Reconstructing the New Deal

Infrastructure is rarely ever among the most glamorous subjects of American history. Highways, public buildings, sewage systems, and the like are all too frequently taken for granted in American life and historiography both. But according to Jason Scott Smith, the unprecedented effort to build such public works during the 1930s holds the key to a bold reinterpretation of the New Deal and its significance in the political and economic history of the United States. His claims are well founded. Building New Deal Liberalism is exhaustively researched, clearly written, and persuasively argued. Its implications for American political and economic history deserve wide reading and careful consideration by anyone with an interest in the modern United States.

Certainly, as Smith himself admits, historians have not ignored the role of public works in the New Deal. The Public Works Administration (PWA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) have long been acknowledged as core aspects of President Franklin Roosevelt's effort to provide relief and recovery during the Great Depression. But traditionally, these public works programs have been understood merely as temporary measures designed to address the immediate crisis of unemployment. This is true of such scholars as Arthur Schlesinger and William Leuchtenburg who looked relatively favorably on the New Deal. It is equally true of later critics such as Howard Zinn and Ronald Radosh, who emphasized the conservative boundaries of Roosevelt's liberal ideology. In both cases, whether the New Deal's public works programs were viewed as bold and experimental or tentative and disingenuous, they have almost always been portrayed as accomplishing little save the short-term alleviation of joblessness.

In contrast, Smith insists "that public works programs were the New Deal's central enterprise" (p. 15). As evidence, he urges readers simply to follow the money spent by the federal government during the period. "On average, between 1933 and 1939 over two-thirds of federal emergency expenditures went toward funding public works programs," Smith points out (p. 1). This money represented an unprecedented increase over earlier federal spending on construction, and it was channeled through a variety of new agencies whose influence and reach grew quickly to match their budgets. The PWA, for example, was created in 1933. Its initial appropriation was $3.3 billion—an amount equivalent to 5.9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in that year—money the agency quickly spent widely, funding projects in 3,068 of the nation's 3,071 counties. In much the same fashion, the WPA was created in 1935 with an initial budget of $4.88 billion, an amount equivalent to 6.7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Although mainly intended as a jobs program, "the WPA built an impressive range of projects, including over 480 airports, 78,000 bridges, and nearly 40,000 public buildings" (p. 2). According to Smith, this level of spending and the unprecedented construction it fueled comprised nothing less than "a public works revolution," a transformation that literally laid the foundations of future prosperity, dramatically altered the nation's political landscape, and "helped justify the new role of the state in American life, legitimizing—intellectually and physically—what has come to be known as Keynesian management of the economy" (p. 3).

True to his word, Smith's account departs quickly from the conventional story of well-intentioned but inadequate relief. Focusing mainly on three New Deal agencies—the PWA, the WPA, and the Federal Works Agency (FWA) created in 1939—he tracks the aggressive use of public works to foster state-building and economic development. Even before the Great Depression occurred, Smith notes, a number of politicians had begun to consider the economic benefits of public works. Then, following the stock market crash in 1929, President Herbert Hoover increased funding for road building and other projects. The creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 pushed the idea even further, though with little impact on...