Harold Meyerson explains why we need — but won’t get — a new version of the WPA:
In the autumn of 1933, Harry Hopkins was worried about the coming winter. Since May, he had served in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration as head of the federal government’s new — in fact, its first — program to distribute funds to the unemployed. Neither unemployment insurance nor food stamps nor welfare had yet come into existence. Only a handful of states had relief programs, and they were rapidly going broke. And private charity was almost laughably inadequate to the problems of a nation where unemployment stood close to 25 percent.
Hopkins feared that millions of Americans would be without food or shelter in the coming cold months. In October, he met with the president and proposed something new: a temporary federal jobs program to see the nation through the winter. It would employ 4 million people and last for four months. Roosevelt did a quick calculation, figured it would cost $400 million, and decided to take that money from the budget of the Public Works Administration, run by his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes.