Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501310003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDMUND C. ARNOLD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
How are these people going to live?
Find jobs? Thousands of former employees of down-sized private-sector companies will share a bitter, ironic laugh at that. Popular as it is with the demagogues and the politicians, it is absolutely no solution to a painful problem. The jobs just aren't there.
There is a solution, though, one too logical for Richmond or Washington: Make jobs! Revive the WPA! Revive the CCC!
For those who did not have to endure the Great Depression, a word of explanation. The Works Project Administration hired men to do a variety of mostly unskilled jobs, those usually done by public-works departments. The Civilian Conservation Corps was groups of young men who went out, mostly into forests and rural areas, with a semimilitary discipline, and built paths and shelters in forests, saved eroding areas and generally conserved natural resources of the nation.
The WPA was a favorite target for wisecracks. It was depicted as five men leaning on shovels, watching one man desultorily shifting dirt from one pile to another.
Actually, the WPA was one of the most successful social programs since the Homesteading Act. Even today, 60 years later, there is evidence of that.
In my Michigan hometown, an island lies in the middle of a wide river that runs the length of the city. It had been inaccessible, a tangled thicket of thorns, until the WPA converted it into a park that serves the city year 'round. In Syracuse, N.Y., one of its loveliest parks was a small canyon literally filled to the brim with refuse until the WPA cleaned it up and uncovered a picturesque waterfall and an inviting stream. In a village where I had a weekly newspaper, the WPA built the first waterworks, which still serves a thriving small town.
As I traveled across the country, especially in the Midwest, I used to take pleasure in looking up courthouses, libraries and municipal buildings that the WPA had built. The magnificent log lodges on Mount Hood in Oregon and on the brink of the Grand Canyon were WPA achievements. And the WPA began the first vertebra on the spinal cord of our interstate highway system.
Similar projects in national forests, especially, remain to serve the public and testify to the worth of the CCC.
More important, though, than these tangibles was the effect these programs had on the people involved. Desperate men and hopeless youths were given the chance to support themselves and their families. Men were given the self-respect that can come only from gainful employment. Boys learned responsibility that they remain proud of today. Many families were literally kept from starvation: There were few social-welfare programs in the 1930s, and private charity was taxed to the very limit by the tremendous needs of a nation with vast unemployment.
To resurrect these programs today probably would not save much, if any, of the money represented by shrunken work-forces and pruned welfare-lists. Even so, the benefits still would be huge.
The WPA and CCC would be productive work. Only a few dollars spent on public payrolls produce anything of physical value (except to the paper industry, of course). Welfare checks actually have a negative effect on our economy. How much better to spend those same dollars on highways, bridges, schools and parks. Our infrastructure is crumbling; now is the time to restore it. There are enough solid vacant buildings, throughout the country as in Roanoke, that can be renovated at low cost and could house the nation's homeless.
More important, it would give the involuntarily unemployed the dignity of constructive labor. It could break the vicious cycle of poverty for the people who have inherited unemployment. It can teach skills, and discover talents, and provide what is probably the only alternative that inner-city young men have to the drug trade and illicit activities.
There are still more than a few of us survivors of the Depression. Ask any of us what the WPA and CCC did two generations ago. And then send our answers on to the politicians, and demand consideration of the only logical solution to our dilemma.
The government absolutely must be "the employer of last resort." It is the only entity that can create jobs that are not made-work. There is no alternative and, without it, there is no hope.
Edmund C. Arnold of Roanoke is a retired newspaper consultant and journalism professor.
by CNB