REAL NEW DEAL HISTORY

      WPA - Works Progress Adm. 

                    WPA was the largest employer in the country until WWII.

                    "The goal of the WPA was to employ most of the unemployed people on relief until the economy recovered. Harry Hopkins testified to Congress during January 1935 why he set the number at 3.5 million, using Federal Emergency Relief Administration data. Estimating costs at $1200 per worker per year, he asked for and received $4 billion."

                    "largest New Deal agency, employing millions to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. It fed children and redistributed food, clothing, and housing. Almost every community in the United States had a park, bridge or school constructed by the agency, which especially benefited rural and Western populations. Expenditures from 1936 to 1939 totaled nearly $7 billion.^[1]...Created by order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the WPA was funded by Congress with passage of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 on April 8, 1935. The legislation had passed in the House of Representatives by a margin of 329 to 78, but was delayed by the Senate.^[1]...Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA provided almost eight million jobs.^[2]
        (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration )

 
      WPA mural in Cincinnati.  Now at airport.  See more WPA murals.
     New Deal/WPA Art Project

      BLUES MUSIC HISTORY PROJECT -  
              Robert Johnson lives because WPA people recorded his music for the Library of Congress...
      Eric Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived" He was ranked fifth "
      in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.^[4]   Eric Clapton described Johnson's music
      as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues"
      he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone
      he can pack into a few lines is astonishing."^[49
            Listen to him...
                       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd60nI4sa9A
                       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MCHI23FTP8
          
           FDR's New Deal Music        WPA Blues   That Man on The WPA
              "The Federal Music Project of the WPA was keeping singers and musicians alive" and performing
in the middle of the Depression.
"The most concerted broadening of musical education and performance came from the federally sponsored WPA Federal Music Project (FMP). Like other artists, musicians were devastated by the Depression in the early 1930s. Headed by Nikolas Sokoloff, the FMP, founded in 1935, sponsored radio broadcasts and musical-education classes and commissioned work from composers such as George Antheil, William Schuman, and Elliot Carter. The FMP funded an index of American composers from colonial times to the present and sponsored folklorists traveling through the South. Between 1935 and 1939 some seven thousand musicians worked for the FMP in twenty-eight symphonies, ninety small orchestras, sixty-eight brass bands, and thirty-three opera or choral groups. The FMP sponsored African American composers and had a hit with The Swing Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan done to African rhythms in Chicago and New York in 1938 and 1939. Music spread and flourished despite decreased economic activity    Music in the 1930s

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
               1933-1942
               "As part of the New Deal legislation proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), the
                  CCC was designed to provide relief for unemployed youth who had a very hard time finding jobs
                  during the Great Depression while implementing a general natural resource conservation program on
                  public lands in every U.S. state, including the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin
                   Islands. The CCC became the most popular New Deal program among the general public, providing jobs
                   for a total of 3 million young men from families on relief.^[1] Implicitly the CCC also led to awareness and
                   appreciation of the outdoors and the nation's natural resources, especially for city youth.^[2] The CCC was
                   never considered a permanent program and depended on emergency and temporary legislation for its
                   existence.^{[3]   ...} During the time of the CCC, volunteers planted nearly 3 billion trees to help reforest America,
                   constructed more than 800 parks nationwide that would become the start of most state parks, developed
                   forest fire fighting methods and a network of thousands of miles of public roadways, and constructed
                   buildings connecting the nation's public lands.^{[5]"
                          (Source:} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps "

   Tennessee Valley Authority
           Est. May 18, 1933.

           "Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression. The enterprise was a result of the efforts of Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska. TVA was envisioned not only as a provider, but also as a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to rapidly modernize the region's economy and society.

TVA's service area covers most of Tennessee, parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small slices of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana and Virginia. It was the first large regional planning agency of the federal government and remains the largest. Under the leadership of David Lilienthal ("Mr. TVA"), TVA became a model for America's governmental efforts to modernize Third World agrarian societies.<sup>[1]

"</sup>the agency was given authority to enter into long-term (20 years) contracts for the sale of power to government agencies and private entities, to construct electric power transmission lines to areas not otherwise supplied and to establish rules and regulations for electricity retailing and distribution. TVA is thus both a power supplier and a regulatory agency.

Today, TVA is the nation's largest public power company, providing electric power to over nine million customers in the Tennessee Valley.  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority )

     Grand Coulee Dam
      In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the dam as a Public Works Administration project, and Congress appropriated funding...It is the largest electric power-producing facility^[5] and the largest concrete structure in the United States.^[6] It is the fifth largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world, as of the year 2008.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam )   

And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men.

Recognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, and on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation is asking for action, and action now.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing great -- greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our great natural resources....

We must act. We must act quickly.

And finally, in our progress towards a resumption of work, we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order. There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments. There must be an end to speculation with other people's money. And there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.