FDR Launches Civil Works: Jobs for 4 Million

Franklin Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration on November 8, 1933, ordering relief administrator Harry Hopkins to put four million unemployed Americans to work before winter. Hopkins, operating from a desk in a hallway, achieved the target in 30 days, launching one of the most rapid labor mobilizations in American history during the worst economic crisis the country had faced. The CWA was born of frustration with existing relief programs. Direct cash payments to the unemployed, while preventing starvation, were demoralizing and politically unpopular. Hopkins and Roosevelt believed work was superior to handouts, both for the dignity of recipients and for the productive value of their labor. The CWA departed from earlier programs by paying market wages rather than subsistence rates, employing workers directly rather than through state agencies, and hiring without means testing. By January 1934, the CWA employed 4.2 million workers on over 180,000 projects. Workers built or improved 255,000 miles of roads, constructed 40,000 schools, laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe, and built nearly 500 airports. The program also employed 50,000 teachers for rural and adult education, and hired artists, writers, and musicians through cultural projects that foreshadowed the later Works Progress Administration. The CWA cost roughly $200 million per month, an enormous sum that alarmed fiscal conservatives. Roosevelt shut it down in March 1934 after just four months, worried about political backlash and the possibility that government employment would become permanent. The CWA's brief existence nonetheless demonstrated that direct federal hiring could reduce unemployment rapidly and produce tangible public improvements. Hopkins applied the lessons when he built the far larger WPA in 1935.