McHenry County and the Newer Deal
“How will the new government spending program affect McHenry County?”
It’s a question many people are asking about the new federal economic stimulus package, especially the unemployed. But the above question actually came from a newspaper covering the government’s last big economic stimulus.
It was a question posed in the July 7, 1938, edition of the long-shuttered Woodstock Journal regarding President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, specifically the Works Progress Administration.
Much of the money coming McHenry County’s way in 2009 will fund new road projects. History repeats itself.
Former Hebron farmer Merrill Douglass, 98, remembers the road projects under the WPA, many of which improved township roads. His dairy farm kept Douglass too busy to work on WPA jobs, but his father helped lay iron forms for the roads to make extra money and did not let having a hook for a left hand get in the way. He had lost the hand in a corn shredder.
“He could move those forms just as well as anybody else,” said Douglass, now living in Woodstock. “He was a strong man and didn’t let the work bother him at all.”
Roosevelt’s Civil Works Administration came before the WPA and put city residents to work improving schools and sidewalks and building playgrounds.
By 1940, according to a Crystal Lake Herald article, WPA workers had built or improved 446.2 miles of road, half of it outside of municipal limits. It rebuilt or fixed 28 bridges, built a mile of new culverts, and improved 1,910 feet of existing culverts. Earlier that year, the paper announced a new work project to extend McHenry Avenue south for a $2,485 bid. Adjusted for inflation, a dollar in 1940 had the buying power of about $15 today.
But the most significant impact of the WPA on McHenry County was sanitation, local historian Craig Pfannkuche said. WPA assistance helped to create sewer systems and treatment plants for Crystal Lake, Fox River Grove and Marengo, which until then were discharging untreated waste into their rivers and streams.
“The impact [of the WPA] was major and substantial, but the average person today is going to say, ‘I don’t see it,’ “ Pfannkuche said.
To McHenry County for the most part, Pfannkuche said, the Great Depression was neither great nor a depression. It was mostly rural dairy farm country, so people got along growing their own food and slaughtering their own meat.
WPA programs also included repairing library books and old clothing. Another program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, encouraged young men to join in efforts to work on natural resource conservation projects, provided that they were fit, stayed out of trouble, and were willing to send at least $25 a month back home.
Dairy farmer Douglass said that although he remembered a lot of people finding work with WPA projects, he did not recall New Deal programs helping out farmers very much, save for a time when some WPA workers came to his farm to pull thistles out of his cornfield. Farmers made their own food, banded together, and muddled along.
“People were all poor at that time,” Douglass said. “Money didn’t mean a whole lot.”
But the county’s economy is a lot different today, and one could argue, more susceptible to economic woes. The county’s population of 40,000 in 1940 stands at an estimated 316,000 as of 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those farms have been rapidly replaced by subdivisions, and a 2008 study commissioned by the McHenry County Workforce Investment Board concludes that more than half of them commute elsewhere to their jobs – jobs that in many cases are in jeopardy and in some cases, already lost.
The thousands of dollars pumped into the county by the WPA is millions under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The city of McHenry and Round Lake Beach are receiving $5.4 million in transit funding under the stimulus plan, and the McHenry County Council of Mayors received $4.7 million to divide among its members to build roads and put people back to work.
Pfannkuche said the county’s changing demographics will make federal investment more important.
“I think it will help,” Pfannkuche said. “The help is now all the more necessary than it was during the Great Depression days.”
Douglass said he hopes it helps as well, although his working days are long behind him.
“The president is putting a lot of money in to try to keep things going,” Douglass said. “That’s about all he can do.”