The Works Progress Administration was created in 1935 to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work on federally funded public projects instead of leaving them to survive on cash handouts. Roosevelt and his advisers believed a paycheck earned building a road or a school would preserve skills, morale, and family stability in ways a relief check could not, while also giving the country infrastructure it needed. So the question of why the WPA was created has two parts: the emergency that made federal action unavoidable, and the choice to answer that emergency with jobs rather than direct relief.
An Unemployment Crisis Local Relief Could Not Handle
By 1933, nearly 25 percent of the American workforce was out of work, roughly 12.8 million people with no job and no income. In industrial cities the local rate often approached half the working population. Factories closed, banks failed, and farms were foreclosed. Unemployed people stopped buying goods, which pushed more businesses to lay off more workers.
The institutions that had traditionally handled poverty relief could not cope. Private charities and religious organizations burned through their resources within months of the initial crash. State and city governments watched property tax revenue dry up and faced their own budget crises. The older assumption that local communities took care of their own simply broke. By 1935, only the federal government had the borrowing power and the organizational reach to respond at the scale the disaster required.
The Legal Authority: Congress and the President Act
Congress laid the groundwork by passing the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act on April 8, 1935. The law appropriated $4 billion in new funding for relief and public works and rolled in roughly $880 million in unobligated balances from earlier appropriations, for a total of about $4.88 billion. It was the largest single peacetime appropriation Congress had ever approved.
The act gave the president broad discretion to distribute funds across categories including highway construction, rural electrification, housing, flood control, soil erosion prevention, and assistance for professional and clerical workers. That flexibility was deliberate. The crisis varied too much by region for Congress to direct every dollar, and the legislation shifted the practical responsibility for economic recovery from overwhelmed local governments to the federal executive branch.
President Franklin Roosevelt used that authority to issue Executive Order 7034 on May 6, 1935. The order created the Works Progress Administration and described it as “responsible to the President for the honest, efficient, speedy, and coordinated execution of the work relief program as a whole.”1The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 7034 – Establishing the Division of Applications and Information, the Advisory Committee on Allotments, the Works Progress Administration, and for Other Purposes The agency’s mandate was explicit: move the maximum number of people off relief rolls and into either public works jobs or private employment in the shortest time possible.
Roosevelt designated Harry Hopkins, then serving as the Federal Emergency Relief Administrator, to run the new agency.1The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 7034 – Establishing the Division of Applications and Information, the Advisory Committee on Allotments, the Works Progress Administration, and for Other Purposes Hopkins, a former social worker, favored fast action over bureaucratic planning, and under his direction the WPA prioritized getting people onto payrolls quickly.
Why Work Relief and Not Direct Handouts
The reasoning behind the WPA was as much philosophical as economic. It represented a deliberate rejection of the “dole,” the system of direct cash or food handouts earlier relief programs had relied on. Roosevelt and Hopkins both believed that simply giving people money, while necessary in the short term, did lasting damage.
Years of unemployment had already eroded the skills and morale of millions of workers. Carpenters, engineers, masons, and other tradespeople had been idle for years, and policymakers worried that long-term dependence on handouts would make re-entering the labor market harder once the economy recovered. Work relief was the answer. You received a paycheck, but only in exchange for labor on a public project.
Wages were set below prevailing private-sector rates so workers would still have an incentive to take a private job if one opened up, but high enough to keep families fed and housed. The arrangement kept practical trade skills alive. It also preserved something harder to measure: the sense that a worker was earning a wage rather than accepting charity. That psychological dimension mattered enormously to the people who lived through it and shaped how Americans thought about the relationship between government and employment for decades.
A Program Designed to Do Two Things at Once
The WPA was structured to solve the unemployment emergency and produce useful public works in the same motion. Regional directors reported to a national headquarters, and the centralized structure allowed the agency to move projects forward while maintaining federal standards across dozens of states.
Over eight years, workers constructed or improved hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and streets, built thousands of schools and public buildings, and put up bridges, airports, and parks across the country. Many are still in use. The program also handled less visible work: sewer lines, retaining walls, waterway improvements, and infrastructure modernization in rural communities that private industry had no financial incentive to serve. The roads connected rural towns to markets. The schools replaced crumbling buildings. The airports became the foundation of the country’s postwar aviation network. In total, the WPA employed roughly 8.5 million people at a federal cost of about $11 billion, making it the largest public employment program in American history.
Who the Design Left Out
The reasons behind the WPA’s creation did not translate equally to every worker. Black workers faced systemic discrimination throughout the program. Despite federal requirements calling for equal treatment, they were routinely placed at the back of the line for jobs and assigned to the lowest-paid positions regardless of qualifications. In the South, WPA projects were often segregated, and some WPA funds went toward building or repairing segregated schools, hospitals, and public housing.
Women fared poorly too. Only about 7 percent of WPA workers were women, and the jobs available to them were narrowly defined, concentrated in sewing rooms, clerical work, and library positions. The underlying assumption was that men were the primary breadwinners and therefore the primary targets for employment relief. Women who headed households or whose husbands could not work had fewer options and lower pay inside a system already paying below private-sector rates. Understanding why the WPA was created means recognizing that its founding logic was aimed at a particular idea of the American worker, and that people outside that idea got less of what the program was built to provide.