WPA 1935 to 1943: Pack Horse Librarians, Slave Narratives and Manzanar

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration in May 1935, with Harry Hopkins shaping its vision and an initial budget of $4.9 billion, about 6.7 percent of U.S. GDP. Hopkins and the administration chose paid work over the dole, arguing that a paycheck restored self-respect and kept skills sharp for the recovery. With roughly 20 million people on relief, the WPA allowed only one paid job per family, paid low wages to avoid competing with private industry, and capped work at about 30 hours a week. Over eight years it employed some 8.5 million people and built 620,000 miles of streets, 10,000 bridges, 40,000 buildings including nearly 6,000 schools, Timberline Lodge in Oregon and the Merritt Parkway bridges in Connecticut.

Critics mocked the agency as We Poke Along and accused it of being a Democratic political machine, tension that led to the Hatch Act of 1939, while the poorer South received less per capita than the swing-state West. Federal Project Number One employed over 40,000 artists, writers, musicians and actors, from Hallie Flanagan's Federal Theater Project to the American Guide Series and the recorded slave narratives. The episode also traces the program's limits under segregation and gender norms, the sit-ins of the League of the Physically Handicapped, and the pivot under Colonel Francis C. Harrington toward defense work, including building airports and helping construct the camps that held Japanese Americans in 1942. Roosevelt ordered the WPA ended in December 1942, and it was liquidated in June 1943.

• Women on horses and mules carried saddlebags of books into roadless Kentucky Appalachia for the Pack Horse Library Project, called the breadline of the spirit.
• Of 10,000 WPA supervisors in the South, only 11 were Black.
• Local relief bureaus stamped applications from disabled people with a PH code, until New York sit-ins won 1,500 jobs.
• The WPA built 85 percent of all new airports in the United States as it shifted to national defense.
• The Federal Theater Project staged a thousand performances a month and launched careers including Orson Welles and Sidney Lumet.