196 ChaPter^4
that time at $5 billiion in 1935 and $13 billion overall. An immense number
of people benefitted from the numerous, over 250,000, WPA projects. Under
the WPA, the government built 110,000 public buildings—including bridges,
post offices, courthouses, hospitals and waterworks, 600 airports, 500,000
miles of road, almost 6000 new schools, 9300 auditoriums, 1000 libraries,
2300 stadiums, 52 fairgrounds and rodeo arenas, over 1600 parks, 3000 play-
grounds, over 800 swimming pools, and countless handball and tennis courts,
botanical gardens, horseshoe pits, ice-skating rinks, golf courses, and ski jumps.
The WPA taught over a million Americans to read and even funded well
known cultural figures like Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Mark
Rothko, and Orson Welles in its Federal Art Project. In one of its most endur-
ing contributions, the WPA paid interviewers to travel throughout the South
and collect “slave narratives,” that is to conduct oral histories with every living
former slave they could find, thereby giving us our greatest understanding of
slave life yet. The WPA, however, employed few Blacks, and few women for
that matter. On the whole, however, it provided millions of poor AmericansFIGuRE 4-11 WPA bridge