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Civilian Conservation Corps - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Civilian Conservation Corps, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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- INFOGRAPHIC ANIMATED HISTORY - The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933

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History Brief: The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

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Public Works Administration - Projects & Housing

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From the start, TVA established a unique problem-solving approach to fulfilling its mission: integrated resource management. Each issue TVA faced - whether it was power production, navigation, flood control, malaria prevention, reforestation or erosion control - was studied in its broadest context. TVA weighed each issue in relation to the whole picture.

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You may have heard we can't afford Social Security. But the facts may surprise you. This video from the National Academy of Social Insurance (www.nasi.org) explains the basics about Social Security, its purpose, who pays for it, who gets it, and what it means to seniors, working families, and children now and in the future.

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TVA History - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of TVA History, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Works Progress Administration (WPA) - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Works Progress Administration (WPA), including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935. Press photographers snapped pictures as FDR, flanked by ranking members of Congress, signed into law the historic act, which guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees. FDR commended Congress for what he considered to be a "patriotic" act.

Roosevelt had taken the helm of the country in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, the nation's worst economic crisis. The Social Security Act (SSA) was in keeping with his other "New Deal" programs, including the establishment of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which attempted to hoist America out of the Great Depression by putting Americans back to work.

In his public statement that day, FDR expressed concern for "young people [who] have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age" as well as those who had employment but no job security. Although he acknowledged that "we can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life," he hoped the act would prevent senior citizens from ending up impoverished.

Although it was initially created to combat unemployment, Social Security now functions primarily as a safety net for retirees and the disabled, and provides death benefits to taxpayer dependents. The Social Security system has remained relatively unchanged since 1935.

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935. Press photographers snapped pictures as FDR, flanked by ranking members of Congress, signed into law the historic act, which guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees. FDR commended Congress for what he considered to be a "patriotic" act.

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AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act & Administration

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In 1937, the Supreme Court ruled that the AAA was unconstitutional, but the basic program was rewritten and again passed into law. Even critics admitted that the AAA and related laws helped revive hope in farm communities. Farmers were put on local committees and spoke their minds. Government checks began to flow.

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Public Works Administration Facts: Fast Fact Sheet for kids
Fast, fun facts and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about the Public Works Administration (PWA) for kids.

What did the Public Works Administration do? The PWA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) that put public works programs under the control of the federal government who awarded contracts for heavy construction projects building highways, airports, bridges, dams, irrigation, water management and sewage systems

What was the result of the Public Works Administration? The result of the PWA was to complete more than 34,000 large-scale, heavy construction projects around the country that improved the nation's infrastructure and invigorated America's "core industries" such as steel, lumber and construction. The project also created work for many skilled, unemployed workers, although the PWA did not directly employ workers

Public Works Administration Facts for kids The following fact sheet contains interesting facts and information on Public Works Administration for kids.

Facts about the Public Works Administration (PWA) for kids

$3.3 billion that had been allocated. He came into conflict with Harry Hopkins who poured unallocated PWA funds into the Public Works Administration Fact 9: Ickes was cautious about awarding contracts and authorized a minuscule amount of PWA money of $110 million in 1933 from the Civil Works Administration (CWA) to finance light construction jobs helping unskilled and unemployed people through the winter of 1933/34. By June 1934 the PWA, under the leadership of Ickes, had distributed its total fund to 13,266 federal projects and 2,407 non-federal projects

Continued...

Facts about the Public Works Administration (PWA) for kids

Facts about the Public Works Administration for kids The following fact sheet continues with facts about Public Works Administration for kids.

Facts about Public Works Administration (PWA) for kids

The PWA was famous for its dam building projects including the completion of the Public Works Administration Fact 11: Hoover Dam on March 11, 1936 on the Colorado River in Arizona. The Fort Peck Dam funded by the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps ( CCC) was completed in 1940 providing hydroelectric power and water management along the upper Missouri River. The Grand Coulee Dam was built from 1933 to 1942 and harnessed the power of the Columbia River to turn arid land in eastern Washington into farmland

Facts about Public Works Administration for kids

Public Works Administration for kids - President Franklin Roosevelt Video
The article on the PWA provides detailed facts and a summary of one of the important events during his presidential term in office. The following Franklin Roosevelt video will give you additional important facts and dates about the political events experienced by the 32nd American President whose presidency spanned from March 4, 1933 to April 12, 1945.

Public Works Administration

● Interesting Facts about the PWA for kids and schools
● Summary of the Public Works Administration in US history
● Public Works Administration of important, key events
● Franklin Roosevelt Presidency from March 4, 1933 to April 12, 1945
● Fast, fun facts about the PWA
● Foreign & Domestic policies of President Franklin Roosevelt
● Franklin Roosevelt Presidency and Public Works Administration for schools, homework, kids and children

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Public Works Administration Facts: Fast Fact Sheet for kids Fast, fun facts and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about the Public Works Administration (PWA) for kids. What did the Public Works Administration do?

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Many people believe the Triborough Bridge in New York was built by the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. But it wasn't. It was built by the PWA, the Public Works Administration.

The confusion is easy to understand, given the similar abbreviations of the two New Deal programs. But somehow it's the WPA that gets all the fame. The PWA seems to have disappeared from Americans' collective memory, even though its structures are all around us, and some of them are enormous.

PWA workers built the state capitol building in Oregon, the highway linking the Florida Keys to the mainland United States, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, D.C., the city hall in Kansas City, Outer Drive Bridge in Chicago, the Ellis Island Ferry Building, Washington National Airport and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state.

They built thousands of miles of roads, hundreds of sewage disposal plants, and thousands of schools. They built or improved hundreds of airports.

These PWA projects were meant to create a useful and sometimes beautiful infrastructure for Americans to use, but the PWA's main purpose was to help the country climb out of the Great Depression.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed legislation authorizing the PWA on June 6, 1933, during his first 100 days in office.

Roosevelt and his advisers hoped that by building public works, the PWA would stimulate the construction industry and put people back to work. As a government report said in 1939:

Here was a country with a great and growing need for more schools, more highways, more bridges, more waterworks, more services of all kinds. Here was an army of men willing and able to build them. Here was industry hungry for orders for the needed materials. The idea was to bring all of them together. The job would have to be done some time, why not now?

The PWA was not a work-relief program, like the WPA, which was created two years later. People working on PWA projects didn't have to be on relief, but the program was meant to help reduce the relief rolls.

Roosevelt said repeatedly that getting people to work was better than giving them handouts.

"The dignity of work sounds trite, but if you read newspapers in the 1930s, everyone talked about that," says Lorraine McConaghy of Seattle's Museum of History and Industry. "They missed a paycheck, but they [also] missed feeling useful."

The PWA solicited proposals for projects from around the country, and it received some doozies. "One was a rocket to the moon," says sociologist Robert Leighninger, author of Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal.

"There was the Kansas preacher who thought that this PWA was a program where he could apply for bibles for his community. He didn't want to build anything, just wanted to spread out bibles. There was a mayor who thought maybe his office could be redecorated with PWA money."

And one applicant suggested building a moving sidewalk across the country.

But Leighninger says most proposals weren't silly. "Most of them were solid projects like water works and schools, parks and police offices and city halls," he says.

Some of the projects would be built by the federal government alone, and others were done in partnership with local governments.

The PWA was criticized for being too slow to get started. Part of the problem was that large public works projects require planning before shovels can go into the dirt. And part of the problem was that the program's director, Harold Ickes, was so scrupulous about vetting the proposals. Leighninger tells the story of Ickes inserting passages of Alice in Wonderland into a proposal, to see whether his staff would read it thoroughly enough to notice. They didn't, and he let them have it.

PWA projects did not immediately turn the economy around, so Roosevelt turned to other programs, such as the Civil Works Administration, followed by the Works Progress Administration; these programs could do smaller projects that were quicker to set up.

The PWA issued a report in 1939, titled "America Builds," arguing that the PWA had in fact stimulated the economy. By then it had built thousands of projects, spending billions of dollars on materials and wages. The report estimates that PWA projects used more than one billion man-hours - 1,714,797,910, to be exact. The report said that wages paid on those projects were plowed back into the economy many times over:

A worker gets a PWA job. He receives his first pay envelope. He needs a suit of clothes, so he spends a part of his pay at the clothier. The clothing dealer takes part of the money and pays the jobber. The jobber takes part of the money and pays his manufacturer. The manufacturer pays his workers and buys more cloth from the mill. The mill owner, in turn, takes part of the money and buys wool and cotton, and perhaps more machinery, and so on.

In fact, the report argued that the PWA's success provided evidence that governments should undertake public works during economic bad times to stabilize the economy.

Historians and economists differ on how much effect the New Deal building programs actually had on the economy. The building programs "didn't bring the Depression to an end, but they reduced the magnitude of it and enabled people to survive who would have had an impossible or difficult time surviving without them," says Richard Kirkendall, emeritus history professor at the University of Washington.

Kirkendall and many other historians also argue that the infrastructure built by agencies like the PWA was essential to the Allied victory in World War II. PWA dams provided electricity to power war plants; its roads and airports enabled troops and goods to move efficiently. The PWA contributed directly to the military, too. It built aircraft carriers, submarines, and military planes.

Many historians argue that the New Deal jobs programs helped preserve capitalism at a volatile time in history.

"It often seemed to me the possibility of some kind of a revolution was there, and these programs were politically significant as well as helpful to individuals and families," says Kirkendall. "Fascist ideas were circulating in America at the time, as well as socialist. We could have moved in a quite different direction, and I think those programs were helpful in preventing us from moving in a totalitarian direction of some sort."

After the war, the infrastructure left by the building programs contributed to post-war prosperity, says Jason Scott Smith, history professor at the University of New Mexico and author of New Deal Liberalism.

"This investment in America's infrastructure is what helps make possible a national marketplace after the end of World War II, connecting regions, building hundreds of airports, building thousands of miles of roads, bridges, sewer systems, you name it," Smith says.

Smith points out that Americans are still using that infrastructure today, both the huge things, such as bridges and dams, and the smaller things, such as schools and sidewalks, usually with no idea that they were built by the PWA.

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"Bridge to Somewhere" is an American RadioWorks production as a part of Blueprint America. Produced by Catherine Winter and edited by Mary Beth Kirchner; help from Scott Hunter. The American RadioWorks team includes Kate Moos, Ochen Kaylan, Craig Thorson, Marc Sanchez, Ellen Guettler, Emily Hanford, Suzanne Pekow, and Stephen Smith.

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Profiles from the recession ~ [REPORT] Bridge to Somewhere: Public Works Administration | Blueprint America | PBS

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Many people believe the Triborough Bridge in New York was built by the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. But it wasn't. It was built by the PWA, the Public Works Administration. The confusion is easy to understand, given the similar abbreviations of the two New Deal programs. But somehow it's the WPA that gets all the [...]