The Wall Street Journal-20080118-In the Bleak -30s- WPA- CCC Saved My Family
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In the Bleak '30s, WPA, CCC Saved My Family
In her op-ed "The New Deal Jobs Myth" (Dec. 31) Amity Shlaes denigrates the value of the public sector relief jobs in the early 1930s, as if schools, town halls, post offices and swimming pools built under Works Progress Administration were not of great value to communities. Then she points with alarm at some public job proposals by candidates John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich. Finally, she mocks those who call attention to the widely agreed need for renewed public investment in transportation infrastructure, as if that would be built not only with public money, but by federal workers. Her Exhibit A for the failure of federal job programs is an obscure and isolated model farm in Arizona in the 1930s.
I can personally vouch for the social and economic value of the WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps jobs under FDR. One uncle, for whom federal farm credit was too late, built drainage systems and cleaned roadside ditches under WPA for a few dollars a day, and held his family together. Another refinanced and saved his farm under a New Deal credit program. My dad learned soil and water conservation from the "CCC boys" and made our farm a public conservation exhibit. By 1948, 12 years after the CCC brought soil conservation to our area in Kansas, voters established a Soil Conservation District. Within a few years, most local farms were terraced or contoured to save soil and water. WPA, CCC and the Farm Credit Administration were not principally political programs. They were principally humanitarian projects: educational, ecological and economic. Ms. Shlaes's complaints against the Tennessee Valley Authority are equally hollow. TVA and the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to millions of families that the private power sector never intended to serve and never tried to serve.
John A. Schnittker
Santa Ynez, Calif.
