The Civil Works Administration, CWA, was started on November 8, 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt; he put Harry Hopkins in charge of the program. The CWA was ment to give people jobs just to get some money in their pocket. There was about four million people in the organization, roughly 3% of the population, and it cost the goverment over to one billion dollars. The jobs were over the winter and people would shovel snow or do anything just to get some money after the stock market crash happened. The workers of the CWA put in 12 million feet of sewer pipes, worked on 255,000 miles of road, 40,000 schools, 3,700 playgrounds, 250,000 outhouses for rural American, and worked on 1,000 airports.
So with as much good as the CWA provided towards America it was ended in March of 1934. So it only lasted about five months, but was it worth it? It cost the government over one billion dollars, but was it worth it? I think it was; it helped 4 million Americans start to overcome the financial problems that they were facing. The reason why the CWA ened really boils down to two men, Al Smith and Harold Ickes. These two men were huge protesters of the organization since it was costing way over the $400,000,000 budget that was originally set for it. I see were they were coming from, but then again in order to bring people out of the troubled spots something had to happen to help.Harry L. Hopkins was the leader of the Civil Works Administration. He was basically FDR's go to guy in everything. He lived in Iowa most of his life which I found interesting, but anyways. He was involved with many programs that the government had going on, mainly with social things. No doubt he tried to keep the CWA alive because he thought it was a good organization. In WWII many people thought he was a spy or had relations with spies. He talked to a lot of people in Russia and they listed him as a informational source; it was never proved that what he told them helped or hurt the U.S. though.
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