What was the purpose of the Works Progress Administration

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(renamed Work Projects Administration, 1939)

President Roosevelt created the WPA on May 6, 1935 with Executive Order No. 7034, under authority of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. Harry Hopkins was the first (and most well-remembered) administrator of the WPA, serving from July 1935 through December 1938 [1].

The WPA was the largest and most diverse of the New Deal public works programs. It was created to alleviate the mass unemployment of the Great Depression and by the time it was terminated in 1943, the WPA had put 8.5 million Americans back to work [2].

The majority of WPA projects built infrastructure, such as bridges, airports, schools, parks, and water lines. In addition, the Federal Project Number One programs undertook theater, music, and visual arts projects, while other service programs supported historic preservation, library collections, and social science research. The WPA also employed women in sewing rooms and school classrooms and cafeterias, and in the later run-up to war it improved many military facilities.

The volume and diversity of work was so large that one researcher wrote at the time: “An enumeration of all the projects undertaken and completed by the WPA during its lifetime would include almost every type of work imaginable…from the construction of highways to the extermination of rats; from the building of stadiums to the stuffing of birds; from the improvement of airplane landing fields to the making of Braille books; from the building of over a million of the now famous privies to the playing of the world’s greatest symphonies” [3]. An inventory of WPA accomplishments in the Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-43 includes 8,000 new or improved parks, 16,000 miles of new water lines, 650,000 miles of new or improved roads, the production of 382 million articles of clothing, and the serving of 1.2 billion school lunches [4].

The WPA employed people directly. A typical project began at the local level, with city and county governments assessing their needs and unemployment numbers. Proposals were then sent to a WPA state office for vetting before being forwarded to headquarters in Washington, D.C. and, finally, to the president for final approval. Projects could be rejected anywhere along this three-step process, and were not imposed on local communities by the Federal government. Normally, localities had to provide about 12-25% to trigger federal funding of WPA projects [5].

In 1939, after a federal government reorganization, the Works Progress Administration was renamed the “Work Projects Administration” and was placed under the newly created Federal Works Agency. With the advent of World War II and absorption of the ranks of the unemployed into war production and the military, the WPA was gradually shut down. Official termination came on June 30, 1943, per a December 4, 1942 presidential letter to the Federal Works Administrator, while the Second Deficiency Appropriation Act of July 13, 1943 established liquidation procedures.

Sources: (1) Federal Works Agency, Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-43, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946, pp. 7-10. (2) Ibid. at p. iii (“Letter of Transmittal”). (3) Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943, p. 126. (4) See note 1, at pp. 134-136. (5) See note 3 at p. 147 and note 1 at p. 9.

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Works Progress Administration 1941, Library of Congress

Of all of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is the most famous, because it affected so many people’s lives. Roosevelt’s work-relief program employed more than 8.5 million people. For an average salary of $41.57 a month, WPA employees built bridges, roads, public buildings, public parks and airports.

Under the direction of Harry Hopkins, an enthusiastic ex-social worker who had come from modest means, the WPA would spend more than $11 million in employment relief before it was canceled in 1943. The work relief program was more expensive than direct relief payments, but worth the added cost, Hopkins believed. “Give a man a dole,” he observed, “and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both body and spirit”.

The WPA employed far many more men than women, with only 13.5 percent of WPA employees being women in the peak year of 1938. Although the decision had been made early on to pay women the same wages as men, in practice they were consigned to the lower-paying activities of sewing, bookbinding, caring for the elderly, school lunch programs, nursery school, and recreational work. Ellen Woodward, director of the women’s programs at the WPA, successfully pushed for women’s inclusion in the Professional Projects Division. In this division, professional women were treated more equally to men, especially in the federal art, music, theater, and writers’ projects.

When federal support of artists was questioned, Hopkins answered, “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people.” The WPA supported tens of thousands of artists, by funding creation of 2,566 murals and 17,744 pieces of sculpture that decorate public buildings nationwide. The federal art, theater, music, and writing programs, while not changing American culture as much as their adherents had hoped, did bring more art to more Americans than ever before or since. The WPA program in the arts led to the creation of the National Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The WPA paid low wages and it was not able to employ everyone — some five million were left to seek assistance from state relief programs, which provided families with $10 per week. However, it went a long way toward bolstering the self-esteem of workers. A poem sent to Roosevelt in February 1936, in block print, read, in part,

“I THINK THAT WE SHALL NEVER SEE A PRESIDENT LIKE UNTO THEE . . . POEMS ARE MADE BY FOOLS LIKE ME,

BUT GOD, I THINK, MADE FRANKLIN D.”

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On April 8, 1935, Congress approved the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the work relief bill that funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression, this national works program (renamed the Work Projects Administration beginning in 1939) employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. The WPA employed skilled and unskilled workers in a great variety of work projects—many of which were public works projects such as creating parks, and building roads, bridges, schools, and other public structures.

Bridgeton, New Jersey. Seabrook Farm. Cannery Workers. John Collier Jr., photographer, June 1942. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Prints & Photographs Division

The Federal Writers’ Project(FWP) was one of several projects within the WPA created to employ people with skills in the arts. Other arts projects included the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). When these projects were created, they were known collectively as Federal Project Number One—or more informally, “Federal One.”

Among the well-known writers employed by the Federal Writers’ project were Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, and Richard Wright. During the Project’s early years, FWP writers produced a series of state guidebooks, the American Guide Series, that offer a flavorful sampling of life in the United States. Now considered classics of Americana, these guides remain the Federal Writers’ Project’s best-known undertaking.

But the Federal Writers’ Project also left a hidden legacy. In the late 1930s, Federal Writers recorded the life stories of more than 10,000 men and women from a variety of regions, occupations, and ethnic groups for the FWP’s Folklore Project. Nearly 3,000 of these manuscripts are now available online as part of the collection American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940.

For more on the Federal Writers’ Project, view the Articles and Essays that include stories and photographs of Americans during the Depression era. Search the collection for the names May Swenson, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren to find interviews conducted by these famous writers. Or, select a place name to find interviews recorded in a region of your choice.

The WPA Federal Theatre Project (FTP) employed out-of-work actors, musicians, vaudevillians, and theater technicians in performances of classical and modern plays, such as Orson Welles’ production of Macbeth. The collection also includes production notebooks, playbills, posters, photographs, and stage and costume designs for three plays performed by the Federal Theatre acting units.

Costume Design from New York production of Dr. Faustus, staged by Orson Welles, New York City, 1937. Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939. Music Division

For more information about the Library of Congress’ collections of WPA-era materials, consult the essay: “Amassing American Stuff: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Projects of the 1930s,” and also The New Deal Primary Source Set.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 — a collection of digitized materials produced by the FWP which contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.
California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. This elaborate New Deal project was organized and directed by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell for the Northern California Work Projects Administration.
The collection Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937 to 1942 combines sound recordings and manuscript materials from four discrete archival collections made by Work Projects Administration (WPA) workers from the Joint Committee on Folk Arts, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Federal Music Project from 1937-42. This online presentation provides access to 376 sound recordings and 106 accompanying materials, including recording logs, transcripts, correspondence between Florida WPA workers and Library of Congress personnel, and a proposal to survey Florida folklore by Zora Neale Hurston.
Posters: WPA Posters — 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of the Federal Art Project, a WPA relief project for visual artists. For an overview of the types of posters included in the collection, browse a selection of representative images.

Additional collections with materials created by other work relief projects during the New Deal include: