President-elect Barack Obama's plans for combating the prolonged economic crisis may include putting people to work repairing the country's battered infrastructure.

This calls to mind the Great Depression with its Works Progress Administration, the much-maligned WPA. Many tangible souvenirs of this program created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Brain Trust remain today.

The WPA was the largest New Deal agency, funded by Congress on April 8, 1935 to find jobs for the unemployed. Headed by Harry Hopkins from 1935 to 1943, the agency employed more than 8 million people working at everything from preparing literacy programs to building roads.

Countless communities have structures constructed by the WPA. A reader reminded me that in New London stone masons and laborers were put to work building a beautiful granite wall in front of Nameaug School on Montauk Avenue.

The agency's budget from 1936 to 1939 exceeded

$7 billion. When it was closed by the World War II boom in 1943, it had the largest employment base in the country. Anyone who needed a job was eligible, and many of the discouraged jobless gave thanks for the WPA.

The program was launched during FDR's second term to combat persistent unemployment. Rather than doling out relief money, which experts believed led to moral disintegration, the WPA provided work to match the skills of the unemployed on projects designed to serve the public good and promote the participant's self-esteem.

WPA workers were paid the area's prevailing hourly wages. They worked only 30 hours a week, earning up to $1,200 per year. Jobs ranged from building roads and stone walls to painting murals in public buildings and preparing regional guide books.

Conservative critics of the Roosevelt administration charged that projects chosen were not always needed or wanted. The pace of work was not always swift, and people joked that WPA stood for “We Poke Along” as some projects slowed to a crawl. Cartoonists delighted in picturing workers leaning on shovels that were growing roots.

But diverse WPA projects are serving us today. State guide books prepared by the Federal Writers Project are collector's items now, and genealogists the country over are thankful for the crews that gathered and published cemetery records.

Intrepid souls from this group visited every cemetery in Connecticut, recording inscriptions on gravestones. These were published in our state as the Hale Collection. They are invaluable for those pursing their family roots. Many of the actual stones recorded in this collection have disappeared through the years. These are the only records left.

Other unemployed workers organized and copied Custom House records from various seaports. I found worksheets produced by those who worked on New London papers safely preserved in the library at Mystic Seaport Museum. Similar records from New Bedford were published eventually. New London's never were, but thanks to the WPA they were saved for posterity.

The WPA wasn't such a bad idea after all.

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