Long-Range Public Investment -- The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal by Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., South Carolina UP '07, 265 pages, ISBN #1570036632. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.
Construction of public buildings has often been viewed as Congressional logrolling or pork-barrel politics. But the schools, courthouses, hospitals, power plants and parks built by FDR's "alphabet soup" agencies during the Depression created construction jobs that took many thousands of working families off the dole. And, as Arizona State sociologist Robert D. Leighninger, Jr. observes, many of those structures are still integral to the nation's public infrastructure today.
While many books have been written about the contributions of the Public Works Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority, the author's contribution is to attempt an "exhaustive survey" of all these agencies and an evaluation of "the impact of public works on stimulating the economy, the role of public jobs in a national employment policy, the means of financing infrastructure, and the paradox of viewing public works as 'pork'."
