America on the job

The Works Progress Administration, which at its 1938 peak sustained 3,334,594 people on the federal payroll, was a cornerstone of the New Deal. At a time when one-quarter of the labor force was unemployed, it gave Americans hope and self-respect, offering them jobs rather than handouts and putting them to work for the public good. WPA employees built airports, stadiums, swimming pools, golf courses and ski lodges. They paved roads, painted murals on public buildings, served hot lunches to schoolchildren and carried books on horseback to rural areas without libraries.

Nonetheless, as Nick Taylor notes in his ambitious history of the WPA, "it was the most excoriated program of the entire New Deal. Its workers were mocked as shiftless shovel-leaners. . . . Red-baiting congressman called it a hotbed of Communists." Those criticisms were side issues. What conservatives truly hated was the notion of the government putting people to work. That was the responsibility of the private sector, they insisted; the government should not interfere in the inevitable ups and downs of the business cycle. But 3 1/2 years after the 1929 stock market crash, the economy lay in ruins. Newly inaugurated President Roosevelt had broad public support for a federal emergency relief program that swiftly evolved into a jobs program under the dynamic leadership of a former social worker named Harry Hopkins.

The 1934 midterm elections overwhelmingly affirmed the New Deal's popularity, and, a few months later, Hopkins and Roosevelt moved to provide jobs more substantial than raking leaves or picking up trash. All work undertaken would afford "permanent improvement in living conditions [or] future new wealth for the nation," FDR declared in a post-election speech. He was careful to note that the 3.5-million people he proposed to employ would be hired "pending their absorption into a rising tide of private employment." It took eight years for that tide to rise, but in 1943, with America at war and the unemployment rate below 5%, the WPA quietly shut down.