NYT profiles New Deal towns set up to save people from starving
ELEANOR, WVA: ... The economic fallout of this annus horribilis, now drawing to a close, continues: 10 percent unemployment ; tens of millions without steady access to adequate food; wholesale industry shakeouts. It takes the collective American mind to another time, an even harder time, when federal stimulus programs meant more than just bridge repairs and weatherization; when the government jump-started the economy by building highways, schools, post offices — entire towns.
Dozens of New Deal “resettlement” communities dotted the country: the Penderlea Homestead Farms in North Carolina; the Phoenix Homesteads in Arizona; the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, where Johnny Cash grew up. And here: on fertile West Virginia land beside the Kanawha River, a community named after Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the New Deal.
Over the years, these New Deal towns have been praised as a sound response to paralyzing poverty and criticized as flawed, communism-tinted social experiments. But in this hard time, as half-built subdivisions stand as ghostly testaments to economic failure, a place like Eleanor reflects a government action that worked, and works.
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Dozens of New Deal “resettlement” communities dotted the country: the Penderlea Homestead Farms in North Carolina; the Phoenix Homesteads in Arizona; the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, where Johnny Cash grew up. And here: on fertile West Virginia land beside the Kanawha River, a community named after Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the New Deal.
Over the years, these New Deal towns have been praised as a sound response to paralyzing poverty and criticized as flawed, communism-tinted social experiments. But in this hard time, as half-built subdivisions stand as ghostly testaments to economic failure, a place like Eleanor reflects a government action that worked, and works.