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PUTTING THE COUNTRY BACK TO WORK
After FDR took the reins at the White House in 1933, he immediately targeted the nation’s severe unemployment, which was nearing 25 percent, with massive spending on public works projects. The Civilian Conservation Corps was established immediately after Inauguration Day in March 1933 and, by the time it ceased operations in 1942, the CCC had employed 3 million people, mostly unskilled young men. The broader and larger Works Progress Administration was established next, encompassing not only public works but also arts, music, education, agriculture and other areas. The largest New Deal agency, the WPA employed a peak of 3.3 million people nationally in 1938 and more than 8 million in all — in the process building 650,000 miles of roads, performing 225,000 concerts and creating a half-million works of art. Roosevelt had his share of critics. Republican opposition to massive New Deal spending prompted him to pull back, a move blamed with spurring a recession in 1937 and 1938. Some also questioned the huge transfer of power from the private sector to the government. At the other extreme, some Democrats criticized the New Deal for not doing enough to redistribute wealth but focusing primarily on saving capitalism and promoting big business.
In the Colorado of the 1930s, falling prices for agricultural and mining exports sparked an economic crisis. Numerous farms became unprofitable, and the Dust Bowl exacerbated an already bad situation. A great many people found themselves economic refugees, looking for a new home and means to make a living. To boost employment, the federal government established 40 CCC companies in Colorado and Wyoming. Between 1935 and 1941, the WPA completed more than 5,000 projects in Colorado at a cost of $100 million. Another agency, the Public Works Administration, was also active. In all, Colorado received more New Deal money per capita than any state but Washington and was 10th in overall dollars spent. Colorado historian Tom Noel says this is a tad ironic, because most Colorado politicians opposed the New Deal. “Our politicians did not support (the New Deal), but we actually made more out of it, largely because of the outdoor focus,” Noel says. Western states received more New Deal money in general because of a deeper inventory of public lands than Eastern states. Of all the New Deal projects in Colorado, one tends to receive the lion’s share of the attention: Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre in Morrison. “Red Rocks is kind of the poster child, but so many things were aided one way or another,” Noel says. “Almost any kind of public project that needed money got money.”
Other New Deal projects included “the best guidebook ever produced about Colorado,” says Noel, titled “Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State,” and the meticulous dioramas at the Colorado History Museum depicting Denver in 1860 and other local landscapes. These resulted from Federal Project Number One, aka Federal One, which included five WPA-backed projects: the Federal Writers’ Project, the Historical Records Survey, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Art Project. The people behind Federal One projects were “unemployed artists, architects, historians, journalists and writers,” Noel says. “Those kinds of folks often suffer during a depression.” Noel also points to Waverly, one of many towns created from the ground up to resettle 1930s refugees of the Dust Bowl, marked by ferocious dust storms fueled by bad agricultural practices. The storms uprooted 2.5 million people, mostly from ravaged states southeast of Colorado, and the federal government built brand-new municipalities to accommodate them. “It was almost like the Tennessee Valley Authority where they got people their first running water and electricity,” Noel says.
Another result of the Dust Bowl was the federal purchase of ravaged farmland and making it Comanche and Pawnee national grasslands. “Environmental historians make a big deal of that,” Noel says. “This was a desert. You can’t turn it into the Garden of Eden.” For this reason, Colorado — and the West as a whole — became decidedly more urban during the Great Depression. “People moved to cities in Colorado,” Noel says. “You saw a dramatic rise in the number of ghost towns, not just in the mountains, but on the plains.”
DELIVERING OBAMA’S ‘NEW DEAL’
Two-thirds of a century after the WPA was mothballed — following nearly 2.7 million jobs lost nationally in 2008, 40,000 of them in Colorado — pundits are waxing rhapsodic on what they’d like to see in a New Deal sequel directed by Obama. A long and perhaps overly hopeful wish list has taken shape, and it includes everything from a national high-speed rail system to a healthier school-lunch program. In his Dec. 6 address, Obama announced a few key specifics about his plan: “a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient,” “the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s,” and “the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.” Obama also pledged to upgrade the nation’s broadband infrastructure and ensure the health-care industry makes use of the latest and greatest information technology. Signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act resulted in more than $100 billion in federal spending on 40,000 miles of roads throughout the country. It looks like a similar highway reconstruction act could top that dollar figure: In November, U.S. governors said that about $136 billion worth of projects could be started as soon as funding became available. A recent report by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials estimated that some 1.8 million new jobs would be created if $64 billion worth of projects that are currently “ready to go” were funded.
Observers believe Obama’s package — which could hit $1 trillion — also could include as much as $100 billion invested into green energy projects, catalyzing the creation of as many as 2 million new jobs. Colorado, home to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, would be well positioned in such an initiative. Another possible spending push mentioned in D.C. that would skew spending toward Colorado: clearing the backlog of maintenance projects in the national parks. Colorado is home to four of the 58 total parks in the system. But the sky is clearly not the limit. If money weren’t an issue, none of the above would have languished without funding for years.
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