PWA

The PWA or Public Works Administration of 1933 was a part of the first New Deal agency that made contracts with private firms for construction of public works. It was headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. It was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. It allotted 3.3 billion dollars to be spent on the construction of public works as a means of providing employment, stabilizing purchasing power, improving public welfare, and contributing to a revival of American industry. Simply put, it was designed to spend "big bucks on big projects."

Frances Perkins had first suggested a federally financed public works program, and the idea received considerable support from Harold Ickes, James Farley, and Henry Wallace. After having scaled back the initial cost of the PWA, Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to include the PWA as part of his New Deal reforms.

More than any other New Deal program, the PWA epitomized the Rooseveltian notion of "priming the pump" to encourage economic growth. Between July 1933 and March 1939 the PWA funded and administered the construction of more than 34,000 projects including airports, large electricity-generating dams, major warships for the Navy, and bridges, as well as 70% of the new schools and one-third of the hospitals built between 1933-1939. Streets and highways were the most common PWA projects, as 11,428 road projects, or 33 percent of all PWA projects, accounted for over 15 percent of total budget. School buildings, 7,488 in all, came in second at 14% of spending.

The PWA had its own administrative staff but all construction work was done by private contractors, who were urged--but not required--to hire the unemployed. Ickes also tried to ensure that African Americans received their share of jobs.

Some of the most famous PWA projects are the Triborough Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, the longest continuous sidewalk in the world along 6 1/2 miles of Bayshore Blvd. in Tampa, FL, and the Overseas Highway connecting Key West, Florida to the mainland. The PWA also electrified the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Washington, DC. The PWA did not create as much affordable housing as supporters would have hoped, building only 25,000 units of in 4½ years.

The PWA spent over $6 billion, and helped to push industry back toward pre-Depression levels. It did not significantly change the unemployment level or help jumpstart a widespread creation of small businesses. Nonetheless, the historical legacy of the PWA is perhaps as important as its practical accomplishments at the time. It provided the federal government with its first systematic network for the distribution of funds to localities, ensured that conservation would remain an element in the national discussion, and provided federal administrators with a broad amount of badly needed experience in public policy planning. It ended in 1939 with the start of the Second World War.

References

• Harold L. Ickes, Back to Work: The Story of PWA (1935)
• Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (2006)