WPA Library Projects in Indiana

Abstract

From its birth in 1935 until its death in 1943, the WPA (the common acronym for the Works Progress Administration and, after 1939, the renamed Work Projects Administration) hired a total of 14,000,000 Americans for a wide variety of public works projects. This massive army of WPA employees and veterans represented more than one in ten of the 132,000,000 Americans counted by the 1940 census. Some economists argued that a cutback in WPA hiring triggered a downturn in the national economy in 1937. Of all the initiatives of the Roosevelt Administration, only Social Security surpassed WPA in terms of size and scope.