Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)
By the winter of 1932–33, at the depths of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate had soared to at least
one-fourth of the labor force. Chief among the priorities of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal
administration upon talking office in March 1933 was the provision of financial assistance—or relief—to
unemployed Americans. On May 12, 1933, Congress created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration
(FERA) and authorized it to distribute $500 million to state and local governments. A week later Roosevelt
named Harry Hopkins to head the new agency. The FERA was an important part of the First New Deal enacted
during the first Hundred Days of the Roosevelt administration and of the New Deal's efforts to support
unemployed and impoverished Americans until economic recovery could provide jobs.
Unlike the relief funds authorized by the 1932 Relief and Reconstruction Act of the Hoover presidency, the
FERA granted rather than lent money to states and localities. Of the $500 million authorized by Congress, half
would be granted directly on the basis of need and half would be spent on a matching basis of one federal dollar
for every three state dollars. Hopkins, who had headed New York's Temporary Emergency Relief
Administration when Roosevelt was governor of New York, was from the beginning a key adviser and policy
maker in Roosevelt's administration and the central figure in New Deal relief policy.
Hopkins implemented the FERA with dispatch, spending some $5 million in his first two hours on the job and
hundreds of millions more in the next weeks and months. Dispensing the money as quickly and flexibly as
possible and having to rely upon an underdeveloped and inexperienced organizational structure, FERA invited
criticism from opponents for inefficiency—and for the inevitable political use, especially by local officials, of
relief spending. Hopkins and the FERA encountered additional difficulties in the reluctance of state officials to
provide the money for matching grants. Sometimes that was because state constitutions forbade such spending
or because poorer states simply lacked the fiscal capacity; but it was also because of fiscal conservatism and a
disinclination to provide money to what some officials thought were the "undeserving" poor who were
supposedly responsible for their plight despite the collapse of the economy. Racial and ethnic biases, not only in
the South, also shaped distribution of FERA funds at the local level. To circumvent such resistance, to avoid
inequity, and to reduce local political use of FERA funds, Hopkins increasingly relied on direct grants—and
then often encountered criticism that the federal government was interfering with state policymaking and
subverting the American federal system.
At first, the FERA emphasized payments directly to the poor (the "dole"), which seemed essential to getting it to
the unemployed needy as quickly as possible. But the process often seemed demeaning or degrading in a
number of ways. After presenting themselves at a public "intake" room for screening, potential recipients had to
undergo a "means" test whereby officials would closely examine income and spending habits prior to certifying
applicants for aid. Many FERA clients received only food or clothing or specific food orders instead of cash to
spend as they desired. But while such direct relief disbursements in cash or kind continued for otherwise
unemployable recipients (the aged, handicapped, and dependent children, for example), FERA funds
increasingly went for work relief projects, which would hire the unemployed for such projects as constructing
roads and buildings, and sometimes hired middle-class professionals as well. In this way, the FERA continued
projects begun by the Civil Works Administration in the winter of 1933–34 and anticipated the efforts of the
New Deal's major work relief program, the Works Progress Administration, begun in 1935.
FERA projects erected some 5,000 public buildings and 7,000 bridges, built nearly a quarter million miles of
new roads, and taught an estimated 1.5 million adults how to read. Project workers had to be on relief rolls and
undergo the means test, and received on average only some $6.50 per week. Despite its limitations and
difficulties, and the criticisms of politics, inefficiency, and useless but expensive "boondoggle" projects, the
FERA was an important agency that helped hundreds of thousands of Americans and marked the federal
government's acceptance of direct relief to the unemployed. It was phased out after the WPA, the Social
Security Act, and other programs of the Second New Deal of 1935 further defined the emerging American
welfare state.
Text Citation:
Jeffries, John W. "Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)." In Jeffries, John W., Katherine Liapis Segrue, and Gary B. Nash, eds.
Encyclopedia of American History: The Great Depression and World War II, 1929 to 1945, vol. 8. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2003. American History
Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com (accessed July 11, 2007).