Bring Back the WPA: Lessons from the Job Creation Programs of the 1930s

Recession and accompanying unemployment often brings calls to revive the WPA (Works Progress Administration), an extensive job creation program from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the WPA is the best known Depression era work program, it was preceded by the even more innovative and controversial FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) and CWA (Civil Works Administration). Through these three programs, work was provided for 1.4–4.4 million people each month in a variety of socially useful projects at payments based on private-sector wage rates—all this at a time when the labor force was one-third of its current size. In this chapter I tell the story of these three programs, looking at the considerable accomplishments as well as the problems, especially discrimination toward women and people of color. Commonly made criticisms of “make-work” and inefficiency, which continue to characterize government job creation, are explored in terms of the “catch-22” mandates imposed on the programs—to create work for as many people as possible while avoiding both “normal government operations” and competition with the private sector.1