WPA Signs

Above: U.S. Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut, August, 1940. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: Sewage disposal plant, Wilmington, Delaware, December, 1939. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: WPA roadblock, Wilmington, Delaware, December, 1939. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: At a WPA-built stadium, Perry, Oklahoma, May, 1940. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: National defense road project, Ayer, Massachusetts, December, 1941. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: Farm-to-Market Road, Maryland, February, 1938. Photo courtesy of the University of Maryland College Park Archives.

Above: Making a sign in Paterson, New Jersey, ca. 1935-1943. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Above: WPA bridge project, Prince George's County, Maryland, May, 1936. Photo courtesy of the University of Maryland College Park Archives.

Above: In color. Image courtesy of the National Archives.

A "momentous and noisy groping for the light"

"At the beginning of the fourth year of gloom [the Great Depression] the people voted. The vote took cognizance of the way things were. Their vote said: Help these people. It said: Help all these poor wretched, cold, and hungry people... Give food to the hungry ones and clothes to those who are naked; give work to the idle ones and don't forget to give fuel to the ones who are cold. By all means, it said, give to these people from the substance of their country. And while you're about it, it said, give a hand also to those who are only half starving, half freezing, half idle. Now, it said, go to it. And there presently began in the capital of this nation such a vast commotion that men may never know within the lifetimes of those now living just exactly what happened - a sprawling, squabbling, stumbling, momentous and noisy groping for the light. Two years passed, and from this mighty hubbub there emerged a thought which set groups of men to work from one ocean to the other, working under small red-white-and-blue placards, working on things that amounted almost to a catalogue of things men can do."

--Jerome Ellison, The Dam, New York: Random House, 1941, p. 49