People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
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decisions made during the 1940s entrenched the institutional power of fiscal Keynesianism, leading to job policy that was restricted to a palliative training model for targeted populations (as opposed to the larger and broader-based programs of the New Deal) and that failed to navigate the choppy waters of racial politics in the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast, Judith Russell’s Economics, Race, and Bureaucracy gives us another take on the failure of job policy within the War on Poverty that focuses more on the internal dynamics of the Johnson administration and explains why the Labor Department lacked the bureaucratic capacity and political strength to claim a central role in the War on Poverty. Frank Stricker’s Why the War on Poverty Failed offers a third explanation, focusing on the importance of academic theories about the causes of poverty as the reason why Johnson’s social policies ultimately failed to grapple with major problems like unemployment, underemployment, and low wages.
Guian McKee’s Liberalism and the Problem of Jobs provides an alternate, contrasting angle. He shows that, in big cities, declining industry led to a powerful call for job creation as the solution to deindustrialization at the local level. At the same time, progressive insistence on the desegregation of public works projects injected the civil rights community into the debate over the prospects for public-sector employment to address at least some part of the racial gap in employment—setting up conflict between construction unions and the civil rights movement.
Standing back from the literature on job policy, one sees a divide between analyses that focus on New Deal job policy in the 1930s and 1940s and accounts that look at debates over job policy in the 1960s and 1970s. They are generally treated as period-bound policy debates rather than an overarching examination of how or whether government should play a role in creating or stabilizing employment. Only Weir’s work spans the two periods and studies how policy ideas were or were not transmitted between them, but Weir’s analysis remains at the level of institutional structure and economic theory, rather than examining the function of specific programs. As a result, less attention has been paid to how continuities in the debate over government “employment activism” emerged across these time periods. The historical record shows us that some policies emerged in the 1930s, only to be dumped for good thereafter, while others enjoyed stability and were incorporated into the fabric of government policy. For example, economic planning and price controls, which emerged in the Great Depression and were reinforced in World War II, were excluded from the realm of possibility thereafter. Policies like Social Security, agricultural supports, and rural electrification were integrated and remain with us today. Direct job creation occupies an odd position in the middle, as a perennial controversy rather than a policy either mainstreamed or permanently dumped.
Periodization makes it harder to achieve a theoretical clarity that reaches across the time boundaries. Conceptual approaches taken by scholars working in one period have not been deployed in the other. Most of the works that look at the 1930s are either programmatic or institutionalist. Arguably, no historian has subjected New Deal job programs to the kind of analytical examination that Weir, Russell, McKee, and Stricker have provided for the intellectual place of job policy during the War on Poverty. At the same time, the major works on the 1960s and 1970s train their attention on both the intellectual debates that animated the inner circle in the War on Poverty as well as the perspectives that dominated broader political and academic communities. Programmatic studies familiar to students of the New Deal have not been undertaken for the later job programs.
People Must Live by Work seeks to reconnect these two literatures by studying the pre- and postwar eras together. Focusing on the role of ideas in the 1930s enables us to appreciate how the policies created by the New Dealers managed to survive the transition to postwar America. In the hands of the youngest policymakers of the Great Depression, who hit their prime in the Kennedy years and engaged with the labor and civil rights movement, we can see a more continuous debate rather than distinctive periods that developed their own vocabularies and legislative agendas.
However, People Must Live by Work also seeks to move the study of direct job creation in new directions. Contrary to the APD school, I argue that the ideas of New Deal administrators are just as important as the coalitions and institutions they created, and that direct job creation policy specifically has to be understood on its own merits, rather than being lumped into a general category of “job policy.” Unlike Smith and Leighninger, I find that New Deal job programs aimed at (and succeeded in) reducing unemployment rates in the short term, and they were more important in serving this purpose than they were in making a case for direct job creation as a long-term economic development strategy. Programmatic historians like Rose, Frank, and Schwartz fail to grasp the common threads that unite the various job creation programs of the New Deal. Finally, while the lived experiences of jobholders are important, the critical details that account for why direct job creation succeeded or failed took place behind closed doors among small groups of policymakers.
A Historiographical Side Note: Why Public Works and Direct Job Creation Are Different
The historical literature on public works, especially during the period of the New Deal, is unusually divided on several key questions: what were the ultimate purposes of federal public works? Relief from unemployment, economic development, or something else? Were public works and direct job creation part of the same political project, or are they distinct?
When it comes to pre–New Deal public works, historiography exhibits greater consensus, especially when it comes to conceptualizing public works as a vehicle for answering questions about the development of the American state. For example, in his influential book Internal Improvement, John Larson focused on public works as a way to complicate our understanding of republicanism and federalism in the early republic. Larson’s work focuses on how struggles over national versus state activism and “different images of ideal future development” found expression in tactical uses of laissez-faire language, but that Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, and Whigs all sought to use public works to push their preferred version of economic development when they were in charge of the federal government. As Larson puts it, “The positive use of government power for popular constructive purposes, such as public works of internal improvement, never was proscribed by American republicanism…. [O]ne of the virtues of republican government supposedly lay in its capacity to render safe and liberal the pursuit of human improvement by representative authorities.”33
Leighninger largely concurs with this narrative, arguing that there were broadly “three historical eras” of public works following the initial attempt by the revolutionary generation to “use … public works to strengthen the nation … aiding commerce and uniting the widely separated colonies” both physically and (through the effort to finance them through federal taxation or deficit spending) politically.34 Notably, there does not seem to be any disagreement that early public works were intended to spur economic development of the young republic or, later in the nineteenth century, “to solve social problems of cities” like public health, water and sanitation needs, education, and housing.35
This consensus runs aground where public works during the New Deal are concerned. Scholars ask whether they should be conceptualized as forms of work relief, with the attendant connotations of charity or poor support, or as a continuation of earlier traditions of national and local improvement through construction. Udo Sautter argues that public works in the 1930s served both purposes simultaneously: “It seems possible to differentiate between public works for relief purposes and work relief,” he wrote, since, “according to one definition, the former term would designate ‘needed public improvements,’ which may have been advanced [in time] to provide employment, but which must have been undertaken in the near future regardless…. [W]ork relief, by contrast, would consist of ‘operations definitively undertaken to provide employment.’”36 However, Sautter argues that this distinction was essentially artificial, because both programs involved hiring workers and producing certain categories of goods (buildings, roads, bridges and tunnels, and so forth), and both tended to concentrate on building projects as an object of federal spending.
Smith offers an amendment to Sautter’s view, arguing that public works and “work relief” were identical, but neither aimed to provide employment. Smith departs from an earlier tradition of economic historians who “generally draw a distinction—unwarranted,