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.

THE FRENZY on the sixth floor of the Littlefield Building bore fruit. Few states met the NYA quotas when schools and colleges reopened in September, 1935. NYA Administrator Aubrey Williams was to admit on October 28 that the youth agency had gotten off to “a very bad start.” But the quota was met in Texas. By September, 1936, the Texas NYA program

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 climati

Unlike relief programs, the Civil Works Administration provided jobs. Within ten days Hopkins had put more than 800,000 people to work, 2.6 million by mid-December, and by early January he was well over the 4 million mark. The CWA paid the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled labor, and the work was seasonal.

It recommended an expenditure of $101 billion ($823 billion currently) over ten years, and forty-one thousand miles of divided highways linking all U.S. cities with a population of more than fifty thousand. Not only was it the largest public works project ever proposed, but when completed it would provide the United States with a highway net superi