For history buffs, Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposal earlier this month to create a Commonwealth Civilian Coronavirus Corps to support the state’s pandemic recovery evoked an earlier government effort to right the economy after a catastrophe.
Like President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, Wolf’s proposal would put unemployed people to work for the public good. In his announcement last week, Wolf said the workers would support coronavirus testing and contact tracing needed for Pennsylvania to emerge from the lockdown in place since March to limit the virus’ spread.
“Through this public service initiative, Pennsylvanians will have opportunities ?in the months ahead to join a collective effort to ensure that we emerge from this pandemic a stronger commonwealth,” he said.
The name invites a comparison to the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, though that program’s mission wasn’t health-related. Instead it put young jobless men to work opening up the nation’s vast interior by building parks and doing forestry work on federal lands.
It was one of dozens of programs Roosevelt rolled out after his election in 1932, that employed Americans to carry out public works and social welfare projects to repair the devastation of the stock market crash of 1929.
The programs, particularly the Works Progress Administration, had a lasting impact in the Lehigh Valley and throughout Pennsylvania, with many local landmarks built by New Deal workers.
“Many of the works the WPA built are the parks we walk in today,” Allentown historian Frank Whelan said.
Wolf’s announcement May 6 was sparse on details, but his press secretary said last week that the administration expected the program to begin in the fall and that more of the plan would be revealed in the next few weeks.
“The corps would be a 21st century approach to historic programs like those in the New Deal,” press secretary Lyndsay Kensinger said, adding that the administration was exploring whether federal money could be used.
Wolf has said the CCCC will partner local public health agencies and community groups to strengthen the contract tracing initiatives already underway.
But Allentown Health Bureau Director Vicky Kistler said last week that the state has given city and county public health officials little information about the coronavirus corps, its mission or who will be recruited.
“We have not heard that help is coming via a corps of people recruited by the governor,” she said.
With the threat of a resurgence in coronavirus infections as the nation relaxes mitigation measures, Kistler said, additional workers will be needed to trace the close contacts of those infected. Cuts to public health staffing have left agencies shorthanded for the volume of work resulting from the pandemic, she said.
Such a workforce would also be valuable to facilitate any mass vaccination efforts, Kistler said.
“If this corps is the way the state is going to go, that’s a step toward introducing people to this public health work,” she said.
But there will be challenges in training and supervising workers without public health backgrounds. Ensuring that confidential health information is properly handled presents another hurdle, she said.
Using the New Deal as a model for coronavirus recovery programs could be a shrewd populist move for Wolf, said Richard Walker, director of The Living New Deal project at the University of California, Berkeley. It would make the work of state government visible in the same way the New Deal brought the top-down and largely faceless federal government into cities and towns, Walker said.
“You had local people with a stake and a contribution, so they could see what was being done in their community,” he said.
With people working in their own communities to do coronavirus testing and track the spread of the virus, the state government’s efforts to speed the recovery would be highly visible, Walker said.
“If you did something like the CCCC in Pennsylvania, people would see themselves, their friends, their children getting involved,” he said.
It would also show progress toward ending the business shutdown, which Wolf has been criticized for as the rate of new infections decreases, said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College.
“The faster we get the testing and the faster we get the tracing, the more likely the governor is to open up nonessential businesses,” Madonna said. “I don’t know why this would be objectionable.”
In the same way Roosevelt launched many of the New Deal programs, Wolf said he believes he can establish the coronavirus corps without legislative approval.
Madonna said many of the New Deal era’s best-known programs such as the Works Progress Administration and Rural Electrification Administration weren’t created by Congress but by executive orders.
The United States had been in the economic morass of the Great Depression for more than three years when Roosevelt took office in 1933. The earliest efforts focused on shoring up the nation’s banking system, stopping fraud on Wall Street and providing food, work and cash relief for struggling Americans.
The efforts turned to making work by spending federal funds on infrastructure improvements. Among the first places in the country to have public works projects completed through New Deal programs was Allentown, Whelan said, which was in an ideal position to benefit from them.
Industrialist and philanthropist Gen. Harry Trexler and Mayor Malcolm W. Gross had been planning a park system for Allentown since the 1920s but were unable get support for it, Whelan said.
“Malcolm Gross was mayor and a Democrat with connections to the Roosevelt administration and was able to implement the plans he had sitting on the shelf,” he said.
The most prominent of those constructions are the massive stone retaining walls and staircases in Lehigh Parkway and on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Whelan said. Similar structures were built along Route 611 in Northampton County and remain today.
Although the programs had critics who joked about shovel leaners and quipped WPA stood for “we poke along,” the effort was popular, Whelan said.
“The factories had closed. The industries had slowed down. People needed work and Roosevelt had a plan to give people work,” he said.
Wolf described the coronavirus corps as a way to make a dent in unemployment by bringing workers who are dislocated and unemployed because of the pandemic into public service. How many jobs, he hasn’t said. The state has not released information yet on how to apply or when the hiring will begin.
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