In the 30s they hired people to build stuff. They hired artists to create public art as well - Woody Guthrie was paid to write songs, for example.

We definitely could do similar now. Lots of infrastructure needs updating. We could accelerate the move to green energy (like the Green New Deal proposal). We could also hire a lot of people to do contact tracing until the end of the pandemic - this could include folks to do datamining, etc.