New Deal Signs

(Image courtesy of WP Clip Art)

Across the country, the WPA erected 937,282 traffic signs. (From the "Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-43," p. 131)

The New Deal Made Us Healthier!

(WPA Poster)

New Deal agencies built hospitals, gave immunizations, performed dental work for children, offered health care training, and more. The New Deal was instrumental in helping America become a healthier nation.

Post Office Mural: Oakland, Maryland

According to the New Deal Art Registry, this mural--in the Oakland (Maryland) Post Office--was commissioned by the U.S. Treasury in 1942, and painted by Robert F. Gates. It is titled "Buckwheat Harvest."

(Image used for educational, non-commercial, and non-profit making purposes.  Copyright, United States Postal Service.  All rights reserved)  

CCC camps for young women?

The CCC was created for young men in their late teens and early twenties (with some exceptions made for older men). But if a new CCC were ever created, it would certainly be open to young women, and perhaps there would also be some co-ed camps. This is hardly surprising, given America's cultural changes over the last 80 years.

But it might surprise some people to learn that female CCC camps were frequently contemplated during the New Deal. These hoped-for camps came to be known as "She-She-She" camps. Unfortunately, the CCC was disbanded before such camps could be realized.

(Information found in "The WPA and Federal Relief Policy," by Donald S. Howard, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943, p. 282 (in footnote).

Historic Preservation Corps

The Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, in Colorado, has a Historic Preservation Corps program that "provides employment opportunities for local young adults in a crew-based format...members train and work under the supervision of a HPC crew leader and a local contractor, learning valuable construction and historic preservation techniques while completing priority projects." (Click here)

If a new WPA were ever created, historic preservation projects could make up a good chunk of the work projects. People of all ages could teach history, restore old buildings, perform & transcribe oral histories, write histories for small towns, and so on.

FDR Quote

Someone sent me this FDR quote:

"No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order....I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. On the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return."

(http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/07/channeling-fdr-the-moral-case-against-unemployment/)

October is a good month to read

One of the hundreds of cool posters created by WPA artists. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.