{"id":11024,"date":"2020-05-28T11:23:13","date_gmt":"2020-05-28T15:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/?p=11024"},"modified":"2020-05-28T11:28:37","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T15:28:37","slug":"the-coronavirus-crisis-and-lessons-from-the-new-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/2020\/05\/28\/the-coronavirus-crisis-and-lessons-from-the-new-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Coronavirus Crisis and Lessons from the New\u00a0Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pointing out that our fight against the deadly\u00a0<\/em>coronavirus is comparable to engaging in a war, Robert Leighninger and Harvey Smith assert in their article shared here that New Deal measures to combat the Great Depression equipped the United States for victory in World War II.<\/em><\/p>\n

In today\u2019s war, too, we face mass unemployment.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

When it is safe to work again, a Job Guarantee\u2014inspired by the New Deal government job creation model\u2014would, as we argue in \u201cEconomic Justice, Jobs, for All, and the Coronavirus Pandemic\u201d (see the lead article of this issue), be the best policy to combat unemployment and speed recovery.\u00a0 Leighninger and Smith discuss New Deal policies that contributed to victory in the 1940s, policies which, updated to fit 21st century conditions to include universal access to health care, would help us to achieve victory over this pandemic\u2014and a much more egalitarian and healthy society.<\/em><\/p>\n

Indeed, had we adopted a Job Guarantee featuring\u00a0<\/em>New-Deal-type government job creation programs,\u00a0<\/em>we would have been much better prepared for\u00a0combat this 21st century world war.<\/em><\/p>\n

How the New Deal Won World War II<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By ROBERT LEIGHNINGER and HARVEY SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n

We have often heard that it wasn\u2019t the New Deal that ended the Great Depression; it was the war.\u00a0We\u00a0don\u2019t think that\u2019s true, but rather than resurrect that\u00a0debate, we\u2019d like to turn it on its head:\u00a0 The war was\u00a0won by the New Deal.<\/p>\n

Understanding this is helpful to our current challenge.\u00a0We can mount a comprehensive war against the varied menaces of pandemic, massive unemployment, and environmental collapse because we once did something just as formidable.<\/p>\n

We want to frame this argument carefully. We will focus on programs initiated by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to put people to work, revitalize the economy, and end the Great Depression. Programs enacted during the New Deal that were designed specifically to prepare for war will be left out.\u00a0This is a tricky line to walk. Roosevelt was aware quite early in his administration that a war was likely, and he may have been thinking of the possible benefits that New Deal programs would have for future preparation for war. But all of the early New Deal initiatives and many of the later ones were targeting the Depression.\u00a0Furthermore, isolationist sentiment was strong enough that it would have been impossible to gain support for anything that might be tainted with militarism.\u00a0The New Deal would not have been accepted unless it was totally about the Depression.<\/p>\n

We also want to leave out anything of which it might be said: \u201cWell, that would have happened anyway, regardless of who was in the White House, once it was apparent that war was coming.\u201d Our argument is that the programs that re-employed the U.S. workforce and re-energized the economy also were vital in providing a solid foundation of experience, personnel, and infrastructure that allowed us to meet, early and effectively, the threat of the Axis Powers and the Japanese Empire.\u00a0Such programs would not have been initiated by another administration. They would not have happened without the New Deal.<\/p>\n

Personnel <\/strong><\/p>\n

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was designed in 1933 to employ young men adrift in the jobless economy, to support their families, and to restore a ravaged landscape by planting trees, stopping soil erosion, fighting forest fires, building a system of state parks, and enhancing national parks and forests.\u00a0The boys learned construction skills, learned to cooperate with other young men of diverse backgrounds, furthered their education, and made lasting contributions to our environment across the nation.\u00a0The camps were supervised by U.S. Army Reserve officers, so the boys learned to follow orders and even perform close-order drill.\u00a0 Many went on to the armed services even before the war.\u00a0They were immediately identified by drill sergeants as potential leaders; an instant promotion to corporal was not unusual.\u00a0Because the Reserve officers had to lead not just through fear of punishment but by inspiring confidence, they were, in the opinion of Gen. George C. Marshall, much better prepared for the range of recruits produced when the draft was imposed. Forty CCC \u201cboys\u201d would earn our highest military award, the Medal of Honor; half of them died in combat.\u00a0Tossing the coin to begin the 1919 Super Bowl was Hershel \u201cWoody\u201d Williams, who served with the CCC in Montana and then cleared enemy pillboxes with a flamethrower on Iwo Jima.\u00a0 Gen. Mark Clark said, \u201c\u2026the CCC became a potent factor in enabling us to win the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 was created to stabilize the airline industry.\u00a0 One aspect of this was the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP).\u00a0The Army had little interest and offered no support in getting the bill through the U.S. Congress.\u00a0Money was borrowed from the National Youth Administration, an offshoot of the Works Progress Administration.\u00a0By 1940, almost 10,000 pilots and 2,000 instructors had been trained.\u00a0 The program was open to African Americans.\u00a0 One of them was Robert J. Friend, who flew 142 missions with fellow Tuskegee Airmen of the Red Tail Squadron.\u00a0 He was wingman for Benjamin O. Davis, who became the first black Air Force general.\u00a0 Women were also enrolled, and over a thousand of them became Women\u2019s Army Service Pilots (WASPs). They were vital to the transportation of warplanes from their point of manufacture into the hands of combat pilots.\u00a0 One of them was Betty Jane Williams, who served 28 years in the Air Force and retired as a lieutenant colonel. These women flew all types of aircraft, including the new B-29, which had a reputation for being hard to handle.\u00a0The men got over their trepidation once they saw WASPs flying them.\u00a0Another career Air Force officer (who was also a test pilot), Rear Adm. Edward Feightner, was trained by the CPTP and became an ace flying Hellcats in the Pacific Theater.<\/p>\n

Secure communication is essential to combat operations.\u00a0Language must be encoded. One code that was never cracked by our enemies was the Navajo language.\u00a0The U.S. Marines used Navajo code talkers to coordinate our troops as they re-took Pacific islands from the Japanese.\u00a0 Up until the New Deal, Navajo children were sent away to boarding schools and forbidden to speak their native language.\u00a0The Public Works Administration built day schools on the Navajo reservation allowing students to stay home with their families. John Collier, the New Deal\u2019s commissioner of Indian Affairs, stopped forced assimilation and championed Navajo culture.\u00a0Thus, the young men who would become code talkers in the 1940s had almost a decade free from suppression of their language.\u00a0They were able to accept the challenge of turning their language into an unbreakable code.\u00a0Major Gen. Howard Conner asserted that without the code talkers the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.<\/p>\n

Infrastructure <\/strong><\/p>\n

The Public Works Administration (PWA) was created to provide grants and loans for public construction projects that would put people back to work and restart the economy.\u00a0Much of this work would be undertaken by cities and states building the backbone of our cultural and physical infrastructure\u2014<\/em>schools, hospitals, courthouses, bridges, libraries and other kinds of public amenities. At the beginning of the New Deal those municipal bodies took some time to prepare their proposals. In the meantime, the PWA turned to cabinet departments that already had projects that needed funds.\u00a0One was the Navy Dept. The PWA provided funding for two aircraft carriers, four cruisers, 20 destroyers, and four submarines.\u00a0One carrier, the USS Enterprise, and a heavy cruiser, the USS Vincennes, escorted the USS Hornet as it launched the first counter-strike after Pearl Harbor, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle\u2019s raid on Tokyo.\u00a0The Enterprise helped stop the Japanese invasion of New Guinea at the Battle of the Coral Sea and, along with the carrier USS Yorktown, was essential in winning the Battle of Midway. This engagement is regarded by both Americans and Japanese as the turning point in the Pacific War.\u00a0 The other New Deal vessels played important roles in support of the Guadalcanal campaign, the island-hopping reconquest of the Pacific, the liberation of the Philippines, and final assault on the Japanese homeland.<\/p>\n

Airports are essential in the development of military power.\u00a0The Works Progress Administration (WPA) built 350 landing fields and improved many others, extending runways, adding lighting, and building terminals and hangers.\u00a0Wold-Chamberlain Field, now Minneapolis\/St. Paul International Airport, got three large concrete runways, which enabled it to be the site of the re-fitting of the B-25 Mitchell bombers that conducted the Doolittle Raid. The same field provided training for the Waco gliders used in the D- Day Invasion.\u00a0 Nearby Holman Field, built entirely by the WPA, re-fitted B-24 Liberator bombers with radar. The PWA was also active in airport construction. They expanded Barksdale Field in Louisiana into a major Army Air Corps base. New Deal infrastructure helped keep soldiers alive.\u00a0The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 supported the construction of four regional experimental laboratories.\u00a0The British, who had invented penicillin, did not have the facilities for making it available for use by combat medics.\u00a0 They turned to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, which developed the process in their Peoria, Ill., experimental lab.\u00a0 This probably saved thousands of lives.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest investments made by the New Deal in the U.S. economy was in the development of hydroelectric power.\u00a0Massive dams, built by the PWA and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), provided water and electricity to agricultural, industrial, and research facilities all over the country. They also controlled flooding and improved navigation. Assessing this impact is difficult, but it was undeniably huge.\u00a0Hoover Dam, called Boulder Dam until 1947, together with Parker Dam, Imperial Dam, the Colorado River Aqueduct (constructed earlier), and the All-American Canal brought water to Los Angeles and turned the Imperial Valley into the \u201cWinter Garden of America.\u201d\u00a0The Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River provided similar benefits to the Pacific Northwest.\u00a0The eventual implications for national defense are immense, but two examples will suffice for a beginning.\u00a0The aluminum industry flourished with the introduction of hydropower, and it is estimated that the electricity from the Grand Coulee dam made the aluminum for about one-third of the planes build during WWII.\u00a0The atom bomb that ended the war was made possible because of New Deal hydroelectric projects. Oak Ridge, Tenn., needed an enormous amount of electricity, which it got from the TVA, to enrich uranium. The water from the Columbia River dams cooled the nuclear reactors that produced plutonium at Hanford, Wash.<\/p>\n

Experience <\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond personnel and infrastructure, the many agencies and organizations spawned by the New Deal gave thousands of people the experience and skills that could be immediately transferred to war activities.\u00a0Henry Kaiser, Warren Bechtel, and Bechtel\u2019s son Stephen, who collectively had a huge impact on American ship-building, learned how to manage large construction as part of the six companies that built Boulder Dam.\u00a0 It required working directly with the federal government, cooperating with other contractors, and managing projects the sheer size of which were a new phenomenon in U.S. industry.\u00a0William Knudsen, who headed General Motors and was tapped by Roosevelt to head war production, had extensive experience dealing with the New Deal from the beginning of the National Recovery Act. When war arrived and industry needed to respond immediately, these years of experience gave the massive mobilization needed to create the \u201carsenal of democracy,\u201d a giant assist.<\/p>\n

Defense projects like Oak Ridge and defense industries around the country needed housing for workers.\u00a0The Lanham Act of 1940 built it. But this operation rested on years of experience building housing provided by the PWA\u2019s Housing Division, the Resettlement Administration and the United States Housing Administration. The private sector\u2019s lack of experience in this area was displayed by the miserable conditions for workers and their families in places like Henry Ford\u2019s B-26 bomber plant at Willow Run outside Detroit.<\/p>\n

Artistic experience was useful to the war effort too.\u00a0The WPA\u2019s Federal Art Project included thousands of graphic artists who moved immediately to create images promoting enlistment, safety, and security.\u00a0Soon-to-be famous Abstract Expressionist painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollack designed window displays for war training programs.\u00a0The photographic division of the Farm Security Administration, which used arresting images captured by famous artists like Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn to dramatize the miseries of the Depression, was easily transformed into the Office of War Information<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

These are all very specific assets that enhanced preparation for war but sprang from programs not intended for that purpose but rather to defeat the Great Depression. We can look beyond them to the general effects of the anti-Depression programs that restored the economy and strengthened the health, safety, and level of education of the U.S. population. When the war came, the United States would have mobilized to defend itself.\u00a0All of these things might have happened in time.\u00a0But how many years would it have taken to achieve what the New Deal accomplished in the five years between 1933 and 1938?\u00a0 By 1938, the New Deal was not only well on the way to ending the Depression, it had already laid the groundwork for the defeat of the Axis Powers and Imperial Japan. The New Deal won World War II.\u00a0Knowing that, why shouldn\u2019t we be able to devise a comprehensive Green New Deal that reshapes our national policies to confront the war we now face on three fronts: health, employment, and the environment?\u00a0We have nothing to fear but lack of will.<\/p>\n

New Deal scholar Robert Leighninger is a National\u00a0Jobs for All Network board member. Harvey Smith is chair of the board of the National New Deal Preservation Association and author of Berkeley and the New Deal<\/u>\u00a0(Arcadia, 2014).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pointing out that our fight against the deadly\u00a0coronavirus is comparable to engaging in a war, Robert Leighninger and Harvey Smith assert in their article shared here that New Deal measures to combat the Great Depression equipped the United States for victory in World War II. In today\u2019s war, too, we face mass unemployment.\u00a0 \u00a0 When… Read More The Coronavirus Crisis and Lessons from the New\u00a0Deal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-full-employment-history"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/njfac.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}