Works Progress Administration

The Great Depression, and the ensuing jobs loss found 10 million men without a job by May of 1935. I think anyone who has studied the Great Depression much, probably has their own opinion of what cause the problems that led up to the stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. I think everyone also has their own opinion on what things helped improve things, and what things prolonged the situation. Whatever the case may be, President Franklin D Roosevelt decided that some changes had to be made, and some helps had to be put in place. One such change occurred on May 6, 1935, when Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was just one of many Great Depression relief programs that Roosevelt created under the umbrella of the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which he had signed the month before. The WPA, the Public Works Administration (PWA), and other federal assistance programs were designed to be a way of putting unemployed Americans to work in exchange for temporary financial assistance. Out of the 10 million jobless men in the United States in 1935, 3 million were helped by WPA jobs alone.

While the programs actually put the United States further in debt, I guess we did make a trade for that assistance. Roosevelt believed in the elementary principles of justice and fairness, but he also expressed a great dislike for handing out welfare to otherwise able workers. That said, the WPA program and the others he set up, found the workers building highways, schools, hospitals, airports and playgrounds. They also restored theaters, like the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, South Carolina and built the ski lodge at Oregon’s Mount Hood. In that way, the payments given to them were not free. I do agree with a fair day’s wage for a job done. Still, it would just be best if the government wasn’t paying for it.

The WPA also employed actors, writers, and other creative arts professionals by funding federally sponsored plays, art projects such as murals on public buildings, and literary publications. Roosevelt protected private enterprise from competing with WPA projects by incorporating a provision in the act that imposed wage and price controls on federally funded products and services. Again, while these people actually did a job for their wages, the thing to note is that these were “federally funded” which meant that the government was going further and further into debt. It seems to me that there must have been a better way to get people back to work, but these programs were what was done in the depression prolonging “New Deal” that Roosevelt set up.

In the years leading up to World War II and the huge defense-industry production that came with the war, the economy came roaring back in 1940. This allowed the opponents of the “New Deal” in Congress to gradually pare back WPA appropriations. In 1943, Congress suspended many of the programs under the ERA Act, including the WPA, because people were back to work doing more of the necessary jobs again.