"Honorable Discharge"

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 $10 1/2 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, libraries, hospitals, police stations, armories, courthouses, museums), and enlarging and improving 800 airports. WPA also published a series of state guidebooks, decorated many a public building with murals, restored many a historic shrine, sponsored tuberculosis research.

Said Franklin Roosevelt: "[It] has reached a creative hand into every county in the nation . . . added to the national wealth, repaired the wastage of depression and strengthened the country to bear the burden of war. ... [It has] earned an honorable discharge." But in asking that all projects be ended by next Feb. 1 or as soon thereafter as possible (there are still 350,000 on the rolls), President Roosevelt did not end work relief as a U.S. institution. Said he: "The knowledge and experience of this organization will be of great assistance in the consideration of a well-rounded public-works program for the postwar period."

*Said Franklin Roosevelt in Jan. 1936: "If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the people for many years to come.

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