History HW - Write 2 page paper,answer 13 questions, create complex thesis per instructions

The Second New Deal also attempted to help sharecroppers, migrant workers, and many other poor farmers. The Resettlement Administration, created by exec- utive order in 1935, provided monetary loans to small farmers to buy land. In 1937, the agency was replaced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which loaned more than $1 billion to help tenant farmers become landholders and established camps for migrant farm workers, who had traditionally lived in squalid housing.

The FSA hired photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans to take many pictures of rural towns and farms and their inhabitants. The agency used their photographs to create a pictorial record of the difficult situation in rural America.

Roosevelt Extends Relief As part of the Second New Deal, the Roosevelt administration and Congress set up a series of programs to help youths, professionals, and other workers. One of the largest was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), headed by Harry Hopkins, the former chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

The WPA set out to create as many jobs as possible as quickly as possible. Between 1935 and 1943, it spent $11 billion to give jobs to more than 8 million workers, most of them unskilled. These workers built 850 airports throughout the country, constructed or repaired 651,000 miles of roads and streets, and put up more than 125,000 public buildings. Women workers in sewing groups made 300 million garments for the needy. Although criticized by some as a make-work pro- ject, the WPA produced public works of lasting value to the nation and gave work- ing people a sense of hope and purpose. As one man recalled, “It was really great. You worked, you got a paycheck and you had some dignity. Even when a man raked leaves, he got paid, he had some dignity.”

In addition, the WPA employed many professionals who wrote guides to cities, collected historical slave narratives, painted murals on the walls of schools

This photograph by Margaret Bourke-White shows people waiting for food in a Kentucky bread line in 1937.

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