A NEW DEAL FOR WORKERS' EDUCATION: THE WORKERS' SERVICE PROGRAM UNDER THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF ADMINISTRATION AND THE WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION, 1933-1942 (WPA, FERA)

This study documents and analyzes the workers' education and workers' service activities initiated and developed nationwide under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) from 1933 to 1942. It traces the background of workers' education in the United States until 1933 and the adult education activities started and sponsored by the FERA and WPA Emergency Education Division during the New Deal years.

Under the directorship of Hilda Worthington Smith who had been Dean of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers from 1921 to 1933, the workers' education activities during the New Deal decade reached approximately one million persons through classes, conferences, teacher training institutes, educational camps for unemployed women and other innovative activities. The program aimed to develop informed citizens; it also aided in developing leaders for fledgling unions formed during the widespread organizing drives in the mass production industries in the late 1930s. It served to enhance the loyalty of workers to the New Deal administration through classes and other information programs on new social policies and new legislation.

Although the program was attacked for its political implications and suffered diminished support in the late 1930s even from within the New Deal administration, it was the most extensive workers' education program ever developed in the United States. It let to a national campaign for a Labor Education Extension Bill, which was conducted from 1942 to 1950, and made significant contributions to the development of union and university-sponsored labor education programs, adult and workers' education teaching methods, and to the careers of many program participants who became rank-and-file leaders and/or staff members of many unions and related organizations.