AmericanStudies: May 9, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: Wartime Evolutions
[On May 6th,
1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works
Progress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a
handful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21st
century revival!]
On two
distinct but interconnected ways the WPA evolved in the early war years (before
Roosevelt
discontinued it in December 1942), and what we can make of the combination.
I hadn’t
really thought about it this way until researching this series, but thanks to
the WPA (and other New Deal programs, but especially the WPA) the U.S. was far better
prepared for the transition into a nation at war than otherwise would have been
the case. As historian Nick Taylor puts it in his book American-Made:
The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (2008), “Only the WPA, having employed millions
of relief workers for more than five years, had a comprehensive awareness of
the skills that would be available in a full-scale national emergency. As the
country began its preparedness buildup, the WPA was uniquely positioned to
become a major defense agency.” Long before Pearl Harbor, it did indeed occupy that
position, with between 600,000 and 700,000 WPA workers transitioning to defense
projects in the second half of 1940. And after the U.S. formally entered the
war, those efforts only ramped up across the country, as literally illustrated
by this photograph of WPA researchers preparing an air raid warning map for
New Orleans on December 11, 1941.
Of course, “defense” came to mean something much more specific and far
more divisive and discriminatory in the days and weeks and months after Pearl
Harbor, and unfortunately the WPA also occupied a central position and role in
those far different wartime efforts. Indeed, the WPA’s last major project,
undertaken throughout its final year of existence, was the construction, maintenance,
and staffing of the concentration camps at which Japanese Americans were incarcerated.
The infamous Manzanar Relocation
Center in California, for example, was estimated to be “manned just about
100% by the WPA.” And Harry Hopkins himself, subject of a good deal of deserved
praise in earlier posts in this series, praised
wartime WPA administrator Howard
O. Hunter for the ”building of those camps for the War Department for the
Japanese evacuees on the West Coast.” The camps were a federal construction project,
and a tragically sizable one at that, so it stands to reason that the WPA would
undertake this effort—but at the same time, this is another side of the WPA I
hadn’t known about prior to researching this series, and certainly not one I
was happy to discover.
Obviously I’m not going to be able to boil all this down in any succinct
way in this final paragraph, but I’ll say this: I’ve written and talked and
thought a great deal in recent years about the worst
and best of America (a phrase I found myself using constantly in my recent podcast, for example);
and I can’t really imagine a more clear and dramatic representation of that phrase
than the WPA, the same social relief organization that helped save so many
Americans and the nation as a whole to boot, working on one of the most exclusionary
and horrific projects in America’s collective history. Our history is so messy,
and, as Trip from Glory put it so evocatively, “ain’t nobody clean.” I could end every series
on this blog with a version of that sentiment, and maybe I should.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
