Relief, reform, and youth: The National Youth Administration in Ohio, 1935--1943

This dissertation examines the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Ohio between the years of 1935 and 1943. A relief agency of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the NYA provided financial relief and training to young people aged 16 to 24. Its major endeavors were aid programs for high school and college students and several measures to provide relief and training to unemployed young people who had left school. As war became eminent in the late 1930s, the NYA shifted its focus to training young people for defense work. This gradually became the NYA's primary mission until the agency was abolished in 1943.; Not only were young people over-represented among the unemployed during the Great Depression, but many adults worried that they were especially susceptible to either apathy or radicalism. Accordingly, the NYA contained both economic and social goals centered on helping to integrate young people into their communities as responsible citizens. Such broad-minded goals made the NYA unique among relief agencies as it sought to not only help the needy but to bring about greater equality of opportunity.; The test case of Ohio shows that the NYA's reformist impulses met with varied degrees of success. In almost every case the NYA became popular among the people and institutions it served because its de-centralized administration provided local control to college, high school, and local officials. Still, the ability of what was primarily a relief program to enact reforms was limited by the lack of opportunities available in many communities. This eventually led the NYA to become more centralized and to work outside of traditional local channels. Only with the general economic recovery brought on by defense spending was the NYA truly able to provide training that would lead directly to jobs; but by that time the agency's broader goals were beginning to be undermined by the needs of wartime efficiency. Still, the NYA helped thousands of young Americans finish their education or gain valuable training and was especially effective at providing opportunities to previously ignored groups, especially women and African Americans.