HISTORY: The New Deal (part 2)

S.C. Encyclopedia (part 2 of 2) | Aiding the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in effecting business recovery was the Public Works Administration (PWA), which stimulated purchases in construction and related industries such as steel, cement, and lumber. In South Carolina the PWA was synonymous with the construction of public housing at University Terrace, Gonzales Gardens, and Calhoun Court in Columbia and Cooper River Court, Meeting Street Manor, and Anson Borough Homes in Charleston, eighty-seven schools and ten city halls and courthouses across the state, and massive hydroelectric projects at Buzzard Roost in Greenwood County and Santee Cooper in the Lowcountry. Both hydroelectric projects helped mightily in the effort to electrify rural areas, expand recreational opportunities, eradicate malaria, and attract industry to the state. Both also required massive amounts of labor at a time when jobs were scarce.

More important in helping the unemployed were the various relief agencies. The Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 appropriated $500 million to be channeled through the forty-eight state relief administrations to alleviate unemployment and human misery. The South Carolina Emergency Relief Administration (SCERA) spent its allotment on both direct relief for unemployables and work relief for those able to work. The latter earned SCERA dollars, and later Civil Works Administration (CWA) dollars, through work at jobs in sewing rooms, libraries, swamp drainage, local infrastructure construction, literacy training, reconstruction of Charleston’s Dock Street Theater, and the construction of highways, bridges, and schools.

In 1935 the Roosevelt administration created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to take over work relief, while insisting that the states assume responsibility for their unemployables. The state of South Carolina, aided by federal grants under Social Security, created the South Carolina Department of Public Welfare to look after the needy. Meanwhile, the WPA undertook the most massive work-relief effort in the state’s history. Indeed, for several years the WPA was the state’s largest employer. Its fruits included the construction or improvement of 1,138 bridges, 11,699 culverts, 10,000 miles of highways, 2,179 schools, and 1,267 noneducational buildings such as courthouses and jails. Less visible but also valuable were the 2.1 million garments made for the poor in WPA sewing rooms, literacy efforts that all but wiped out illiteracy in the educable population, the publication of the nationally known South Carolina: A Guide to the Palmetto State (1941), and music classes and concerts for more than twenty percent of the state’s citizens.

The most popular of all New Deal programs in the Palmetto State was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This program put unemployed young males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five years into South Carolina’s thirty CCC camps to do conservation work, which by 1939 included thinning almost fifty thousand acres of forests, devoting more than 115,000 man-days to planting trees, and spending almost 120,000 hours fighting forest fires. The young men also constructed more than 5,400 miles of fire breaks, almost 1,500 miles of truck trails, and the state’s first fourteen state parks. In 1938 alone, an estimated one-fourth of the state’s citizens enjoyed the new state parks. By 1939 almost 32,000 South Carolinians had served in the CCC.

Also by 1939, other less visible but equally valuable New Deal agencies had improved conditions in the Palmetto State. The National Youth Administration (NYA) paid $1.1 million in wages to almost twenty thousand high school and college students who could not have remained in school without the jobs provided by the NYA. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which purchased mortgages from lenders and then renegotiated more favorable terms with the borrowers, saved ten percent of the state’s nonfarm homes from foreclosure. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured more than twelve thousand loans totaling almost $15 million, made credit available to home buyers when none existed in the private sector. The presence of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance so restored popular confidence in banking that bank failures in South Carolina dropped from an average of twenty-five per year between 1921 and 1933 to just two banks in the five years between 1934 and 1939.

Results of the New Deal in South Carolina were mixed. It did not challenge racial segregation, which existed in every New Deal program. Neither did the New Deal dismantle the state’s conservative political culture, local power structure, legislative supremacy, or prevailing notions of class, gender, and race. On the other hand, the New Deal restored confidence in democracy, capitalism, and progress. It kept farmers, mill owners, bankers, and mill workers out of bankruptcy long enough for them to prosper during and after World War II. The programs in work relief and public works were responsible for the state’s first public housing, two massive hydroelectric complexes, and thousands of miles of highways, bridges, sewage systems, and water systems. The program in industrial recovery and reform brought permanent shorter hours, higher wages, better working conditions, and labor’s right to organize. The program for agricultural recovery brought permanent price supports, acreage reduction, agricultural credit, soil conservation, and rural electrification. The New Deal launched the national careers of politicians such as Olin D. Johnston and Burnet Maybank and furthered the career of James F. Byrnes, who helped author or served as Senate floor manager for at least eight major pieces of New Deal legislation. The state’s current system of alcoholic beverage control began with the New Deal. Also starting during the New Deal was African American activism, which culminated in the civil rights movement in the decades following World War II. Truly, the New Deal was a watershed in the state’s history.

– Excerpted from the entry by Jack Irby Hayes. See Part One. To read more about this or 2,000 other entries about South Carolina, check out The South Carolina Encyclopedia by USC Press. (Information used by permission.)