The Needy Doing Something Useful:
The WPA Goes to Work
by Dr. Douglas Carl Abrams*
illions of Americans found them¬
selves without jobs in April 1935,
about six years after the stock
market crash. President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and Congress
created a New Deal agency called
the Works Progress Administration (WPA),
with plans to hire 3.5 million people nation¬
ally at a cost of $5 billion. After two years of
"direct relief," or grants of money not tied to
working, the federal government was switch¬
ing to "work relief," paying people to work
on projects for agencies like the WPA. States
took over public welfare programs.
Between 1935 and 1940, the WPA in North
Carolina employed 125,000 men and women
of all races, completed 3,984 projects, and
touched the lives of nearly everyone in the
state. The WPA's purpose was to provide a
variety' of jobs for the unemployed during the
Great Depression. But what kinds of jobs?
In New Bern, 37 women worked in sewing
rooms for $32 a month making things like
mgs and clothing. About 70 percent of these
skilled laborers provided the only source of
income for their families. The WPA's Federal
Music Project, for musicians without work,
organized 18 African American choral groups
in the state. The president and his wife, Elea¬
nor, selected the North Carolina Negro Cho¬
rus to perform at the White House on June 8,
1939, in a concert honoring the king and
queen of England. For two years, the North
Carolina Federal Theater Project participated
in the outdoor cirama in Manteo, The Lost Col¬
on}/. In 1939 the Federal Writers' Project in
the state produced two books: North Caro¬
lina: A Guide to the Old North State,
which employed about 100 people for
three years to describe and map
parts of the state and its history, and
These Are Our Lives, designed to include
stories about "common southern folk."
The WPA hired artists to paint murals in
public spaces like post offices, and its
National Youth Administration aided needy
young people with training and campus jobs.
Most WPA workers, however, were men —
working outdoors to build schools, housing
for public school teachers, armories, stadi¬
ums, swimming pools, gyms, community
halls, hospitals, sewers, and even outdoor
toilets, or "privies." The workers built miles
of roads and bridges. In addition to sewing
rooms, the WPA provided jobs for women in
school lunch programs, libraries, nursery
schools, and literacy classes.
Today some people oppose the federal gov¬
ernment's stimulus package to help the econ¬
omy. hr the 1930s, not everyone supported
the WPA. Opponents, like North Carolina's
United States senator Josiah Bailey, argued
that the program cost too much money and
would mean higher taxes. They believed it
did not solve the problem of unemployment.
What would happen when these jobs, created
by the federal government, ended? How
much should the government pay WPA
workers? If people made more money work¬
ing for the agency than working on a farm or
in a factory, businesspeople and farmers
would have a hard time getting the workers
they needed. After much debate, Congress
agreed that the WPA would not pay more
than typical jobs in business and industry.
Politicians fought over who would control
the WPA, which would spend a lot of money
and hire a lot of people. The federal govern¬
ment ran the WPA from Washington, D.C.
Harry Hopkins, the national director,
WPA employees make chairs near Black Mountain in
Buncombe County. Image courtesy of the State Archives.
North Carolina Office of Archives ami History.
'Dr. Douglas Car! Abrams teaches history and supervises student teachers at Bob tones
University, where he chairs the Department of Social Studies Education. He has authored
Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal and Selling the Old-
Time Relircion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940.
24
TH/H, Spring 2010
