During the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. It was part of relief efforts for the unemployed during the Great Depression. The program had many positive results, though it was also attacked for various inefficiencies, especially excess costs.
By the late 1930s, appropriations for this program were cut, and as a result, so were some jobs.
In North Dakota 2,385 WPA jobs were cut by this date in 1940. In a state our size, that had real impact. The papers reported the threat of even more jobs cut here and elsewhere in the country. North Dakotans showed their support for those who had lost their jobs. Mayors from Bismarck, Grand Forks, Fargo, Minot, Jamestown, Devils Lake, Mandan, Dickinson, Williston, Grafton, Wahpeton, and Valley City joined the North Dakota League of Municipalities and Governor John Moses to protest the action.
You can hear the alarm in this quote from the Bismarck Tribune:
"Knocking on the doors of relief officials these days are many persons who, unless something is done for them--and soon--will go hungry. ...These are the people who have been deprived of their WPA jobs because of reduced government appropriations. Governor Moses, Mayor Churchill and others have directed an appeal to Washington that the WPA jobs be continued. So far as North Dakota is concerned, says the governor, it still is the middle of winter. Certainly we will be able to get no sustenance from the soil for another three months. Unless the federal government restores these WPA jobs we shall have to do something locally--in every one of North Dakota's communities--or else watch people starve. Yes, literally starve."
The writer went on to suggest that if these men could not be provided jobs, they should be "returned to the land," where they could be provided some capitol and start on their own. The article noted, "The land CAN absorb those in distress. It has healing qualities undreamed of by those who have formed the HABIT of looking to the federal treasury for assistance. And that --apparently--means all of us."
However, soon thereafter, World War II reared its ugly head in Europe; men were needed to serve; a surplus of men and shortage of jobs flipped; and the WPA program came to its official close within the next few years. And, the land remained for those to look back, to rally around--and hopefully, return to, if they came home.
Dakota Datebook by Sarah Walker
Sources:
Bismarck Tribune, March 15, 1940, p1
Bismarck Tribune, March 16, 1940, p1
Bismarck Tribune, March 19, 1940, p1
