Michael Moore just said FDR was a democratic socialist.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

119. Government-funded projects aren't "socialism" just because

they're government-funded. Just about all governments everywhere fund public works projects (that's why they call them public works projects). There's also the fact that these days large parts of most of those projects are subcontracted to private companies.

WPA was simply an emergency measure to stimulate the economy during the Depression by providing jobs for unemployed people to build roads, bridges and other public structures. Full employment, which was reached in 1942 because of WWII (and the WPA was then disbanded), was not the goal of the WPA; rather, it was intended to provide one paid job for each family in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment. If the intent had been to create a permanent socialist economic structure the WPA wouldn't have been disbanded as soon as unemployment was no longer a serious problem. It's a huge mistake to call anything funded by the government socialism. Even during the Depression the government wasn't controlling the means of production and distribution; all it was doing was providing a temporary jobs program. It was more like how the government bailed out the auto companies after the crash of 2008.