1929, when prosperity was at its height. It didn't mean much to the stranded communities left to perish while business went happily off to some place where wages were lower. It didn't mean much to a lot of towns that couldn't raise or borrow money to put up new school buildings or lay a new sewer.

But what private initiative was powerless to do in the heyday of prosperity, the Federal work program began to do in the depth of the depression. That work began under the CWA, continued under the State ERA's, and is going on full tilt under the WPA.

ROADS, PARKS, WHARVES, SCHOOLS, CLOTHES

In just the last 2 years, under the WPA, the "unemployed" have built 30,000 miles of new farm-to-market roads, repaired 116,000 miles more. Statistics such as these don't tell much. What one needs is the imaginative power to conjure up the innumerable farming communities to which a 10- or 15-mile stretch of mudholes has been the only way to get to town, and multiply that all over 48 States.

Every road in the country has been in need of new bridges and culverts for safety. The WPA has built 19,000 bridges and 183,000 culverts, and repaired more than you could shake a stick at.

New roads look like a raw gash in the landscape. The WPA has landscaped-beautified-fixed up-call it whatever you like nearly 40,000 miles of roadside, so that now it is a pleasure to ride along it.

Prosperity left us with a lot of old streetcar and railroad tracks scarring our streets. The WPA has torn up over 400 miles of them and smoothed the places out. In addition, along our waterfront the WPA has built 81 new docks, wharves and piers and improved 128 others.

How many new school buildings have been constructed by the WPA? Nearly 1,600. How many old school buildings repaired? Over 16,000. New hospital buildings constructed-99. Reconditioned, over 900. New courthouses, townhalls and other administrative buildings? Over 500. Old ones fixed up, over 2,000. Count in the firehouses, municipal garages, warehouses, gymnasiums, armories, and other city, county, and State buildings, and the grand national total comes to over 42,000 improved, repaired, or constructed.

And over 6,000 dangerous and unsightly old structures have been torn down-often to make room for playgrounds or new municipal housing.

Add in also over a thousand new playgrounds. Hundreds of new swimming pools. Fifteen hundred new wading pools for small children. Three thousand new public tennis courts. A hundred new public golf courses.

Nearly 800 new parks with an acreage of 22,000 acres. Old parks everywhere made more fit for public use by toilet facilities, drinking fountains, roads, parking space, picnic fireplaces, drainage, and landscaping.

These are some of the things that can be seen with the naked eye. Underground there are nearly 4,000 miles of new water mains, and over 5,000 miles of new storm and sanitary sewers.

Never mind the figures-they are impressive enough-on landing fields, runways, reservoirs and storage tanks, municipal utilities of all

kinds, small dams, levees, drainage and riprap work on streams and rivers. It has all been waiting to be done for a long time. It took the "unemployed" to do it.

CONSERVING THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

In prosperity days there never was enough time or private profit incentive to get around to conservation work. Now we are beginning to get around to it. Millions of new trees have been planted on thousands of acres by the WPA. Over a thousand miles of firebreaks have been cut in our public forests. Millions of acres of land have been cleared of noxious plants. Insect pests have been eradicated from millions of acres more. Over 800 bird and game sancturaies have been established.

People too poor to buy clothes for themselves and their children are found nowadays to a great extent decently dressed, in garments made by WPA sewing rooms. The 108 million articles of clothing for men and women, boys and girls and babies, made in the last 2 years, have gone to people on relief, people in public hospitals, orphanages and other institutions, and to refugees from our great annual floods.

To them, too, have gone the 24 million pounds of food canned and preserved on WPA projects. Also there are projects for teaching housewives how to can and preserve for themselves. WPA food also goes to WPA school lunches.

Education does not educate hungry children. The WPA, in addition to establishing 2,000 branch and 6,000 traveling librarians, has been feeding hungry children in thousands of schools. Over 128 million nourishing hot lunches have been served to schoolchildren in the last 2 years.

ART, DRAMA, MUSIC, LECTURES, RECREATION

In the late lamented prosperity era there was a contemptuous phrase for most of the United States-it was called the hinterland, a polite way of saying "the backwoods." The hinterland was supposed to be ignorant, unkempt, uncivilized. The hinterland had no music, art or drama. But who cared? It was only the hinterland.

It turns out, however, that the hinterland enjoys music, now that it has been given a chance to have some to enjoy. Over 3 million people a month attend the concerts and other performances of WPA orchestras and other musical units. Over a million people a month attend Federal theater productions, and some of these are out in the hinterland. The hinterland even enjoys art. The new WPA civic art centers, many of them far out in the hinterland, have an aggregate monthly attendance of over 2,500,000 people. WPA music and art classes, many of them scattered all over the hinterland, have a monthly attendance of nearly 200,000-young people, desperately poor, but eager for beauty.

The hinterland wants more education than it has been getting. Grownup people flock to the WPA's adult education classes. Young people want vocational training. Mothers want to learn more about homemaking. Illiterates want to learn how to read and write. Workers want to learn how to conduct meetings, citizens want to learn about public affairs, youths at work want to take correspondence courses.

Well over a million people, young and old, were enrolled in all branches of the WPA education program last fall.

One branch of this program provides demonstration nursery schools in towns that are waking up to modern educational methods. There are over 1,400 WPA nursery schools. Some day all our children will go to nursery schools. This is just a beginning.

Our communities are beginning to realize that public recreation centers need leaders and instructors. The WPA operates over 9,000 public recreational centers and assists in over 6,000 other centers. Last summer, in a sample week, over 11 million hours were spent by young people in recreational activities led by WPA recreation workers. Our towns and counties are beginning to take these recreation projects and workers over.

All this, and much more, has come out of the stupendous paradox of the depression. We had plenty of work that needed to be doneand millions of unemployed people with every kind of training and ability. It was no good telling the unemployed to go out and sell apples to one another. We put the unemployed to work for the public benefit. And now we can do what we need to have done, even if nobody profits from it except the American people.

[From the American Economic Review, June 1940]

UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITER STATES, 1930-40

(BY PAUL WEBBINK, SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL)

The 10 years just past have been marked by the most extensive and prolonged unemployment ever experienced in the United States. The active interest of American economists and commentators in the phenomenon of unemployment has in the last few years come to seem so natural and inevitable that it is easily forgotten that earlier American economic writing had traditionally dismissed unemployment as a minor and evanescent incident in the functioning of the Nation's economy. Only a little more than two decades ago Frederick C. Mills found after reviewing the existing literature that "intensive study of the problem of unemployment is a very recent development in the United States." Though, he said, "the spectacle of large numbers of able-bodied men out of work during periods of industrial inactivity" had caused "brief flurries of excitement, characterized by generalizations of hobby-ridden individuals as to the causes of the phenomenon, and by appeals for immediate remedies essentially of a superficial character," nothing even approaching a scientific analysis had yet followed.1

Passing over for the moment the question to what extent this stricture might be said to remain valid in large part today, there will be little disagreement with the opinion that his observation was still very much to the point a decade ago. In spite of a few major individual contributions with respect to labor turnover, employment regularization, and certain other special problems, American economists during most of the 1920's by and large seemed to continue to share the view current a generation before when Richard T. Ely had considered it necessary to justify the inclusion in his "Outlines of Economics" of a chapter on "Expenditures for the Poor and the Unfortunate" by saying that while "there are those who deny that the problems here discussed are economic problems," it was his view that "if these things in their cost to society, in their loss to productivity and their demoralization of organized industry, do not affect the problem of man in his relation to wealth, what thing do?" 2

Though a spurt of active concern with the causes of unemployment and with ameliorative measures developed during the social and economic ferment of 1909-15 and revived briefly in the immediate postwar years, it was short lived. The unexpected ease with which demobilization and postwar readjustment took place in the United States, and

1 Frederick C. Mills, "Contemporary Theories of Unemployment and Unemployment Relief" (New York: Columbia University, 1917), Studies in History, Economies, and Public Law, LXXIX, 1, 118.

Richard T. Ely, "Outlines of Economics" (New York; Chautauqua-Century Press, 1893), p. 334.

the prosperity of the years which followed, pretty generally submerged further efforts toward the "scientific analysis" which Mills had found wanting in 1917. The work of the individual economists who persevered in studying unemployment lacked the sustained interest of their colleagues and any continuing mechanism for integrating the results of their research; neither public nor private agencies pushed much further, for instance, the suggestions advanced by the 1921 President's Conference on Unemployement.

A reversal of the general disinterest appeared possible when, during the aftermath of the temporary upswing of unemployment in the winter of 1927-28, the initiative of a small group of economists brought about the passage of a resolution authorizing a Senate committee to investigate "the causes of unemployment and the relation to its relief" of a variety of possible governmental or private measures. The report which in March 1929 resulted from this investigation explained that difficulty had been encountered in holding the attention of the members of the committee, because of the conflicting committee meetings with which Senators had been beset, but expressed the hope that the investigation had nevertheless "contributed to an aroused interest in the subject," and that the survey made would represent "another advance" in the effort to "solve" the problem of unemployment. A rather striking résumé of the state of thought about unemployment just prior to the decade of the thirties is afforded by the "suggestions and recommendations" which the committee presented:

1. Private industry should recognize the responsibility it has to stabilize employment within the industry. The Government should encourage this effort in every way, through sponsoring national conferences, through publishing information concerning the experience had by industries in this work, and through watching every opportunity to keep the thought of stability uppermost in the minds of employers.

2. Insurance plans against unemployment should be confined to the industry itself as much as possible. There is no necessity and no place for Federal interference in such efforts at this time. If any public insurance scheme is considered, it should be left to the State legislatures to study that problem.

3. The States and municipalities should be responsible for building efficient unemployment exchanges. The Government should be responsible for coordinating the work of the States so as to give a national understanding of any condition which may rise and so as to be able to assist in any national functioning of the unemployment exchanges.

4. The existing U. S. Employment Service should be reorganized, and every employee should be placed under civil service.

5. Efforts should be made to provide an efficient system for obtaining statistics of unemployment. The first step should be taken by the Bureau of the Census in 1930, when the bureau should ascertain how many were unemployed as of a certain date and how many were not seeking employment and yet were unemployed as of that date.

6. The Government should adopt legislation without delay which would provide a system of planning public works so that they would form a reserve against unemployment in times of depression. States and municipalities and other public agencies should do likewise.

7. Further consideration might well be given to two questions, the effect had on unemployment by industrial developments such as consolidation of capital, and the necessity and advisability of providing either through private industry, through the States, or through the Federal Government, a system of old-age pensions.*

3 U.S. Congress, 70th, 2d sess., "Causes of Unemployment" (S. Rept. No. 2072, 1929, presented by James Couzens, chairman, Committee on Education and Labor), p. vi. • Ibid., p. xv.