>I don't have the material at my fingertips any longer, but I know the
>sneers at WPA as "make-work" are very wrong for two reasons. One is that
>make-work (unless its solitary) is certainly better than isolation. The
>other is that an enormous amount of WPA work was "make-work" only in the
>sense that it wouldn't have produced a profit for a private concern but
>was in fact of enormous public benefit.
My father grew up poor in an Irish immigrant family in New Jersey. As a teen, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps because he couldn't find a "real" job in the midst of the Depression. He often tells me how much he loved the experience - working on what we'd call today environmental projects (god knows how good they were, but that's beside this point), earning $ to be sent back to his family, and having something to do. Rightwingers would scorn it as makework, which it was according to capitalist principles, but it provided money for a family that badly needed it and something meaningful and useful for him to do when an unsatisfying idleness was the only alternative.
Doug