WPA

April 8, 1935: FDR Forms the Works Progress Administration | The Nation

"At just 22, a very young (and avowedly Communist) Jimmy Wechsler argued in The Nation (December 18, 1937) that the view that the WPA’s workers were mere ‘boondogglers’—and that the program was only ‘nourishing parasites’—was wrong. He carefully compiled statistics on how much the program had already achieved: ‘29,000 miles of new roads, 1,099 school buildings, 1,440 recreational centers, and 3,350 miles of new trunk and lateral sewers,’ and so on."