People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
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a right to a job should be created.96 In mid-1934, they were still negotiating with each other over how distinctive this new program would be from what came before.
FERA officials would use the very mutability of these ideas when debating proponents of other programs. To promoters of social insurance, direct job creation advocates would argue that the UI program would not provide enough of a demand boost to restore the economy, a point familiar to their interlocutors who often relied on the same argument. In dealing with advocates for social assistance and mothers’ pensions, they would use the language of social work to argue that direct job creation offered more income and greater security than social assistance ever could, and that it provided the kind of psychological support that poor relief could not. Locked in battle with economic planners, the FERA administration claimed that their policies could help government planners manage long-term patterns of employment and demand. This rhetorical fluidity would be crucial in the next phase of the CES’s deliberations.97
Initial Conflicts
The first skirmish with the CES revolved around the scope of its policy remit and the breadth of empirical knowledge it needed to gather. Social surveys would serve as the basis for the separate reports issued by the Executive Staff, the Technical Board, and their specialized subcommittees. In a series of memos titled “Basic Questions of Policy” and “Possible General Approaches,” Edwin Witte, the executive director, attempted to steer the direction of knowledge gathering toward social insurance. Witte set forth what he considered to be the key questions about the economic security program that would have to be researched first. Unsurprisingly, these questions focused exclusively on social insurance: should it be funded by payroll taxes or from general funds, should the system be federal or combine federal and state administration, and so forth.98 He hoped to dominate the discussion of options such that the deliberations would become a debate between his own Wisconsin plan and the Ohio plan.
He went a step further by downplaying the role that alternative options could play in a system of economic security. Witte engaged in a preemptive defense by listing what he perceived to be direct job creation’s flaws. “Even if it [direct job creation] were attained,” he argued, “it would not eliminate the necessity for other methods of protection against the hazards of accident, sickness, old age, and death.”99 FERA staff would no doubt have agreed with this, except Witte did not extend the same standard to his own proposals for UI (which fewer than half of the workforce would be eligible for). Likewise, there was more than a little hypocrisy in Witte’s argument that workers’ compensation and health insurance were necessary, given that these were both rival projects that Witte viewed as inferior options to UI.
Above all, he argued that even if direct job creation were part of the solution, it could never be the main chance. Why? Because, the executive director argued, it “would very likely prove quite costly,” and employers would oppose prevailing wages and the production of usable goods.100 The traces of Witte’s push to have social insurance dominate the thrust of research efforts are visible in the legwork of the CES. Of 116 reports written prior to the passage of the Social Security Act, 65, or slightly more than half, dealt with some form of social insurance, with 36 reports devoted to UI specifically.101
Against this current, direct job creation advocates pushed for a different research agenda. In a memo titled “Outline of Work,” Emerson Ross laid out a strategy that emphasized gathering statistics favorable to including direct job creation, including “estimates of unemployment and/or employment as far back as possible, present unemployment by industries … emergency government employment, PWA [Public Works Administration], CCC [Civilian Conservation Core], CWA, [FERA] Work Program.”102 By focusing attention on unemployment as the major crisis of the Great Depression, FERA officials believed that their research would point the committee toward the conclusion that more direct job creation was essential. Ross labored over preexisting data sets collected by FERA’s Research Division on relief applications and relief clients, as well as surveys of poverty and unemployment conducted by the CWA’s research projects to set up a comparison between relief and work as rival options.103
To underline the contrast between direct job creation and public works, Ross pushed for statistics on the “relative importance of government construction programs … in relation to total volume of construction,” contrasting the slow pace of PWA construction against the CWA’s sterling track record of a large “number of employed” compared to “wages earned [and] … costs of materials.”104 Finally, Ross argued that studies of “the present operations of each of the following agencies” would be necessary “to arrive at a judgment as to their relationships with the new program” of direct job creation. Ross believed that these studies would lend weight to his proposal to establish a permanent Public Welfare Department that would unify all aspects of direct job creation, including under one roof offshoot programs such as the CCC or placement bureaus such as the United States Employment Service.105
Naturally, these two research agendas collided. Ross wrote to Witte, arguing, “I think it would be useful to study the methods by which other countries have met the unemployment problem as a whole rather than simply by variations in unemployment insurance.”106 Ross thus positioned FERA on the side of all those policy advocates whom Witte was attempting to exclude from research funding and policy discussions, thus building valuable goodwill for FERA among the members of the Technical Board and advisory committees from organizations outside of the Labor Department—the raw material for future alliances.107
Ross increased the pressure by also insisting on more FERA research projects, arguing that “work programs should be incorporated in addition to social insurance measures” in CES research.108 “Equal time” demands won space for some fifteen reports on direct job creation.109 This was far and away the largest amount of research done by any noninsurance group. By contrast, Children’s Bureau advocates and health insurance advocates only managed to include three reports on their respective policies in the CES’s research program.110 Insofar as reports can be used as proxies for the overall flow of argument within the CES (as official minutes tended to report only final decisions, with little mention of deliberations), direct job creation advocates succeeded in maintaining a significant place in the conversation despite opposition.
Witte’s hostility may well have been exacerbated by efforts of direct job creation advocates to borrow ideas and rhetoric from other groups on the committee. In a proposal titled “A Public Work Program as a Means of Economic Security,” submitted as part of the first round of reports, Ross presented a system of direct job creation that focused on UI’s shortcomings. “Any work program that may be devised must of necessity be more comprehensive than a program of unemployment insurance,” he recommended, at least in part because “the work program would provide for those not covered by the unemployment insurance plan” in light of its stringent eligibility standards.111 Ross joined this emphasis on universality (which appealed to advocates for more universal social insurance programs like the Ohio plan) with arguments that would appeal to the more conservative members of the committee: work projects like roads, schools, and bridges would ensure that the New Deal’s program for the unemployed would return some value to the taxpayer.112
Ross appealed to the members of the “spending caucus” by relying on purchasing power theory. Demand stimulation was important to their analysis of the Depression and he found a way to incorporate it into the direct job creation agenda. His comments about eligibility pressed on the biggest weakness of the UI approach: its failure to provide economic security to blacks, women, the long-term unemployed, and all other workers not covered due to industry or firm size. Job creation was open and hence it appealed to critics of the Wisconsin plan, to social workers, and to labor unionists.113 Most trenchant, Ross pointed to the resonance of jobs in shaping public opinion: UI offered a dole in a political culture dismissive of “handouts,” whereas direct job creation offered work, which would be viewed more favorably by citizens. Social science surveys and FERA interviews provided ample support for the notion that the poor themselves were mainstream believers in the value of work over relief. As part of this rhetorical shift, Ross also sought to distance direct job creation from poor relief by gradually