All political systems have showcase projects through which they present themselves to the world and expect their aims, methods, and ideals to be judged. For Fascism, the New Deal, and National Socialism, those projects were, respectively, the reclamation of an area of swamplands, the building of dams and power plants along a forgotten river valley, and the construction of a national network of highways. To understand why these projects were so important to the three governments in question, we must first turn to the regime they all implicitly copied and competed against: the Soviet Union.
