The Public Works Administration was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 16, 1933, one ofthe cornerstone measures ofthe First New Deal. Title I of the NIRA created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was to help achieve recovery from the Great Depression by means of economic planning and controls for industry. Title II of the NIRA established the PWA and allocated the agency its initial $3.3 billion for large-scale public-works projects. These PWA projects were to stimulate the economy by producing new jobs and business activity and to build projects that would enrich the national domain. Directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the PWA was a major New Deal agency that achieved its aims of building important, well-engineered, and well-constructed public works projects. Like the NRA, however, it did not contribute significantly to economic recovery.
The public works achievements of the PWA were significant and sometimes spectacular. Spending more than $6 billion on some 35,000 projects in the 1930s, the PWA underwrote an astonishing array of projects, from public housing to hospitals, dams, and battleships, and allocated nearly $2 billion more to other federal projects and programs, including the Civil Works Administration (CWA). From 1933 to 1939, PWA helped construct some two-thirds of the nation’s new schools and one-third of its hospitals and public health facilities. La Guardia Airport in New York City, the Skyline Drive in Virginia, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in California, and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown were all financed by PWA. Under Ickes’s meticulous, prudent leadership there was almost none of the inefficiency and waste of some New Deal programs, and no hint of corruption. The PWA Housing Division pioneered the first federal housing projects, which though disappointing in the volume of housing built became in some ways a model for slum clearance and public housing projects to follow. PWA projects also signally advanced the conservation aims of the administration, and provided employment at prevailing wages for more than 1 million workers. By one accounting, all but three counties in the United States had at least one PWA project.
Yet the economic impact of the PWA was consistently disappointing. Not just insistent upon the most careful planning and management, but also deeply suspicious and greatly concerned about his own reputation for rectitude, Ickes spent money far too slowly to have the desired effect on recovery or employment. In the PWA’s first six months, when the economic situation was most perilous, for example, Ickes expended just $110 million of the agency’s $3.3 billion authorization. The Housing Division built only some
22,000 units of low-cost public housing from 1933 to 1937, leading impatient reformers such as New York senator Robert F. Wagner to create the United States Housing Authority. Ickes’s priorities and performance also produced near-constant conflict over public works money with reliee administrator Harry L. Hopkins, who believed that government public-works and work-relief money should be spent as rapidly as possible and on laborintensive projects like those of the CWA and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) rather than on the capital-intensive projects of the PWA. In these often acerbic intra-administration battles, President Franklin D. Roosevelt more often than not sided with Hopkins. But while Roosevelt shared Hopkins’s preference for quick-impact projects that would directly provide jobs and income (and political benefit), he did not embrace the emerging view of Keynesianism that large-scale government deficit spending could produce economic recovery. The failure of PWA to spend sufficiently to underwrite recovery was thus by no means the responsibility of Ickes alone.
In the end, the PWA should be remembered for its accomplishments as well as for its limitations. Although it never achieved its aims or potential before being phased out in June 1941 (by which time defense spending had begun to confirm Keynesian doctrine of the importance of government spending to economic recovery), the PWA not only financed thousands of important and well-constructed projects but provided a model for prudent, efficient, effective federal funding of major construction and conservation projects.
Further reading: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Graham White and John Maze, Harold Ickes and the New Deal: His Private Life and Public Career (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Pyle, Ernie (Ernest Taylor) (1900-1945) war correspondent
Ernie Pyle, the most famous combat correspondent of World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reports that captured the hopes and fears of ordinary soldiers.
Born on August 3, 1900, in the small farming community of Dana, Indiana, Ernest Taylor Pyle was a quiet but restless youth with dreams of a future filled with travel and adventure. In 1923, he left Indiana University to work for a small paper in La Porte, Indiana, only to move a few months later to a desk job with the Washington Daily News. Pyle spent the next 12 years with this paper, where he worked as a reporter and copy editor, launched the country’s first daily aviation column in 1928, and reluctantly become the paper’s managing editor in 1932.
In 1935, Pyle sought and received a roving reporter position with the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Over the next seven years, Pyle and his wife Jerry crossed the United States some three dozen times and traveled to Canada, South America, and England as he wrote a daily column, which appeared in as many as 200 newspapers across the country. His reports were intertwined with nostalgic themes and provided stories of adventure and escape to readers who could never hope to make such journeys.
Pyle asked to work as a war correspondent in 1942. In covering the war over the next three years, he revealed his personal fears and hatred of war as he tried to interpret his own feelings as well as those of the GIs. Pyle’s dispatches often contained the names and hometowns of the men who experienced the hardships, sacrifices, and homesickness he wrote about. His reports were collected in his best-selling books Here Is Your War (1943) and Brave Men (1944). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his reporting from the World War II European theater.
Tragically, on April 18, 1945, while covering the Okinawa campaign in the World War II Pacific theater, he visited the nearby island of Ie Shima and was killed by Japanese gunfire. His reporting, however, lived on. His coverage of the Italian campaign inspired the 1945 motion picture G. I. Joe, and a final book, called Last Chapter, was published in 1946.
Further reading: Lee G. Miller, The Story of Ernie Pyle (New York: Viking, 1950); James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1997).
—Ronald G. Simon
World History
