Works Progress Administration - Labor

Show Notes

Nia and Aughie discuss the Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor programs to provide jobs and income to men and women during the Great Depression. These jobs often involved physical labor building and maintaining infrastructure.

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Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.

N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie?

J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning Nia, how are you?

N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine. Thank you. What do you want to talk about today? We're back to you being president.

N. Rodgers: Right. When I'm president I want to have 100 percent employment.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: Because that would be the best thing ever. Everybody has a job, everybody loves their job, everybody goes to work, everybody makes money, capitalism is fabulous. Isn't that generally speaking how this is supposed to work?

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, according to most economists, 100 percent unemployment would actually cause a significant number of issues in the economy.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, but economists are wrong all the time. Fine. I will allow five percent unemployment. Is that good?

J. Aughenbaugh: Most economists would say, unemployment being somewhere between 4-5 percent is good. The reason why is it's not because economists want a certain percentage of people to be without jobs and thus supposed to be.

N. Rodgers: I don't know. I think they might.

J. Aughenbaugh: The reason why is you want that caution within the labor force just in case you have uptick in certain industries that may need additional people to be employed. Okay?

N. Rodgers: Okay. You want a little bit of churn.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. You need to have people in reserve just in case there are new jobs or changes within the economy to go ahead and handle the demand for more workers in a particular sector. Okay?

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because if you don't have that that's when you start seeing inflationary pressures arise within the labor market. Because if you know, for instance, Nia, that there is a shortage of librarians, you can basically go ahead and tell your current employer or any other library that is looking for a librarian, I want more money and you basically know you're going to get it simply because there aren't enough of you.

N. Rodgers: By the way, that is never a problem in librarianship. But I can see where that's going to be a problem perhaps in teaching in the economy. As teachers are quitting there may be a shortage of teachers and so teachers may be able to get higher pay rates. The government has an unemployment system where if you have been employed you can apply for unemployment and the government will help you for awhile until you find another job.

J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.

N. Rodgers: Where did that start? How did it become the government that looks after people in that way?

J. Aughenbaugh: Basically what you're talking about is in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression, United States federal government created a number of programs designed to help the millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the Great Depression. Now Nia, you just mentioned the unemployment program. The unemployment program is basically the idea that if you lose your job because of no fault of your own, to tide you over for a short period of time, and this is administered by state government, so it's a really good example of cooperative federalism, the federal government will give you unemployment benefits so you can continue to pay your rent, your mortgage, put food on the table, etc.

N. Rodgers: Right. Because if you can't pay those things you have cascading failure across the economy. Because if I can't pay my rent and then the guy who owns my apartment building can't pay his mortgage, which means that he could lose that property.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That's why you have that.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's the reason why you have that. But there was another program during the 1930s Nia, the Works Progress Administration. Again listeners, because we love our acronyms, it is known as the WPA. The WPA was created in 1935 by an executive order issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The WPA was not unemployment insurance. The WPA was a jobs program. This is where the federal government actually said we have millions of able-bodied Americans unemployed. Because they are unemployed, they're not paying the rent, they more than likely lost their house. If they at some point owned a house or paying a mortgage on a house, that's gone. But these ''breadwinners'' weren't providing food for their kids, so kids were going hungry. They weren't contributing anything to retirement, in fact, a very high percentage of Americans lost their retirement savings. If they were farmers, they lost their farms.

N. Rodgers: Just as a side note on the retirement, there was no Social Security at that point. Right?

J. Aughenbaugh: No, you don't get Social Security until 1935, the same year.

N. Rodgers: What you saved was what you lived on when you were old and couldn't work anymore.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: So if you weren't able to put away savings, then that's also a long-term disaster that you're talking about because by the time you're able to retire you don't have anything to put away.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because many Americans had to go ahead and dip into their savings in the first few months of the Great Depression.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then when they burnt through their savings, they were effectively screwed. Okay?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: The WPA was designed to go ahead and put able-bodied Americans back to work. For those of you who are of an economic bent, this is in the tradition or the philosophy theory of British economist John Maynard Keynes.

N. Rodgers: Oh, Keynesian economics.

J. Aughenbaugh: Keynesian economics. This is the idea that when a nation's economy is in a prolonged downturn, like a great recession, like a great depression, Keynes actually advocated in this went against the grain. He actually advocated that a nation's government should spend money to generate economic activity. Because if the government generates economic activity, then individuals will have money to spend and if they're spending money, corporations will rehire people that they've laid off so even more people now have money.

N. Rodgers: I see it gooses everything because these people are employed so now they're putting money into the economy, employing other people, who are putting in money into the economy employing other people and it's like that commercial from the '70s. Remember you tell two friends and you tell two friends about Breck shampoo, was that commercial.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Anyway, and it proliferates.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, so you use the term cascade in regards to a downward trend. The idea of Keynesian economics is if the government spends during an economic downturn, it can have positive uptake, a cascading effect upwards. It builds and then eventually when a nation's economy returns to growth.

N. Rodgers: Oh, then you can shut down the program.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then the government should spend less money.

N. Rodgers: Okay. Basically, you throw money at the problem for a little while until the problem mitigates itself, and then you're able to say, okay, well now those people, because the WPA I assume did not pay thousands of dollars an hour for people to work. Like if you could get a job at a regular company then you probably would make more money so you would have something in the meantime that we keep you alive, but it will encourage you to look for work that is higher paying. Right?

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Basically, WPA would pay slightly below the local prevailing wage. But again, for those of you who are like, well, that doesn't sound very good. But remember, we're talking about people who had gone years without jobs. For readers to give you a sense of the scope of how horrific the Great Depression was in the United States at that time. The population in the United States in the mid-1930s was roughly 127 million. In 1935, there were 20 million Americans on relief in the United States. So we're basically talking about one in every six Americans was receiving some sort of aid.

N. Rodgers: That's terrifying.

J. Aughenbaugh: Whether it was from the federal government, what many Americans don't understand was before the New Deal and the Great Depression, most welfare benefits came from non-profits. So we're talking about church-related relief organizations. State governments were wholly unprepared to provide assistance to their citizens when the Great Depression hit.

N. Rodgers: They didn't have the money. Well, you're talking about that 17% of the population that doesn't have a job. I mean, even if the state had a kazala of money, that would not be enough.

J. Aughenbaugh: In terms of those 20 million Americans, 8.3 million were children under the age of 16. They wouldn't have been working anyways or if they had been they had been working limited hours because many states had passed child labor laws. Three-point eight million of that 20 million were between the ages of 16 and 65 and they were either unemployed, meaning they weren't working, but looking for work, or underemployed, meaning they didn't have jobs and they had stopped looking.

N. Rodgers: Because in their area there weren't jobs?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Three-quarters of a million of that 20 million were persons aged 65 or older. Now today, we know plenty of people over the age of 65 who work. But back then, if you lived to 65, you were at the high end of the life expectancy chart.

N. Rodgers: Because life was harder.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: I mean, there was very little leisure. Life was harder. Like work was harder.

J. Aughenbaugh: Basically, the way the WPA was set up was basically there would be one person per family that would be permitted to work, and the way this all played out in terms of numbers, 3.5 million workers received jobs from the WPA.

N. Rodgers: That's a lot of workers. That's a huge workforce.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, particularly when the population at that time, Nia, as we just discussed, was 127 million. I mean, I'm not very good at math, but that's a really significant percentage of Americans who were employed directly by the federal government. By this one single program. We're not talking about people who worked for the federal government as a bureaucrat. Are we ready to go ahead and talk about the kind of work that they did?

N. Rodgers: I am very interested in the kind of work that they did, but I want to do a little bit of math here. Okay, so that works out to about two percent of the population?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Were basically, federal employees.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That's a lot.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's in addition to listeners.

N. Rodgers: There were people who were already federal employees who were just normal federal employees.

J. Aughenbaugh: Those were just bureaucrats. Those who were running the government.

N. Rodgers: Right.

N. Rodgers: There's a lot of people. That's a big program. But then again, Americans were starving. Americans were starving because, in the 1930s, you had generally speaking men as breadwinners and women as housewives. When a man is out of work, his wife and his children also suffer because he's theoretically the breadwinner, he's supposed to be bringing home at least hence the name breadwinner. He's supposed to be bringing home bread.

J. Aughenbaugh: Providing for the family. That was his job, that was his role in the family.

N. Rodgers: Psychologically, it's got to be terrible for a man at that time to not have work.

J. Aughenbaugh: The 1930s is one of those decades where we had a huge uptake in the number of suicides committed by working-age men.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, I'm not surprised. It's humiliating to not be able to care for your family.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yap.

N. Rodgers: But yeah, no. Wait though, I want to ask you one thing about you said one worker per family.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: A husband or a wife could get a job but not both of them because they were trying to spread out the jobs.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Across all families so that as many families as possible had something coming in.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: Nobody is getting wealthy off of this. I know you probably don't know the answer to this, but when I saw your notes, it made me think, I wonder if there were couples at the time who decided not to get married so that they could each have a job.

J. Aughenbaugh: Or they got divorced.

N. Rodgers: Or they got divorced so they could each have a job. I don't know that's weird.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that I don't know. But if you think about how desperate you might be if you were willing to put off marriage or you were willing to go ahead and book societal norms and get a divorce.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because back then in the 1930s the divorce rate in the United States was not nearly as high as the divorce rate is today.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, no we are not divorced right now, it's like 50% and it was even remotely that back then. But I wonder, and I didn't even think of it until I was looking at your notes to look up. Someone might look that up and see it mentioned in some future podcast if the divorce rate went up. But it's an interesting provision that the government makes that one person per family because they're trying to spread.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Has it were spread the wealth, spread the money across enough people that nobody is absolutely starving that people can at least bring in something.

J. Aughenbaugh: While at the same time making sure that people were not defrauding the system.

N. Rodgers: Exactly.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. Yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: Or maybe because there were a bunch of criticisms of the WPA, which we might get to in this episode or our next episode, where we look at the WPA in its contribution to the development and maintenance of art in the United States.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. I'm excited for that episode, but this episode I'm also excited. I mean, I'm interested to hear what they did. We're talking about now though. There's two kinds of WPA, there's the RPA and then there's the one we're talking about today which is the physical labor. Just the I am hiring men and it's mostly men. They hired some women, but it's mostly men to do physical job like constructioning type jobs. Is that mostly construction?

J. Aughenbaugh: This is known as infrastructure work.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Infrastructure work. Initially, the WPA had two sections, the division of engineering and construction and then the division of professional and service projects which sounds terribly boring.

N. Rodgers: Yes, it does but first one sounds more interesting.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. But the WPA basically built traditional infrastructure, the New Deal era, where it's responsible for a huge growth in infrastructure projects in the United States. It's like the United States finally got caught up to what industrialization actually required of the nation. They built roads, bridges, schools, libraries, courthouses, hospitals, sidewalks, sewage, and water facilities and post offices, a huge number of post offices.

N. Rodgers: Which is why you have tiny little post offices in towns all over America.

J. Aughenbaugh: America. Yes.

N. Rodgers: The town that my parents live in their post office is the size of my apartment. It's very small. I want to say there may be three employees right there maybe. I think there's somebody who's always in the office and there's two people who deliver mail.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: But my parents live in a rural part of North Carolina and that was enormously valuable to have that infrastructure so that the mail system it didn't take weeks and weeks and weeks to get them a letter from somebody, it would take significantly less time than that.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, your speaking of post offices in small rural towns.

N. Rodgers: Which by the way, they know everything. If you move to a small rural town and you need to know who in town, can cut down a tree in your backyard, you go to the post office and you ask the post lady, "Hey, who around here, cuts down trees"? She will give you five names.

J. Aughenbaugh: You know, who's the best dentist? Where's the good bank?

N. Rodgers: They know everything. If you hang around in there, you hear gossip because people show up and they're like, you know, so and so is sleeping with such and such. No. Then there's all these stories I could tell, yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: When I go home one of the first things my mom and my grandmother ask me to do is take them to the post office.

N. Rodgers: Its like taking place in the poster.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's not a 10-15 minutes stop off, they're in there for a couple of hours. I'm like, what are you guys doing there?

N. Rodgers: Catch up with everybody.

J. Aughenbaugh: Are manufacturing the stamps? Is there a volunteer chore here? What's going on there? But the reason why I bring this up is my local post office for my hometown, the cornerstone on the building, and they still use the same building, 1938.

N. Rodgers: Okay, so it's part of this program.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was part of the program.

N. Rodgers: I have not looked at the cornerstone of ours, but I bet it was part of the program.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. But, Nia they did more than just what many of us would consider basic infrastructure.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: They built museums, swimming pools, parks, community centers, playgrounds, Colosseums, markets, fairgrounds, tennis courts, zoos, botanical gardens, auditoriums, city halls, gymnasiums. A lot of high schools got gymnasiums in the 1930s.

N. Rodgers: Okay. I guess they didn't have them before. Well, that makes sense. If your local district can build a building to teach, they probably don't have enough money to build a gym. If you have to make a choice between those two, of course, you would build classrooms. You would not build a gym.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Recreation was done outside, but now it could be done inside, which means it's all weather.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: That's a huge benefit to schools, is to be able to have kids take a lap during the winter when you need them to be burn off some energy or whatever.

J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly in the North, they didn't work things.

N. Rodgers: Right. Or the Southwest where it's so hot.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: That's cool. I didn't even know that. That's new.

J. Aughenbaugh: The WPA, 40,000 new buildings, they renovated 85,000.

N. Rodgers: Sorry. Go ahead.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, no go ahead Nia.

N. Rodgers: I do want to mention that in your notes, you said that they built 254 golf courses and 65 ski jobs.

J. Aughenbaugh: Sixty five ski jobs.

N. Rodgers: 1,101 ice skating

J. Aughenbaugh: Ice skating. Yes.

N. Rodgers: Can I just say I love that part of what the new deal, that not to be difficult but Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. Physical exercise to him was super important. He swam a lot. He pad a time in the pool a lot because his legs didn't work. He was more or less paralyzed, I think.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because he suffered from.

N. Rodgers: Polio.

J. Aughenbaugh: Adult-onset polio.

N. Rodgers: Yes. It's fascinating to me that one of the things that he wanted was things like rodeo grounds and athletic fields and handball courts.

J. Aughenbaugh: Courts.

N. Rodgers: Stuff like that. Where you have these, let's encourage people to be physically active.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: In communal spaces. I don't know. I think that's cool, especially coming from someone who could not partake of a lot of it himself.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is one of the criticisms, but a lot of it was made up work. Right?

N. Rodgers: Yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, as one historian pointed out that I came across in my research the WPA, all this infrastructure work, all these schools, all these libraries, all of these athletic fields and places for people to exercise, it's like the country finally went ahead and got caught up to industrialization.

N. Rodgers: Yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because.

N. Rodgers: There should be public parks, there should be public tennis courts. There should be, because if we are going to have people in cities working.

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's give them someplace to blow off steam. Let's give them some place to where they can go ahead and take a book out and read.

N. Rodgers: Probably not a lot of farmers playing tennis. Do you know what I mean? Like they're getting enough physical in the labor that they don't need.

J. Aughenbaugh: That is right.

N. Rodgers: But if you're working in a factory and you just need to be outside in the sunshine, vitamin D and all that stuff. But you also want to have that with your children. You want to go play some place with your children. You get parks. You get zoos. You get things where people can go that are combinations sort of learning, but also relaxation spaces. Now, you try to take away public parks from people. They will be up in arms. Like that is not happening. If the city of Richmond decided that it was just going to close, [inaudible] Park, the outrage would be.

J. Aughenbaugh: We're thinking about closing a zoo or getting rid of ball fields. These are the kinds of amenities that workers today are like, if I'm trying to decide between two jobs, do I want to go to a city that has things for me to do, things for my family to do when I'm not working 50, 60 hours a week or don't they?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: If they don't, I don't care how much a potential employer wants to pay me. I'm going to go to the place that has more for me to do, more for my family to do than the other place

N. Rodgers: It just makes sense. You can live in this place with nothing or you can live in this place with stuff that's cool and fun and fabulous to do. Why would you choose the nothing place?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. I like that even though it may have been considered busy work, it actually in some ways becomes the fabric of American society.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: What do you mean there's no ball field here for us to go throw a football? What do you mean? Why not?

J. Aughenbaugh: Some of this stuff is just important for the growth and development of a local government or a local government jurisdiction. The WPA built 325 firehouses, renovated over 2,300 of them. If you have a large number of people in one area.

N. Rodgers: You need a lot of firehouses.

J. Aughenbaugh: You need firehouses. They also built, this is a phenomenal number Nia, over 20,000 miles of water mains.

N. Rodgers: Miles.

J. Aughenbaugh: 20,000 miles.

N. Rodgers: When you turn on the faucet, thank the WPA.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's the WPA in a lot of communities, right?

N. Rodgers: Yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: In fact, what we now have in many local government jurisdictions, Nia, is that some of this infrastructure has never been repaired or replaced since the1930s.

N. Rodgers: That's terrifying. We need my program. We need me to come in as president. We need to say, we're having another WPA and we're going to do. But how much does it cost? Is the WPA expensive?

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's go ahead and get the exact figure. I have this somewhere in my notes. I can't assure I went overboard. You guys would just be fascinated when I write up these notes. Because quite obviously sometimes I go down a rabbit hole and I don't get out. But Nia has gone ahead and highlighted this. By the way, the WPA lasted from 1935-1941. For some of you who are wondering why 1941, guess what happened in 1942.

N. Rodgers: We entered World War II.

J. Aughenbaugh: There you go.

N. Rodgers: At that point, you don't need this because you're on a war footing. You're putting everything into defense. The defense companies will be hiring left, right, and center, and you're drafting some of these people and sending them off to war.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: We have to draft in World War II?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, we did.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is where you see by the way listeners, the explosion, the huge number of women entering into the workforce was during World War II.

N. Rodgers: Because men went off to war.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, we sent all these able-bodied American males to fight in the war. But then we had all of these jobs that needed to be filled at the home front.

N. Rodgers: Somebody had to build tanks. Somebody had to build guns, airplanes, and yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Okay.

N. Rodgers: How much did they spend?

J. Aughenbaugh: The WPA in a six-year period spent $11.4 billion.

N. Rodgers: That's not bad.

J. Aughenbaugh: Today that is the equivalent of 201 billion.

N. Rodgers: That's more than I was thinking.

J. Aughenbaugh: But again guys think about the federal government budget, which is trillions of dollars today.

N. Rodgers: That's true.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is a drop in the bucket. The rate of return of the WPA and mind you, many of you who are longtime listeners know I am generally a fiscal conservative. But the rate of return of what we got for the amount of money we spent, this was a good project.

N. Rodgers: Well, yeah, if we only spent, listen to me, only, like I have billions of dollars of my own hanging around. By the way, listeners, I do not have billions of dollars. $201 billion is not over six years. It's actually not that much money per year. You're only talking around what, three billion? No, that's not right, 30 billion a year? 30 billion out of the budget is even less of a big ginormous drop. That seems like we got a lot of stuff for that, but we haven't kept up with it. If you look at our engineering reports for the United States of our bridges and our roads it just makes you cry. Because we're like a D plus or something. We're some terrible score for that because we have not kept those things up in part because no other president has done something like this. No other president has said, You know what, we're going to have a giant program and we're going to rebuild all this stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: One of the reasons why is, today we have created so much red tape for the federal government to spend money. But during the New Deal, you add a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. They were trying something that had never been tried before. Many of the accountability measures in controls that we now have in place just didn't exist. FDR went ahead and appointed Harry Hopkins to run the WPA. He didn't get congressional approval of Harry Hopkins. He just hired Harry Hopkins and said, make this work. Well, to give you a comparison, Nia, recall the great recession of 2007 and 2009.

N. Rodgers: Oh, yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: Bush 43 convinces Congress to pass a bill to basically prop up those too big to fail industries and corporations.

N. Rodgers: I believe that was known as TARP.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, it was TARP. Obama comes into office and does Part 2. The federal government was going to go ahead and spend a whole bunch of money for infrastructure projects. But one of the problems that arose was that it took two, two-and-half, three years from the time the money got appropriated by Congress for shovels to dig into the dirt for the infrastructure projects.

N. Rodgers: By then we were coming out of the recession.

J. Aughenbaugh: We were coming out of the recession.

N. Rodgers: Did this happen like immediately?

J. Aughenbaugh: No, it happened immediately.

N. Rodgers: Did he say he was going to this thing and then they turned around and boom, they were doing the thing?

J. Aughenbaugh: They were doing stuff. They were building sidewalks, they were digging foundations for a new library. They were putting new roofs on firehouses.

N. Rodgers: I want to ask you about how this worked. The federal government says there shall be money. It gives it to the states and then the states put it out in like what if they have projects within the states and then they were funded federally, is this how?

J. Aughenbaugh: This is an example of cooperative federalism. Basically how it worked was this Nia. The federal government would go ahead and say to a state, you guys are going to receive this amount of money for the WPA program. Then each state had "relief agencies". We didn't call it welfare, we called it relief. Nomenclature in regards to federal bureaucratic programs is really, really important. The state relief agency then would go ahead and decide one, what projects would be worked on. Two, what would be the prevailing rate. Then three, actually hire the people. Again, this is a good example listeners of cooperative federalism. The federal government created the program and then basically said to the states, if you want to help out your citizenry, here is your allotment for WPA projects.

N. Rodgers: Oh, so a state could have said no?

J. Aughenbaugh: A state could have said no. No single state said no.

N. Rodgers: Why would you? No, we don't want you to save our citizens from starving to death. Like no. But they could have. Because of the cooperative federalism, a state can opt out. A state can say, I don't want your money because I don't like the conditions you put on the money or I don't like whatever, whatever. We've seen that in other things like the extended unemployment in recent times. States have said, I am not interested in having that for a variety of reasons. Most of which is they just want to be recalcitrant and difficult, but also because they don't like the conditions put on the money so they just don't want take it

J. Aughenbaugh: They have their theoretical issues. In fact Nia, not only did all 50 states participate but one of the criticisms of the WPA was that the Roosevelt administration and in particular Harry Hopkins who ran the WPA played geographical favorites. The South complained. They received almost 75 percent less WPA money than other regions. The West also made that complaint and they said it demonstrated a bias within the Roosevelt administration but particularly Harry Hopkins because Harry Hopkins did not like how conservative the South and the West were. Harry Hopkins at one point, I think he became Roosevelt's second Vice-President but he stepped down after one term because he complained that President Roosevelt was not liberal enough.

N. Rodgers: Wow. Can I just say, that's not a complaint you hear often about Roosevelt.

J. Aughenbaugh: I think Harry Hopkins in 1944 I want to say, maybe it was, yeah 1944, ran for President as the Socialist Party nominee.

N. Rodgers: He was in fact, come pick a liberal of the true tradition of, if you are not Karl Max you're not working for me.

J. Aughenbaugh: That was the criticism of Harry Hopkins. Harry Hopkins wanted a larger federal government presence, not a smaller one.

N. Rodgers: That's his complaint. I want to get to one of the programs before we wrap up for this episode because I don't want to miss talking about this. While I appreciate the firehouses and I appreciate the miles of water mains and all that other kind of stuff, there's something dear to my heart in this that I want you to talk about and you know what I'm referring to because I'm sure you put it in here for me.

J. Aughenbaugh: You're talking about the library service demonstration projects.

N. Rodgers: Yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: They had an entire sub-unit listeners devoted to building libraries, but in particular building libraries for underserved and rural populations. Part of this project was the training of 30,000 women to become librarians. Not men, women.

J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, what that means is not only were they building libraries, but they were also putting in infrastructure to hire these women to take books out into rural areas and deliver them to people who wanted to read. No, sorry, I'm about to get all waxing and poetic and I might even cry. Just bear with me for a minute. We're talking about women who would get on a mule and ride all day out to people's houses in the countryside because in 1935, my good friends, there were not a lot of roads.

N. Rodgers: That's right.

J. Aughenbaugh: There we're certainly not a lot of rural roads. Roads connected cities. But if you lived out in the country country, and I mean out in the country not like what we think of as the country which is actually, I hate to break it to you, the suburbs. But out in the real country where you are miles from anybody. A lot of those people did not own cars. My mother's parents never owned a car. My mom didn't ride in a car until she was 16 years old. That's just how that works. They didn't have money for a car and there were no roads. Even if you had money for a car, it would have to have been the toughest car ever made because you'd be riding on these dirt, potholed gravels. There were roads but they weren't paved. I should say they weren't paved roads.

N. Rodgers: They weren't paved roads. But regards to this library demonstration project needed too your point. You had women being trained to figure out ways to get library books to rural families. Because the thought was many of these kids weren't going to school. I know this sounds very foreign to a lot of our listeners. But well into the 1930s and '40s in the United States, you had rural communities with no schools.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because kids worked on the farm.

N. Rodgers: Kids worked on the farm.

J. Aughenbaugh: I mean, that's how everybody survived.

N. Rodgers: But families lost farms during the Great Depression. How do you prepare these kids for labor, for jobs in their futures? Because they weren't going to work on a farm, but they weren't going to school. How do you get books? Just books to these families. This was a huge part. They have an example in the research that I did. There's an example with the state of South Carolina. You were born and raised in North Carolina, but South Carolina in many ways is not all that different to North Carolina, right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Right.

N. Rodgers: When the project started, South Carolina had fewer than five publicly funded libraries. At the end of the project in 1943, they had 12 publicly funded libraries, one regional library, and a fully-funded State Library Agency for the first time in the state's history. I mean, you're talking about a state that had been around since the early 1800s. They had put no resources whatsoever in libraries. This was huge.

J. Aughenbaugh: The other thing that should mentioned here is that libraries have consistently, across their history, been open to all races. When these women would deliver books, they weren't just delivering them to white kids, they were also delivering them to black kids under the hope that reading would make people better citizens. That's what the goal of library. Let me deliver books and magazines. Unfortunately, they also delivered newspapers which sometimes would be three to six months old because that's a whole separate issue. But that's how some of the Appalachian communities that was their connection to the outside world. Was the postmen and the library lady, or what they called the book lady.

N. Rodgers: The book lady.

J. Aughenbaugh: Here comes the book lady. Let's go meet the book lady. Some people would walk to meet them because they would come to a certain spot. Everybody comes to this meadow and if you're five miles from that meadow, you walk five miles, and you get your books, and you turn your books in, and then you take the next ones out. They brought books on canning, and they brought books on animal husbandry. Techniques and things that people needed to learn how to do or newer things that people were trying to change their way like, Oh, this is improved, and we now know this.

N. Rodgers: This was before listeners. The ubiquitous YouTube video that shows you how to go ahead and fix the plumbing in your bathroom.

J. Aughenbaugh: The book lady was the Internet. She actually the active Internet. She went from one place to another, and I'm sure that part of what her job was too was to carry news from one place to another. So and so had their baby, and they're doing fine. Such and such's father died, Oh my goodness, that's terrible, that kind of thing. Because people think now that news is just, Oh, well, you just look at your phone and you know everything that's going on. That may be true, but back then, no and rural communities didn't and they were suspicious of outsiders. But if she consistently brought something for their children, she wasn't an outsider. She was an insider who lives somewhere else.

N. Rodgers: My grandmother referred to the staff at our local library as the book people. They didn't call them librarians. Because again, where she grew up in rural Pennsylvania, part of the Appalachian Mountain region of the United States. It goes the whole way up to Maine folks, my hometown as part of the Appalachians. But they didn't have a library until the tail end of the Great Depression. She remembers the book lady. The book lady would be at the junction of this farm and that farm. If you wanted your book, she had to get to the junction of those two farms because she had other small communities to get to and that was her stopping point.

J. Aughenbaugh: She had what was then called the traveling library and what would now be called a bookmobile.

N. Rodgers: Yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's a similar concept. Of course, she didn't have a car. Most of them didn't know it. Some did, but most didn't. Most did it on mule or foot. Occasionally people did it by boat. If you lived in parts of Louisiana where the only way to get to your community is by boat, the book lady had to put the books on the boat and bring them out to you, that thing. But that to me is, I mean, I know it's because I'm a librarian, that it's special to them. But it's that thing of reaching into rural communities and saying, we will do our best to improve your lives through spending this money. We're not just spending this money recklessly. We're spending it to improve people's lives.

N. Rodgers: In listeners, full disclosure or one of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode, Nia suggested it, but one of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode is my great grandfather was employed by the WPA for nearly four years.

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, what did he do?

N. Rodgers: Well before the Depression, he was a coal miner. He lost his job. He used to tell me stories. I got to spend time with him before he died when I was 13. He dug ditches and laid concrete for roads. That's what he did.

J. Aughenbaugh: People would think that coal miners wouldn't be unemployed. But the problem with coal is that that's how people heated their homes. If you just have a home or you couldn't afford to buy the coal, and you just wrapped up and went cold, eventually coal miners would be out of work. That's a perfect example of how this went down.

J. Aughenbaugh: A lot of the coal that he mined, the coal mine where he worked, a lot of that coal was used for steel production. When the economy shrinks, the demand for steel goes down.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Interestingly enough, he got rehired by the coal mine when the United States entered World War II because we needed a whole bunch of steel for weapons and blades.

N. Rodgers: That's make sense, that was how that was supposed to work.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: In the time when he didn't have work he was covered, and then when the time when he could go back to work then the economies improved. He's a perfect example of why you do a program like this.

J. Aughenbaugh: Till the day he died, he was a big believer in the United States because he said, "The government saved me and my family." For easily 2.5, 3 years, he started drinking, he was a functional alcoholic but he felt terrible about himself because he couldn't provide for his family.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: That was his job. He never finished school, so it wasn't like you could go ahead and get a different job. The only thing that he had that was a value to most employers was his body.

N. Rodgers: As many laborers experienced. Because what we saw here was a loss of jobs in laborers and people who did physical work. But I think it's interesting that we have the physical labor side. I'm looking forward to our next episode where we're talking about the art, because starving artist, that's a trope in movies stuff. That was a legit scene in the depression and so it will be interesting to talk about that too and the importance of not just building your infrastructure, but also building the things that feed your soul, because you need both.

J. Aughenbaugh: Remember too, listeners. In addition to feeding both, feeding your family, etc., but also feeding your mind, feeding your soul. From a purely economic point of view the arts are a huge industry in the United States.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: If you want to see certain collections in museums, you have to pay. Part of it is free and then part of it you have to pay for.

J. Aughenbaugh: Also think about when we were talking about gymnasiums and building ball fields, etc., even back then sports, leisure activities have been a huge industry. If Americans don't have money for food, they're not going to ball games, which means, now you've got a whole bunch of athletes who are unemployed. If Americans don't have money to pay the rent, they're not going to see a show on Broadway or the local theater, which means we also have a whole bunch of actors, writers, directors who are unemployed.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, the logic here was, it's not just infrastructure, it's both taking care of the economics, but also the soul in the mind of a community, but these are people who need jobs.

N. Rodgers: Right and who generate income for other people.

J. Aughenbaugh: If they're not playing a concert, they're not getting paid and if they're not getting paid, they can't pay the rent.

N. Rodgers: If they're not playing then the venue is closed, which means they can't pay their rent and the people who were the custodial staff aren't working because there's nobody to clean up after. Like we said, it cascades outwards to, then this one thing doesn't happen. I know that there are probably grumpiness about this, can we talk about those two the criticisms after we're done with the art stuff next time because I think it's all magical and fabulous and wonderful, but I'd be willing to hear what you're going to say except, and you're going to point out a couple of things, and I'll be like, man, because that's what you always do to me.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, but it also is a paradigm shift, and we'll get into that next week when we get to the criticisms because prior to the new deal in Keynesian economics, the idea that the government would be responsible for providing employment was unheard of in the United States.

N. Rodgers: It's an alien concept.

J. Aughenbaugh: We can get into that next week. But listeners, this is one of those times and again, we live in a cynical era, a hyper-partisan era. But Nia and I are both generally, maybe not fiscally conservative, but we tend to go ahead and focus on, can you pay for what you're doing?

N. Rodgers: I would say I'm fiscally conservative.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. How are we going to pay for that? That's a great idea. How are we going to pay for it?

J. Aughenbaugh: You will pay for that.

N. Rodgers: It's almost always the first question.

J. Aughenbaugh: I have, right? But this is one of those examples, the WPA, where not only did we employ a whole bunch of people, but the staff that they built basically was a legacy for the rest of the 20th century.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Some of the roads that you have driven on, some of the libraries you've gone to, some of the schools where you were educated were built by WPA workers.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: If you lived in a rural area, it was one of the few things to where you've go ahead and say, here's my connection to the government, and this was a good thing.

N. Rodgers: Right. The government gave me a positive thing instead of giving me a tax bill.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Or something else. It's [inaudible]

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Awesome. We'll talk more. I'm excited to talk more about the other part of it when we're back together. Thank you, Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: I enjoyed this. Thanks.

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