Getting the neighborhood’s first flush toilet was cause to celebrate with an open-house. A friend shared that family story on a Zoom call just yesterday. The western mountains of North Carolina and plenty of other rural areas across the southeast were without power and water infrastructure until the Tennessee Valley Authority began building it as part of FDR’s New Deal ninety years ago.
Power and water are not roads and bridges. They are even more vital. But the New Deal built roads and bridges, too, and more. David B. Woolner writes at The Washington Post: “the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employed approximately 8.5 million people and built nearly 600,000 miles of rural roads, 67,000 miles of urban streets, 122,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, 1,050 airfields and 4,000 airport buildings.”
Here in WNC, the Blue Ridge Parkway (part of the National Parks system) begun in the last century remains an economic engine for the region in this one.
FDR’s team took a broad-minded approach to defining infrastructure:
To improve the nation’s water supply, for example, the WPA built water and sewage treatment plants and miles of sewer lines and storm drains. To help bolster the nation’s education system and enhance public safety, WPA workers also built thousands of schools, hospitals and firehouses, along with nearly 20,000 other state, county and local government buildings.
FDR saw a need. He filled it.
By 1940, about 40 percent of all American farms had electricity, and by the end of the 1940s, 9 in 10 farms had electricity, a complete reversal of what had existed at Roosevelt’s inauguration.
The Biden administration sees similar issues plaguing the country now, especially access to reliable high-speed Internet — 35 percent of rural America does without. Ask my neighbors farther west. Now matter how scenic, it’s tough to attract businesses and jobs to areas lacking broadband.
Improviing “the quality of life for their fellow citizens” under the New Deal had an additional benefit, Woolner explains, one especially pertinent nearly a century after FDR:
In doing so, they helped counter the argument, so prevalent in the 1930s, that the best way to overcome economic hardship was to turn to fascism and autocracy. Today, anti-democratic ideas have again found appeal as the United States endures a festering of long-standing problems — including a lack of technical infrastructure, problems with education that keep Americans from getting good jobs, and the dangers of climate change. Roosevelt’s broad definition of infrastructure — and the positive impact that such an understanding had in a similar moment, both short- and long-term — is an endorsement for Biden to take a similar approach. If anything, Biden should be even bolder in ensuring that the fruits of these projects benefit all Americans.
As Roosevelt demonstrated, the infrastructure of a nation is much more than paved roads or physical structures. It includes the social and economic well-being of its people and the building of a society that provides a clean environment and equal opportunity for all.
Our conservative faction that reminds us there is no free lunch, yet has skated by and gotten rich on infrastructure they got, essentially, for free. Their parents and grandparents bequeathed it to them. Now they dislike the idea of making these kinds of investments after decades of neglect from which they benefitted.
“I even heard some Republicans oddly suggesting that water pipes, wastewater pipes aren’t infrastructure,” Sec. Buttigieg says. “I don’t really care which label you apply to which part of the plan. Every part of the plan is popular and good.”
The Biden plan is popular. Successful politicians are in the popularity business.
Republicans are determined to change their business model to one that runs on unpopularity.
Good luck with that.