The Works
Progress Administration--the WPA, along with the NRA, the FERA and the FWP was
one of the "alphabet soup" agencies that distinguished the
administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It was also an early experiment in making welfare recipients work for
their checks.
The idea
was simple. During the Great
Depression, tens of millions were out of work, millions were hungry.
Communist agitators were proclaiming the death of capitalism, the more
radical calling for outright revolution--even as early as 1928, the Communist
Party won nearly 200 votes from disgusted and disillusioned Otter Tail County
residents. Discontent was rising
all across America. President Roosevelt--believing he must forestall social
unrest--vowed to act. People
would need government financial assistance in order to survive, but he
correctly believed outright cash welfare was "a narcotic, a subtle
destroyer of the human spirit." The
WPA seemed a compromise between foundering private enterprise and outright
welfare.
It worked
like this: Any level of
government--township, county, or state--could assess a need and supply
materials. The Federal government
would provide wages averaging $75 per month to unemployed carpenters, masons,
laborers (and in some cases writers and artists) to work on projects for the
public good. Between 1935 and
1942, the WPA employed over eight million Americans.
Across Minnesota, the resulting numbers are impressive--20,000 miles of
new roads, 500 bridges, 21, 000 culverts, 70 miles of retaining walls, 1000
schools, 40 stadiums, 400 miles of sewer line.
In Otter Tail County alone, some two thousand took home WPA paychecks.
The WPA built much of the State Hospital and the county fairgrounds in
Fergus Falls, many of Maplewood Township's roads, the first addition to the
Rothsay school. In Pelican
Rapids, WPA workmen labored to construct the long stone retaining wall along
5th Street SE and the city's first sewer plant, that for nearly fifty years
arguably performed better than its troublesome replacement does today.
Ironically,
Otter Tail County's farmers initially fell through the cracks in government
concern. After all--the
government reasoned--farmers owned property, which technically kept them from
being destitute. Indeed, in the
first few years of the Great Depression, farmers were envied by their city
cousins. At least a farmer could
eat out of the garden and poach an occasional deer for fresh meat. But by the mid 1930's, the predictable near extinction of the
local deer herd and a severe drought reduced many farmers to feeding their
children unsalted cornmeal mush and boiled muskrats. By 1936, unpaid property tax left Otter Tail County with
nearly three quarters of a
million dollar revenue shortfall. Helpless
to aid suffering farmers, the county commission successfully petitioned
farmers inclusion in the WPA.
Some
farmers were put to work improving roads immediately adjacent to their
property--so they might also continue their daily chores.
Others went to work on an ambitious program sponsored by the WPA and
the Minnesota Department of Conservation--the forerunner of today's DNR--to
restore drought ravaged Otter Tail County lakes.
Farmers were planting corn on what was once the bottom of Lake Alice in
Dora Township. On Pelican Lake,
tourists were playing badminton where they used to catch northern pike. Since the department thought it difficult to communicate the
economic impact of local tourism, they
stressed the value of water for municipal and agricultural use, contributing
$485,000 to restore 63 lakes and clean up the Pelican and Otter Tail rivers.
The WPA supplied wages for an estimated 585 man-years of labor.
The low concrete dams that still control water levels on Pelican,
Lizzie, Long, and Stalker lakes are all legacy of that effort.
In spite
of it's impressive accomplishments, the WPA did not meet with universal
approval. A skeptical senator
buttonholed WPA administrator Harry Hopkins in a capitol corridor and demanded
consideration of the program's long-term negative effects.
"Senator," Hopkins was reputed to have said, "people
have the bad habit of eating in the short-term."
Locals--noting the inactivity of some participants--dubbed the WPA the
"We Piddle Around." A
well-worn joke went thus: Lars
reported to a WPA site. A moment
later he was complaining to a foreman. He
did not have a shovel like the others. The
foreman did not understand since the others weren't working.
"I know," Lars said, "but I deserve something to lean
on, too." The editor of the
Perham Enterprise Bulletin was considerably more direct when asked if he could
handle a couple of WPA clerks sent to index back issues of his paper.
"Shooting is the only profitable way of handling them."
The WPA was
undeniably an early example of bureaucracy run amok--"too wide, too tall,
too broad" the Daily Journal complained, "too heavy...with no
administrator having authority to do more than collect his pay."
Results were predictable--confusion, wasted effort, conflicting orders
from Washington, St. Paul, and the Detroit Lakes district office--and, of
course, five carbon copies of every document on onion skin paper.
Local politicians chafed over a wage scale that paid outstate workers
less than their counterparts in the Twin Cities, since "everybody knows a
skilled worker in Minneapolis is not as smart as an Otter Tail County
farmer."
But for all
its shortcomings, the WPA put the money where it was most needed, into the
pockets of working class Minnesotans. And
the infrastructure it created--the roads, bridges, the parks, the schools,
facilitated rural Minnesota's belated entry into the Twentieth Century.
-----Roger
Pinckney