Why the New Deal Matters by Eric Rauchway

Author:Eric Rauchway
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300252002
Publisher: Yale University Press

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the street where you live

A walk around your neighborhood and an investigation of public works programs, the idea of economic security, and the country the New Deal helped to build

I

n earlier chapters, I’ve asked you to consider a specific and sometimes spectacular location modified or created by the New Deal. We have seen how the New Deal wrought immense changes in the political and literal landscape, often through awe-inspiring projects. And certainly we could continue a tour of the New Deal by looking at airports and bridges and dams. But in this chapter, instead of taking you to a landmark location, I want you to consider the New Deal’s impact through its more modest, but not therefore less consequential, efforts that affect nearly everybody, and begin, as the chapter title suggests, in your neighborhood.

During the spring of 2020, states and counties throughout the United States, like governments throughout the world, issued shelter-in-place orders to control the spread of the novel coronavirus. In the interest of public health, governors, county supervisors, city councils, and other authorities instructed people to remain home except for essential trips outside. But even under those orders, you could generally still go out for exercise, so long as you kept yourself a safe distance from other people and wore a mask to keep water vapor from your breath away from strangers. For many Americans, deprived of access to their gyms and swimming pools and court sports, a good brisk walk was the best way to get their hearts and lungs working. And with the reduced traffic—most people had no essential need to drive a car frequently—the air was often fresher, the sky bluer, and the soundscape freer of the hum of machines than at any time anyone could remember. A walk, even down the street where you live, could become a luxury and a voyage into unfamiliar territory. If you took advantage of this time to get out and get around, you might well have spent time on one of the more commonplace legacies of the New Deal: sidewalks.

Throughout the United States, innumerable rectangles of pavement remain that were first poured by laborers employed by the Works Progress Administration (later the name changed to the Work Projects Administration but the abbreviation WPA remained the same). These sidewalks bear a stamp of the agency’s initials and, generally, the year they were created; the WPA sidewalk nearest me says it dates from 1938. Begun in 1935, the WPA lasted until 1943, when war work wiped out the need for it. Over the course of its existence, WPA workers laid about twenty-four thousand miles of new sidewalks and improved another seven thousand more.1 These strips of concrete were, and remain, valuable beautification measures for a neighborhood. They also provide safety: as one report reflecting on the value of the new pavements dryly put it, “Juxtaposition of children and elderly adults to moving automobiles is an undesirable state of affairs.”2

Or perhaps, if you went outdoors in that pandemic spring, you noticed

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