Public Works Administration

Based on Wikipedia: Public Works Administration

The Government That Built America

In the summer of 1933, the United States government embarked on the largest construction project in the nation's history. Over the next decade, it would pour half of all the concrete produced in America and consume a third of all the steel. It would electrify the countryside, connect cities with tunnels bored through mountains, and raise dams that turned desert rivers into sources of power for millions. The agency responsible for this transformation had a forgettable bureaucratic name: the Public Works Administration, or PWA.

But its impact was anything but forgettable.

Drive across the Triborough Bridge in New York City today—now renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge—and you're traveling on PWA concrete. Fly out of Los Angeles International Airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson, or Philadelphia International, and you're using infrastructure that traces back to this Depression-era agency. The hospitals where Americans are born, the schools where they learn, the courthouses where they seek justice—thousands of these buildings still standing were raised by PWA funds between 1933 and 1943.

The Pump That Needed Priming

To understand why the federal government got into the construction business on such an unprecedented scale, you need to understand the catastrophe that made it necessary.

By 1933, nearly one in four American workers had no job. That's not a typo. Twenty-four percent unemployment. Imagine walking down any street in any city and knowing that roughly every fourth working-age person you passed had been thrown out of work—not because they were lazy or unskilled, but because the entire economic system had seized up like an engine run dry of oil.

The problem wasn't that people didn't want to work. The problem wasn't that there was nothing to build. The problem was that nobody had money to pay for anything. Consumers couldn't buy goods because they had no wages. Factories couldn't hire workers because nobody was buying their products. Banks couldn't lend because their deposits had evaporated in waves of panicked withdrawals. The economy had entered what economists call a deflationary spiral, a vicious cycle where falling prices led to falling wages led to falling demand led to even lower prices.

The traditional economic thinking of the time said the government should do nothing—let the market correct itself, balance the budget, wait for the storm to pass. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated in March 1933, had a different idea. Actually, he had many different ideas, some of which contradicted each other. But one of the most ambitious was borrowed from an economic concept called "pump priming."

The metaphor comes from old-fashioned water pumps. Before they could draw water up from a well, you had to pour a little water in first to create the suction. Roosevelt and his advisors believed the economy worked similarly. Pour government money into construction projects, and you'd create jobs. Those newly employed workers would spend their wages, creating demand for goods. Factories would hire more workers to meet that demand. Those workers would spend their wages too. The economic pump, once primed, would start flowing on its own.

Harold Ickes: The Honest Curmudgeon

The man Roosevelt chose to run this massive construction program was Harold L. Ickes, his Secretary of the Interior. This was an unusual choice in several ways.

Ickes wasn't even a Democrat. He was a Progressive Republican from Chicago, brought into the cabinet as a symbol of bipartisan cooperation. He was also, by all accounts, one of the most difficult personalities in Washington. Suspicious, combative, and brutally honest, Ickes trusted almost no one and assumed corruption lurked around every corner—probably because he'd spent decades fighting the notoriously corrupt political machine in Chicago.

These qualities made him a nightmare to work with but possibly the perfect person to oversee billions of dollars in government contracts. Ickes was so paranoid about graft that he personally reviewed major contracts and instituted layers of oversight that would have made a bank auditor weep with joy. He moved slowly, methodically, checking and double-checking everything.

This drove Roosevelt crazy at times. The president wanted to get money flowing into the economy fast. Ickes wanted to make sure every penny was spent honestly and on quality construction. The two impulses were in constant tension throughout the PWA's existence.

But Ickes's caution paid dividends in at least one crucial way: the PWA was remarkably scandal-free. At a time when government spending on this scale was unprecedented and opportunities for corruption were everywhere, Ickes kept the agency honest. The projects it built were solid. Many are still in use ninety years later.

How It Actually Worked

The PWA operated differently from what you might expect of a government jobs program. It didn't directly hire unemployed workers. Instead, it gave contracts to private construction companies, who then hired workers through normal channels.

Here's how a typical project unfolded. A city or state would propose a project—say, a new hospital or a bridge. PWA headquarters in Washington would evaluate the proposal. If approved, the PWA would provide a grant covering a portion of the cost, typically around 30 percent, with the rest coming as a loan that the local government would repay over time. Private construction firms would then bid on the contract, hire workers, purchase materials, and build the project.

This structure had both advantages and drawbacks. On the positive side, it leveraged existing construction industry expertise and capacity. It put money into private hands quickly, since the construction companies needed to buy materials and pay workers right away. Economists estimated that for every worker directly employed on a PWA project, almost two additional workers got jobs indirectly—in steel mills, cement plants, lumber yards, and countless other industries that supplied the construction sites.

On the negative side, this approach meant the PWA didn't directly help the unemployed as much as a program that hired them directly would have. If you were an out-of-work accountant or factory hand, you couldn't just show up at a PWA project and get a job. You had to compete for positions through the normal hiring process, which often favored workers who already had construction experience and connections.

This was the crucial difference between the PWA and its great rival agency, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, run by Harry Hopkins. The WPA hired unemployed workers directly, paying them government wages to do smaller-scale projects like building sidewalks, painting murals, and putting on theater productions. Hopkins was Ickes's opposite in temperament—fast-moving, willing to accept some waste in exchange for speed, focused on getting money to the desperate as quickly as possible.

Roosevelt, characteristically, kept both agencies running in competition with each other, believing that rivalry would spur innovation and efficiency. Whether this worked or simply created bureaucratic confusion is still debated by historians.

What They Built

The scale of PWA construction is hard to grasp without concrete examples. Over its ten-year existence, the agency funded more than 34,000 projects.

Streets and highways were the most common, accounting for a third of all projects. This makes sense when you remember that America was rapidly becoming an automobile society, and many areas still lacked proper roads. The PWA funded 11,428 road projects, from urban streets to rural highways, knitting together a nation that had previously been connected mainly by railroads.

Schools came second. The PWA built 7,488 school buildings across the country, representing 70 percent of all new schools constructed during the 1930s. If you attended school in a building constructed before World War II, there's a good chance it was a PWA project. These weren't temporary structures either—Ickes insisted on quality construction that would last generations.

Hospitals followed the same pattern. One-third of all hospitals built between 1933 and 1939 were PWA projects. The agency also funded courthouses, post offices, and other public buildings that still serve their communities today.

But the most spectacular PWA projects were the massive infrastructure works that remade the American landscape.

Taming Rivers

The great dams of the American West are perhaps the PWA's most enduring legacy. The agency funded the construction of several of the largest dams ever built, structures so massive they remain engineering marvels today.

Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, completed in 1942, was the largest concrete structure ever built at the time. It remains the largest power-producing facility in the United States and one of the largest in the world. The dam backs up the Columbia River for 150 miles, creating a reservoir that irrigates over 600,000 acres of previously desert land.

Hoover Dam, straddling the border between Nevada and Arizona, was another PWA project. Built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, it required pouring enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York. The dam created Lake Mead, which supplies water to millions of people across the Southwest and generates electricity for three states.

Fort Peck Dam in Montana, built on the Missouri River, created the fifth-largest artificial lake in the United States. Pensacola Dam in Oklahoma created Grand Lake, which remains a popular recreational destination. These projects transformed rivers that had flooded unpredictably for millennia into controlled sources of power, irrigation, and recreation.

The environmental and social consequences of these dams—displaced communities, destroyed ecosystems, water rights conflicts—would become more apparent in later decades. But in the 1930s, they represented triumph over nature, proof that American engineering and determination could remake the continent itself.

Connecting Cities

While the dams captured public imagination, the PWA also funded less dramatic but equally important projects that connected American cities.

The Lincoln Tunnel, linking Manhattan to New Jersey under the Hudson River, was a PWA project. So was the Triborough Bridge, which connected Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx and became a crucial artery for New York City traffic. The Overseas Highway, connecting Key West to the Florida mainland via a series of bridges leaping from island to island, was rebuilt with PWA funds after the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane destroyed the original route.

In Boston, the PWA funded work on Logan International Airport. In Atlanta, it helped build what would become Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, now the busiest airport in the world. Los Angeles, Portland, Salt Lake City, Tampa, Nashville, Charlotte, Philadelphia—major airports across the country trace their origins to PWA construction in the 1930s.

The agency even funded the electrification of the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line between New York City and Washington, D.C. This massive project converted the nation's busiest passenger rail corridor from steam power to electric power, enabling the faster, cleaner service that the Northeast Corridor still provides today.

Building Ships for a War No One Wanted

One of the PWA's most consequential investments wasn't in roads or dams but in naval vessels. The agency funded the construction of two aircraft carriers, the Yorktown and the Enterprise, along with four cruisers, destroyers, and submarines.

In 1933, when these ships were authorized, World War II was still six years in the future. Hitler had just become Chancellor of Germany but had not yet begun his military expansion. Japan was aggressive in China but had not yet attacked Pearl Harbor. Most Americans wanted nothing to do with foreign wars and believed the oceans on either side of the continent would protect them from any conflict.

But the ships the PWA built would prove crucial when war did come. At the Battle of Midway in June 1942—often called the turning point of the Pacific War—the Enterprise and Yorktown were two of the three American carriers that faced the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft sank four Japanese carriers, a blow from which the Imperial Japanese Navy never recovered.

The Yorktown was sunk in the battle, but the Enterprise survived to fight throughout the war, earning more battle stars than any other ship in the U.S. Navy. When it was finally decommissioned in 1947, it had participated in every major naval campaign in the Pacific.

None of this could have been predicted when the PWA authorized the carriers' construction. But the decision to spend Depression-era dollars on naval shipbuilding—an unusual use of a public works agency—may have changed the course of history.

The Failed Promise of Public Housing

Not all PWA projects were successes. The agency's attempt to build public housing for urban poor families is widely considered its most significant failure.

Public housing was a new concept in the United States in 1933. Europe had experimented with government-built housing for workers, but America had always left housing to the private market. The PWA was supposed to change that, building quality affordable housing for families who couldn't afford private rentals.

In the end, the agency constructed just 52 housing communities with a total of 29,000 units—a tiny fraction of what was needed and far less than what housing advocates had hoped for. The first public housing community completed, Techwood Homes in Atlanta, was restricted to white residents, a pattern that would mar American public housing for decades.

Why did the housing program fall so short? Historians point to several factors. Ickes's caution meant projects moved slowly. Land acquisition in cities was complicated and expensive. Local opposition—particularly from real estate interests who saw public housing as competition—delayed many proposals.

But the deeper problem was money. Roosevelt, despite his reputation as a big-spending liberal, was actually quite uncomfortable with deficit spending. He constantly sought to balance competing demands for limited funds. The PWA never received enough money to achieve its housing goals, and what money it did receive was often diverted to other priorities.

The failure of PWA housing would have long-term consequences. When public housing did expand after World War II, it often took the form of dense high-rise projects that concentrated poverty and created their own problems. The garden-style communities that the PWA built in small numbers were generally more successful, but the model wasn't replicated at scale.

Race and the New Deal

Harold Ickes was one of the most progressive members of Roosevelt's cabinet on racial issues—a low bar in 1930s America, but still notable. He instituted quotas requiring that PWA-funded projects hire both skilled and unskilled Black workers, a revolutionary policy for the time.

Enforcement was another matter. Employers and unions, particularly in the skilled trades, resisted hiring Black workers. The building trades unions were notoriously exclusionary, restricting membership to white workers and refusing to work alongside non-members. Ickes's staff negotiated with these unions and implied that federal contracts might be withheld from projects that discriminated, but their leverage was limited.

The results were mixed. Unskilled Black workers, who faced less union resistance, benefited significantly from PWA employment. Skilled positions were harder to access. But the simple fact that the federal government was trying to enforce non-discrimination in employment was unprecedented and set important precedents for later civil rights enforcement.

Of course, the same PWA that tried to employ Black workers also built segregated housing projects and funded segregated schools and hospitals across the South. The New Deal operated within the constraints of 1930s America, which meant accepting Jim Crow segregation in most of its programs. Progress came in small steps, and the steps were too small for millions of Black Americans who remained locked out of economic opportunity.

Did It Work?

The simplest measure of the PWA's success would be whether it ended the Depression. By that standard, it failed. The agency spent over $7 billion (equivalent to well over $150 billion today), and unemployment remained painfully high throughout the 1930s. The Depression didn't truly end until World War II mobilization finally absorbed the unemployed into the military and defense industries.

But this may be an unfair standard. Most economists today believe the PWA and other New Deal programs weren't large enough to overcome the Depression's depth. Roosevelt's reluctance to embrace deficit spending meant the stimulus was too small relative to the economic collapse. The pump was primed, but not with enough water.

By other measures, the PWA was remarkably successful. It built lasting infrastructure that served the nation for generations. It did so honestly, with minimal corruption despite handling unprecedented sums. It pioneered government-industry cooperation on construction projects, developing models still used today. And it provided employment for millions of workers at a time when private industry had nothing to offer.

Perhaps most importantly, the PWA helped restore Americans' faith that their government could accomplish great things. The dams and bridges and airports it built were visible, tangible proof that collective action through government could solve problems that individuals and markets could not. Whether you consider that a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on your political philosophy. But there's no denying it changed American expectations of what government should do.

The End and the Legacy

The PWA was absorbed into the Federal Works Agency in 1943 and officially dissolved in 1944. By then, the Depression was over, replaced by the all-consuming demands of World War II. The agency had served its purpose.

But its projects live on. The next time you cross a bridge built in the 1930s, fly out of a major airport, or visit a school or courthouse in an older American city, look for a plaque or cornerstone. You may well find the initials PWA, a reminder of the decade when the federal government set out to build America and largely succeeded.

The Public Works Administration wasn't perfect. It moved too slowly for some, spent too freely for others. Its housing program failed. Its racial policies, progressive for their time, seem inadequate by modern standards. But it left behind 34,000 projects that helped Americans live, work, travel, and learn. Ninety years later, that's not a bad legacy for any organization.

Not bad at all.