Climate, architecture, and the public in the New Deal

The New Deal dramatically changed the built environment in the United States

Public works programs were a major part of the New Deal. These programs served the macroeconomic purpose of countering unemployment, which had reached nearly 25 percent by the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. In terms of our present-day discussions of how to reckon with employment shortfalls, New Dealers were emphatically on the side of a jobs guarantee, rather than a universal basic income, and at their peak, New Deal employment programs had as many as 4 million Americans on their rolls.

But more important, from the point of view of New Dealers, public works served an ideological purpose. Roosevelt wrote for the government to employ Americans directly would “help restore the close relationship with the people which is necessary to preserve our democratic form of government.” The essence of the modern condition was alienation from the great structures of government and business; direct employment would reverse that process of alienation and thus strengthen American democracy.(Rauchway 2021, 32)

Moreover, with a program for public hiring, the administration could set policies for wages, hours, and other working conditions, including the right to unionize; with a sufficiently large program for public hiring, the administration’s policies on these subjects could influence the general labor market.

The public works program was therefore not merely Keynesian stimulus, but an ideological and political tool.

A constructed commons both grand . . .

Often when we think about New Deal public works, we think about the grandest efforts—like Shasta Dam, depicted here during its construction, which took from 1937 to 1945. It was the second-tallest dam in the country at the time; it remains one of the top ten tallest dams today. It spans the Sacramento River, creating Shasta Lake and allowing for flood control, and of course it generates electricity.

. . . and mundane

But maybe even more important, for their effects then and now, are the more modest public works—swimming pools, playgrounds, community centers; miles and miles of sidewalks and improved roads—the unexceptional but ubiquitous demonstrations that, no matter where you lived, there was something the New Deal could offer your community.

And to repeat a point: this determination served an ideological purpose. Universality and community were vital values in the New Deal’s revitalization of public life in the United States.

Works for the whole public

This is a sidewalk in the city of Davis, a few blocks away from the university there; sidewalks like this exist all over the country, and remain a reminder of what the New Deal did. People who worked for the Works Progress Administration laid about 24,000 miles of new sidewalk and improved 7,000 more. These sidewalks are invaluable for public safety; as one New Deal report somewhat dryly put it, “Juxtaposition of children and elderly adults to moving automobiles is an undesirable state of affairs.”(Rauchway 2021, 136) They create a network of public space on which neighbors can meet.

Design for democracy

So that’s the first idea I want to get out there, the notion that New Deal public works came from a deeply ideological place, and that the foundation of that ideology was the preservation, extension, and improvement of democracy in the United States—creating a literally concrete basis for democratic and communitarian life.

A crisis of resources

Now that we’ve got the idea that the New Deal addressed crises in the economy and in democracy, we want to turn to the way it also sought to address a climate crisis, or a crisis of sustainability. The major way New Dealers expressed this concern was with respect to the issue of soil depletion and erosion—the idea that aggressive and careless use of the land was robbing it of nutrients, and leading to the loss of topsoil.

Many of you will, I suspect, be familiar with this concern through the idea of the Dust Bowl, but it was more general than that—worries about soil depletion underlay all manner of New Deal programs, which aimed at introducing more sustainable use of the land—terracing, and fertilizer use, as you see here. But also more ambitious efforts to reorient Americans to the land.

Watershed architecture

You’re looking here at the map of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, as it developed over the course of the Roosevelt administration. Many of you will know the basics of the TVA, but just as a swift primer: the “Tennessee” in the name is not the state of Tennessee, but the Tennessee River, which you can see covers some 650 miles over the course of seven states, draining out of the hills of Virginia and flowing ultimately into the Ohio River just before it joins the Mississippi. Before 1933, it was the scene of considerable poverty, aggravated by the frequent flooding of the river. Its bottomlands were fertile, but the scene of considerable erosion owing to those floods, which were carrying topsoil away and out to the Gulf of Mexico. The people who lived there were more likely than their fellow Americans to be poor; their earnings were well below the national average. Generally they lacked electricity and indoor plumbing; they farmed tobacco for money, and pretty much everything else for themselves.

The aim of the TVA, established in the first weeks of the New Deal, was not only to build dams on this river to control flooding and generate electricity, but to use those dams as the infrastructure for economic development of the whole region. You can see on the map the Tennessee River watershed in red; the radical doctrine of the TVA was not to generate and distribute electrical power on the public’s dime—though that was contested at the time—but to think in terms not of the arbitrary lines of states, as was (and remains) traditional in American politics, but rather in terms of the area defined by the river itself, there, even though it crossed state lines.

So the design of the TVA was regional—it was headquartered in Knoxville—and local; TVA officials helped local residents set up cooperatives to determine the pricing and distribution of the electricity generated by TVA dams.

Now, to talk a little bit about design and architecture, here: notice the earliest date here is actually before the New Deal—it’s for Wilson Dam, completed on the stretch of the Tennessee that runs through Alabama, at Muscle Shoals, in 1924.

The architecture of democratic power (before)

This is Wilson Dam, as completed. It was begun under legislation passed during the Great War, and then afterward was the subject of a major fight over whether the federal government should be in the electricity business. It not only survived that fight, remaining in the federal government’s hands, but then became the foundation for the TVA. The argument was that if the federal government produced some electricity, that practice would provide it some knowledge of how much it should cost to make electricity, and therefore what would be a reasonable price for private companies to charge. This use of federal production as a “yardstick” was the basis for the TVA, which aimed to, as one early survey said, “stop the pyramiding of wealth.”(Rauchway 2018, 157)

Now, I wanted you to have a look at it to have a sense of what dams were then supposed to look like—it’s monumental, it’s practical; it’s also got kind of a neoclassical colonnade.

And in the 1920s, when US agencies drafted designs for prospective dams, they drafted designs that looked something like this, including for a dam on the Clinch River, a tributary of the Tennessee.

The architecture of democratic power (after)

But the TVA chucked those plans, in favor of a newer design, by the Austrian architect Roland Wank, that was far more modernist. Its sheer concrete slope is angled in such a way to make it appear as if it grows out of the banks to either side. Le Corbusier visited it, and admired it as

a marvel of complete agreement between man and nature

and even a critic of the TVA, Donald Davidson, had to admit that it

aptly fitted where it belonged

The whole countryside had been altered to make it look like, as Davidson also wrote, “an amiable wild park.”

Wank had also given the concrete surfacing of the dam a textured surface, to break it up into a checkerboard pattern, to render it more comprehensible, and designed it with observation decks so people could visit it and feel a sense of ownership over it.

You can see here Roosevelt visiting; the journalist Ernie Pyle would also visit, and write a series of articles on the dam, and the TVA, in which he would note that the ambitions of the projects went far beyond the control of flooding, the prevention of erosion, and the generation of electricity. Rendering the river more navigable and electricity cheaper would make it possible to start industry in the valley, which would be enabled also by improved education. With Norris Dam came a model town—the first of a few notable model towns in the area—you can see the town of Norris laid out here, showing its modern, single family homes, each with electricity and telephone, and its winding paths. Eliel Saarinen came to Norris to admire it, and to apply its lessons in his future designs with his son Eero.

So the New Deal-inspired designs aimed to tame, and to contain, the hulking monstrosity of the dam, and make it part of a democratic community.

Design for sustainability

Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the TVA did only what its more idealistic designers intended; particularly with the war and the Cold War and the need for more electricity, it went into the business of coal-fired, and not at all clean, power production. Moreover, even when it was in the business solely of hydroelectric power, it was making difficult and sometimes ruthless decisions about who would remain in the valley, and benefit from the new developments, and who—because their homes would be underwater—would have to move on. Because it was located in the segregated South, it operated segregated facilities, and was frequently the object of civil rights complaints to challenge it to live up to its expressed ideals.

On the other hand, it was a major employer of Black Americans in good construction jobs. It did bring clean electricity to the valley, and put its generation and distribution in the hands of the local citizenry—literally, as well as figuratively, empowering them. It established a more sustainable model of plowing, of fertilizing. It stocked the valley with wildlife, both terrestrial and aquatic, and managed its populations.

Design for democracy and sustainability

So those are the two legacies of the New Deal, at its best, anyway—an interlinked concept of designs for democracy and sustainability

Which is why, despite its flaws and shortcomings—despite its being overtaken by the war—the New Deal remains a source of inspiration; that’s why its proponents, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, decided to draw on the New Deal. And that’s why its imagery also inspires the artists of the Creative Action Network, a couple of whose posters you can see here.

The New Deal remains, to date, the only mass mobilization of the American people for peacetime purposes and as such is still a touchstone for people who want to tap into that energy of modernity channeled toward the goals of democracy and sustainability.

Fin