Cities prospered during the depression with the help of the Roosevelt programs

[Peacetrain]

This is an article for those who think stimulus does not help.. if I remember correctly and better historians than me in this area can collaborate, but when Roosevelt came into office we had a 25% unemployment rate, and his programs dropped that to 11% very quickly.

While it is true WW2 with all men in the service and women entering the workforce to support them at an unheard of rate, really pulled the economy out..unlike those who wish to rewrite history, the Roosevelt programs made a huge move forward.

http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2009/02/08/news/top/b94113d8d999a27a862575550071b9c4.txt


SIOUX CITY -- As the worldwide economy gasped for air in the grip of the Great Depression, Sioux City was a hub of activity, thanks to a stimulus plan out of Washington.

The city came to life after people were put to work on federally funded projects through the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the WPA and related New Deal Program to employ millions of Americans as a way to lift the country out of the Depression. Congress footed the bill.

"You only think that laborers were put out of work during the Depression, but it was so bad that you had lawyers, architects, writers and other professionals without jobs," Grace Linden, curator at the Sioux City Public Museum's Pearl Street Research Center, said. "They found jobs for them. The CCC built the park shelters at Stone Park. They had a big camp near the Big Sioux River near Highway 12 where they stayed."

WPA workers built Roberts (now Elwood Olsen) Stadium, started work on the Grandview Park Bandshell that was finished by the city and built the original Leif Erikson swimming pool. They also made improvements at Garretson, Lewis and Hubbard parks and finished Pulaska Park and started work on the Municipal Auditorium and the first Floyd River Project.

WPA workers helped build the Sioux CIty airport, built a rifle range, widened Military Road, built a north Riverside community house, built the Missouri River Road, repaired the Fourth Street and the Wall Street viaducts, reset brick pavers, did survey work for a city comprehensive plan, installed a heater unit at the public library and hired people to repair books and stock them at library branches.

[tabatha]

1. Do you have a link?

[Peacetrain]

2. Yep I do.. I will edit and put it in the OP.. I forgot to do that..

Thanks :hi:

[progressoid]

3. I just left my two cents worth for the knuckle draggers to ponder.

[omega minimo]

4. ,

[starroute]

5. The WPA even studied and recorded folk music

I don't know much about it, but I was able to come up with this online:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afccchtml/cowhome.html

The WPA California Folk Music Project is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music recorded in twelve languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians.

This elaborate New Deal project was organized and directed by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell for the Northern California Work Projects Administration. Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center), this undertaking was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-language folk music in one region of the United States.

[Doremus]

6. Cleveland got this.

[4_TN_TITANS]

7. There is so much opportunity for infrastructure repair

and expansion. For too long, we've taken for granted the country that a generation built for it's children.

[SammyWinstonJack]

10. !

:thumbsup:

[NNN0LHI]

8. All the hand painted murals in my high school were WPA projects

Actually I think the whole high school was?

Don

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Almost identical figures for unemployment were given by James Galbraith

in his interview w/Amy Goodman:

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, first of all, there is a grave understatement in those arguments about what the New Deal actually did. And that understatement is typically because the unemployment figures that many people are accustomed to using for the 1930s don’t count people who actually worked for the New Deal. This is Michael Steele’s distinction between jobs and work. But people who were building the Lincoln Tunnel or the Triborough Bridge or the aircraft carrier Yorktown are counted as work relief and not as employed, and there were many millions of those. And when you put them into the figures, you find that the New Deal actually reduced unemployment from 25 percent in 1933 to about—to less than ten percent in 1936. It went up again in ’37 and then came back down again to about ten percent before the war. So, a major, major improvement in unemployment did occur under the New Deal.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/10/economist_james_galbraith_bailed_out_banks

[Peacetrain]

11. Thank you so much for that info.. The rewriters of history constantly

devalue what really happened with the New Deal in order to bolster their own failed polices, that we have been living with every time the republicans get in office.. they have no concept of managing large government...

[eppur_se_muova]

12. No problem, I just learned it this morning and felt an urge to share! :^)