Donald Trump promised a trillion-dollar infrastructure program that would create jobs. [1] Bernie Sanders and other Democratic leaders are talking about a federal jobs guarantee. Many Americans think this is utopian.
Eighty-some years ago, during the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration showed what is possible.
The Public Works Administration (PWA) put hundreds of thousands of people to work on a variety of heavy construction projects that gave a face-lift to the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Roads, bridges and dams were repaired and upgraded.

Rundel Memorial Library in Rochester, N.Y., funded by the Public Works Administration and completed in 1937
Scores of new schools, libraries, hospitals, post offices and playgrounds were built for an expanding population. All of these projects were undertaken on a scale inconceivable, even in the most prosperous times.
In April 1935, Congress inaugurated the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which put nearly 3 million people to work, including semi-skilled and unskilled, on projects as diverse as building athletic stadiums, making books for the blind, stuffing rare birds and improving airplane landing fields and army camps. …
In its first six years, the WPA spent $11 billion, three-fourths of it on construction and conservation projects and the remainder on community service programs. In those six years, WPA employed about 8 million workers. …
The New Deal paid special attention to the nation’s dispossessed youth. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) put approximately 2.75 million idle young men to work to reclaim government-owned land and forests through irrigation, soil enrichment, pest control, tree planting, fire prevention and other conservation projects. …
Thousands of unemployed writers, actors, musicians and painters were given an opportunity to earn a modest livelihood from their artistic talents (many of them to achieve fame and fortune in later years) and to enrich the lives of countless culturally-deprived citizens. The productions of the WPA Theater Project, for example, entertained a phenomenal audience totaling 60 million people, a great many who had never before seen a play.
Through the National Youth Administration (NYA) the government made it possible for 1.5 million high school students and 600,000 college students to continue their education by providing them with part-time jobs to meet their expenses.
A monumental achievement of the New Deal was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which produced and sold cheap electric power and fertilizer in a seven-state area (about four-fifths the size of England), whose farms were among the nation’s poorest and least productive, and where only a fraction of the inhabitants possessed electricity to light their homes and operate their equipment.
Source: Labor Educator
These were not make-work projects. We still enjoy the benefits of these projects today. Here is a summary of New Deal construction projects here in Rochester, N.Y., where I live.
- Doubled the size of the Rochester International Airport (still in use)
- Built a high school (still in use)
- Built a post office with publicly commissioned art (still in use, art still there!)
- Built a new Art Deco headquarters for the Rochester Fire Department (still in use)
- Built a 40,000 square foot library (still in use)
- Commissioned a variety of murals in high schools and public spaces, most of which still exist
- Improved the local waterworks system
- Set up a local Federal Arts Project center, that paid unemployed artists to create exhibits, run community art classes, and create art for public spaces.
- Source: Jack Meserve, Democracy Journal.
What conditions exist today that prevent us Americans from doing what our forebears did then?