The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Often Go Astray, Especially in a New Jersey New Deal Settlement Named for FDR
USA Today has an interesting story (with video) of Roosevelt, New Jersey, a town which got its start in 1936 as a New Deal-financed cooperative. Though the story is ostensibly positive ("New Jersey community offers lessons for today's economy") and stresses the not-insignificant fact that the place still exists, the lessons it gives seem pretty dreary from a government perspective:
[New Deal officials] constructed a town for 200 garment-worker families (selected from a pool of about 800 applicants). Each family paid $500 - about a year's rent in New York—to become a member of the cooperative.
Proponents included Albert Einstein; detractors included William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal, which called the project "Boondoggle Manor."
Almost immediately, [resident] Ticktin says, "the dream collided with reality."
There were many problems, including opposition by the New York-based garment workers union and a recession in 1937.
Above all, photographer and local resident Edwin Rosskam observed in a 1972 memoir that the workers were inexperienced in managing a factory in such a cutthroat industry and more concerned about their own wages and working conditions than the factory's success.
Each worker thought he knew best, Rosskam wrote, and "idealist cooperators were few. You didn't think people would strike against themselves. But they did."
The farm was no better. Most of the factory workers were unwilling to till the soil for a lower wage, according to a 1942 federal study. Many weren't good at it. "My father used to say that most of them didn't know which end of an onion to put in the ground," says Shirley Marcus, 75.
After the town's original vision collapsed (and, apparently, the government stopped funding it directly), people did stick around. Long enough for what one former mayor considers some sort of public-sector karma:
Like many municipalities, Roosevelt (the town's name was changed after the president's death in 1945) has put in a request for some federal stimulus money: $540,000 to paint and shore up its 75-year-old water tower, and $1.3 million to reline the water pipes. With a population of about 950, that would come to about $2,000 per resident.
"Things are coming full circle," says Mike Hamilton, a former mayor. "This town was created as part of a government stimulus package."
It's an interesting slice of American history, and one that underscores the inefficiency (if not always total ineffectiveness) of government action.
Jesse Walker looked at the utopian roots of select suburbs here. And Amity Shlaes discussed failed agricultural collectives during the New Deal here.
