Whether for this reason or for the underlying economic weakness, businesses were still not hiring and millions remained out of work.īut Roosevelt's efforts to date had at least been popular with voters, who gave the president's Democrats larger majorities than they had ever had in the midterm elections of 1934. Critics saw his vaunted National Recovery Administration as bureaucratic and drowning in details - the ultimate red tape machine. By then, FDR had been in office for two years and much of his initial momentum had dissipated. The WPA, which did not arrive in the first year or even the second year of the New Deal, was part of what some called "the second New Deal," legislated in 1935. It was an important part of the larger whole, but it set relatively modest goals and spent money in the millions. The first flurry of legislation, a shotgun blast of new programs and spending, included public projects under the Public Works Administration and the leadership of Harold Ickes, a loyal FDR operative. In fact, the WPA is so closely associated with the New Deal that it sometimes surprises people to learn it was not part of Roosevelt's "First Hundred Days" of legislative accomplishment after taking office in 1933. The program literally left its initials everywhere it went - on bridges and overpasses, at airports and water treatment facilities, at schools and libraries and public structures of all kinds, you will find the letters WPA enshrined on plaques and cornerstones.
And perhaps none has left so much of a visible legacy on the American landscape. Most of that direct employment was organized and done by the WPA, an icon of the "bold persistent experimentation" FDR said would characterize his approach to recovery.įew episodes in American government have left as permanent an imprint on the national memory. By the time the agency closed up shop in 1943, it had put 8.5 million Americans to work - a sizable chunk of the workforce in a country less than half as populous as it is today. And while that was far from being all the New Deal did, it was quite a bit of what the New Deal accomplished in the short term. Much of our popular memory of the New Deal pictures millions of jobless Americans going to work for the government and building roads, bridges, schools, airports and other public works. Roosevelt, the man elected president in 1932 promising a "New Deal" to end the Great Depression. That conjures scenes from the 1930s, the breadlines and soup kitchens and the wan-faced men selling apples on the street. Mention government financing public works projects and sooner or later someone's going to bring up the Works Progress Administration.
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