent in a cowardly cloak of generality. Let them define the issue. We have been specific in our affirmative action. Let them be specific in their negative attack.
(emphasis mine)
My own naïvete may stem from being raised by Depression-hardened parents. Some manner of truth in the comparison between the 1930’s and now surely exists. To me, a major discrepancy seems underlined in the apparent lack of a national and nationally promoted program that continually advertises itself as the Stimulus. Are we worried about socialism, truly?
I see CNN “report” on the impact, or lack thereof, of the Stimulus in different communities across the country. I see local TV news stories, comments on blogs, bits and pieces of articles in the few remaining small community newspapers – all emphasize a lack of consistency in application and message, a lack of branding of the projects funded by Recovery dollars.
Why is an Administration so very good at self-promotion during the Presidential campaign, now blind to the benefits of promoting each Stimulus project with a visible identifier, a notable “label”? I don’t get it.
As a kid, I heard the pride and the identification my mother had, when I asked her about FDR.
"He put Americans back to work building things we still use."
Respectfully, FDR did more than that. He formed a team able to create programs that were branded as his legacy, people of vision who understood that legacy.
I was a kid in 1968 and we were driving back down Highway 101 along the Oregon Coast from Portland to our home in the southwestern part of the state. Youthfully perspicacious, I noticed the design and structure of the "waysides"; I drank in the gothically designed spires and deco stanchions of the many bridges we crossed from Lincoln City north to North Bend travelling south, the rock and wood construction of shelters and restrooms, stone-cairn barriers and monuments girding the road along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
"Those were mostly built by the WPA or with money from the government in the '30's."
Mother's further answers to me covered the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the New Deal of FDR. She fleshed out more information than my ten-year-old mind could accommodate at the time. What stuck with me was the breadth and depth of these structures built some thirty years previously. There was a rich design of parks, and history, and public works that could be identified up and down the Pacific Coast. Beautiful things, costly things built during a time of great need with vision and a nod to both history and the future.
It's taken me forty years to fully comprehend what I saw and learned on that coastal trip, what remains now, and why it is that I remember.
Those spires touch my memory. Layered scales of reinforced concrete or steel, rising to a sharp point into the sky over an often foggy coastal estuary. Lofty images in my head. They reach to the sky. The cathedral-like arches of bridges, rounded triangular shapes of historical cairns; these architectural designs offer a hint that reaching up was part and parcel of the recovery mentality during the Great Depression.
It gives us guidance.
Our disastrous economic and politically divisive climate suggests the necessity of forging a legacy that serves at least two purposes:
- A constructive purpose at the onset of creation – put people back to work and improve our crumbling physical infrastructure.
- An emotional and aesthetic goal for the future - provide us with substantive proof of what we've done.
It remains a hobby of mine to attempt to identify the bridges, structures, or murals that were developed and executed through the WPA or CCC employment of thousands of workers, artists, and architects. Timberline Lodge ranks as my favorite WPA structure on the West Coast, aside from the soaring bridges built along Highway 101. Building and bridges with a soul that advertise the value of the necessary millions of dollars poured into nearly every community during the Great Depression; they spurred imagination and industry, not just relief, put people back to work, and boosted the esteem of an economically and emotionally demoralized populace. Many of those projects were derided by the politicians and businessmen of the day as boondoggles, especially those that included artistic works, or cultural, theatrical involvement.
The artifacts and archives show that many of those projects have had a lasting effect on our common conscience as we debate the benefits of new programs with echoes from the past. The same arguments are used. The same defenses are arguably stronger because of the relevant and living impact of many of the WPA/CCC projects today.
We don't see historical placards on existing WPA structures that emphasize the following: "This was a bipartisan project, enacted through the combined efforts of both Congress and the Administration".
Good works, necessary works, are needed. Go bold. Now. Take a leaf from Roosevelt's second term and note that few domestic programs were successfully legislated after 1936.
Leave aside the brilliant, though mostly wasted, spoken effort, the verbal attempt at reaching across the aisle with each piece of legislation.
Give this stimulus a soul, put Main Street back to work, both industriously and culturally.
FDR was a couple of years into his first term before he took the extra step of instituting the Federal Art Project components of the New Deal (the Second New Deal) and enhanced the strength of recovery with the Works Progress Administration.
I’m not certain we can afford to wait that long. It will take people of more foresight than has been displayed so far, and more cooperativeness, to intersperse this recovery process, this Stimulus, with recognizable, functional, concrete works that prove we can compete, create, conserve. We can and we do aspire.
It's delightful and brilliant political theater for enthused and re-energized liberals when you step into the lion's den and come out strong, Mr. President.
At the end of a professorial day, perhaps at the end of the Presidency, maybe even at the nadir of a life when the children, as adults, are driving through Chicago, or Honolulu, or perhaps Muskegon, what will be the visible, concrete, perhaps graceful proof that you put America back to work, that we renewed our culturally collective soul and improved our damaged national self-esteem?
Will there be a parent who wells with emotion as she says, "He put Americans back to work building things we still use"?
For an interesting Time article from 1972 on re-activating the New Deal, check out The Boondoggle Recalled
Ain’t it lucky, ain’t it swell
I ran all the way home to tell
I'm so happy it's just like ringing a bell—
Papa's got a job!
Background - Dailykos:
The face of the Great Depression
Black Sunday (April 14, 1935)
The CCC - FDR's Forest Army
CCC in Texas State Parks
STFU
1000 words, 1000 years
Bread and Roses
Open Thread - Why stimulus spending should go to public art
Back when populism wasn't a dirty word
Additional links
The New New Deal
New Deal Cultural Programs
Depression Era Public Works
Google "WPA projects state capitols"