Joe Biden's New Deal

It's not just an infrastructure bill, it's a public works program

Guardrail of bridge built during the WPA

It wasn’t so long ago that you could find 10 mile-an-hour roads in this country.  By that I mean roads where you couldn’t drive faster than 10 mph.  I can remember riding on a couple of them around my grandfather’s farm in Loudon County, Virginia, back in the early 1950’s.  They were dirt roads, very curvy dirt roads that closely followed the terrain they passed through.  There weren’t any cuts through hills or rises.  If there was a hill, the road went straight over it.  If the hill was  steep enough, there were switchback turns to the crest.  If there was a creek, often the road would wander until it found a shallow place and ford the creek, rather than cross over a bridge.  If it rained, the roads got muddy and rutted and you got stuck.  In the hot days of summer, the dirt roads were so dusty, driving behind another car was like driving through fog. 

I went back to visit my grandfather’s old farm about 20 years ago. All  those old dirt roads through Loudon County had been paved.  The creeks we forded had bridges over them.  Sharp turns through woods that used to be blind had been straightened out so you could see oncoming traffic all the way around the corners.

Loudon County was very poor and very rural back in the early 1950’s.  But in 1962, Dulles Airport was built on the county’s eastern border just outside of Washington, D.C., and the Northern Virginia suburbs began moving west toward the new airport, along with businesses servicing the growing federal government in and around the District of Columbia.  Today, Loudon County has a median household income of $136,268.  Since 2008, the county has been ranked among the wealthiest in the entire country, with the highest median income of any county with a population greater than 65,000.  The county doesn’t even have an interstate multi-lane highway running through it, but it has good local roads, good schools, and a strong business climate associated with its closeness to the nation’s capital.  But at least part of Loudon County’s current wealth was due to the modernization of its infrastructure during Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

That modernization began in the 1930’s under the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, probably the largest generator of modernization and wealth in this country’s history.  The WPA was started in 1935 and lasted until 1943.  At its peak, in 1938, the WPA employed 3.2 million Americans, more than 60 percent of the unemployed adults during the depression.  In the 8 years the WPA was in existence, the program was responsible for building 650,000 miles of paved roads and 78,000 bridges.  More than 125,000 military and civilian buildings were erected such as schools, post offices, libraries, court houses, museums, community centers, city halls, gymnasiums, stadiums, fairgrounds, dormitories, and even zoos.

The WPA built or improved more than 800 airports, including La Guardia in New York, and National Airport in Northern Virginia.  The WPA ran the rural electrification program that brought electricity to Loudon County and rural areas like it across the country.  The WPA built 325 firehouses in small towns that didn’t have them, renovated and improved more than 2,300 others, and built more than 20,000 miles of water mains and other public water and sewer and public utility projects.

I have a family connection to the WPA that I’m very proud of.  My maternal grandfather, Col. Bartley M. Harloe, who graduated from West Point in 1918, was the head of Army Corps of Engineers for the WPA and supervised the construction of National Airport in 1941.  It was the Corps of Engineers that designed many of the local two-lane bridges that were built everywhere around the country.  When I lived in Tennessee, I used to cross about a dozen bridges as I went about doing my daily errands, every one of them marked by stanchions with WPA cast into their concrete.  I used to think of them as “Paw-paw’s bridges.”  It was like they were family heirlooms that didn’t belong to us, but to everybody.

But the WPA did even more than lay asphalt and erect buildings.  The WPA employed workers in schools who served more than 900 million hot lunches to students and ran and staffed more than 1500 nurseries, which today we would call child care centers.  And the WPA famously funded art, music, theater, and literary projects that affect the arts in our country to this day.  One artist who was a recipient of a WPA grant early in his career was Jackson Pollock, who lived less than a mile from where I’m writing this.

Is any of this sounding familiar?  The Biden administration is proposing a $2 trillion infrastructure bill that would fund plenty of road repairs, bridge repairs and replacements, airport improvements, rail improvements, public transit and electrical vehicle modernization including charging stations, the modern equivalent of rural electrification, which brought electric lights to places where people still lit their houses with kerosene lamps. 

The plan includes billions for other improvements:  $45 billion for removing lead pipes – which are responsible for Flint, Michigan’s ongoing public water disaster; $100 billion for improved broadband where it’s not available; $100 billion for electric grid and clean energy like solar and wind; $100 billion for school construction; $25 billion for child care facilities; $400 billion for elderly and disabled care and facilities; $200 billion for affordable housing; $300 billion for scientific research and development, including $50 billion for the National Science Foundation and $35 billion aimed at “addressing the climate crisis.”

Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party are calling the $2 trillion Biden infrastructure plan a “Trojan horse” and claim it’s filled with all sorts of things that have nothing to do with infrastructure.  Looked at from their narrow and negative perspective, that’s probably true.  Yet as an investment in the future, the Biden bill makes the same kind of sense the WPA made in the 1930’s.  McConnell probably gets his mail back in Kentucky from a post office built in the 30’s with public funds by the WPA.  He flies home from Washington D.C. out of an airport my grandfather built for the WPA, into another airport that was built with WPA labor and funds.  Tens of thousands of his constituents in Kentucky have electricity in their homes and businesses made possible by the WPA.  McConnell drives to and from work on WPA roads and crosses WPA bridges, not just in Kentucky, but in Washington D.C. and the surrounding states of Virginia and Maryland.  When his constituents travel to the nation’s capital, they visit museums and a zoo built or improved by WPA labor and money. 

Washington D.C. itself has been a public works project since it was founded.  So was Dulles Airport, which brought the wealth that Loudon County today enjoys.  The county and state roads down which everyone drives in Loudon County were public works projects.  So are the county and state roads I drive on in Long Island every day.  So are the roads you drive on and the bridges you cross to take your kids to school or go to work or get to the grocery store or gas station.

The whole of the United States of America is one gigantic public works project that we take far too much for granted. Joe Biden’s bill isn’t just an infrastructure bill.  It is plainly and simply a public works bill, and Democrats should pass it if they have to cram every last penny it costs down Mitch McConnell’s flabby throat.