Time was, the sentiment of the American people was firmly against allowing government – at any level – to engage in “public works.” That’s not the same as “public property,” of course. Public works, while they may result in the acquisition or creation of public property, are nominally intended for the improvement of some aspect of American life and society. The Hoover Dam is a good example. Another is the Tennessee Valley Authority.
But public works were once regarded as “the camel’s nose under the tent.” The Founding Fathers did not authorize the federal government to engage in them, except for those purposes that were explicitly authorized in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution. While the framers of state charters were free to take whatever position their people favored, the presumption was that they would be predisposed against a general grant of permission to engage in public works.
Well, as time passed, here and there state governments dipped a toe into the water. Over time, the general bias against public works weakened. Today there’s hardly a shred of it left – which has opened the door to a great deal of public expenditure on boondoggles. But at first, state governments attempted projects with a high likelihood of popular approval. One such had its anniversary just yesterday:
The Erie Canal, a major achievement in transportation infrastructure that connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and ignited American economic development, was completed on this day in history, Oct. 26, 1825.
“The Erie Canal played a major part in commerce in the history of the United States,” reports the Library of Congress.
“Its creation helped to make New York City the chief port in the United States and opened the western part of the state and other western territories to increased settlement and trade.”
The federal government, at that time, was still largely bound by its Constitution:
The federal government refused to pay for the project. So [Governor Dewitt] Clinton marshaled support from New York legislators and taxpayers.
But New York State’s government was able to persuade its electorate to permit the construction of the Canal. Afterward, the project met with general approval:
It proved public money well spent, a major commercial success virtually unheard of among public infrastructure projects today. The Erie Canal’s cost of construction was recovered in just nine years, according to state history.
The rush of commercial development in Western New York was dramatic. It provided an entering wedge by which other state governments were able to persuade their own taxpayers to fund similar public works projects. After all, the unctuous appeals from politicos ran, if New York could do it…!
Of course, eventually Washington disregarded the lack of Constitutional authorization and joined the parade. However, as the article states, seldom over the decades since has any “public works project” met the Canal’s criteria for success. A great deal of money has been spent. A lot of private property has been acquired under eminent domain condemnations. But few such projects have shown an objective return on investment… unless we count the “investments” of the companies favored to build those public works. They’ve made out like bandits, which they usually were.
The Erie Canal can no longer be traversed. It’s sad, as the C.S.O. and I would have loved to do so, purely for the sense of history. But perhaps it’s for the best. As the article states, the Canal didn’t long retain its position as a driver of New York industry:
The canal was largely rendered commercially obsolete by advances in train transportation, then trucking and finally by the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which opened up the Great Lakes to much larger ocean-going vessels.
Sic transit gloria rei publicae.
3 comments
Yes, you can travel the Erie Canal. Pleasure boats do it all the time. I boat in Western Lake Erie and hope to traverse the canal sometime. And there are canals that go into Lake Ontario and one of the Finger Lakes. It’s also part of the Great Loop
Author
Are you sure? I was told that it’s no longer continuous from end to end.
Another interesting tidbit is that many of the “public works” were corrupt that some states amended their Constitutions to prohibit the state from taking part.