American-Made
The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work
The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work
When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, 13 million American workers were jobless. What people wanted were jobs, not handouts, and in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created--the Works Progress Administration, which would forever change the physical landscape and the social policies of the United States. The WPA lasted for eight years, spent $11 billion, and employed 8 and a half million men and women. The agency combined the urgency of putting people back to work with a vision of physically rebuilding America. Its workers laid roads, erected dams, bridges, tunnels, and airports, but also performed concerts, staged plays, and painted murals. Sixty years later, there is almost no area in America that does not bear some visible mark of its presence.--From publisher description.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is sprawling tale of how the WPA came to be describing precursor programs and the elections that confirmed the popularity of New Deal programs. It goes into great detail about larger WPA projects, who was in charge, the kind of character they were, and how the press dealt with them.
I'll be honest, I like to think I like history and I read this because I feel like we could use a jobs program in the country and wanted to figure out how people were persuaded it was a good idea to try. I felt like this was more rambling and a coherent narrative didn't exist other than “Jobs were wanted and only Roosevelt had the foresight to give the people government jobs”
