May 5, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: EO 7034

[On May 6^th, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21^st century revival!]

On three significant elements of the Executive Order that established WPA.

1)      Building on the Past: While EO 7034 did in many ways create a new government agency, it didn’t quite do so officially; instead the WPA explicitly took the place of an existing agency, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Partly that shift was to make practical questions like leadership and funding for this new organization as smooth and straightforward as possible; the EO makes clear that “the Federal Emergency Relief Administrator shall serve also as Administrator of the Works Progress Administration,” for example. But I would argue that replacing FERA with WPA was also quite importantly symbolically, as it reflected the defining and important idea that these works projects—including, as we’ll see later in the week, artistic and cultural projects of all types—were part of the government’s Depression relief efforts.

2)      A Focus on Relief: That organizational shift was far from the only way in which the EO overtly and centrally linked the WPA to the concept of relief. Section 3a of the EO notes that one of the WPA’s “powers and duties” will be “to assure that as many of the persons employed on all work projects as is feasible shall be persons receiving relief.” For the prior two years, organizations like FERA and many other early New Deal programs had focused on precisely that mission, providing relief of many different kinds to Americans suffering from the Depression’s catastrophic and widespread effects. The WPA was one of many programs that became known as the “Second New Deal,” but details like the EO’s section 3a illustrate that despite this evolution, the New Deal would continue to focus on the goal of relief, even (if not especially) through these new projects.

3)      Wages and Working Conditions: Like most Executive Orders, 7034 didn’t go into great detail about specifics, leaving those for the follow-up work of the WPA (on layers to which, again, the rest of the week’s posts will focus). Which makes one particular specific section very telling: the fifth and final of the “powers and duties,” which authorizes the WPA “to investigate wages and working conditions and to make and submit to the President such findings as will aid the President in prescribing working conditions and rates of pay on projects.” That framing is ambiguous enough to allow in the abstract for less than ideal working conditions and wages, of course; but when we remember the FDR was considered in his own era and has been perceived ever since as one of the most pro-labor presidents in American history, it’s clear that this section was meant to give this federal program the ability to guarantee better working conditions and wages than might otherwise have been possible.

Next WPA post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?