People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
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the NEC’s structure did not please administrators of either the WPA or PWA, who had hoped for exclusive control of the federal program, it was nonetheless the result of years of advocacy on both their parts. Virtually from the moment that he had arrived in Washington as the new secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes had pushed for a “major program of public works,” calling for a $5 billion appropriation.13 Rebuffed by a still-hesitant FDR in the early days of the New Deal, Ickes had persevered, bringing together allies such as Frances Perkins, Rexford Tugwell, Donald Rich-berg, Raymond Moley, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, and even his erstwhile rival Harry Hopkins into a loose pro-spending caucus within the New Deal.14 These policymakers had collaborated on passing the $3 billion in public works attached to the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that had funded the PWA and the CWA; they also allied against antispending advocates such as Lewis Douglas. In the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, this coalition had achieved a real victory in expanding the fiscal footprint of the New Deal.
The stakes for both public works and direct job creation were higher than ever before. Previously a sideshow to political struggles over the NRA and Social Security, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 pushed the issue of work relief and public works into the spotlight of national politics, with presidential messages placing FDR’s prestige behind the effort, and a massive source of funds independent of NRA or the Social Security Board. To win in the ACA would mean more than success for the WPA or the PWA as government departments; it would signal that the ideas behind these programs would become integral to the New Deal, and it would become the means by which the mass unemployment of the Great Depression would be defeated.
Two Visions of Relief and Recovery
When the members of the WPA and the PWA sat down around the long, dark table of the Cabinet Room to fight for their proposals in the spring of 1935, they brought with them more than bureaucratic imperatives and printed charts—they also carried their own intellectual heritage that explained, justified, and legitimated their policies. To understand the arguments made by both camps and the impact they had on the outcomes, one must first explore the intellectual background of these competing ideologies.
In One Corner: The Works Progress Administration
The WPA’s Economic Theory
As described in Chapter 1, the chief administrators of the WPA had begun to develop an economic theory during their time at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the CWA. It stood on three legs. First, Jacob Baker’s purchasing power theory diagnosed the Great Depression as a crisis of mass unemployment caused by a collapse in consumer demand. He therefore recommended direct hiring of the unemployed as the most efficient means of both boosting consumer spending and reducing unemployment. Second, Corrington Gill’s institutional analysis of the labor market showed that the confluence of structural and cyclical unemployment would trap the country in permanent double-digit unemployment unless the government intervened, and he argued that direct job creation could accomplish recovery without destabilizing the private sector. Third, Lewis Baxter formalized their arguments into a model of the U.S. economy that had the public and private sectors as complementary halves that could produce full employment to absorb the whole of the labor-market surplus, and he argued that the business cycle could be corrected by public action.
These precepts would shape the WPA’s thinking and action in 1935. First, it convinced Hopkins and his aides that the scale of response was critical to the success or failure of direct job creation. Second, it made the WPA’s experts skeptical about whether traditional public works were capable of generating sufficient employment to close the employment gap in full. For the WPA then, the competition over the ERA funding was about more than money.
The WPA’s Ideology
Job creation advocates had already begun developing an ideology in 1933–1934, inspired by the new “democratic philosophy of relief.”
It departed sharply from the old poorhouse ideology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that had dominated American social welfare policy.15 Traditionally, the unemployed were seen as morally corrupt (thus requiring social control and reform) and responsible for their own sad plight. More important than this moral-flaw diagnosis, though, policymakers believed that work was inherently painful and undesirable. Fear and coercion had to be applied to drive the working class through the factory gates. FERA administrators rejected this view altogether. Their direct experience with the unemployed made it clear that the poor were perfectly ordinary workers who were cut off from employment by forces beyond their control, and that they wanted nothing more than to find work.
Much like the radical social workers in the 1960s and 1970s who fought for welfare rights decades after the Depression, direct job creation advocates in the 1930s wanted to eliminate the invidious distinction between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor. For them, work was the ideal vehicle for accomplishing this aim. In contrast to traditional paternalism, they came to view work as an expression of the creative spark and a critical component of self-worth in industrial society as opposed to a penalty imposed by capitalism. The provision of employment to the destitute unemployed was refigured from the terror of the Victorian workhouse to a liberating force that would restore morale, skills, and ultimately economic citizenship.16
Countless interviews with relief clients undertaken by FERA social workers and millions of CWA job application interviews both bolstered the findings of opinion surveys and made it clear that the unemployed overwhelmingly preferred work over relief. Moreover, work clearly had a psychological impact above and beyond the provision of income: unemployed workers hired onto job creation schemes developed a militant self-image that associated work with heroic masculinity. CWA workers described themselves in their newspapers as an “army of the unemployed” who would “slay the dragon of the Great Depression through work,” and they lionized a New York City administrator who died at his desk as a modern Leonidas at Thermopylae who had been “KILLED IN ACTION.”17
These influences led the experts who had worked for FERA, CWA, and now the WPA to expand direct job creation’s ideological objectives to encompass the “right to the job.” During his time on the Committee on Economic Security (CES) in 1934, Jacob Baker had argued that economic security had to begin with “job assurance for all…. [T]his will provide security for those who are now working as well as those at present employed” in that job assurance would give current workers the knowledge that, should they lose their jobs in the future, the government would provide new ones for them.18
This certainty offered an entirely new relationship between the citizen and the state. “If a government job is certain for every employable person,” Baker argued, “he will have economic security through job assurance,” as opposed to economic security through social insurance.19 As he saw it, this required a major sea change in federal policy—the government must “make certain that every employable person at the bottom get a job. Employment should gradually ascend the scale of need as far as necessary at any moment,” over time becoming an expected right for workers displaced by economic downturns.20
At the time, this perspective was held by only a few, even within this circle of experts. However, in the critical period between the completion of the work of the CES and the passage of the ERA, this kind of thinking had begun to spread well beyond Baker. In 1935 memos to President Roosevelt, Hopkins and his aides called for a “fresh, vital … real employment program” to take the place of work relief.21 As part of a “Program for Social and Economic Security,” they “propose[d] as fundamental policies … that the government assume the obligation of providing the opportunity for gainful work for all its citizens able and willing to work” (a phrase that would reappear in 1945).22 After the passage of the ERA, they went even farther: the act, they argued, implied that the government had “assumed the responsibility for those thrown out of work by the depression.”23
In addition to their growing commitment to the right to a job, WPA advocates came to see a sharp division between their views and those of PWA partisans intent on building traditional public