There are many thousands of Americans alive and well today — many living right here in Enid — who well remember the devastating effects of and the condition of the nation during the infamous Great Depression, which lasted roughly from 1929 to 1941.

I recall an old great uncle of mine, now deceased (who loathed Franklin D. Roosevelt) saying, “It took a war for him to get us out of the Depression.”

Some people believe it took the increased manpower requirements in the military and defense industry and the huge government military equipment orders to lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression.

Whether or not it took WW2 to lift the U.S. out of depression is a debate for historians and economists, but the federal work relief programs implemented by FDR gave millions of unemployed Americans steady jobs and recaptured their lost dignity. FDR’s federal work programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration, also built lasting, important structures at many locations throughout the country.

Recently, President-elect Barack Obama announced his intent for a new federal projects program, a program to rebuild America’s infrastructure and in the process stave off the pernicious effects of unemployment for millions of currently unemployed Americans.

U.S. employers put 533,000 American workers out of work in November, the highest monthly number of newly unemployed American workers since 1974.

“We need to act with the urgency this moment demands to save or create at least 21⁄2 million jobs so that the nearly 2 million Americans who've lost them know that they have a future,” Obama said in his weekly Internet/radio address.

The last large scale nationwide infrastructure improvement was during the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as supreme Allied general became enamored with Nazi Germany’s autobahn system, brought us the federal interstate highway system, which kept millions of American road builders and satellite contractors and feeder industries busy and gainfully employed for decades. Today there is not a nook and cranny in our huge nation which is not impacted in some way by an interstate highway.

Obama proposes we embark on a federally engineered program to make public buildings more energy-efficient, rebuild the nation’s highways, renovate decrepit school buildings, install computers in classrooms, extend high-speed Internet to underserved areas and modernize hospitals by giving them access to electronic medical records.

Of course, Obama’s plan is merely a plan, and like all plans proposed by leaders, is subject to the approval of the people who control the budget — Congress.

Yet, Obama’s announced intent galvanizes the population with some hope and excitement as we as a nation teeter on the precipice of the second Great Depression. Probably we already are in a depression even if it has yet to reach “great” dimensions.

Our national unemployment rate is about 7 percent, which looks nearly like full employment compared to the horrific unemployment rates of the Great Depression, which our thousands of thousand of living witnesses can recall. During the Great Depression, this nation had between 25 and 30 percent of its eligible, able work force out of work, until the FDR-inspired federal work programs descended upon our beleaguered population like so many pennies from heaven.

Probably nearly everyone has a living member of their extended family who is a living eyewitness to the Great Depression. Ask them what it was like to go to bed hungry and undernourished every night. How did it affect their sleep? How did it make them feel to be qualified to work and not be able to find one job despite looking every day?

My paternal grandfather joined the Army in early 1942, and what he loved best about the Army, he used to say, was the “three square meals a day.” A notion we take for granted today, but one my grandfather didn’t experience until 1942, when he enlisted in the Army.

In the period between 1935 and 1943, WPA gave almost 8 million jobs to needy workers. Though some of these jobs, our living eyewitnesses can attest, were things like picking up leaves in the public parks — one leaf at a time — their legacy is immeasurable. The federal work programs probably saved this country from complete failure.

Let us hope President-elect Obama’s plan for a federal infrastructure improvement program has similar results in the present.



Kinnamon is a weekly columnist for the Enid News & Eagle. Contact him at dave.kinnamon@sbcglobal.net.