Laws

The United States

Since at least the New Deal era, American federal law has addressed the social and economic dimensions of disaster as well as the physical concerns. The Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 created one of the New Deal's first relief operations. The emergency in question was the Great Depression, and the principal goal of the act and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) that it defined was to alleviate the country's economic woes through the creation of jobs. Job creation was fundamentally more expensive than direct cash relief or emergency loans, the sort of relief favored by the previous Hoover administration and contemporary political factions. But its benefits lasted longer, and it was believed that creating jobs for those in need would alleviate long-term suffering and morale in ways that simply handing out cash would not. Over 20 million people worked FERA-created jobs in the agency's two years of existence, before it was replaced by the broader Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Work relief programs included both make-work projects—the construction of monuments, remodeling of existing buildings, and the creation of works of art, for instance—and production-for-use projects under which consumer goods like clothing, bedding, and canned goods were produced by FERA job holders. Free market advocates decried the production-for-use projects more than the make-work jobs, because its production of goods inherently competed with the private sector. When the WPA replaced FERA, production-for-use projects were discontinued. The separate Civilian Conservation Corps (CRC), which operated until 1942, provided three million men aged 18–24 with unskilled manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural areas, and included disaster preparedness jobs such as fire lookout, fire prevention, fire pre-suppression, firefighting, flood control [Page 383]and prevention, dam repair, irrigation canal digging and repair, bridge repair, and the distribution of provisions in drought-afflicted states in the Midwest. This proved one of the most popular and least politically controversial programs of the New Deal—enrollees in the Corps included future movie stars Robert Mitchum and Walter Matthau, as well as test pilot Chuck Yeager. The Conservation Corps transitioned into a civil defense program in 1939 before gradually phasing out as the draft was put into effect for World War II. Community service programs at the state, national, and local level have followed the Corps model, and various politicians, candidates, and groups have called for reinstating it or creating a similar program virtually every year since the end of World War II.

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