| A public works revolution transformed the American economy, landscape, and political system between 1933 and 1956. The New Deal spent over two-thirds of its money on construction programs such as the Public Works Administration (PWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Federal Works Agency (FWA). This represented a dramatic increase over pre-Great Depression spending on construction, as the federal government developed the state capacity to place public works projects in all but three of the counties in the nation. Most significantly, these programs developed the infrastructure that laid the foundations for such features of postwar economic growth as the national highways and the military-industrial complex.;This dissertation places public works programs at the center of our understanding of New Deal liberalism. This study explores the changing rationales that underwrote public works programs: from economic development (via the PWA) to social welfare (through the WPA) during the Great Depression, and back to economic development during World War II and the Cold War. Previous scholarship on New Deal public works has missed the significance of these agencies. It has either bemoaned their failure as temporary welfare measures to end mass unemployment, focused on intriguing facets of these programs such as the New Deal's support for artists, or simply noted their role in containing class solidarities during a time of economic crisis. My dissertation, however, takes these works programs seriously and asks two straightforward questions: what did these programs accomplish, and what do their accomplishments tell us about New Deal liberalism? In so doing, this project provides the first extended treatment of the contributions made by the New Deal's public works programs to American economic development. Harry Hopkins's claim that the New Deal was a political project that could "tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect" points to the qualities that made New Deal liberalism so powerful and controversial: the taxing and spending functions of the federal government could remake the political, as well as the physical, landscape of the nation. |
