Word: wpa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...card to ensure CIO's Independence. Other alternatives were very few, but to ask labor to abandon FDR was going too far despite Mortimer's lack of faith in the President. "If, in his efforts to get the economy back and functioning, a few crumbs in the form of WPA and CCC fell to labor, it was incidental and not because FDR was basically pro-labor...
More than half of the money went for construction. But since WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins believed that man did not live by concrete alone, WPA gave work to thousands of writers, artists, musicians and actors. In addition to Sing for Your Supper, the agency's Federal Theater Project spread the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Eugene O'Neill. The Federal Writers' Project published about 1,000 books and pamphlets; its famous American Guide Series is still a mainstay. For good or ill, the Federal Art Project revived mural painting, largely to decorate public buildings. The Federal Music...
...WPA generally paid better than relief, but not as well as private industry. Unskilled laborers earned as little as $19 a month; professional and technical workers not much more than $94 a month. Fortunately, some WPA families were also eligible for relief payments. By law, nine out of ten WPA recruits had to pass a means test, and Congress did not want them to have too much money left for luxuries...
...WPA was violently controversial. Labor leaders denounced it as a plot to drive down wages in industry. Republicans charged that it was a plot by the Roosevelt Administration to buy votes. Most of all, the agency was damned as a gigantic boondoggle; in fact, that word, which until then referred to leather handicrafts made by Boy Scouts, was turned into a pejorative word by WPA critics...
...WPA also inspired some awful jokes (sample: a WPA worker sued the Government when the shovel he was leaning on broke). Still it gave eating money in hard times to some Americans who later became famous, including Actors Orson Welles and Burt Lancaster and Artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Oh yes, and a fellow named Richard Nixon earned 350 an hour from the National Youth Administration, a division of the WPA, for doing research in the Duke University law library...