Poverty in America and the WPA Program

14 million Americans unemployed and unable to provide for their family or themselves. Starving children lined the streets, while men were out desperately searching for any means of pay. The Great Depression hit America hard in 1929. The President at the time was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and many claim that he was the perfect man to help America out of the financial mess it was buried deep in. Mr. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 to create jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans. As head of WPA, Roosevelt chose his close and trustworthy friend, Harry J. Hopkins, to be in charge of the program. Even though the WPA had it’s fair number of critics, it helped employ millions of poor, low class families during the Great Depression which not only made it a successful program that benefitted society as a whole, but truly united America.

As the years continued, the WPA was heavily critized by government officials. They argued that money was being spent to fund projects that had no real benefit to the economy. Some examples of this included tap dancing lessons and murals painted in post offices. These government officials created a new word “boondoggling”, which was used to describe the agency’s make-work projects as a waste of money. Roosevelt then quickly retorted to this complaint that “the high morale of the workers was well worth the cost”. Others out in the west, such as Governor Charles H. Martin of Oregon wrote to Mr. Roosevelt complaining that it was unfair to expect Americans to work from sunrise to sunset for so little money, while the WPA program workers worked for less money and time. Despite Roosevelt’s efforts to cease the critics, federal funding for the WPA decreased over the years...

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... day. The WPA was a promise that anyone involved in it would be employed and be paid. The overarching idea of the Works Progress Administration was to give Americans a sense of security and trust in what was to come tomorrow for their country.

While critics might argue that the federal money was wasted on unnecessary projects, it is clear that the work of the WPA enabled America’s economy to bounce back from the Great Depression. It gave the people of the United States something to believe in and managed to unite the country under one common goal: revive the economy. By 1945, there were few starving children lining the streets and no men searching desperately for pay. The United States had recovered from the supposedly unrecoverable, all thanks to the millions of workers that the Works Progress Administration employed and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s determination.