As a government report said in Here was a country with a great and growing need for more schools, more highways, more bridges, more waterworks, more services of all kinds. Here was an army of men willing and able to build them. Here was industry hungry for orders for the needed materials. The idea was to bring all of them together.
The job would have to be done some time, why not now? People working on PWA projects didn't have to be on relief, but the program was meant to help reduce the relief rolls. Courtesy Library of Congress. The PWA solicited proposals for projects from around the country, and it received some doozies.
He didn't want to build anything, just wanted to spread out bibles. There was a mayor who thought maybe his office could be redecorated with PWA money.
But Leighninger says most proposals weren't silly. Some of the projects would be built by the federal government alone, and others were done in partnership with local governments. The PWA was criticized for being too slow to get started.
Part of the problem was that large public works projects require planning before shovels can go into the dirt. And part of the problem was that the program's director, Harold Ickes, was so scrupulous about vetting the proposals. Leighninger tells the story of Ickes inserting passages of Alice in Wonderland into a proposal, to see whether his staff would read it thoroughly enough to notice. Massive steel bar columns rise in the construction of Boulder Dam, now called the Hoover Dam.
At the time of its completion, it was the tallest dam in the world. Today, it generates enough hydroelectric power per year to serve 1. The finished bridge connects the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. Kennedy Bridge , which connected Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
The powerful New York City official Robert Moses led construction of the bridge, which opened in An aerial view showing the little San Antonio River winding through the suburban city.
The city used this money to build bridges and pathways that made the area more walkable and allowed businesses to move into the area. Today, the River Walk is a major commercial and tourist hub for the city. When it opened in , it was known as New York Municipal Airport. While women were employed in library programs, sewing centers, and childcare programs, youth programs like the CCC and construction projects were limited to male workers. The Civilian Conservation Corps were also racially segregated, and a ten percent quota limited the number of African American youth admitted to the camps.
WPA projects were supposed to be open to all races and there were no official segregation rules in Washington State, although discrimination on particular projects was common. Still African Americans made use of the federal jobs and sometimes managed to seize valuable opportunities.
Blacks had been routinely shut out of traditionally "white" jobs before the Depression. Some now found office work through the WPA or worked on one of the federal arts programs. Like all New Deal programs, public works sought to redefine an American liberalism that broadened its social vision to include the unemployed, the poor, and working people. Yet that vision was never quite as expansive as many of its supporters hoped, and thus the civil rights gains of the era relied not on the opportunities granted by the federal government as much as on the social protest of disadvantaged groups.
Just as public works programs reshaped the geographical landscape of the state, they also shaped its social landscape as well. Mass unemployment relief did much to upend the s poor law mentality that assumed that the unemployed were lazy, not victims of larger structural collapse, yet also upheld previous ideas about the marginal place of nonwhites and women to the American workforce. Funding from the Works Progress Administration allowed the completion of the Grand Coulee Dam in central Washington, one of the most dramatic ways the New Deal rebuilt Washington's infrastructure.
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