ReThink History: The Infinite Dividend: The WPA

society, culture, history · EN-US

You have used a WPA project — a road, a school, an airport, a mural, even the hot-lunch line. Between 1935 and 1943 the Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million Americans on 1.4 million projects and built the public country we still live in: 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 public buildings, and 800 airports — and then, deciding that out-of-work artists, writers, actors, and musicians had to eat too, it painted 200,000 works of art, wrote a guidebook to every state, recorded the last living voices of slavery, and put a free orchestra in every region of the country. It was attacked as a boondoggle from the first day, it never ended the Depression (the war did), and Congress shut it down at the height of the war boom — yet its return is so vast and so diffuse that the country is still drawing on it, and still arguing about whether it could ever build this way again. This 13-part ReThink History series tells the whole story: what the WPA set out to do, what it ach