May 9, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: Wartime Evolutions

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

On twodistinct but interconnected ways the WPA evolved in the early war years (beforeRooseveltdiscontinued it in December 1942), and what we can make of the combination.

I hadn’treally thought about it this way until researching this series, but thanks tothe WPA (and other New Deal programs, but especially the WPA) the U.S. was far betterprepared for the transition into a nation at war than otherwise would have beenthe 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 millionsof relief workers for more than five years, had a comprehensive awareness ofthe skills that would be available in a full-scale national emergency. As thecountry began its preparedness buildup, the WPA was uniquely positioned tobecome a major defense agency.” Long before Pearl Harbor, it did indeed occupy thatposition, with between 600,000 and 700,000 WPA workers transitioning to defenseprojects in the second half of 1940. And after the U.S. formally entered thewar, those efforts only ramped up across the country, as literally illustratedby this photograph of WPA researchers preparing an air raid warning map forNew Orleans on December 11, 1941.

Of course, “defense” came to mean something much more specific and farmore divisive and discriminatory in the days and weeks and months after PearlHarbor, and unfortunately the WPA also occupied a central position and role inthose 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 RelocationCenter in California, for example, was estimated to be “manned just about100% by the WPA.” And Harry Hopkins himself, subject of a good deal of deservedpraise in earlier posts in this series, praisedwartime WPA administrator HowardO. Hunter for the ”building of those camps for the War Department for theJapanese 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 wouldundertake this effort—but at the same time, this is another side of the WPA Ihadn’t known about prior to researching this series, and certainly not one Iwas happy to discover.

Obviously I’m not going to be able to boil all this down in any succinctway in this final paragraph, but I’ll say this: I’ve written and talked andthought a great deal in recent years about the worstand 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 phrasethan the WPA, the same social relief organization that helped save so manyAmericans and the nation as a whole to boot, working on one of the most exclusionaryand 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 serieson this blog with a version of that sentiment, and maybe I should.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?