Today it could take decades to build bridges, roads, dams or other such needed fundamental foundations, including the planning and development stages, costing upwards of ¼ of a billion dollars (statistics of Sunshine Skyway Bridge, St. Petersburg and Bradenton, Florida, USA). However the great bridges of our nation were not built today. They were built at the direction of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) of the 1930's. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal of the great depression put millions of people back to work and built our nations infrastructure, as we know it today. What was different then to motivate laborers, government and bureaucracy to work together with such limited time, money, and resources as were available in the 1930's? Was it a result of the New Deal that redirected the focus of Americans back to the federal government, instead of self-preservation, expecting it to support the nation's welfare?.
With the affluence of the roaring '20's, and then the post war '50's, American cultural values of work hard - play hard seem to have been lost. Roosevelt, favoring work relief over welfare, created the WPA. Before the Project was terminated during World War II, it left permanent monuments on the landscape in the form of buildings, bridges, dams, hard-surfaced roads, airports, and schools. The National Youth Administration (NYA), under the WPA, provided part-time employment to students and set up technical training programs for them. The WPA also employed a wide range of talents in the Federal Theatre Project, Federal Art Project, and the Federal Writers' Project. Never before or since has our government so extensively sponsored the arts. Much of what they created has survived through the efforts of museums, libraries, and archives. They are examples of an extraordinary burst of American creativity that occurred during a time of tremendous adversity. Their recurring theme was the strength and dignity of common men and women, even as they faced difficult circumstances.
