An End to Civil Works
“The question of where the money was coming from (to fund the Civil Works Project) kept bobbing up, but we persistently ignored it. New Deal financial magic would take care of that, we told ourselves. Wishfully thinking ourselves away from the sordid theme of relief, we saw a bright vista stretching ahead to a land "where every man who wanted a job would have one," if not in industry, then in government service. But we have had a rude awakening.
The return to realism puts everything back into the old, familiar perspective where Relief stands glowering in the foreground, shadowing the other figures of the Recovery group. Public Works is there, and Business and Farm Employment; but as Civil Works prepares to lay down its burden of the Four Million, we seem to see that it is Relief which strains forward to pick it up.
The President attempts to allay our fears on this score. With the nation clamoring in protest against discontinuance of Civil Works and with Congress eager to appropriate funds so that it may go on, he has asked us to recall that Civil Works when formed last November, was for an emergency of less than three months. He is agreeing now to extend that term to five. He asks us to consider the cost of keeping the program going and whether, after all, we are ready as a nation to meet it. He assures us of his confident belief that those other giant figures, Public Works and Business and Farm Employment, will step forward and take over the tremendous burden of the Four Million, as Civil Works prepares to give it up. We try hard to believe that this will happen. But after four years of depression it is difficult to be optimistic about the possibility of this happening so rapidly."
An End to Civil Works
Classification: Civil Works Administration
Publication: The Survey
Date: February, 1934
Author: Kurtz, Russell H.
Type: Article
Publisher: Survey Associates, Inc.
Notes: Vol. 70, No. 2, p. 35.
From: The New Deal Network - http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/s342.htm