June 29, 2010
By David Cox
My father grew up in Springfield, Ohio, which at the time was a mill town. Springfield once had eight iron mills, but during the last Great Depression most all of them faded away. My father was the youngest of seven boys and because of the hard times he was sent away to live with his grandfather on the farm in Ross County.
::::::::
Both of my parents lived through the Great Depression. My father
was born in 1920, and my mother was born in 1926. My father was raised
in a small industrial town, my mother in inner city Chicago. Those of
you familiar with Chicago's waterfront might be surprised to learn that
children once played in the empty shell of what now is the Museum of
Science and Industry. It was dilapidated, hollow, crime was rampant in
the area, vegetable gardens were guarded with shotguns, and in a
strange dichotomy whole families would sleep on the beaches of Lake
Michigan on summer nights to escape the Summer heat.
My
father grew up in Springfield, Ohio, which at the time was a mill town.
Springfield once had eight iron mills, but during the last Great
Depression most all of them faded away. My father was the youngest of
seven boys and because of the hard times he was sent away to live with
his grandfather on the farm in Ross County. My father never really got
over his feeling of abandonment, too young to understand the financial
reasons for the separation.
As a teen he ran away from the
farm and rode the rails, living his own "Bound for Glory" Woody Guthrie
tale. He told me about finding a lost boy of about fourteen who was
crying and wanting to go home. So he and another boy promised him they
would take him home. In their mind's eye they saw a grateful, crying
mother and a thankful, relived father insisting they take a reward as
the mother fed them home cooking. What they got was an unpleasant,
"Thanks," and the door slammed in their faces. Such is the fate
sometimes of the well intentioned; the boy was more abandoned than lost
and as my father and his friend discussed it they understood why it was
that no one was looking for them.
Years later when I was a
child, long before seat belt use became common, I would lean forward on
the back of the car seat and talk to my father as he drove. We had a
game we regularly played, "See it!" He'd say, "That's a WPA Bridge." I
bet we counted a thousand of them; most are gone today but a few
survive in rural areas. They were concrete bridges for the most part.
Built to high standards and in many cases over-engineered for their
time. As my dad would tell it, before those, the bridges across America
were rickety wooden bridges built with local expertise for horse
traffic, or in many cases they just didn't exist at all.
Now,
as our own current day economy continues to slide towards the brink, I
have heard academic free market economists make the claim that FDR and
the New Deal actually made the Great Depression worse. This is picked
up and parroted by right wing partisans who, using 20/20 hindsight,
pick apart the failings of the New Deal without counting up all those
things that the New Deal gave us.
It is easy enough to give
credence to what the academics say because that's their business,
knowledge and facts and figures and all. Could they be wrong? I mean, a
few bridges versus all those statistics. Of course, using that same
historical lens, what did Moses do really? Just a delivery boy with a
bad sense of direction, but it was what Moses delivered to the people
and where he led them and what he led them from that is remembered as
important.
Let's look at Roosevelt's predecessor, Herbert
Hoover. Hoover was strongly against any direct aid to the poor, fearing
that the poor would become demoralized. The Republican Congress,
likewise, was against any national scheme to aid the poor. The United
States was the only industrial power with no system of social security.
No system of national unemployment. No minimum wage law, no national
labor laws of any kind. No aid for the elderly or the disabled. Looking
back at that America it is like looking into almost medieval
proportions.
When Roosevelt had been struck down by polio,
he searched the world seeking a cure and ended up in Warm Springs,
Georgia. Warm Springs is about an hour from Atlanta but it was light
years from Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park. He was shocked by the living
conditions of the people. The lack of electricity and education for the
majority of the people, many barely eking out a living by scratching in
the dirt as share croppers. But the people welcomed him; their warmth
and compassion for his situation touched him. He was like the Buddha
leaving the imperial city to find a world of suffering. The townsfolk
called him Mr. Frank until the election; then they called him Mr.
President.
Before the New Deal, the elderly were the poorest
demographic in the country. When you got too old to work, you lived on
your savings, and if you didn't have savings you starved or lived on
charity or with your children. America was mainly rural then with most
people living on farms, so those elderly worked until the day they
died. Healthcare existed only for the rich and hospitals were a cash
affair except for the "charity ward". If you were sick or injured you
went home and you either got better or you died. There was no public
health service. Hypothermia was the second leading cause of death for
the elderly and pneumonia was the first. In Detroit in 1932 two people
an hour died of starvation; in Toledo unemployment was at 70%.
The
Americans of that generation, like our own, sought change and hope, and
in 1932 the Republicans were completely repudiated. Roosevelt reversed
the federal government's position completely with what was called the
alphabet soup of government programs. Of course the most obvious is
Social Security for the elderly, but there were many other programs
that have faded into history and been forgotten.
In New
Orleans, just to use one city as an example, the programs included
paving streets, building the airport, and archeology projects for the
region as white-collar workers established federal archives for Orleans
Parish. Workers were trained in book binding, recovering 25,000 school
and library books. The WPA built libraries and refurbished other public
buildings. They made mattresses that were distributed to the poor and
to hospitals. The canals were dredged and cleared; levees were built.
People were trained as cooks, heavy equipment operators, surveyors, and
even musicians. You see, the Bourbon Street that you know today might
have disappeared except that the WPA put musicians to work as teachers,
teaching music to others.
Some projects were frivolous, like
harmonica bands, but you have to look at the situation with the
understanding of the times, harmonica bands versus doing nothing. These
projects were carried out all across America; no matter where you go
today you will see something that was originally built by the WPA. No
matter where you work or what you do for a living, the New Deal has had
a positive impact upon your life. If you get hurt at work your employer
is responsible for your medical bills; that was not the case before the
New Deal.
My grandfather worked in the steel mills and told
of people burned who were just carried home to die. Tonight when the
sun goes down and you turn on the lights, think of the smiling
photograph of FDR because before FDR most Americans in the South didn't
have electricity. In the 1930's only 10% of rural Americans had
electricity in their homes. Private power companies maintained that it
wasn't cost effective to string power lines outside the cities, another
fine example of letting the marketplace work.
There were
summer camps for children to give them an escape from poverty. Youth
leagues, dance classes, even free showers. Yes, the WPA advertised
free, safe, clean showers to the people of New Orleans. Parks,
playgrounds and even a dark room where returning soldiers could develop
their photos gratis, courtesy of a grateful nation.
The
Tennessee Valley Authority, in 1934, began providing power service for
the people of Tupelo, Mississippi. Building 26 major dams and hundreds
of smaller ones, the TVA changed the face of the rural South. Did you
know that in the 1930's, 30% of the inhabitants in the Tennessee Valley
were afflicted with malaria? Wages and living standards were the lowest
in the nation, even by Great Depression standards. The modern cities of
Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Birmingham, Huntsville, Hopkinsville,
Paducah, Memphis and Nashville were all built on TVA power.
During
the 1940's the United States armed forces needed aluminum and the
shortage was so great that Harry Truman once said, "I want aluminum. I
don't care if I get it from Alcoa or Al Capone." The production of
aluminum requires large amounts of electricity that the TVA supplied.
There were other effects wrought by the TVA, flood control, barge
traffic, locks that opened up new vistas to a previously poor and
suffering region. It is not by accident that America's nuclear
laboratory was located in Oakridge, Tennessee. The refining of uranium
into fissionable materials also requires huge amounts of electricity;
without the TVA we might not have gotten the atom bomb first.
The
New Deal changed the face of America; it is the seed that modern
America was built upon. And it was built without a road map; no
administration had ever faced such a situation bordering on a total
economic collapse. It should come as no surprise that Roosevelt won
four terms in office; he was an American Moses. He led the American
people out of the wilderness, and they would have elected him for four
more terms if they could.
My own father, who was sent away
because his family couldn't feed him, was able to go home. He finished
high school and during WWII he became a Navy pilot. Then after the war
he did something that he never dreamed possible. He enrolled at Ohio
State University and became a mechanical engineer, thanks to the GI
Bill. He went on to become vice president of a mid-sized corporation
and then became a professor at a university in Tennessee which didn't
exist before the New Deal.
He never forgot being fifteen and
riding the rails and living in hobo jungles with absolutely no
opportunities whatsoever. Or to what he became, all thanks to the New
Deal and FDR. That's why it was so important for him to tell his son,
"See it!" He'd say, "that's a WPA Bridge." Moses wandered for forty
years seeking the Promised Land; Roosevelt found it in a little more
than twelve. As to the academics, well there are some things that just
can't be quantified or measured by statistics. The things that are made
up more of feelings and intentions and in just caring about the
people's suffering, like the difference between the WPA in New Orleans
in 1935 and hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Authors Bio:I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.
Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.
We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.