The Boondoggle Recalled

Ain't it lucky, ain't it swell

I ran all the way home to tell

I'm so happy it's just like ringing a bell--Papa's got a job!

THOSE Depression lyrics from the musical Sing for Your Supper were first presented to the public in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration. At the same time, that agency was covering the country with highways, bridges, sidewalks, sewers and dams, giving free piano lessons to housewives and eventually providing jobs for 8.5 million Americans who otherwise would have been unemployed. Its activities have suddenly become of considerably more than antiquarian interest. The Nixon Administration has sneered that Democrats pushing public employment programs to relieve current joblessness are only "rediscovering the WPA" although at least one Administration official has suggested that it create something like the WPA itself.

Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA built or improved enough roads to girdle the globe 24 times, enough bridges to connect New Orleans with Havana, plus 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 parks and 853 airports. The WPA companion agency, the Public Works Administration, gave posterity Hoover Dam, Chicago's sewer system and the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise. In all, the two agencies disbursed $9.8 billion.

More than half of the money went for construction. But since WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins believed that man did not live by concrete alone, WPA gave work to thousands of writers, artists, musicians and actors. In addition to Sing for Your Supper, the agency's Federal Theater Project spread the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Eugene O'Neill. The Federal Writers' Project published about 1,000 books and pamphlets; its famous American Guide Series is still a mainstay. For good or ill, the Federal Art Project revived mural painting, largely to decorate public buildings. The Federal Music Project sent jobless musicians out hunting up forgotten folk songs and presenting concerts.

The WPA generally paid better than relief, but not as well as private industry. Unskilled laborers earned as little as $19 a month; professional and technical workers not much more than $94 a month. Fortunately, some WPA families were also eligible for relief payments. By law, nine out of ten WPA recruits had to pass a means test, and Congress did not want them to have too much money left for luxuries.

The WPA was violently controversial. Labor leaders denounced it as a plot to drive down wages in industry. Republicans charged that it was a plot by the Roosevelt Administration to buy votes. Most of all, the agency was damned as a gigantic boondoggle; in fact, that word, which until then referred to leather handicrafts made by Boy Scouts, was turned into a pejorative word by WPA critics in 1935.

The WPA also inspired some awful jokes (sample: a WPA worker sued the Government when the shovel he was leaning on broke). Still it gave eating money in hard times to some Americans who later became famous, including Actors Orson Welles and Burt Lancaster and Artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Oh yes, and a fellow named Richard Nixon earned 350 an hour from the National Youth Administration, a division of the WPA, for doing research in the Duke University law library.

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