WPA

When Government Worked For People

This is embedded in the sidewalk across the street. It’s how you can date the construction of the sidewalk.

I was startled to see it still proudly intact, and to consider what life must have been like in Newburyport, and the rest of the country at the time.

WPA, The Works Project Administration was begun in 1935. It was officially terminated in 1942.

Those two dates reveal endless information about a critical time in our history.

In 1929 the stock market crashed, and the American economy began a downward slide that eventually reached 25%. Imagine! One in four people couldn’t find work.

In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt rode a wave of anger and anxiety into the first of his four terms as President. After a series of skirmishes with a Supreme Court that kept ruling his attempts to use the government to put people back to work (sound familiar?), he threatened to pack the Court with additional justices who would ignore the false charges of Socialism and allow the government to function on behalf of the most struggling.

The Court began to reconsider its rulings, and in 1935, the WPA went into effect.

Think of hungry, unemployed workers building sidewalks, roads, and countless other jobs that gave them a wage, and rebuilt the infrastructure of the growing country.

In 1941, The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and suddenly there was plenty of work, both for people in uniform, and for those who produced the materials needed to wage a World War. The project was no longer needed.

Horrifying to realize it took a war to put us back to full employment.

It also cost more than 400,000 American dead.

When the war ended, the GIs came back to a grateful nation that enacted the GI Bill that helped returning service members to finance housing, go to college at low or no tuition.

As I walk over that plaque on my morning walk with Basil, I think about the battle we’re engaged in, again, about the role of the government in helping people. The current administration has made a show of surrounding itself, and sponsoring legislation for, the richest among us. Nearly unimaginable is the bill being debated right now, that cuts taxes for the richest, while cutting back on medical care, Social Security for those most in need. While, at the same time, decimating international aid programs that have given us the reputation as the helper of people around the world.

I consider it axiomatic that the proper function of government is to ensure the well being of the people it governs.

People who are lucky or clever enough to gain wealth, need the government’s help the least.

It haunts me to think that it could take a crisis like WWII, or scary civil unrest, to awaken us to the injustice, and danger, of a country in which a tiny minority hold more of the country’s wealth, than the great majority.

The crisis is already upon us:

Might “Drill baby drill,” the cry of the plutocrats, be our funeral dirge?