Three veterans' work camps existed in the Florida Keys before the hurricane: #1 on Windley Key, #3 and #5 on Lower Matecumbe Key. The camp payrolls for August 30 listed 695 veterans. They were employed in a project to complete the Overseas Highway connecting the mainland with Key West. The camps, including seven in Florida and four in South Carolina, were established by Harry L. Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). In the autumn of 1934 the problem of transient veterans in Washington, D.C. "threatened ... to become acute and did become acute in January." Facilities in the capital were inadequate to handle the large numbers of veterans seeking jobs. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Mr. Hopkins and Robert Fechner, director of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to discuss solutions. He "suggested the Southern camp plan and approved the program worked out by Mr. Hopkins for their establishment and maintenance." The VA identified eligible veterans. FERA offered grants to the states for their construction projects if they would accept the veterans as laborers. The state Emergency Relief Administrations were responsible for the daily management of the camps. In practice the state ERAs were very much the creatures of FERA, to the extent of handpicking the administrators. That only two states participated was perhaps attributable to the then popular impression that the transient veterans were "diseased" bums and hoboes. It was a characterization enthusiastically fed by the media. In August 1935 both "Time Magazine" and "The New York Times" published sensational articles. On August 15, 1935, Hopkins announced the termination of the veterans work program and closure of all the camps.