You know, it's a funny thing about walking around
an older American city. Oh, yeah. Always something
to trip over. Literally, you trip over a slight,
like, uneven crack in the sidewalk and you look
down to catch your balance. And right there,
stamped permanently into the concrete at your
feet, are three letters. W -P -A. Exactly. W
-P -A. And today we're unpacking exactly what
that stamp means. Our material for this deep
dive is drawn from a comprehensive Wikipedia
entry detailing the history, the staggering scale,
and the complex controversies of the Works Progress
Administration. Yeah, it's this literal imprint
left behind by a very specific moment in time,
a time when the government had to figure out
how a nation actually responds to you know, total
economic collapse. Right. And our mission for
you, the listener today, is to explore how the
U .S. government answered that collapse. Because
they didn't just hand out money. No, they took
a completely different route. They transformed
into the largest single employer in the nation.
We are going to look at how the physical and
cultural landscape of modern America was quite
literally built by the unemployed. So, okay,
let's unpack this. Let's do it. Before we get
into all the sprawling structures they built,
we really have to look at the philosophy behind
its creation. This all started on May 6, 1935
via an executive order. by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt. Yeah. And to grasp the why behind
that executive order, we have to look at the
sheer desperation of 1935. I mean, there were
20 million people on relief in the United States.
20 million. That's a massive portion of the country.
So when FDR and his close advisor, Harry Hopkins,
who was tapped to head up the WPA when they looked
at this crisis, they secured an initial budget
of $4 .9 billion. Which is just an astronomical
number to wrap your... your head around, even
today. Our sources note the $4 .9 billion was
about 6 .7 % of the entire US gross domestic
product in 1935. Yeah, 6 .7%. Imagine the federal
government today just carving out nearly 7 %
of the national economy for one single agency.
It was a monumental injection of capital, for
sure. But the core philosophy behind how they
spent that money is really what set it apart.
Right, because they didn't just write checks.
Exactly. They firmly believed in work relief
over the dole, which was their term for direct
public assistance or welfare. The prevailing
theory was that direct handouts might keep people
physically alive, sure, but work relief preserved
a worker's self -respect. It kept them active.
Yeah, it reinforced their work ethic, and crucially,
it kept their professional skills sharp for when
the economy eventually recovered. You know, I
was thinking about this, and it's basically like
a sports team. Giving someone direct welfare
is like paying a player to just sit on the bench.
Oh, that's a good way to look at it. Right. Sure.
They're getting paycheck, but they are going
to get incredibly rusty. The WPA was like the
government creating a nationwide minor league
just to make sure the players didn't lose their
swing while they waited to get called back up
to the major. Exactly. And they took that that
minor league strategy quite literally when setting
their hiring goals. They didn't want everyone
right. Right. They weren't actually aiming for
100 percent national employment. The strategy
was highly targeted. They wanted to supply exactly
one paid job for every family where the primary
breadwinner was suffering from long -term unemployment.
Which still sounds like a massive undertaking.
Oh, the logistical mountain of achieving even
that limited goal is staggering. At its peak
in November 1938, the WPA was employing over
3 .3 million people simultaneously. Wow. And
over its entire lifespan, it employed 8 .5 million
unique workers. To put that in perspective for
you listening, that was roughly half the population
of New York at the time, all suddenly working
directly for the federal government. Yeah. But
I mean, how do you actually invent jobs for millions
of people out of thin air? You don't just hand
them shovels and tell them to dig holes and fill
them back in. No, you build the nation's physical
infrastructure on a scale that had never - been
attempted. And the way they avoided creating
meaningless work was through a localized system.
Oh, so it wasn't all just directed from Washington?
Not at all. The federal government didn't just
dictate what got built. Local municipalities,
so mayors, governors, city councils, they had
to pitch the projects. The local sponsors usually
covered the cost of the materials, and the WPA
provided the labor. And the resulting numbers
in the source material are just... Mind -boggling.
Most of the jobs were in construction, right?
Petaly construction, yeah. They built over 620
,000 miles of streets. Incredible. They built
over 10 ,000 bridges. We're talking about iconic
structures that you probably know or maybe have
even visited without realizing the unemployed
built them. Oh, absolutely. Like the Griffith
Observatory in Los Angeles. WPA Timberline Lodge
in Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest. WPA.
Yeah, the architecturally unique bridges of Connecticut's
Merritt Parkway. Also WPA. It's everywhere. And
beyond the glamorous landmarks, they were building
the vital invisible arteries of the country,
too. They built three hundred and twenty five
firehouses and renovated over two thousand more.
That's a lot of brick and mortar. Yeah. And they
installed twenty thousand miles of water mains,
which drastically increased fire protection and
public sanitation nationwide. They spent over
one billion dollars on publicly owned or operated
utilities alone. OK, wait, I have to jump in
here because this seems like a glaring economic
problem. How so? Well, if the government is suddenly
stepping in with billions of dollars and hiring
millions of people to build every road, bridge,
and water main in the country, doesn't that completely
crush? private construction companies. I mean,
how on earth does a private business compete
with the federal government just giving away
free labor to cities? This raises an important
question, and it's one the architects of the
program actually anticipated. They had to put
strict economic guardrails in place to prevent
the exact cannibalization of the private sector
you're describing. So they knew it was a risk.
Oh, absolutely. Think of the WPA as an economic
pressure valve. It was designed to keep the system
from exploding, but it was calibrated just carefully
enough that work workers would naturally want
to escape back into the private sector as soon
as possible. By design, yes. To ensure they weren't
undercutting private industry, the WPA intentionally
kept their hourly wages well below standard industry
rates. Interesting. Worker pay varied based on
the region, urbanization, and skill level, ranging
from $19 to $94 a month, with the average wage
sitting at about $52 .50. OK, so a pretty low
ceiling. Right. Furthermore, the hours were capped.
Workers were generally kept to a minimum of 30
hours and a maximum of 40 hours a week. week.
The underlying logic was to provide a subsistence
income just enough to put food on the table.
But keep it undesirable enough so they leave.
Exactly. Keep the conditions undesirable enough
that a worker was heavily incentivized to take
a private sector job. The absolute second one
opened up. You want it to be a safety net, not
a hammock. Perfect way to phrase it. But the
WPA quickly realized that not every unemployed
person is a guy who knows how to pour concrete
or lay pipe. I mean, a nation doesn't just need
roads. It needs culture. And artists, writers,
and musicians were starving too. Which brings
us to one of the most enduring and hotly debated
aspects of the agency Federal Project Number
One. Here's where it gets really interesting
to me. The government essentially transformed
into the greatest patron of the arts in American
history. It was unprecedented. Federal Project
Number One employed 40 ,000 artists, musicians,
actors, and writers. They had the Federal Theater
Project, directed by a playwright named Hallie
Flanagan, which employed 12 ,700 performers.
And they were busy, too. Yeah, they were producing
a thousand performances a month. And they employed
future legends, like a young Orson Welles. Then
you have the Federal Writers Project, which left
an incredibly vital historical record. They created
the American Guide series, extensively analyzing
the history and culture of every state and major
city. Such a cool project. But even more importantly,
they recorded massive archives of oral histories.
This included the slave narratives and initiative
where writers interviewed formerly enslaved people.
Right. Their firsthand accounts of American history
might have otherwise been lost to time entirely.
And we can't forget the Library Services program.
Before the Depression, it was estimated that
a third of the U .S. population didn't have reasonable
access to a public library. A third of the country.
Yeah. The WPA employed over 38 ,000 people. Primarily
women, to change that. They created initiatives
like the Pack Horse Library Project, where women
would literally ride horses or mules deep into
the remote mountains of eastern Kentucky to deliver
books to isolated communities. It was a revolutionary
expansion of rural access to information. But
the mechanism of how they saved local budgets
is brilliant to me. The government realized that
replacing worn -out books was a crippling expense
for local public schools. Because books aren't
cheap. Exactly. So they trained thousands of
these women, many of whom were the sole breadwinners
for their families, simply to repair and mend
damaged books. It sounds like such a mundane
task. But the impact was huge. That one mending
project saved public schools thousands and thousands
of dollars in acquisition costs during a time
when local tax revenues were totally decimated.
It perfectly illustrates the multifaceted value
of these programs. The public response to these
libraries and theaters was profound. As our sources
note, for many Americans in deeply impoverished
areas, the WPA had become what was termed the
bread line of the spirit. The bread line of the
spirit, wow. Yeah. It wasn't merely about physical
survival anymore. It was about democratizing
art, education, and basic human enrichment for
millions of rural Americans who previously had
zero access to that kind of cultural infrastructure.
It's an incredible legacy. But as we look at
the source text for this era, it presents a very
complicated dual reality. It really does. The
WPA was a sprawling microcosm of 1930s America.
The records show unprecedented economic relief,
but they also objectively document severe institutional
prejudice. And we should be very clear here.
Yes, exactly. We need to pause for a second because
our source material highlights historically and
politically sensitive facts detailing both progressive
economic policies and deep institutional racism.
We want to be clear to you, the listener, that
we are not... taking aside or endorsing the historical
actions of the era. We're just impartially reporting
the complicated realities contained in the source
document. Right. Our goal is to look closely
at exactly what the records tell us happened
on the ground when federal ideals collided with
local realities. Exactly. And that tension between
federal mandates and local administration is
really the defining theme of the WPA's demographics.
Because the projects were locally sponsored and
managed, local prejudices often dictated how
the federal money was distributed. The statistics
regarding African Americans show this starkly,
right? Very starkly. By 1938, about 45 % of the
nation's African American families were either
on relief or employed by the WTA. Almost half.
Yeah. In northern urban centers, the program
actually provided many Black Americans with their
first real opportunity for white collar employment.
Civil rights organizations at the time eventually
praised the agency for keeping discrimination
to a minimum in those specific northern areas.
But the WPA was operating during the height of
the Jim Crow era, and the South was a completely
different story. Completely. The local administration
in the South largely operated segregated units
and maintained rigid systemic discrimination.
To give you a clear example from the text regarding
who held the power out of 10 ,000 WPA supervisors
in the South, only 11 were black. Wow, 11 out
of 10 ,000. Yeah. The programs in that region
routinely perpetuated existing segregation and
enforced differential wages. And that same tension
between federal policy and societal bias. deeply
impacted women, too. Women made up about 15 percent
of the household heads on relief. But there was
this very strong prevailing belief in the 1930s
that husbands and wives shouldn't both be working.
Right. It was viewed as stealing a job from another
family's rightful breadwinner. Because administrators
held that bias, women were largely excluded from
the heavy construction projects. So what did
they do? Well, instead, they were relegated to
sewing projects, making bedding for hospitals
or being trained for domestic employment. We
see another battle for inclusion with people
with physical disabilities. Initially, city relief
bureaus coded physically disabled applicants
as PH for physically handicapped. And they were
just flat out denied jobs? Yeah, denied by the
WPA administrators who assumed they couldn't
perform the manual labor. Which led to organized
pushback, right? It did. In May 1935, the League
of the Physically Handicapped organized in New
York and staged sit -ins to protest this explicit
discrimination. Did it work? The pressure actually
worked. The WPA relented and was forced to create
1 ,500 jobs specifically designed for physically
disabled workers in New York City. And then perhaps
the starkest example of the WPA being used as
a tool of the era's policies involves Japanese
Americans. Yes. This is a crucial point from
the text. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the
government utilized the WPA's vast infrastructure
network to facilitate the incarceration of Japanese
Americans. In 1942, WPA regional directors actually
took charge of the early assembly centers. They
essentially repurposed their expertise. Yeah,
they used the logistical expertise and road building
experience they'd gained during the New Deal
to help build and staff the internment camps
on the West Coast, complete with the installation
of guard towers and spotlights. The agency spent
nearly $4 .5 million on the removal and internment
process in just an eight -month period in 1942,
acting as a major administrative arm for that
wartime enterprise. So what does this all mean
for you, the listener? If you're wondering how
the exact same agency could build a public library
to save a rural town and then pivot to building
an internment camp, It really comes down to the
sheer mechanical power of the WPA. It was a massive
machine. It was the ultimate reflection of the
state apparatus of that era, wielding unprecedented
resources. And anytime you have a government
program that is this expensive, this ubiquitous,
and this culturally dominant, It is going to
make a lot of enemies. Oh, it faced ferocious
political pushback. Critics strongly attacked
the WPA as essentially functioning as a giant
political machine for FDR's Democratic Party.
Buying votes with jobs. Exactly. The argument
was that these millions of relief jobs were being
implicitly traded for loyal votes. This criticism
grew so intense that it led to the passage of
the Hatch Act of 1939. Which was what exactly?
A federal law specifically designed to de -politicize
the agency. and restrict the political activities
of its employees. And it wasn't just the politics
of patronage. There was deep ideological paranoia,
particularly aimed at federal project number
one. The artists. Right. Representative Jay Parnell
Thomas of the House Committee on Un -American
Activities at UAC went after the arts divisions.
He explicitly called them a hotbed of communists
and a New Deal propaganda network. What fueled
that paranoia was the actual content the artists
were producing. The Theater Project, for instance,
frequently put on plays with strong pro -labor
themes or featured integrated casts, which infuriated
conservative politicians at the time. And that
had real consequences. Huge consequences. The
backlash was so severe that the Federal Theater
Project actually had its funding entirely zeroed
out by Congress in 1939. Wow. And beyond the
halls of Congress, there was also a massive cultural
stigma against the workers themselves. Private
employers complained that the WPA instilled poor
work habits. Yeah, the workers were relentlessly
mocked and stereotyped as just, you know, lazy
men leaning on shovels. The jokes from the era
were fairly brutal. Because the program was perceived
as inefficient, people joked that WPA stood for
we poke along or we putter along. My personal
favorite from the sources is that it stood for
whistle, piss, and argue. Oh, wow. That is brutal.
Which is a pretty harsh indictment of how some
of the public view these infrastructure projects.
Yeah. But ultimately, what ended the WPA wasn't
the congressional critics or the sarcastic nicknames
or even the politics of the New Deal. No, it
was a complete shift in the global landscape.
Right. World War II completely altered the economic
reality of the United States. As the war approached,
the WPA rapidly evolved. The focus shifted away
from civilian parks and cultural arts, and it
pivoted aggressively to military readiness. They
just started building for the war. Yeah. The
agency began building military bases, cantonments,
and airports. In fact, they built 85 % of the
new airports in the U .S. during that pre -war
buildup. 85%. Yeah. They also began heavy vocational
training for war industries. And with that mobilization,
the unemployment crisis that birthed the agency
just evaporated. Millions of men joined the armed
services and the explosion of wartime manufacturing
contracts meant private companies were desperately
hiring and training anyone who was left. The
economic crisis was just over. FDR officially
terminated the WPA in 1943, concluding that a
national relief program simply wasn't needed
in an economy running at absolute full capacity
for the war effort. So what does this all mean
when we look back at the whole eight year run?
What is the grand takeaway of the WPA? Well,
if we connect this to the bigger picture, there
is a profound historical irony here. The WPA
was conceived strictly as a peacetime program
for civilian relief. Right. Yet because it spent
years organizing millions of workers, building
supply chains across all 50 states and constructing
heavy infrastructure, it unintentionally became
the very mechanism that laid the logistical groundwork
for America's rapid entry into World War Two.
That's wild. The skills they preserved and the
physical facilities they built literally strengthen
the country to bear the burden of a global war.
It is a wild trajectory. To summarize this deep
dive, the WPA leaves behind a legacy of an undeniably
flawed, heavily scrutinized, but entirely unparalleled
10 -year experiment. Absolutely unparalleled.
It was a moment when the government decided that
preserving human dignity mattered as much as
basic economic survival. And it left America
with a cultural and physical infrastructure that
we are still driving on, learning from, and utilizing
today. Which leaves us with a fascinating question
to consider. The economy is vastly different
today than it was in 1935. Very true. If a sudden
unforeseen crisis wiped out millions of jobs
tomorrow, would modern society have the imagination
or the political will to create a new WPA? What
would a modern federal project number one even
look like in the age of artificial intelligence,
remote work, and the gig economy? How do you
create a bread line of the spirit for the 21st
century? Exactly. That is something to really
shoe on as you navigate the modern economy. Next
time you're out walking in your neighborhood,
look down at the sidewalks, see if you can spot
that WPA stamp in the concrete. When you do,
you'll know exactly the history, the struggle,
and the incredible scale of human effort that
put it there. Thank you so much for taking this
deep dive with us today.