Review: Building New Deal Liberalism

Jason S. Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 

Published in 2006, Jason Smith's examination of the impact both of the Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) came at a time of revived Democratic Party fortunes. That year, the Republican Party lost control of Congress, which they had dominated for over a decade. Two years later, neophyte Illinois Senator Barack Obama took back the White House after the eventful eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. Given the prevailing economic malaise, it was not difficult for convicted liberals to look on the newly convened Obama administration as following in the footsteps of the sage of Hyde Park.

In practice, more separates the era of the Work Progress Administration from that of the Affordable Care Act than the passage of almost eighty years and Building New Deal Liberalism is an excellent illustration of why this might be. Following in the footsteps of such historians as Theda Skocpol and Steven Skowronek who advocate "bringing the state back in," Smith seeks to address what he calls the "public works revolution" by which "New Dealers remade the built environment that managed the movement of people, goods, electricity, water, and waste." (3) Such an approach abandons the traditional understanding of New Deal public works as intended solely to mitigate the effects of unemployment (by which criterion they must be judged a failure) in favor of one that views them as state-sponsored economic development.

Any discussion of New Deal public works inevitably invites comparisons between the PWA and the WPA and their very different overseers, Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins. While Smith eschews any inclination to dismiss the WPA as the "poor relation," by providing extensive documentation of its infrastructural impact, his examination of the PWA is valuable for confirming certain patterns of New Deal state activity. The heated discussions within the PWA that addressed such issues as regional administration, the selection of technical experts, the extent of reliance on private contractors and even the initial interest rate levied on PWA loans all attest to the scope of the undertaking, a point driven home by Ickes in a 1933 NBC radio broadcast in which he told listeners that "public works represent capital investments." (44)

Smith argues that the PWA provided a secure environment for engineers and lawyers to promote efficient forms of economic development, and cites approvingly the work of the first head of the PWA's investigation division, Louis Glavis. (56-59) Although Ickes would ultimately remove him for excessive zeal, it was Gavis—dismissed from the General Land Office during the Taft administration for revealing details of the manner in which private interests had secured undue access to public resources—who was responsible for establishing the machinery necessary to resist the inevitable pressures of political patronage. Even ostensibly impartial engineers could not be wholly trusted, however, with Smith suggesting that experts hired to review power project applications were often slow to approve any application for funding a publicly owned power plant because of previous employment by the utility industry. (72)

Despite the extent of PWA spending, Ickes tended to emphasize the "indirect employment" generated by the demand of PWA projects for raw materials rather than on-site employment. Its achievements, far from being confined to bricks and mortar structures, encompassed technical innovations in such fields as civil engineering, transportation, electrical power generation and aeronautics. PWA expenditures (the greater part of which occurred in the Northeast and Midwest) were weighted towards highway construction, educational buildings and flood control and, in so doing, laid the groundwork for the Cold War economy.

The advent of the WPA in May 1935 reflected the ongoing debate within the Roosevelt administration concerning the relative merits on infrastructural investment and work relief. Interestingly, Smith extensively documents the acceptance by Hopkins of the need for the program to be acceptable to governors and big city mayors, since the federal government had neither the power nor the ability to go it alone. Unlike the PWA, however, the WPA was obliged to dispense with the practice of employing private contractors because of the latter's reluctance to hire relief workers. Smith's documenting of WPA projects, including 67,00 miles of city streets, 572,000 miles of rural roads, 40,000 public buildings and 78,000 bridges, indicates that far from being a make-work alternative to the PWA, the WPA had its own distinct role to play in infrastructural investment. (113-115)

Smith devotes considerable attention to the question of political patronage and charges of corruption, particularly those directed at the WPA. That local enthusiasm for such projects was broad and deep was evident as late as 1939, when the US Community Improvement Appraisal reported that nine in ten communities considered WPA projects "of permanent value." (147) It must be admitted, however, that the administration was not slow to trumpet its achievements, notably through radio broadcasts that publicized the work both of the WPA and the PWA. (106, 110-111) Such Democratic functionaries as James Farley and Emil Hurja were also quick to exploit the political opportunities of work relief, giving rise to Republican (and conservative Democrat) charges of "boondoggling," some of which were more than verifiable. (149-159) Smith's documentation of the Democratic Senate primary in Kentucky in 1938 thus provides valuable context for the groundswell of public opinion that helped ensure passage of the Hatch Act, which sought to prescribe fundraising from those employed on federal relief projects. (160-189)

Although focused on the New Deal years, Smith's object is also to demonstrate the continuity of the New Deal into the era of the Second World War and the beyond. Both the PWA and the WPA were merged into the Federal Works Agency (FWA) in 1939. Its survival was ensured by the New Deal's embrace of the language of rearmament to further infrastructural investment, under the leadership of John Carmody, former head of the Rural Electrification Administration, and with the backing of the Army's chief staff, General George Marshall. Although the FWA increasingly embraced the PWA practice of private contracting, wartime conditions offered new opportunities. Not only did the FWA establish training programs for the unemployed, which organized labor had always resisted during the 1930s, but the Community Facilities Act of 1940 permitted for the first time a significant federal investment in house construction. (217-218) Less appealing is the account the FWA's enthusiastic involvement in the relocation of Japanese Americans in 1942, a telling reminder of the limitations of mid-century liberalism. (222-231) Transformed into the General Services Administration in 1949, the FWA's postwar demise signalled a shift away from public works at home, although its lingering influence could be seen in the interstate highway program of the Eisenhower administration. (251-253)

Smith's documentation of the rise and fall of public works during the 1930s and 1940s is extensive and he casts a revealing light on the behind-the-scenes debates that helped shape federal policy. What is to be regretted is that his discussion of the ideology of public works and the public reaction to it are sometimes so fleeting. In a fascinating but all too brief analysis (118-122), he invokes a speech delivered by Jerome Frank of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1938. "A country whose amazing development was based upon Nineteenth Century pump-priming—on Nineteenth Century gigantic government aid to private enterprise—will not arrest its present development and stifle its amazing potential future growth," Frank told members of the Harvard Business Club in 1938, "merely because government aid to private enterprise must now take on a new form." (119) The New Dealers thus understood themselves—rightly or wrongly—to be heirs to a long-standing tradition of government investment in national infrastructure. The forms might change, but the essence remained constant.

Smith's analysis also points to a long-standing myth regarding popular hostility to the WPA at the grassroots level. "This broad range of support for federal public works spending at the local level," he writes, "suggests that portraits of New Deal political culture that emphasize such features of daily life or taxpayer resistance or the role of mass culture in mediating the growing acceptance of the welfare state are incomplete. Through the PWA's public works, the New Deal won the support of native-born white property owners too." (98) Ultimately, his analysis confirms the conclusion reached by James Patterson over thirty years ago in The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition. From Harry Hopkins downwards, the New Dealers understood that their success was contingent upon local cooperation. Public works remained genuinely public and—for the most part—genuinely local throughout the 1930s. From such roots did the modern American state grow.