One Person’s Boondoggle, Another’s Necessity
Colin Hackley/Sarasota Herald-TribuneTURTLE CROSSING Matt Aresco, a marine biologist, in a culvert near Tallahassee, Fla., where $3.4 million in stimulus aid was sought to help turtles navigate the area.
The $14.7 million for a new airport on an Alaskan island that averages only 42 flights a month. The half-million dollars for a new skateboard park in unemployment-ravaged Rhode Island.
The $3.4 million for fencing and tunnels to keep Florida turtles from becoming roadkill.
Those proposals for spending federal stimulus money were all criticized by cable news commentators, Republican officials and, in the case of the airport, the inspector general of the Transportation Department. But they have something else in common, too.
They are popular locally.
And they underscore a truth that has been evident since the New Deal: sometimes the boondoggle is in the eye of the beholder.
...on April 3, 1935, at a hearing in New York City on how New Deal relief money was being spent. A Brooklyn crafts teacher reluctantly testified that he was paid to show the jobless how to make “boon doggles.” The outcry was swift. “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play,” trumpeted a front-page headline the next day in The New York Times. “ ‘Boon Doggles’ Made.”
A new, more sinister meaning was born, and the word came to signify government make-work, later referring to wasteful government projects in general. Critics used it to criticize scores of projects, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a longer view. “If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this Depression,” Roosevelt said, “that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.”
The Depression ended, but the word has not exactly been enshrined in the hearts of the people.
... Robert D. Leighninger Jr., a sociologist who wrote “Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal” (South Carolina University Press, 2007), recounted the story of a Works Progress Administration official in Arizona who went off in search of boondoggles, and discovered that the towns he visited seemed to like their own projects but questioned those of their neighbors.
“I’ve been hunting all over the state for one, but everywhere I go I’m told it’s in the next county,” the official was quoted as saying in a 1936 newspaper article. “So far I haven’t been able to catch up with a real, live one.”
THEY MISS THE POINT: THE NEW DEAL WAS A HUGE LEFT-WING FEDERAL BOONDOGGLE AND PORKULUS IS TOO!
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