Thoughts on the New Deal and the ‘Atlanta Grade School’
Wed, 06/29/2022 - 5:00am
“Dramatic changes rolled over Texas and the nation like a title wave in the early 1930s,” I wrote in 1986 for a special 1936 Texas Centennial commemorative issue of Texas Architect magazine, “brought on by a hurricane of economic disaster called the Great Depression.” The building industry suffered as much as any economic sector when funding for most public and almost all private construction evaporated. By 1933, overall national unemployment exceeded 30 per cent, and an estimated 85 per cent of professional architects and engineers had no commissions or paychecks. In response, a new U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), took the oath of office in March 1933 (as I continued in 1986) …
