Regarding Carmine DiFazio’s Sunday letter to the editor, headlined “War gave illusion of success for FDR’s programs,” which was a response to Nick Taylor’s commentary in the Sept. 14 Las Vegas Sun, “FDR’s Depression-era spending gives Obama a proven strategy”:
Every so often someone will write how the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps were not effective stimulus plans. Talk about smoke coming out of my ears.
I am pushing 87 and I lived through the Great Depression, and I can tell you firsthand that those two programs were very effective in my hometown, a town of 9,000 people in Minnesota. I saw a 17-mile highway built between my town and St. Paul, a 30-mile highway between my town and Minneapolis, two roads paved between my town and an adjacent town, a bridge built over a river that divides Minnesota and Wisconsin, a beautiful post office and a state prison.
Over the years, the WPA put a lot of people to work and my town was just one in the entire nation. Those two programs put millions of people to work and it didn’t make any difference what kind of job you had; the fact was you had a job that put bread on the table and kept that roof over your head.
Have we forgotten the Tennessee Valley Authority, Hoover Dam and all the other projects built across the country at that time? It wasn’t until we got into the war that we saw hundreds of thousands of women going to work to replace their loved ones who went off to war.
It blows my mind when these people say it was the war that brought us out of the Depression — it was only a part of it. During Eisenhower’s recession, he also had his own stimulus plan. Stimulus plans do help, be it during Roosevelt’s administration, Eisenhower’s administration or Obama’s administration.
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