We can’t forget what bold and ingenious leadership can accomplish against the caution of low expectations in harsh economic times.

FDR Didn’t Govern from ‘the Center’ — Neither Should Obama
By Gray Brechin

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wasted no time cautioning Americans that they should not let their hopes run away with them just because the Democrats scored an electoral landslide. Calling herself a “proud progressive,” Pelosi advised president-elect Obama’s supporters to exercise the diminished expectations of political prudence: “The country must be governed from the middle,” she said a day after his victory.

November marked the 75th anniversary of one of the least known relief agencies to come out of the New Deal — the Civil Works Administration. At a time when the press regularly fuses FDR’s jaunty image with that of Barack Obama’s — and when the president-elect himself vows to create 2.5 million new jobs within two years as “a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face” — we should remember how much more one short-lived agency accomplished through the winter of another economic crisis.

The Speaker, whose father represented Baltimore as a New Deal Democrat, must know that Franklin Roosevelt did not govern from the middle. He chose a Midwestern social worker steeped in the Social Gospel movement at Iowa’s Grinnell College to run his relief programs, Harry Hopkins knew that legions of impoverished Americans could not wait for the cautious policies of Harold Ickes’ Public Works Administration to provide them with jobs. Neither could his boss.

On November 9, 1933 President Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Civil Works Administration. He did so by moving $400 million ($6.4 billion in today’s dollars) previously allocated to the PWA into the CWA account. A meeting of governors, mayors and other public officials six days later at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel effectively launched the agency.

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