People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
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and an advocate of “cooperative enterprise,” wrote most of the policy proposals for direct job creation programs. Emerson Ross, a Dartmouth-educated statistician who had formerly worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Corporation, was both Hopkins’s chief numbers man and a key architect of direct job creation proposals. Corrington Gill, a University of Wisconsin–trained economist of the John R. Commons school who had been studying unemployment in New York State before being hired on by FERA, provided the economic theory and empirical analysis to undergird their arguments. A French-trained social worker and white racial liberal from Alabama, Aubrey Williams contributed his training in social work and his on-the-ground experience as the chief administrator of the Alabama Relief Administration.50
Aubrey Williams, Emerson Ross, and Josephine Brown had all entered into the relief business in the early days of the Great Depression; Brown was a social worker who had been hired as Hopkins’s assistant, and Ross was a staff statistician for FERA. These FERA staffers additionally leaned on Meredith Givens, another University of Wisconsin–trained scholar, and Eveline Burns, one of the few women economists working at Columbia University, for additional firepower. While Jacob Baker and Givens and Burns had no formal training in social work, they were passionate amateurs and picked up much of the social work culture from their peers. Harry Hopkins himself was a professional social worker trained at Grinnell College, and he acted as a synthesizer and popular advocate for the ideas developed by these specialists; he was assisted by Brown, who would later write a history of FERA and its successor agencies.51
As Brown described in Public Relief, many FERA staffers came out of the new generation of social workers (both professional and amateur) in the late 1920s who imbued their work with a new “democratic philosophy of relief” that emphasized the systemic nature of unemployment, the importance of treating individuals on relief with dignity and respect, and the obligations of all citizens to help people in need.52 This view, she argued, diverged sharply from earlier philosophies of social work that had emphasized personal responsibility and individual failings. The massive failure of private industry produced a concurrent need for public provision for the poor.
Beyond this binding philosophy, three factors crafted a cohesive intellectual community out of these disparate individuals. First, they shared similar backgrounds. They were all well educated, either in the Ivy League, the Midwest, or Europe.53 Most had been trained in the social sciences or were amateur social scientists with backgrounds in engineering or statistics. Most important, they had all come of political age in the 1920s and were hence somewhat disinterested in Progressive Era debates about the state and economy.
Second, they shared the common experience of administering poverty programs during the Great Depression. As both Brown and William Bremer point out, the 1930s had a transformative effect on those in the relief fight, overthrowing existing orthodoxies in economics and social work, leaving intellectuals scrambling for new explanations and prescriptions for ending the crisis.54 Simultaneously, the unprecedented scope of economic collapse and human suffering created a deep sense of urgency and impatience with inadequate local institutions and traditional methods of relief administration.
Third, they shared a common institutional home—all of them had come to work for the federal government during the early days of the New Deal. Some of them had either worked in state relief agencies or had been hired by Hopkins to work in New York’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) prior to the New Deal. Most of them signed on to the federal government in the First Hundred Days through the FERA. These activist-intellectuals were charged with coordinating national relief policy across the country, and they had to come to grips with the inadequacies of local methods and the sheer scope of the poverty crisis. And, most important for our purposes, they were steeped in job creation experiments. Indeed, for five months immediately prior to the establishment of the CES, they had run the CWA, the first and most ambitious effort to put the unemployed back to work across the country.
As social scientists and experts, these individuals were expected not only to produce plans for action, administer programs, and evaluate outcomes—the raw stuff of “policy learning”—but also to explain to the government and themselves what they were doing or propose how it would work or how it was working, and why it should be done. The CES relied on research programs, iterative proposals, and a final report to the president, all of which provided FERA staffers the means and the opportunity to convert their explanations into an economic theory of the Great Depression and the wisdom of government intervention, and into a series of formal policy proposals that translated ideas into agencies, budgets, and boots on the ground.
Direct Job Creation Emerges
The idea of direct job creation as developed by FERA experts in 1934 was this: that in order to respond to a crippling unemployment rate of 20 percent, the federal government had to create jobs for the unemployed on a mass scale. This action would reduce unemployment rates by “force account” (i.e., by the government’s directly employing and managing formerly unemployed workers). Once the target for federal job creation was met, these workers would be assigned to various useful projects: “light” construction (chiefly of roads and public buildings), social services (especially in the realm of public health and education), arts projects, and social science surveys. FERA jobs were to include administrators for these programs as well.
The notion that the government should provide jobs first and worry about what the jobs produced afterward was a major departure from traditional ideas about public works. A long-standing tradition in American political economy since the eighteenth century, public works were usually created by local governments in times of economic decline in the hopes of absorbing some of the excess unemployed.55
Direct job creation had a different intellectual root. It emerged not among public works experts, but rather from within the brain trust of poor-relief agencies and the social workers who staffed them. From the beginning, FERA administrators had experimented with providing relief in the form of wages for work instead of handing out food baskets or grocery orders (“in-kind relief”) to the destitute unemployed. In October 1933, FERA administrators had pushed their experiment further by establishing the CWA, which offered jobs to 4.26 million unemployed without requiring workers to take the humiliating step of registering as paupers under relief regulations.56 Thus, by the time FERA officials walked into the first meeting of the CES, they already had the kernel of a program as well as a year and a half of experience.
The Economic Theory Behind the Policy
Advocates of direct job creation saw their program as grounded in a particular school of economic thought. In an internal FERA memo titled “A National Program for Economic Security,” Jacob Baker, the FERA assistant administrator for policy and one of the chief intellectual architects of FERA’s direct job creation program, laid out the essentials of their approach. It began by analyzing the causes of the Great Depression. He argued that the economic collapse was ignited by mass unemployment and evaporating demand as opposed to various other theories that ranged from monetary deflation or economic imbalance between agriculture and manufacturing to tariffs restricting trade or a lack of “business confidence.” Baker’s report opened with a comprehensive survey of employment, unemployment, and relief statistics collected by FERA bureaucrats and then focused on the ten million unemployed as the chief economic problem. In Baker’s view, “There can never be recovery as long as there are economic strata without money to buy and security to spend…. [T]hey cannot contribute to recovery, their support constitutes a constant deflationary drain.”57
Baker justified his arguments by appealing to “the purchasing power theory of development and maintenance of prosperity” that was percolating within the New Deal.58 The economy had collapsed due to a lack of purchasing power. There would be no escape from the downdraft of the Depression until the government enabled the public to get back to its normal spending patterns. As he put the matter, “Government money shall be spent when private money stops.”59 This economic theory particularly emphasized that pump priming had to be directed toward specific programs rather than spread across the normal areas of government activity: increased spending would only work by redistributing wealth to “the lowest economic strata because it is there that occurs automatically