The WPA put 8,000,000 men & women to work. They built 1,164 public schools, 5800 libraries,

[Karmadillo]

and lots more. Think what we could do today if we didn't have two political parties dedicated to maintaining our system of private affluence and public squalor.

http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2009/02/reflections-the-wpa.html

REFLECTIONS: The WPA
Sam Friedman

<edit>

The WPA, born in 1935 at an initial cost of $4.8 billion, was at the time, the largest “relief” program in American history (now it’s called “stimulus”). By 1941, when spending on the coming war pulled America out of the lingering slump, WPA had cost $11.4 billion and put eight million men and women to work building 1,634 public schools, 105 airports, 3,000 tennis courts, 5,800 libraries, 3,300 storage dams, hundreds of miles of roads, sewer lines, while the CCC built roads through national and state parks, fire towers, and scores of campgrounds, many of which are in use today.

I doubt if George Bush even suspected that his weekend retreat, Camp David, which Franklin Roosevelt called Shangri-la, was built by the WPA as a recreation area in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. Do baseball fans know that WPA workers built Doubleday Field, in Cooperstown, New York, in 1939 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of America’s pastime on that hallowed ground?

The architecturally unique bridges of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut were built by the WPA. Not until 1937 did New York City get an airport, La Guardia Field (named after the city’s New Deal era mayor), with its beautiful art-deco main terminal, all built by WPA labor.

Indeed, while the WPA mostly worked with bricks and mortar and steel, building theaters and city halls, the WPA gave work to men and women of the arts when no one else could. The WPA Arts project gave us murals by Jackson Pollock in Pennsylvania. Dozens of artists were paid to paint murals in post offices and city halls many of which are still there, or have been transferred to museums for permanent display.

The WPA Theater Project, hired out-of-work actors and stage-hands who traveled the country putting on plays, concerts and vaudeville shows in hundreds of towns where people had never seen such a thing. And the Writers Project, which included Richard Wright and Saul Bellow, created dozens of wonderfully written state, city and regional guides, many of which I used as a reporter to learn about the places I covered and lived.

The WPA, I should add, hired women, although the agency’s boss, Harry Hopkins, frowned on giving work to both a wife and to leaving children unattended. About 15 percent of the workers were in the Women’s Division and they received equal pay, which was the local prevailing wage, from $19 to $94 a month, for a maximum of 30 hours of work each week. The WPA also provided jobs for 350,000 blacks, and helped dent some color barriers. And the WPA’s Education Division gave work to teachers who taught reading to thousands of illiterate blacks and whites.

more...

[LWolf]

1. "Private affluence and public squalor."

Yes.

Investment in unnecessary war, wasting lives and resources instead of improving the lives of all here at home.

:grr:

[Fumesucker]

2. But.. but.. the population of the US was 127 million in 1935..

We couldn't possibly put 8 million people to work today..














Yes, it's :sarcasm:

[Mika]

3. Post revolution Cuba did something similar, but with less money.

Cuba was the US's "whorehouse of the Caribbean", with some of the worst social index stats in the Americas.

Then, the people rose up and brought real change they can believe in.

This is why the corporate American gov hates Cuba ...



Before the 1959 revolution

75% of rural dwellings were huts made from palm trees.

More than 50% had no toilets of any kind.

85% had no inside running water.

91% had no electricity.

There was only 1 doctor per 2,000 people in rural areas.

More than one-third of the rural population had intestinal parasites.

Only 4% of Cuban peasants ate meat regularly; only 1% ate fish, less than 2% eggs, 3% bread, 11% milk; none ate green vegetables.

The average annual income among peasants was $91 (1956), less than 1/3 of the national income per person.

45% of the rural population was illiterate; 44% had never attended a school.

25% of the labor force was chronically unemployed.

1 million people were illiterate ( in a population of about 5.5 million).

27% of urban children, not to speak of 61% of rural children, were not attending school.

Racial discrimination was widespread.

The public school system had deteriorated badly.

Corruption was endemic; anyone could be bought, from a Supreme Court judge to a cop.

Police brutality and torture were common.

___



After the 1959 revolution
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/185.html

“It is in some sense almost an anti-model,” according to Eric Swanson, the programme manager for the Bank’s Development Data Group, which compiled the WDI, a tome of almost 400 pages covering scores of economic, social, and environmental indicators.

Indeed, Cuba is living proof in many ways that the Bank’s dictum that economic growth is a pre-condition for improving the lives of the poor is over-stated, if not, downright wrong.

-

It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations. It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Bank’s Vice President for Development Policy, who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself.

By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999;

Chile’s was down to ten; and Costa Rica, at 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999.

Similarly, the mortality rate for children under the age of five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50% lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cuba’s achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999.

“Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable,” according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. “You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area.”

Indeed, in Ritzen’s own field, the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100% in 1997, up from 92% in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations - higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90% rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries.

“Even in education performance, Cuba’s is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile.”

It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7% of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin American and Caribbean countries and even Singapore.

There were 12 primary school pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country. The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one.

The average youth (age 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at 7%. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is 7%, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy.

“Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40% to zero within ten years,” said Ritzen. “If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say it’s not possible.”

Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canada’s rate. Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world.

The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not.

“What does it, is the incredible dedication,” according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since.

No one can say with any credibility that universal education and universal health care needs to be forced on any population. Castro didn't give it to them either. Together, nearly all Cubans worked hard to create the infrastructure and systems that they felt were essential for any progressive system.

The Cuban people wanted universal health care for all Cubans, and they have it. They pushed for government that represented their ideals, and organized and formed infrastructure that enabled Cubans to create a fair and complete h-c system.

The people of Cuba wanted universal education for all Cubans, and they have it. They pushed for government that represented their ideals, organized and formed infrastructure that enabled Cubans to create a complete and world class ed system, and they have it.

Cubans want to assist the world's poor with doctors and educators, instead of gun ship diplomacy.. and that is what they have done WITH their government, not at odds with their government.

-

DU thread -- Electoral Process Continues Smoothly Nationwide (Election season kickoff in Cuba)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x31936

-

Viva Cuba!

---

[blindpig]

18. Viva Cuba! You betcha.

n/t

[Mika]

38. We could learn a lot from Cuba. n/t

[OHdem10]

4. This is the part Bernanke, Geithner and Obama have apparently

overlooked.

Bernanke, a scholar of the Great Depression, was prepared and
did the right thing to stabalize the Financial System. This
was the right thing to do--no matter how distasteful it may seem.
In studying the Great Depression scholars have admitted FDR
was right in his approach. Some believe his bailing out
banks was the right thing to do but he was too cautious in
the amount of money he put forth. Bernanke avoided this and
put the boatloads necessary to avert collapse.

FDR used a two pronged approach. He also put money into
programs designed to put people to work. He understood
from Keynesian Economics, money has to circulate through
the entire economy for improvements to occur. He knew that
in order for the economy to ever improve, the GOVERNMENT
had to provide a bridge between a horrible Depression
and the time when the Private Sector could get up and going.
These jobs kept the economy going and money circulating
until the Private Sector could kick in. As the Private
Sector became stronger the Government Programs would shut
down.
This is where Bernake, Geithner and Obama have come
up short. And, this may prove to be a serious mistake,
long long long term unemployment can drag the entire
economy down once again.

Is there such fear of Conservatism, that they chose only
one prong????

[girl gone mad]

32. The bailout was definitely not done right.

Recapitalization should have come with massive strings, clawbacks, management ousters and regulatory reform. There were countless options at our disposal that were better than the papering over the losses/throwing good money after bad strategy Paulson, Bernanke et al chose. Our banks are not healthy, a point which is made patently obvious every Friday night. Even our TBTFs remain on very shaky ground because the structural problems were simply not addressed.

The way in which FDR engaged in bank rescues was markedly different from our recent highly dubious approach. Roosevelt shut down the banks for over a month and created the FDIC to protect the depositors. Very little actual money was spent, it was largely a confidence game which worked because our government was fiscally sound and had the broad trust of the American people.

The Bush and Obama administration's primary objective was protecting the banking executives, shareholders, bondholders, derivatives counterparties and foreign investors. None of these groups should have assumed they were guaranteed the level of safety inherent in a government-backed savings account product. When people were putting their money into banks in the 20s, they assumed the banks to be safe and received a low rate of interest in return for that high margin of safety. The types of instruments banks were selling recently were much higher yield than government-backed treasury bonds or FDIC insured savings accounts precisely because they came with greater risk. Most of these counterparties and bondholders should never have been bailed out at anything approaching 100%, yet some were paid over 100 cents on the dollar. The executives and traders should have been out on their asses, not handed mountains of public cash in "bonuses" for fucking up the world economy. It's very hard to make a case that the American taxpayer should be held accountable for bad risky investments wealthy foreigners made. Why not go ahead and bail out all of Madoff's investors, too, and throw in the high returns they were promised?

I know the administration is currently engaged in a campaign of historical revisionism veering on outright propaganda, but at times I just have to roll my eyes at the over-the-top silliness of these comparisons. Please, do not insinuate that the recent clusterfuck looting of the American treasury by Wall Street was in any way comparable to FDR's shoring up of American citizen's deposit accounts during the depression. What an insult to our collective intelligence that analogy is!

[rhett o rick]

5. But isnt that s-s-socialism? There you made me say the S-word. nt

[Bigmack]

6. Remember, though...

FDR said about the conservatives.. "I welcome their hatred."

Today's Dems are either bought-and-paid-for by the corporations or completely nutless.

The goddam country is literally falling apart. We need massive fix-it projects, from reforestation to levees. We have the manpower. We simply lack the political willpower.

FDR also knew that you have to employ the young men at something. Too much potential for trouble. Hence the CCC.

[pnorman]

7. From the author of "American-made" (about the WPA)

.
..
The WPA’s remarkable achievement was to combine the urgency of putting people back to work with a vision of rebuilding America. Its workers weren’t merely raking leaves. They were overhauling the country's Nineteenth Century infrastructure. The WPA also transformed the social landscape. It recognized the federal government’s obligation to sustain the basic needs of its citizens, and it brought women into leadership roles to an extent that was remarkable less than a generation after they won the vote.

Perhaps most important, the WPA’s multifarious projects and its success at implementing them produced both an array of skills and a confidence of execution that was vital as the country entered World War II and cast off the chains of the Depression at last.

When disaster struck, the WPA was there. During the devastating Ohio River flood of 1937, and the New England hurricane of 1938, the agency sent thousands of men to the scene without waiting to be asked, and they evacuated families, shored up levees, and did a hundred other tasks that saved lives and property and helped victims and their towns and cities get back on their feet afterward, in vivid contrast with the current government's response to Hurricane Katrina.

WPA workers built everything from airports to zoos, including bridges, roads, and schools. They laid water lines and sewers. They dug up arrowheads and the bones of mastodons and built catwalks around the Odessa, Texas, meteorite so people could climb on it and look. They fought forest fires and took fingerprints. They stocked rivers, lakes, and streams with fish, seeded oyster beds, and planted trees. They built and refurbished toys for Christmas distribution, and they sewed clothing, mattresses, and dolls. Some of the best playwrights, actors, musicians, painters and writers in the country, who had to eat like everybody else, wrote and performed plays, gave concerts, painted murals, and wrote guidebooks. WPA workers cooked and served the first hot school lunches, often using vegetables grown in WPA gardens. To put a measuring stick on its accomplishments, the WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 buildings, and seven hundred miles of airport runways. It served almost 900 million hot lunches to schoolchildren, and operated fifteen hundred nursery schools. It presented 225,000 concerts to audiences totalling 150 million, and produced almost 475,000 works of art. Even today, almost sixty years after it ceased to exist, there is no part of America that does not bear some mark of the WPA.
.
.
.

http://www.nicktaylor.us/

[pnorman]

10. Here's some more on that topic:

The right-wing New Deal conniption fit
Revisionist historians and economists keep trying to stomp on FDR's legacy. But declaring that WPA workers were unemployed is just silly.

For the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the spectacle of a major government spending program aimed at combating a severe recession is evidently a nightmare beyond belief, complete with a popular interventionist-leaning president, Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, and, scariest of all, a legion of zombie back-from-the-dead Keynesian economist holy warriors. How else to explain the paper's increasingly shrill declarations that the New Deal absolutely, positively did not work?

The latest salvo came Monday morning in a piece by two economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee. E. Ohanian: "How Government Prolonged the Depression."
.
.
.
Let us reflect, for a moment, on what the men and women employed by those programs achieved (aside from earning cash to buy food and pay for shelter, of course). In his paper, "Time for a New, New Deal," Marshall Auerback (pointed to by economist James Galbraith) summarizes:

The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

In other words, millions of men and women earned a living wage and self-respect and contributed mightily to the national infrastructure. But, according to the statistics as interpreted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they were unemployed.
.
.
.

Way back in 1976, economist Michael Darby exposed the absurdity of not counting WPA workers as "employed" in his paper "Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941." More than 30 years ago, Darby observed that correctly counting those 3 and a half million people as employed workers effectively debunked "the 'un-fact' that recovery was extremely slow from 1934 through 1941. From 1933 to 1936, the corrected unemployment rate fell by nearly 5 percentage points per year..."
.
.
.

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/02/02/the_new_deal_worked/

[Citizen Worker]

20. The WPA and the Commons

I'm fortunate that where I live there are constant daily reminders of what the WPA, CCC and other government sponsored programs have done to expand the commons. A bit over two miles from where I live is a WPA built Community Center. A simple structure built of wood and stone it serves as a local meeting place for the community, a wedding venue, local garden club get togethers, etc. About 12 miles distant is a much larger WPA built community center that features several athletic fields, an indoor swimming pool, a gymnasium, several meeting rooms and a number of out buildings. More distant is the lodge at Mt. Hood, OR, another WPA built structure. Whenever I enter one of these buildings I stop to read the dedication plaque out loud and if my grandchildren are with me I ask one of them to read the plaque and then we have a discussion about the WPA and the Commons, who built them and who benefits from their use and continued existence.

Thank you FDR and the workers who built these enduring structures.

[bamacrat]

8. SOCIALISM!!!

Doing something for the greater good of all people in America is socialism to the dumb asses in this country. Doing something for the good of only the top 5% in America is democracy/capitalism.

But a new WPA is needed, there are so many crumbling schools or schools that are just too small to house all the students. So either way the go, build more schools or build bigger schools in the place of the smaller ones means more jobs. I hate this country alot of the time because the people in charge are horrible people (excluding some)who only care about campaign donations and their own job security, forget about our job security.

[maryf]

25. Yep! nt

[NightWatcher]

9. now these stimulus projects are going to contractors who dont always use American Labor

the stimulus will only stimulate the bottom lines of greedy fat cat contractors who farm out the work to subs who hire illegal workers

[WillyT]

11. Here's A Must See:

From PBS's American Experience: The CCC

Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/ccc/

From Their 1930's Collection.

Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/collection/1930s/

Enjoy!!!

:hi:

:kick:

[The Genealogist]

12. I wish there was something like this in America today

With schools being failed, people out of work, mass pessimism abounding over where meals, roofs over heads and other basics are going to come from, this country desperately needs an injection. Something like the WPA and its sister organizations, I think, could be just the kind of shot in the arm this country needs right now.

That said, the KKKorperate puppets of America would never go for a reestablishment of such organizations, because they would have little if any way to rape, plunder and pillage it.

The RWers would blast out rhetoric the likes of which makes the current nasty blithering seem like tea party chatter. The hordes of their listeners would, I think martyr themselves on the alter of conservatism--literally die--before touching such a program.

The political atmosphere of 2010 is nothing like that of the 1930s. The United States has become just plain too conservative, socially and economically, to be open to the kind of sweeping progressive change that it would take to set up and implement the programs. I say socially and economically too conservative. The Conservative Christian translation of the Christian gospel and supply-side economics have become far too fused, IMHO.

[Starry Messenger]

13. But that's not realistic.

:sarcasm:

[Gormy Cuss]

16. Well, we don't have all those unemployed people nor a crumbling infrastructure to update.

x(

[Edweird]

14. Yep. But Obama said forget about a new one.

[smalll]

15. We had a Stimulus Bill. It DIDN'T put people to work this way, BECAUSE

the government would have had to suspend the YEARS-long environmental and other reviews that are required now before the government can build anything substantial.

[TexasObserver]

17. We need WPA now, to put people to work.

Why the president won't do things that worked for FDR is a mystery.

Both of my grandfathers were farmers who had to rely on WPA to feed their families. They went to work building roadside parks and other such useful facilities for the public.

We need the president to identify with families that are suffering - enough to be motivated to do something about it.

[blindpig]

19. Well, the Chamber of Commerce wasn't gonna let that happen

again.

He could have been another FDR but instead he's Calvin Coolidge.

[earth mom]

21. Isn't this what everyone on DU THOUGHT Obama was gonna do once he was in office?

Rah Rah Sis Boom Barf. :puke:

That about sums up the job prospects in this country right now.

Obama ain't no FDR that's for damn sure!

Here's an excellent documentary on PBS about the Civilian Conservation Corp which put 3 million to work during the depression which is what Obama should be doing and is NOT:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/ccc/

[Greyhound]

22. To these "masters of the universe", there is nothing beyond finance.

The tyranny of the MBA continues unabated.

[Greyhound]

23. K&R & a big pile of outrage.

[Wilms]

24. k&r n/t

[leftstreet]

26. K&R

[maryf]

27. Thanks!!

for another great OP!!

[scarletwoman]

28. Wonderful post! How far we've fallen...

:(

[Karmadillo]

30. That is sadly true. "Me first, you not at all" has pretty much won out,.

at least for now. Let's hope we can work up the courage to take back the country from our Corporate Masters.

[scarletwoman]

31. Won't happen unless people stop being good little consumers.

I mean, for cripesakes -- even after all the shit that's gone down in the financial sector people are STILL handing their money over to Wall Street. People are STILL handing their money over to Bank of America and its ilk. People are STILL hanging on to their credit cards as if their survival depended on it -- when the fact is, ALL our survival depends on NOT cooperating with our own enslavement.

The ONLY thing that's going to free us is non-cooperation with the system that the "Corporate Masters" have designed.

Until people recognize that, there'll be no "taking our country back." You can't free yourself from a system if you're still (literally!) buying into it.

sw

[slampoet]

29. When i was a kid i thought Pine trees grew exactly the same distance from each other.

Then i read about the Civilian Conservation Core and I realized that every Pine Forrest i had ever seen in Northern Michigan had been planted by the CCC as part of the New Deal - WPA programs.


As i see more places in the USA, I see that MANY places must have had nearly all of their trees gone in the 30's and that they owe almost all of their pine trees to the CCC.


Also if you ever find one of the long handled shovels they used to dig deep holes in the CCC, let me know. Those have got to be the best made shovels in the world. One of those will last you all the rest of your life and still be going strong for your great-grandchildren's generation too.

To this day i quiz young "environmentalists" one the pine trees and you'd be shocked how many think that pine trees naturally grow in staggered straight rows naturally.

[Doremus]

34. We have such a pine tree woods near here.

I never knew the Conservation Corps was responsible. Thanks.

[Doremus]

33. WPA masterpiece: Lorain Carnegie/Hope Memorial Bridge

[donheld]

35. k & R

[spanone]

36. this occurred when politicians still worked for the people....not any more

[Karmadillo]

37. Kick

nt

[slipslidingaway]

39. WGA - Works Green Administration

http://www.grist.org/article/kucinich

"...You propose, for instance, the Works Green Administration.

The Works Green Administration harkens back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt and the Works Progress Administration, where he put millions of people back to work rebuilding America's infrastructure. I too have an infrastructure-rebuilding program which will put millions of people back to work. Picture this: You take every area of involvement in the federal government -- whether it's the Small Business Administration, or the Housing and Urban Development Department, or the Department of Agriculture, or the Department of Labor. Each would incorporate green goals. We'd have billions of dollars loaned to the states at zero interest for green development programs, we'd have programs furthering green housing, agricultural policies would relate to green..."


Kick - too late to rec.

[LWolf]

40. If Democratic voters would VOTE for Democrats like that one,

we'd see some authentic, positive change.

[slipslidingaway]

42. Exactly and we could have used his infrastructure bill years ago...

instead we invaded Iraq.

:(

[KoKo]

41. ABOLUTELY! MASSIVE PROGRAM that Rebuilt America in Arts and Infrastructure!

BRING IT BACK, PRESIDENT OBAMA! DO IT NOW!