Civil Works Administration

[CONTENT TITLE]: Civil Works Administration

[CONTENT]:

Accomplishments
– CWA workers laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe
– CWA workers built or improved 255,000 miles of roads
– CWA workers built or improved 40,000 schools
– CWA workers built or improved 3,700 playgrounds
– CWA workers built or improved nearly 1,000 airports

Opposition
– Critics argued that the CWA provided nothing of permanent value
– Roosevelt decided to end the program and replace it with the WPA
– The WPA aimed to provide long-term benefits for society
– The CWA was criticized for not creating permanent jobs
– Some believed that the CWA only provided short-term relief for the unemployed

Related Programs
– Works Progress Administration
– Civilian Conservation Corps
– Public Works Administration

References
– Peters, Charles; Noah, Timothy (Jan 26, 2009), Wrong Harry – Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months, Slate
– Roger D. Hardaway, The New Deal at the Local Level: The Civil Works Administration in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, North Dakota History, 1991, Vol. 58 Issue 2, pp 20–30
– Harold L. Ickes, Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: The First Thousand Days 1933–1936 (1953) p. 256
– Badger, Anthony J. Doles and Jobs: Welfare. in The New Deal (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1989) pp. 190–244.
– Bremer, William W. Along the American Way: The New Deals Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed, Journal of American History Vol. 62, No. 3 (Dec., 1975), pp. 636–652 in JSTOR

Further reading
– Hopkins, June. Harry Hopkins: Sudden hero, brash reformer (Springer, 2016).
– Lewis, Michael. No Relief From Politics: Machine Bosses and Civil Works. Urban Affairs Quarterly 30.2 (1994): 210–226.
– Lyon, Edwin A. A new deal for southeastern archaeology (University of Alabama Press, 1996).
– Neumann, Todd C., Price V. Fishback, and Shawn Kantor. The dynamics of relief spending and the private urban labor market during the New Deal. Journal of Economic History 70.1 (2010): 195–220.
– Schwartz, Bonnie Fox. The Civil Works Administration, 1933–1934: The Business of Emergency Employment in the New Deal (1984), a standard scholarly history Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration

Civil Works Administration (Wikipedia)

The Civil Works Administration (CWA) was a short-lived job creation program established by the New Deal during the Great Depression in the United States to rapidly create mostly manual-labor jobs for millions of unemployed workers. The jobs were merely temporary, for the duration of the hard winter of 1933–34. President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled the CWA on November 8, 1933, and put Harry L. Hopkins in charge of the short-term agency.

The CWA was a project created under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The CWA created construction jobs, mainly improving or constructing buildings and bridges. It ended on March 31, 1934, after spending $200 million a month and giving jobs to four million people.