Franklin Roosevelt last week killed off one of his favorite projects and a favorite target of New Deal critics: the Works Progress Administration. In a country at war, faced with a manpower shortage, work relief is unnecessary.
In seven and one-half years, WPA had spent $10½ billions and employed 8,000,000 persons with some 30,000,000 dependents. Long the butt of cartoonists, its more frivolous projects made the word "boondoggle"* an American idiom. But the bulk of its funds were spent in constructing 644,000 miles of roads, 77,000 bridges, 116,000 buildings (schools, city halls,...
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