Sublime

Between July 1933 and March 1939, the PWA financed the construction of more than 34,000 projects at a cost of more than $6 billion. Projects ran the gamut from lighthouses and battleships to municipal sewer systems. Approximately 1.2 million men were employed on site under the program.

When it went out of existence in April 1934, the CWA had pumped close to $1 billion into the ailing economy. Eighty percent of that had gone directly into workers’ wages, with the bulk of the remainder paid out for equipment and material.49 Less than 2 percent went for administrative overhead— another Hopkins hallmark.

Moses built public works costing, in 1968 dollars, twenty-seven billion dollars. In terms of personal conception and completion, no other public official in the history of the United States built public works costing an amount even close to that figure. In those terms, Robert Moses was unquestionably America’s most prolific physical creator. He was

In the 1980s, Milwaukee was the epicenter of deindustrialization. In the 1990s, it would become “the epicenter of the antiwelfare crusade.” As President Clinton was fine-tuning his plan to “end welfare as we know it,” a conservative reformer by the name of Jason Turner was transforming Milwaukee into a policy experiment that captivated lawmakers

As Jones Beach and other state parks opened during Roosevelt’s regime, the number of jobs at Moses’ disposal steadily increased. By 1930, the number of lifeguards, special police, gardeners, parking-field and bathhouse attendants, janitors and toll takers at the Long Island parks was more than fifteen hundred.

The agency whose budget was once second only to the Department of Defense, the agency that had replaced slums with (once) safe and dependable housing, soon couldn’t pay for its buildings’ trash collection or elevator repair.[11]

Complicating the problems of the Texas NYA director—the youngest of the forty-eight directors and one of the few without public works or administrative experience—was the factor that complicated every problem in Texas: its vast size. Every attempt to establish a statewide public works program in Texas had been hamstrung by the variations in