Roosevelt faced unprecedented mass unemployment. By the time
he took office, as many as 13 million Americans – more than a
quarter of the labor force – were out of work. Bread lines were
a common sight in most cities. Hundreds of thousands roamed the
country in search of food, work, and shelter. "Brother, can you
spare a dime?" was the refrain of a popular song.
An early step for the unemployed came in the form of the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program that brought relief
to young men between 18 and 25 years of age. CCC enrollees
worked in camps administered by the army. About two million took
part during the decade. They participated in a variety of
conservation projects: planting trees to combat soil erosion and
maintain national forests; eliminating stream pollution;
creating fish, game, and bird sanctuaries; and conserving coal,
petroleum, shale, gas, sodium, and helium deposits.
A Public Works Administration (PWA) provided employment for
skilled construction workers on a wide variety of mostly medium-
to large-sized projects. Among the most memorable of its many
accomplishments were the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams in the
Pacific Northwest, a new Chicago sewer system, the Triborough
Bridge in New York City, and two aircraft carriers (Yorktown and
Enterprise) for the U.S. Navy.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), both a work relief program
and an exercise in public planning, developed the impoverished
Tennessee River valley area through a series of dams built for
flood control and hydroelectric power generation. Its provision
of cheap electricity for the area stimulated some economic
progress, but won it the enmity of private electric companies.
New Dealers hailed it as an example of "grass roots democracy."
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), in operation
from 1933 to 1935, distributed direct relief to hundreds of
thousands of people, usually in the form of direct payments.
Sometimes, it assumed the salaries of schoolteachers and other
local public service workers. It also developed numerous
small-scale public works projects, as did the Civil Works
Administration (CWA) from late 1933 into the spring of 1934.
Criticized as "make work," the jobs funded ranged from ditch
digging to highway repairs to teaching. Roosevelt and his key
officials worried about costs but continued to favor
unemployment programs based on work relief rather than welfare. |
