The Make-Work Eras

There was a vast amount of industrial production to supply America's war effort during the First World War. After the war the productive capacity was turned toward consumer goods. Industry turned out a wide range of goods, from cars to radios. This brought about the memorable decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". 

Companies were naturally trying to maximize profit by charging as much as possible for their products and paying their workers as little as possible. Magnificent skyscrapers were built with the wealth that was gained. The trouble was that workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford the goods that they were producing. Manufactured goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash in October 1929. 

The Thirties were as bad of a time as the Twenties had been good. The economic malaise is known as the Great Depression. In various countries the governments came up with "make-work" projects in an effort to get the economy rolling again. In the U.S. the Works Projects Administration was created. The efforts centered around it were collectively known as the "New Deal".

It is easy to notice that there are a lot of stone government buildings, including schools, that were built during the 1930s. I am writing this about halfway between two nearby middle or prep schools, one of which I attended, that were built at about the same time during the Thirties. These were make-work projects. Better known such projects during this era included Boulder (Hoover) Dam and the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority. 

In Germany the construction of the Autobahn was a project along similar lines. But none of these efforts completely brought the west out of the Great Depression. A party arose in Germany with another idea. Absorb unemployment by drastically increasing the military forces and get the factories back to full production making military equipment for them. The party was the Nazis and the plan worked brilliantly. It was only the following war that completely eradicated the Great Depression.

This concluded what we could call the First Make Work Era. This make work era is recognized as part of economic history but what I would like to add is that there has also been a Second Make Work Era that is unofficial and has not been recognized. The First Make Work Era revolved around building but the Second Make Work Era revolved around technology. 

After the Second World War ended, in 1945, the west was past the economic depression, in fact the economy was booming. But there were other pending issues. There were millions of returning soldiers that would need jobs. Many returning soldiers attended college on programs such as America's G.I. Bill. 

But these college graduates had to have something to do. Another issue after the Second World War was the competition with Communism. The greatest thing that ever happened to Communism was the crash of capitalism in 1929, as described above. This is what turned Communism into a major world economic system. This competition was not just military but was also about living standards. 

What started in the 1950s was the space program. The Nazi V2 rockets can probably be considered as the first man-made objects to enter outer space. There is no exact definition of where outer space begins, since the atmosphere gradually fades out. The first man-made object in orbit was the Soviet satellite Sputnik. 

The space program was one of the main frontiers of the competition with Communism. Like nuclear power, which was being developed at the same time, the space program had both civilian as well as military applications. There were a tremendous number of technology spin-offs from the space program, from powdered orange juice to super-strong glass. The landing of astronauts on the moon, while certainly a great accomplishment, didn't teach us much about the moon that wasn't already known. It's great benefit was all of the technology spin-offs that it brought.

I am certain that part of the motivation of the space program was as a make-work program for the college graduates of the G.I. Bill. It would produce a lot of useful technologies at the same time. We have to remember that the generation that had worked on the original make-work projects during the Thirties were now the people in power. Doesn't it make sense that they would use the economic techniques that they were familiar with?

But the space program, even with it's spin-offs, was a specialized and high-end field. It wouldn't provide jobs for the many millions of returning veterans and workers in industries making things for the military, whose labor would no longer be necessary. Those millions of jobs would be provided by the drastic expansion of the automobile industry after the Second World War. 

In postwar North America having extensive front yards and back yards came into style. When homes have yards, it means that everything must be further apart. This brings us to what we could call "The Automobile Spiral". Having everything further apart means that car ownership is a practical necessity. This, in turn, means that everything must be still further apart because cars require a driveway at the home to park in, wider streets to accommodate them and, highways for through traffic to avoid local congestion.

Most of all, cars mean that there must be parking lots wherever people will be driving to. It is these parking lots that shape the forms of our cities like nothing else. Urban areas balloon with parking lot space so that cities tend to sprawl into one another, rather than having much of a sharp definition.

None of this takes place if buses, streetcars, bicycles and, walking can accomplish daily transportation. But that is only practical without yards. Levittown, New York is considered as the prototype postwar suburb and was followed by a development in Pennsylvania with the same name. Those suburbs were named after the builder, but could just as easily have been named "Yardtown".

The entire economy is shaped by those backyards and front yards. The auto industry quickly became one of the most important. The oil industry grew alongside it to provide fuel for the cars that were made necessary by the distance which yards put between everything. Building and maintaining the necessary highways was yet another major industry. The Urban Renewal movement, from the 1950s to the 1970s, was the reshaping of the older sections of the city to accommodate the cars.

Actually making the cars was only the beginning of the jobs created by the new car culture. Everything from maintenance to sales and accessories to gas stations and building garages for homes provided millions of jobs. In the late Fifties the Interstate Highway System would be built for all of these cars. Doesn't it seem that the postwar development of the car culture was motivated, at least in part, as a general make-work program, not as high-end as the space program, by the people in power who remembered the programs of the Thirties? 

The millions of returning soldiers after the end of the Second World War started families, and this brought about another postwar issue. Their children would be known as the Baby Boomers. The first of the Baby Boomers would graduate from high school in 1964. That would mean a steady flow of millions of people who needed jobs. The people in power must have dreaded nothing more than the millions of people without jobs that they remembered from the Thirties.

Could it be just a coincidence that America's large-scale involvement in the Vietnam War began just as the first Baby Boomers were graduating from high school and would need jobs? The confrontation with Communism was still going on at this time, but the primary purpose of the Vietnam War was not the confrontation on the military side. It would be all of the production that the war would bring and all the jobs that it would provide, and the economic prosperity that it would produce. Remembering that it was the Second World War that finally brought the west out of the Great Depression. We have seen this in more detail in the section 17) AMERICA'S WAR IN VIETNAM, in the compound posting "Investigations" December 2018.

I define the postwar "SECOND MAKE-WORK ERA" as being unofficial and unannounced, unlike the first one, and revolving around technology rather than building.