WPA
Created during 1933 under the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, the Works Progress Administration(WPA) was a relief program made to employ many jobless Americans at the time of the depression. Instead of just giving out welfare to the jobless, the WPA was made to give jobs to able workers on projects such as schools, highways, hospitals, airports, and playgrounds.
Types Of People Given Jobs:
The WPA hired far more men than women, with only 13.5% women on the peak year of 1938. The WPA did decide to pay women and men equally, but only gave menial, “lower paying”, jobs to women such as sewing, bookbinding, taking care of elders, school lunch programs, nursery school, and recreational work. Professional women were treated equally in areas such as federal art, music, theater, and writer’s projects.
The WPA federally funded plays, art projects such as murals, and literary publications to give jobs to the writers, actors, and artists. During this mass funding, 2,566 murals and 17,744 pieces of sculptures were funded to decorate public buildings nationwide. Due to this mass funding of Art, more Art was formed than before, and programs such as the National Foundation for Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were formed in the process.
Pay:
The WPA paid out low wages, but the poor people of the depression were happy to even have jobs. It couldn’t employ everyone; about five million had to seek assistance from other relief programs. It paid about $10 per week, however it helped the self esteem of depressed workers at the time.
The WPA was disbanded in 1943, when the government realized it didn’t need it anymore since the economy was rising at the time.
All in all, though the wages were low and the government spent lots of money on this, many people were able to work and provide for their families again.
I used these sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/dustbowl-wpa/
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-creates-the-wpa
Great post, Ankith! The Works Progress Administration definitely was key towards lowering unemployment and increasing morality among people. Although it seems like everyone would want to support this act, it still received criticism, especially from the right-wingers who claimed that the WPA was a prelude for a national political machine on behalf of Roosevelt. Most of the criticism to the WPA however stemmed from the view that the decisions on funding and distribution of projects were politically motivated. The South received 75 percent less in federal relief and public works per capita than the West. Critics pointed that the South, being predominantly democrat, didn't need to be won over by Roosevelt as opposed to the West which had a lot of swing states. Roosevelt, however made it clear that the WPA was not for his political advantages by establishing a "division of progress investigation" to investigate complaints of malfeasance.
ReplyDeleteSource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration#Relief_for_African_Americans
Great post Ankith! I had no clue how many art projects were funded by the WPA. I did some more research and found that the Work Progress Administration provided almost eight million jobs to the unemployed from 1935 to 1949, and at its peak in 1938, have more than three million people employed. The WPA also funded a very large variety of buildings and included " 5,900 new schools; 9,300 new auditoriums, gyms, and recreational buildings; 1,000 new libraries; 7,000 new dormitories; and 900 new armories. In addition, infrastructure projects included 2,302 stadiums, grandstands, and bleachers; 52 fairgrounds and rodeo grounds; 1,686 parks covering 75,152 acres; 3,085 playgrounds; 3,026 athletic fields; 805 swimming pools; 1,817 handball courts; 10,070 tennis courts; 2,261 horseshoe pits; 1,101 ice-skating areas; 138 outdoor theatres; 254 golf courses; and 65 ski jumps"
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
"In 1935 there were 20 million people on relief in the United States. Of these, 8.3 million were children under sixteen years of age" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration#Employment). I find this statistic really interesting. Why was the demographic of children and adolescents so high? I assume it's because it would be harder for a parent working for low wages to pay for children than no children. It's interesting to think about what would happen in this day and age if our families lost their jobs, and we had to go try to find work.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting how they promoted the arts, maybe also an attempt to lift the spirits of downtrodden Americans? I'm glad the U.S. was successful in this attempt to create more jobs since in the case of the Public Works Administration, it failed since the leader of the Administration, Harold Ickes was too conservative. Did any of the leaders of the various administrations collaborate with one another? I think it probably would've helped the overall recovery cause.
ReplyDeleteI am not entirely sure if they collaborated with each other, but the WPA did sometimes take over state and local relief programs that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation or Federal Emergency Relief Administration programs.
DeleteThe WPA and PWA dealt with different things so they may have not communicated much. The PWA dealt with large projects, such as giant dams, often giving them to private firms to kickstart companies and also get more people hired, while the WPA dealt with small projects, such as buildings, and gave jobs directly to the people. Since they dealt with different kinds of projects, they probably wouldn't work with each other.
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DeleteReally interesting post. I was wondering though, did women only get hired for the menial jobs? If so, do you think, since those were low paying jobs, this organization can really claim to be equal for both men and women? Only about 13% of WPA employees were women. Has anyone seen the WPA murals in Coit Tower in San Francisco? They were the first art project funded by the WPA. They show an interesting snapshot of California in the 1930s as well as the impact the depression had on people.
ReplyDeleteYes you are right technically; the women got lower paying jobs so in turn got paid lower than men. The WPA's claim is about something different though; the WPA claims that if a male and a female had the same job, they would be paid equally. Their claim is valid, since they don't pay women unequally.
DeleteThe reason that their weren't many women who were hired was that the WPA didn't want both husband and wives working since it takes a job away from another person. Because if this, most women hired were either unmarried or separated from their husband.
I used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration#Popular_Culture to answer your question
DeleteNice post Ankith, I had a question about the enormity of the people who participated in the WPA, and what locations did it reside over; was it mostly West Coast organization, or otherwise. Other organizations such as CCC had no specific location, as an example. Speaking of the CCC they hired around 10% of the African American population to work, and I have another question from that. What is the distribution of non-white workers hired by the WPA?
ReplyDelete