Will we ever again hear words such as these issuing forth from the very
highest levels of the United States government?
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT'S executive order creating the Civil Works
Administration was in effect a declaration of war on the depression, a call
to four million unemployed Americans to take up their picks and shovels and
dig themselves out of the depression. The response to his call was immediate
and impressive. Within six weeks more than the four million called for had
enlisted. The fight opened immediately on all sectors, in every state,
territory and island possession. Although this time the struggle was for
peaceful ends, the methods and weapons employed were not so different from
those used in real warfare. No ploughshares had to be hammered into
swords. The tractors that formerly would have been used to drag cannon, now
pulled road-making machinery, gouged out trenches, yanked out stumps,
ditched malaria-ridden swamps, charges of dynamite blew down whole
hill-sides, to widen dangerous curves on highways; sites being cleared for
playgrounds at times resembled Flanders battlefields flung skywards by
exploding lyddite. Hundreds of miles of trenches were opened, but now it was
for the installation of water mains and sewer conduits. Useless
uninhabitable buildings were demolished; unsanitary schools were pulled down
and replaced with modern structures. Hospitals were built. Unemployed nurses
were given jobs visiting the needy sick, caring for children. The fight was
carried on into the city slums and the forgotten mountain regions in the
southern states, with jobs for the jobless and medical care, education and
recreation for the underprivileged. As in war, every form of technical skill
was enlisted. Unemployed architects, engineers, scientists, teachers,
nurses, surveyors, masons, carpenters, mechanics, as well as unskilled labor
found a place in the ranks. The first campaign of this war against
depression ended with the end of the Civil Works program on March 31st, a
campaign lasting less than four and one-half months. The results achieved
have been the reverse of those usually brought about by old-style
wars. There has been construction, not destruction. Hardly a community but
can show some lasting benefit derived from Civil Works activities, a street
paved, a school-house reconditioned, a nursery school installed, a new
playground. But the most important thing that was done, after all, was to
give four million jobless men and women of these communities jobs on useful
work.
HARRY L. HOPKINS