Seventy-two years after it first
emerged from President Franklin Roosevelt's post-inaugural Hundred Days of
epochal legislation, the New Deal rises from the grave to haunt those who
hoped they had buried it for good. Its eternal foes ironically resurrected
"that man's" memory by attempting to privatize his most popular and
enduring legacy. Social Security -- a program whose very name invokes the
communitarian ethos that makes the New Deal satanic for those who would
privatize risk along with everything else in the public domain -- still
easily has enough voting friends that Republicans backed off tampering
with it before next year's midterm elections.
But nothing did so much to freshen the fading memory of the New Deal as
hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In their ruinous wake, liberal commentators
called for similar federal activism to rebuild the South while
reactionaries sought to tamp back its dreaded specter into the tomb of
forgetfulness.
Among the latter, New York Times columnist John Tierney predicted
("Losing the Faith," Sept. 24) that the "1930s nostalgia craze" would
quickly founder on the rocks of a public cynicism to which he added his
own weighty boulders. Tierney related how he had lost faith in government
after working with a federal antipoverty program in the 1970s. There, he
witnessed bored teenagers paid to do little or nothing. Tierney
gratifyingly cited a Pew Research Center poll, which found that 56 percent
of Americans after Katrina thought government almost always wasteful and
inefficient. The Bush administration's calamitous bungling of a natural
catastrophe, according to conservatives such as Tierney, only buttressed
their own ideological antipathy to the shared risks and responsibilities
inherent in New Deal programs. A Louisiana laborer told the columnist that
government's unresponsiveness taught him that "The lesson is to save money
and be self-reliant." John Wayne rides again.
A 1939 Dorothea Lange photograph reminded me that Tierney's tale of
redundant teens was as stale as those of FDR's enemies, who savaged the
Works Progress Administration for useless make-work projects. Lange's
camera captured a 1939 parade of WPA laborers in San Francisco protesting
congressional funding cutbacks. One carried a sign asking, "Was the Cow
Palace Built Leaning on Shovels?" (a reference to the city-owned
exhibition building that has been paying dividends since it opened in 1941
by hosting everything from Republican Party conventions to Billy Graham
revivals, rodeos and the Beatles). Few know that federal workers and
grants built the Cow Palace, and that they did so with not a whiff of
graft. As waves of corruption and mismanagement charges engulf the present
administration, those who have lost faith in government cannot conceive of
a regime notable for little scandal even as it employed millions of men
and women on public-works projects.
For most Americans, the ubiquitous public landscape of the New Deal is
as invisible as it is essential for the functioning of a modern nation.
One of the New Deal's first alphabet soup agencies -- the Civil Works
Administration -- lasted only for the dire winter of 1933-34. Within three
weeks, CWA Director Harry Hopkins put 2 million people to work, a number
that soon doubled as legions of laborers built or repaired more than 800
airports, 3,700 athletic fields and 255,000 miles of roads. Demonstrating
a commitment to public education characteristic of subsequent New Deal
programs, the CWA built or modernized 4,000 school buildings, hired 50,000
teachers for rural schools, and controversially employed about 3,000
artists and writers who, Hopkins insisted, "had to eat, too."
In the coming years, Hopkins' CWA and the Public Works Administration
(under "Honest" Harold Ickes) put millions more to work building a network
of levees, roads, airports, military bases, schools, community colleges,
civic auditoriums, water-delivery systems, sewers, hospitals, zoos and
parks still in use today. New Deal workers restored the Statue of Liberty,
the Washington Monument and San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, and they
built the Triborough and San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges, the Lincoln
Tunnel, TVA dams, Treasure Island and the spectacular Timberline Lodge on
Mount Hood. Without WPA flood-control projects, last winter's storms would
have devastated Southern California at a cost of billions of dollars to
taxpayers and insurance companies.
Civilian Conservation Corps "boys" stationed in thousands of rural
camps meanwhile reforested the nation and clocked in 6.5 million days
fighting forest fires. They built 204 museums, restored almost 4,000
historic buildings and constructed 3,116 fire towers and more than 46,000
bridges. While saving families and individuals from destitution, the CCC
made the nation's proliferating parklands so gracefully accessible that
few who use them are aware of the peacetime "tree army's" heroic
contributions to our collective well-being.
FDR called upon Americans to overcome their fear even as his works
programs vastly enlarged the public domain, providing them with a
multitude of spaces in which to come together both as citizens and as a
national community. By remembering the optimism, the wit, and the
demonstrable compassion with which he led the nation through the twin
calamities of depression and world war, we can better measure what recent
administrations lack, as well as the quality we have forgotten to demand.
Those who -- like Tierney -- have lost their faith in what government can
accomplish for the common good have but to look around themselves to
regain it. The evidence of intelligent design is everywhere; it bears the
name of Roosevelt, and it points to the future we could have if we but
remembered we once had it.
Gray Brechin is project scholar and writer for the New Deal Legacy
Project (www.newdealproject.org), which is documenting the physical
legacy of the New Deal in California under the aegis of the California
Historical Society.
© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle
