The Infinite Dividend: The WPA · Episode 8 of 13 · 38 min
The Hot Lunch: How the WPA Became America's First Safety Net
The WPA was built to give jobs, but it hired cooks, nurses, teachers and librarians off the relief rolls and put them to work at what they knew. The result was an unplanned welfare agency: roughly half a billion hot school lunches, nursery schools, public-health nursing, literacy classes and bookmobiles. The school lunch became permanent in 1946.
Who's who
- Harry Hopkins+10 more episodesWPA administrator who put service workers on the payroll
Timeline
- May 6, 1935Executive Order 7034 creates the WPA with a mandate for employment, not services
- 1936-1937One tally reports 80 million meals in 18 months to about a million undernourished children
- Late 1930sSchool lunches reach about 500,000 meals a day in some 10,000 schools
- June 30, 1943The WPA is liquidated as wartime employment absorbs the unemployed
- 1946Congress establishes the National School Lunch Program
Still debated
Calling the WPA the first national welfare agency is a framing, since it delivered services as a byproduct of work relief. The 1946 school lunch law also grew from surplus-disposal and wartime nutrition concerns, so the WPA is a principal ancestor, not the sole cause.
← PreviousFootlights and Symphonies: The Federal Theatre Project Congress KilledNext →Sewing Rooms and Human Computers: The Women and White-Collar WPA
