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WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA)

When Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency on March 4, 1933, he focused much of his inaugural address on the approximately thirteen million unemployed Americans constituting roughly 25 percent of the workforce. "Our greatest primary task," Roosevelt advised, "is to put people to work." Characterizing President Herbert Hoover's approach to poverty as "scattered, uneconomical, and unequal," Roosevelt called for a massive attack on the Depression. On May 12, 1933, Congress responded with a law creating the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). FERA became the first stage in an evolutionary process during which the New Deal shifted its Depression-fighting strategy from the dole to public employment by way of the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF RELIEF

Depressions, recessions, and financial panics have plagued the United States since its colonial period. Early Americans relied on British methods, mainly the dole, to relieve the persistent problem of poverty. Although outright grants and indentured servitude constituted the primary methods, America's attitude toward poverty soon became obvious with the emergence of poor houses, also known as "pest houses," which became common. These isolation structures, provided by churches and wealthy humanitarians, reflected a national belief that privatism, the private solution to public problems, was the most efficient means of aiding the needy. From 1929 to 1932, President Hoover insisted that if Americans relied upon private initiative, "prosperity was just around the corner." Having served as food administrator and relief commissioner during World War I, Hoover claimed early in his administration to have found a "final solution to poverty." However, after three years of depression, it became obvious that the old methods were not working in a country where more than 50 percent of the people lived in what the Census Bureau defined as urban areas (populations of 2,500 or more). Hoover, who feared that government relief payments would undermine people's self-reliance, became a national scapegoat and lost his 1932 reelection bid by a landslide to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York.

Roosevelt's philosophy of dealing with the Depression was apparent during his New York governorship when he created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), headed by Harry L. Hopkins, in October 1931. Roosevelt clearly stated his belief that cities and counties should control relief and local funds should supplement state money. He steadfastly warned against deficit spending. However, as the Depression deepened, Roosevelt placed New York in debt by supporting an emergency $30 million bond issue.

When Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March 1933, he faced a Congress representing a public that demanded action on the problem of widespread poverty and unemployment. However, during the first "Hundred Days" of his presidency (March to June 1933), even the political opposition agreed that he had made a good start at handling the problem. Republican floor leader Bertrand Snell, indicating bipartisan congressional support, said, "the house is burning down and the president of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire."

RELIEF DURING THE FIRST NEW DEAL (1933–1935)

During the First New Deal, Roosevelt's approach to relief closely resembled that taken by his predecessor, with one major difference. Whereas Hoover felt that public employment that competed with private enterprise was un-American, Roosevelt followed Hopkins's advice to incorporate public works into his relief programs. With urban bread and soup lines lengthening and farmers destroying their crops and livestock, Roosevelt placed Hopkins in charge of the $500 million Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).

One New Dealer stated that Hopkins combined "the purity of St. Francis of Assissi with the sharp shrewdness of a race track tout." A social worker, bureaucrat, and politician from Iowa who ran relief programs in New Orleans and New York, Hopkins was an unusual Washington power broker. Unlike most of the Washington establishment in 1933, he had been divorced and had undergone psychoanalysis. By 1936, Hopkins had become Roosevelt's closest advisor and remained in that position until the president died in 1945. Roosevelt ordered Hopkins to provide quick relief and keep politics out of relief. He achieved the first goal. The second proved an impossible task.

Political intuition, empathy for the poor, and speed with the dispensation of relief were Hopkins's greatest assets. The FERA administrator spent millions even before workers installed a desk in his office. His goal was to provide assistance to poor people and he did not care about the political fallout. "I'm not going to last six months here," he noted, "so I'll do as I please." To the surprise of many, he lasted twelve years.

Hopkins's chief aide in the business of dispensing relief was Aubrey Williams of Alabama. Starting as a regional administrator with FERA, Williams moved up the bureaucratic ladder and eventually controlled the WPA during Hopkins's prolonged medical absences. A liberal idealist, Williams had a relationship to Hopkins that resembled Hopkins's role in Roosevelt's cabinet. They made a formidable team, relieving misery and enabling millions of Americans to survive the crisis.

FERA established a practice that was followed by the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Late in the fall of 1933, President Roosevelt expressed concern that economic recovery was proceeding too slowly. The slow-moving Public Works Administration (PWA) under Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes left millions of unemployed workers and their families facing a harsh winter. Hopkins seized the initiative and persuaded Roosevelt to adopt a plan that became the CWA, which paid the jobless a minimum wage. Roosevelt, who agreed with Hopkins's argument that the dole demeaned and demoralized recipients, subsequently approved $400 million worth of work relief. Hopkins and his FERA staff ordered the CWA to construct more roads, buildings, and airports. Fifty thousand CWA teachers taught in rural schools built by the same organization. The program was a spectacular success, although cost overruns and Republican cries about waste and political corruption marred its image. On balance, however, public reaction was favorable and the CWA so impressed Roosevelt that he became amenable when Hopkins proposed the Works Progress Administration.

WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (1933–1943)

Early in 1935, Roosevelt decided to emphasize public works over direct relief. The principal result was the WPA. Executive Order 7034 on May 6, 1935, created the WPA, which Congress had previously authorized by passing the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. The WPA probably constituted the most successful effort at public works ever conducted by the federal government. Certainly it spent the most money, finished the most projects and hired the most people, averaging 2,112,000 on its monthly payroll from 1935 to 1941.

The influence of Hopkins, who became the chief administrator, could be seen in Roosevelt's speech announcing that the intent of the massive program was to "preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destruction, but also their self-respect, their self-confidence, courage, and determination." The dole, Roosevelt warned, was "a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.... Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers."

Hopkins also persuaded Roosevelt to see that a greater percentage of the vast sums of WPA money would go into the workers' paychecks, not materials, based on the argument that increased revenue would come back to the treasury. Only "useful projects" should be funded and they should be staffed solely by workers taken directly off relief. State governments would be given the right to request projects, and hire and fire employees. Although Roosevelt and Hopkins strongly desired to keep local and state politicians out of the process, the WPA nonetheless opened the door to political coercion, interference, waste, and corruption.

This was the WPA's Achilles heel. The massive organization had the potential to provide tremendous support for Roosevelt's 1936 reelection campaign. Accordingly, the president, not Congress, controlled billions of WPA dollars. Republicans, such as minority leader Bertrand Snell, complained vociferously, warning that the WPA gave Roosevelt "greater spending power than any ancient or modern dictator ever wielded." Democrat Huey Long, who was planning to run for president himself, asked "why should Congress give Roosevelt a $5 billion blank check with an election coming on?" Others, however, such as columnist Walter Lippmann, congratulated Roosevelt for not allowing Congress to earmark pork barrel projects in their home towns, counties, and states. Stating that "everything is political," Hopkins concluded that the WPA staff should control the program. It was Roosevelt, however, who determined the nature and direction of work relief.

Despite the best efforts of the president and his WPA administrator, state and local politicians did control and manipulate many of the projects. Occasionally, as with Governor Martin Davy of Ohio, Hopkins federalized state WPA programs. In other instances, where urban machines run by bosses like Edward Crump of Memphis, Frank Hague of Jersey City, and Edward J. Kelly of Chicago, controlled their states' electoral votes, Roosevelt did not attempt to keep politics out of relief.

When reformers complained, Roosevelt reminded them of his rule never to interfere in local Democratic politics. The principal exception to this rule occurred in Missouri when Roosevelt, over Senator Harry S. Truman's protests, allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prosecute Truman's Kansas City mentor, Thomas J. Pendergast, and the Missouri WPA director, Matthew Murray. The prosecution of Pendergast and Murray proceeded because Roosevelt could rely on Governor Lloyd C. Stark to deliver Missouri's electoral vote in 1940. Roosevelt ignored similar charges against Hague and Kelly because he had no replacements to run the machines that controlled the electoral votes in New Jersey and Illinois.

Against this broiling political scenario, Hopkins determinedly proceeded to ensure that the WPA would employ as many as 3,500,000 people taken off the relief rolls. He hoped that WPA workers would perform jobs that suited their particular skills. The FERA staff, with Aubrey Williams assisting Hopkins, would run the program. Subordinates in Washington and throughout the country played a key role. They included Jacob Baker, who directed FERA and CWA public works; Corrington Gill, research and statistical director; Lawrence Westbrook, assistant administrator; David K. Niles, publicity and political advisor; Dallas Dort, chief investigator; and Ellen S. Woodward, head of the Women's Division.

Woodward, possibly the second most important woman in the New Deal after Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, worked her way up the FERA into the WPA. She ensured that sufficient funding be provided to more than 500,000 women working on projects that focused on public health, sewing, and school lunch preparation. Later, Woodward expanded the program to include actresses, artists, and writers.

Below the Washington staff were the field investigators led by Lorena Hickok, Hopkins's personal representative, whose close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt gave her sharply analytical reports great influence. Hickok identified the major problems throughout the country, such as drought and starvation. She attacked political greed and bureaucratic inefficiency. Her letters to the First Lady also became a source of pressure on Roosevelt and Hopkins to take action.

Other field representatives, such as Howard Hunter, Pierce Williams, and Alan Johnstone, supplied a wealth of information on such varied subjects as waste, inefficiency, corruption, and the coercion of WPA workers in election campaigns. State directors controlled by Democratic bosses and officeholders, however, maintained their jobs unless charges of corruption forced Hopkins to appoint civil engineers to direct those programs. Numerous complaints from Republicans and excluded Democrats charging waste and inefficiency reached the Washington staff. Although these accusations damaged the program's image, the WPA nonetheless succeeded in relieving poverty and unemployment for the millions who benefited from it.

At its peak, the WPA employed 3,300,000 persons working on projects as diverse as roads, sewers, theatre and art, football stadiums, courthouses, dams, historical and literary writing, and sewing circles. Although defenders of the private enterprise system saw waste, Roosevelt and Hopkins operated under the premise that, while they knew some of the money would be stolen, enough would reach the people who needed it, thus satisfying the WPA's chief goal.

Hopkins never wavered from his mission to aid that one-third of the nation Roosevelt described as "ill housed, ill clad, and ill nourished." WPA workers basically built (or rebuilt) America's infrastructure, including approximately 2,500 hospitals, 572,000 miles of road, 1,000 airports, 5,900 schools, and 85,000 courthouses, police stations, firehouses, and arenas. The projects varied widely, ranging from the multimillion dollar Lake of Ozarks Project in Missouri, through shelterbelts in Kansas, to a children's hospital in Brooklyn, New York.

WPA instructions required that the government hire unemployed workers from the relief rolls who passed a "means test." WPA workers were encouraged to accept employment opportunities in private enterprise since fear of competition with the private sector was deeply embedded in the New Deal's public works philosophy. WPA projects were aimed at filling local needs and paying people quickly so that their wages would translate into purchasing power to stimulate the economy and ultimately into tax revenue. Monetary expenditures and project selection required approval from New Dealers working in tandem with Democratic National Committee Chairman James A. Farley, but patronage sometimes went to Republicans, causing complaints from Roosevelt's party.

Federal One. Although most of the WPA men worked on construction sites and women taught, sewed, or learned home economics, thousands of actors, artists, writers, and musicians benefited from Federal One, the WPA arts program that included the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writers' Project. Federal One reflected Roosevelt's willingness to experiment. Its controversial plays and paintings prompted criticism from Roosevelt's political opposition, especially since many of its projects reflected the New Deal's liberal political philosophy. Hopkins counterattacked, asserting that the recipients of the New Deal arts program needed "to eat just like other people."

Perhaps the most famous of Roosevelt's artistic work relief programs was the Federal Writers' Project, whose employees were free to write in their specialties. Historians, as well as many nonhistorians, for example, traveled from town to town, and state to state, writing guides that described the history and culture of their subjects. Urban and state histories, biographies of former slaves, sharp analyses of conditions in areas as diverse as New York's Bowery, Missouri's Bootheel, and San Francisco's Cannery Row contributed much to the national literature.

Struggling directors and actors received employment opportunities in the Federal Theatre Project. Plays, puppet shows, vaudeville presentations, and even circuses became part of the New Deal's effort to keep the culture alive. Hallie Flanagan, Hopkins's classmate at Grinnell College in Iowa, ran the theatrical program with assistance from such famous actors as Charles Coburn and playwrights such as Elmer Wright. It Can't Happen Here, a play based on Sinclair Lewis's novel by the same title, opened on twenty-one stages simultaneously throughout the country. Lewis, who had previously become the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, played the leading role in the New York production.

Criticism of the WPA. The WPA's Federal Theatre Project added to a growing political controversy swirling about the basic nature of President Roosevelt's approach to poverty and unemployment. Conservative Republicans ridiculed the agency, stating that WPA stood for "we piddle around," and remarking that "you can always identify the federal government's road builders by they way they lean on their shovels." Such Republicans as Representative Hamilton Fish, who ironically represented Roosevelt's New York congressional district, branded the WPA as a huge political machine whose purpose was to achieve the election of 100 percent Roosevelt Democrats. Comparing "the whole rotten mess. . .[to] a dead mackerel," Fish exclaimed that it "stinks and shines and shines and stinks."

Southern conservatives also became increasingly disgruntled with the WPA. Walter George and Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, Josiah Bailey of North Carolina and "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina railed against the New Deal's interference with southern states' rights. In particular, Eleanor Roosevelt's excursions south of the Mason-Dixon line to promote the WPA's employment of African Americans infuriated southern politicians and embarrassed Roosevelt. Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas warned that the WPA would inflict damage on the national character by making a large percentage of the population permanently dependent on government aid. "I get very much discouraged," he warned, [that] it is going to be very difficult to ever get away from this habit of giving out federal favors." Even South Carolina Democratic Senator James Byrnes, who loyally supported Roosevelt on most issues, thought the WPA wasted millions of dollars. In response to the critics, the president admitted that waste existed.

A deepening recession in 1937 to 1938, however, caused Roosevelt to reverse his position and increase the WPA workforce. In 1938, Roosevelt's congressional opponents, concerned with the president's growing power as evidenced by his attempted court-packing scheme and campaign to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party, created a coalition dedicated to blocking New Deal measures. As these Republicans and southern Democrats gained strength in Congress, various committees began scrutinizing the WPA's political activities. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) condemned the Federal Theatre Project's employment of Communists and other "un-patriotic Americans," prompting Roosevelt to end the program on June 30, 1939. Mindful that Roosevelt had increased the WPA workforce in the months preceding the 1938 off-year elections, Congress further passed two Hatch acts in 1939. Aimed at eliminating political corruption and coercion in New Deal agencies, they attempted to prevent Roosevelt from using the WPA to produce votes for the 1940 presidential campaign, despite his claim that he was not a candidate.

On July 1, 1939, the Works Progress Administration became the Work Projects Administration, an effort by Roosevelt to shift the emphasis from welfare to more positive achievements, such as infrastructure construction. The new WPA focused on military projects after 1939, and Roosevelt ended it on June 30, 1943.

Legacy. Despite all the controversy generated by the criticisms, the WPA made important contributions to the American economy and culture. Many of the buildings constructed by WPA projects still functioned as the nation entered the twenty-first century. Millions of Americans received an education from teachers employed by the agency. Although politicians, including Roosevelt, used the WPA as a form of patronage, its $10 billion subsidized families of the unemployed and relieved their misery.

In the years that followed President Roosevelt's death in 1945, other politicians advocated philosophies similar to the one that produced the WPA. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson secured the passage of several laws providing job training, federal employment, highway construction, and education as a part of his Great Society. In 1988, Senator Paul Simon made a revived WPA his campaign promise in his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. For whatever reasons, these attempts did not succeed in continuing the practice of public employment in the way that the WPA had addressed America's economic woes. Such programs as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, however, reflected one of the WPA's legacies to the nation as it entered the twenty-first century.

The Works Progress Administration succeeded in enabling millions of desperate Americans to survive the 1930s. Employment generated by World War II achieved the WPA's primary goals.

See Also: FEDERAL ART PROJECT (FAP); FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT (FMP); FEDERAL ONE; FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP); FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT (FWP); HOPKINS, HARRY.

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J. CHRISTOPHER SCHNELL