The largest, most important, and most innovative of the RELIEF programs of the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created under the auspices of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of April 8, 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration by executive order on May 6, 1935, and New Deal relief administrator Harry Hopkins headed the new agency until he resigned to become secretary of commerce in December 1938.
The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act and its funding of nearly $5 billion escalated a struggle going back to 1933 for works projects funds between Hopkins and public works administrator Harold Ickes. Ultimately, the great majority of the funds went to Hopkins and his emphasis on labor-intensive work relief projects rather than to Ickes’s capital-intensive heavy public works projects that would employ fewer workers and dispense money more slowly. The WPA reflected the desires of Roosevelt and Hopkins to replace direct relief programs (payments in cash or food and clothing) still being carried out by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) with work relief programs (jobs on government projects) of the sort begun by the CiviL Works Administration (CWA) and then partly continued by the FERA when the CWA was terminated. In the new organization of relief, the federal government would assume responsibility for employable jobless workers, while unemployables on relief (handicapped, aged, infirm, dependent children) would become the responsibility of the states (which subsequently would receive federal matching funds for such groups via the Social Security Act of August 1935). The WPA projects were to be useful, employ workers on relief rolls, spend money promptly, and put as much of the spending as possible into wages.
As always, Hopkins acted quickly, and by December the WPA had plans to employ 3.5 million workers. Paying its workers wages that were higher than direct relief assistance, yet were below prevailing wages so as not to compete with the private sector for workers, the WPA continued and enlarged the variety of projects building the nation’s infrastructure begun by the CWA and the FERA in their work relief efforts. Within three years, the WPA had employed 5 million workers, some 3.3 million at its height during the recession of 1937-1938. By the time the agency was terminated in 1943, the WPA had spent more than $10 billion, employed more than 8 million workers, and built or improved an estimated 80,000 bridges and viaducts, 8,000 parks, 850 airports, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and 85,000 public buildings.
But the impact of the WPA went beyond its achievements in construction projects and work relief for manual workers. The agency also launched an array of programs aimed at preserving and enhancing the skills of a variety of white-collar workers, artists, actors, authors, professionals, and young people, and it gave unusual attention as well to African Americans and women. It created the Federal Art Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Writers’ Project (together known as “Federal One”). The WPA also launched the National Youth Administration (NYA), which provided young people assistance to stay in school (and out of the job market) as well as employment and training for out-of-school youth. Hopkins and other officials made the WPA one of the New Deal agencies most sensitive to and supportive of blacks, including establishing the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs headed by Mary McLeod Bethune. The Women’s and Professional Division of the WPA gave substantial attention to helping working women.
Despite such achievements, the WPA had real limitations. It never employed more than about one-third of the unemployed at any one time, paid low wages, and proved unable to surmount various forms of prejudice and
Poster for the Works Progress Administration (Library of Congress)
Discrimination. Such limitations stemmed largely from obstacles that the WPA encountered. It never received funding from Congress sufficient in size or predictability to meet Hopkins’s larger aims. Like other New Deal programs, its implementation depended in part on state and local governments that were often inefficient and resistant to federal direction.
Although criticized from the left for doing too little for the unemployed, the WPA faced criticism from conservatives for doing and spending too much, and in the late 1930s it came under fire from the emerging CONSERVATIVE coalition in the Congress. Critics alleged that WPA workers engaged in useless “boondoggle” projects and that WPA really stood for “We Poke Along.” A special Senate committee uncovered evidence of inappropriate political activity. The House Committee on Un-American Activities and other congressional committees investigated the agency—especially the theater and writers’ projects—for “un-American” activities. The House Subcommittee on Appropriations eliminated the Federal Theatre Project, reduced funding for a number of projects, and required workers to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States. In 1939, Roosevelt changed the agency’s name to the Works Projects Administration to draw attention to its projects, but as prosperity returned with increased defense spending, the WPA like other relief agencies lost favor with the public and encountered growing opposition from conservatives and the Congress. In December 1942, with Congress sharply reducing appropriations for the WPA, Roosevelt reluctantly gave the agency its “honorable discharge” and ordered its termination by the end of 1943.
Further reading: Searle F. Charles, Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1963); Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943); George T. McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
World History
