There were some interesting comments by Michael R. Morgenstern on H-URBAN on New Deal relief: >"Hopkins sought to preserve the skills of the unemployed through work relief, a major rationale for the WPA, for future employment. As such, the remark that jobs required little skill is a bit ... well, wrong. Too many times New Deal work relief is written off as make work or generalized as simply public works projects, when actually the social utility of work relief extended from the worker to the community through the enhancement of skills and the provision of living wages, through to the establishment of specialized community programs such as the staffing of rural schools and the establishment of community centers." I disagree on the skills part (but agree with the value of the WPA etc in generating desperately needed cash & community services, and possibly also self esteem.) Hopkins did indeed talk about "preserving" skills. But neither the CWA nor the WPA (nor the CCC) did very much of that. Most workers did the most casual kind of unskilled labor. There were indeed some rather famous "arts" projects. But most of them involved very minimal skills. The writers, for example, did very little writing. One key difference between the WPA-type programs and today is job training. Since 1960 or so the US has been committed to a human capital model of employment (following the intellectual leadership of Chicago economists Gary Becker and Theodore Schulz.) The New Deal cut a deal with the labor unions: NO NEW SKILLS to be taught on relief. In a famous episode, FDR took the AFL president William Green on a tour of the first CCC camp to show that the boys would not be taught any skills that could possibly compete with union members. There were some exceptions. The NYA did try to train some youth in its own vocational ed. system--and then it slammed into the fierce opposition of the public school system, which felt seriously threatened. (NYA instructors were notoriously poor teachers.) Surely some people on WPA learned some useful job skills, though I have yet to encounter any study or even anecdotal evidence to that effect. People who left the WPA, CCC etc were stigmatized as bad workers, and until WW2 they had a very hard time finding any job. See Richard Jensen, "The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (1989) 553-83. Richard Jensen U of Illinois-Chicago [EMAIL PROTECTED] [For earlier conversation on this, send a note to Listserv@uicvm or [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET CWA TREES -- Wendy Plotkin, H-Urban Co-Moderator]