826 ★ CHAPTER 21 The New Deal
persons had passed through CCC camps, where they received government
wages of $30 per month. The CCC made a major contribution to the enhance-
ment of the American environment.
Public-Works Projects
One section of the National Industrial Recovery Act created the Public Works
Administration (PWA), with an appropriation of $3.3 billion. Directed by
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, it contracted with private construction
companies to build roads, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities, includ-
ing New York City’s Triborough Bridge and the Overseas Highway between
Miami and Key West, Florida. In November 1933, yet another agency, the Civil
Works Administration (CWA), was launched. Unlike the PWA, it directly hired
workers for construction projects. By January 1934, it employed more than
4 million persons in the construction of highways, tunnels, courthouses, and
airports. But as the cost spiraled upward and complaints multiplied that the
New Deal was creating a class of Americans permanently dependent on gov-
ernment jobs, Roosevelt ordered the CWA dissolved.
Some New Deal public-works initiatives looked to government-planned
economic transformation as much as economic relief. The Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA), another product of the Hundred Days, built a series of dams
to prevent floods and deforestation along the Tennessee River and to provide
cheap electric power for homes and factories in a seven-state region where
many families still lived in isolated log cabins. The TVA put the federal gov-
ernment, for the first time, in the business of selling electricity in competition
with private companies. It significantly improved the lives of many southern-
ers and offered a preview of the program of regional planning that spurred the
economic development of the West.
The New Deal and Agriculture
Another policy initiative of the Hundred Days addressed the disastrous plight
of American farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) authorized the
federal government to set production quotas for major crops and pay farmers
to plant less in an attempt to raise farm prices. Many crops already in the field
were destroyed. In 1933, the government ordered more than 6 million pigs
slaughtered as part of the policy, a step critics found strange at a time of wide-
spread hunger.
The AAA succeeded in significantly raising farm prices and incomes. But not
all farmers benefited. Money flowed to property-owning farmers, ignoring the
large number who worked on land owned by others. The AAA policy of paying