Timeline - WPA

WPA

1935 Apr 8	The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act authorized $5 billion to increase employment and for useful projects including the Works Progress Administration (WPA). President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression of the 1930s when almost 25 percent of Americans were unemployed. The WPA created low-paying federal jobs to provide immediate relief. The WPA put 8.5 million jobless to work on projects as diverse as constructing highways, bridges and public buildings to arts programs like the Federal Writers' Project. Writers were paid to produce comprehensive guidebooks for each of the US states and Washington DC. In 2008 Nick Taylor authored “”American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR Put America to Work.” Links: USA, Labor, RooseveltF, WPA

1940	WPA workers created a 41-by-37-foot raised relief map of San Francisco. The disassembled map was re-discovered in 2010 in a UC Berkeley warehouse. Links: USA, SF, WPA

1946 Jan 29	Harry Lloyd Hopkins (b.1890), American social worker, died. He was the 8th Secretary of Commerce, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's closest advisor on foreign policy during World War II. He was one of the architects of the New Deal, especially the relief programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which he directed and built into the largest employer in the country. Links: USA, RooseveltF, WPA