During the recent presidential campaign someone – I think it was Barack Obama – said that the worst thing about the nation’s soaring national debt is that we have nothing to show for it.
Of course that may have been an overstatement, a bit of campaign rhetoric. I’m sure there are a few things – perhaps a new road from downtown Baghdad to the airport – that the current administration could point to, but the fact is that while the debt has jumped more than $4 trillion under George W. Bush, the largest increase in any president’s term, our highways and bridges have continued to crumble, centuries old underground water systems in our cities are deteriorating, our electrical grid is threatening to blow its fuse and our cities and states are going broke just trying to maintain what they have.
And, perhaps the worst irony of all is that after spending all that money we’ve not only ended up with a record national debt – it’s now reached $10 trillion, so many zeros that they had to add another digit to the National Debt Clock in Times Square – but our economy is in shambles as well.
So what’s the answer? Obviously, it’s to spend more. It’s time to rebuild America and among President Obama’s first proposals should be a "stimulus package" that won’t just dole out federal funds in the form of "bail-outs" but will be "earmarked" – excuse the use of a dirty word in a family newspaper – for projects dedicated to modernizing our antiquated infrastructure. Something like a 21st Century version of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of my own youth which Franklin Roosevelt created in 1935 in an effort to pull the nation out of the depths of that Great Depression.
The idea was simple: create jobs by putting people to work rebuilding our own country. By the time WPA was terminated in 1943, when the task of providing weapons for World War II ended the need for any economic pump priming, the program had spent $11 billion – a tremendous amount in those days – and could boast of having provided work for 8,500,000 people on 1,410,000 projects which included 651,087 miles of highways and local roads, 124,031 bridges, 125,119 public buildings including libraries and post offices, 8,192 parks, and 853 airport facilities. There was hardly a city or town in America that didn’t benefit from a WPA project. Many of them, like LaGuardia Airport and Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, still exist and you can find rusting signs on many back roads attesting to the fact that the aging concrete bridge you are about to cross was build by the Works Progress Administration sometime in the 1930s.
My own personal memory of the WPA has nothing to do not with bridges or roads, however, but with music. In addition to its construction projects, WPA commissioned artists to paint the murals that you can still view in many of those public buildings and assigned writers to researching and chronicling our heritage and hired professional musicians to form symphony orchestras to tour and bring classical music to our schoolrooms.
I must have been 15 years old, back in 1937, when the musicians who, if it had not been for WPA would probably have been standing in a bread line, came to our junior high school in Bergenfield. It was the first time that any of us had heard the rich, full sound of a symphony orchestra reverberating from every corner of an auditorium and when they played Rossini’s "William Tell Overture," we listened, awestricken but silently, until suddenly the horns sounded the familiar radio theme for the Lone Ranger.
"Hi-yo, Silver!" we shouted spontaneously. When the music ended our principal came on stage and lectured us on proper conduct at a classical concert but the conductor and members of the orchestra all seemed to be smiling. They knew that music was meant to paint a mental image and if what we saw was a masked man on a white horse so be it.
Of course the cultural programs of the WPA may be among is its minor accomplishments but for me the visit of that orchestra to our school triggered an appreciation for classical music that has enhanced the quality of my own life.
When Dwight Eisenhower became president in 1952 he was urged by many of his fellow conservatives to reverse Roosevelt’s spending policies. Instead when it came to public works programs, Eisenhower took up where FDR had left off by sponsoring legislation that included construction of the Interstate Highway System and the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
We’ve done little but fill in some of the potholes in our infrastructure since. Maybe it’s time for some new construction instead.
