People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
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Tugwell, as well as “compulsory standards for wages and hours, guaranteed annual wage plans, and wide extension of unionization.”76 This intellectual work was a key part of coalition building; by explaining how direct job creation could complement other New Deal projects, Gill provided Williams and other FERA staffers with arguments they could use in conversation with the “spending faction,” key advisors to the NRA and AAA, and significant sections of the Labor Department.
Gill worked hard to ensure that direct job creation projects would not undercut private manufacturing and displace workers from the labor market. He looked to the empirical data to argue that “inasmuch as these projects would not have been undertaken in the immediate future through the regular channels,” the decline in private spending meant that “displacement of the labor forces of private contractors is not involved.”77 From a more traditional economic theory perspective, Gill noted that conservative complaints were based on the “lump of work doctrine” rejected even by neoclassical economics. Finally, Gill pointed to direct job creation as an engine of economic growth. It was a “failure to utilize the productive services of idle men,” he argued. “[It] … has cost us at least 200 billion dollars in income which we might have produced but didn’t.”78
As much as his economic arguments sought to place direct job creation on a sound theoretical platform, Gill was actually one of the more conservative FERA thinkers. He maintained that the old “security wage” derived from poor relief should be maintained in any new program in order to reduce dependency and forestall the movement of private-sector employees to government employment. Wage differentials should not become incentives to seek public employment. Gill maintained that FERA’s program should concentrate on relief clients, thereby maintaining the means test and limitation of jobs to heads of households.79 What is more, in contrast to most of his compatriots, he did not believe in the absolute right to a job as he thought such a guarantee was beyond the fiscal means of the federal government.
Nonetheless, even the most conservative of the FERA’s policy experts placed direct job creation at the heart of New Deal economic policy, a keystone of social Keynesianism. Gill argued that since “normal times have ceased to mean full employment … others besides marginal workers will be in need” of publicly provided work.80 If the economy continued to lag below full employment, he was prepared to abolish the means test that he had argued for elsewhere: “Mr. Hopkins has said that ‘we should reach a concept in America where the able-bodied unemployed are entitled to a job as a matter of right.’ … Abolition of the needs basis of hiring [and means testing], therefore, may be regarded as a desideratum which it has been impossible to achieve thus far because of … necessity.”81
The major dividing line over the means tests and the right to a job was, at least as Gill saw it, less an ideological issue than a practical matter. However, for people like Baker, the issue was very much an ideological dividing line. For Baker, fundamental social rights were at stake. The United States needed to promise a new social contract between worker-citizens and the state—one founded on a reciprocal exchange of work for wages. In a memo titled “A Program for Social and Economic Policy,” he wrote, “We, therefore, propose that the government assume the obligation of providing the opportunity for gainful work to all its citizens able and willing to work,” even as he proposed the elimination of federal direct relief.82
A common criticism of New Deal job programs now and in the past is that they failed to employ everyone who needed a job. This was not by design. Gill, Baker, and others envisioned a much more comprehensive program, embracing anywhere from 3.5 million workers (roughly 35 percent of the total unemployed) to eight million workers (roughly 80 percent of the same population).83 Their eyes were far bigger than the budgets that were available to them, but this was not for lack of imagination. Moreover, with the exception of Gill, who thought of direct job reaction as an emergency stopgap, the rest of the FERA brain trust was moving in a more fundamental direction: permanent direct job creation and eventually the fulfillment of a sacred principle that every American has the right to a job.
Origins of an Ideology
In the minds of FERA staffers, direct job creation was simultaneously an economic policy and an ideology. As administrators of programs that had to register millions of people on relief, collect data on the programs they were enrolled in, and find a way to provide sustenance for everyone, FERA officials focused primarily on the needs of poor people. They used experiential data, as sociologists might have used statistical or ethnographic data, to elaborate on an ideological conviction that they knew what the poor wanted. In memo after memo, supporters of direct job creation argued that “work is the form of assistance desired by the unemployed themselves…. [T]he unemployed themselves want assistance in the form of work…. [W]hat the workers really want is continued employment.”84 FERA officials pointed to their experience in the CWA, when seven million unemployed workers who had refused to take relief lined up to apply for government work in the winter of 1933, as proof of the overwhelming preference of unemployed people for work over relief.85 Ordinary people supported a conservative self-help doctrine that “employment is the best cure for employment” and “work is the best antidote for poverty,” converting these cultural precepts into a populist demand for affirmation of the popular will.86
Direct job creation advocates pointed to the psychological and social benefits to the unemployed individual to bolster their policy recommendations. Just as they believed that relief had destroyed morale and allowed skills of the trade and habits of self-reliance to wither away, FERA officials believed that direct job creation would restore morale and self-respect and also maintain skills. “Projects must be planned to use the skills of the workers in need … but also the rehabilitation and retraining of persons whose ordinary means of livelihood has permanently disappeared,” FERA officials argued.87 Psychological well-being was also necessary for real economic security: “the worker … should feel that, both in terms of security and maintenance of skill, he gets something besides the wages paid…. [E]ach worker should be sure of his job.”88 This emotional sense of economic security would help combat the universal fear of destitution and helplessness that characterized the early 1930s.89
At the same time, FERA staffers had not yet reached a consensus. Still in the process of formulating their own position, they were evolving from a poor-relief mentality to a destination not yet fully elaborated. Indeed, one of their first priorities at the outset of the CES was still welfare reform.90 “It is proposed to abolish direct relief for the unemployed,” argued one memo. “Give no relief for the able-bodied,” urged another.91 In its place, FERA administrators urged a direct job creation program as a better alternative. At the same time, Eveline Burns, an economist hired by FERA to conduct research on direct job creation, argued that, given public hesitancy regarding federal intrusion into the economy, the administrative difficulties of bringing enough projects online, and the need to preserve the dominance of the private sector in a capitalist society, “work must be regarded as a desirable form of relief which cannot, however, be extended to all the unemployed.”92 The same sentiment was shared by Ross and Givens in other reports.93
In contrast, other staffers (including Baker and Alan Johnstone) argued that “work relief” had to be as large as possible in order to have the necessary impact on purchasing power across the entire economy. Even FERA officials who believed that direct job creation could not cover all the unemployed emphasized that it had to be deployed as a countercyclical measure on a large scale. “As a permanent policy, the federal government, without guaranteeing employment, should continuously interest itself in maintaining a high level of employment,” argued direct job creation advocates on the CES’s Executive Staff.94 Over on the Technical Board, Williams and others further emphasized that “the first effort of government should be to … encourage maximum … employment.”95
Thus within the CES, FERA staffers were doing more than fighting over social insurance—they were developing an entirely new policy program, an economic theory to explain it, and an ideology to justify it. The process was not complete. FERA officials differed between themselves and were not always internally consistent on major issues such as whether jobs should be limited to heads of