and FERA administrator Harry Hopkins were determined to provide work to the unemployed—rather than relief through direct cash assistance—wherever possible.2 “Direct relief was merely a temporary emergency expedient,” explained FERA assistant administrator Josephine Brown. “It was necessary to keep the unemployed from starving until work and wages in some form could be provided.”3 Public works programs soon emerged as a central component of the response to the Depression, with more than four million workers employed by the Civil Works Administration by January 1934. Federal relief flowed at unprecedented levels as well, reaching more than eleven million people at the beginning of 1934, and more than eighteen million by the fall.4
As the emergency began to subside, the president turned his attention to creating a permanent program of social protections designed to provide Americans with “security against the major hazards and vicissitudes of life.”5 He appointed a high-level Committee on Economic Security (CES) in June 1934 to study and prepare legislative recommendations for a comprehensive program of federal social provision. Their efforts would yield the landmark Social Security Act of 1935, which included both social insurance programs for current and retired workers and public assistance programs for eligible categories of poor Americans. Within the U.S. context, FDR’s vision for economic security was a bold one, and it rested primarily on the promise of social insurance. “The President wanted everybody covered for every contingency in life—‘cradle to grave,’ he called it—under a social insurance system,” said Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, who had been tapped to head the CES.6 Social insurance programs were designed to shield workers from economic hardship when they were unable to earn due to circumstances beyond their control, such as temporary unemployment, illness, or old age. Unemployment insurance and, later, old age insurance emerged as priorities for the CES.7
Although envisioned as a “second line” of defense against destitution, behind social insurance, public assistance was regarded as a necessary “supplement” for certain populations facing poverty but unable to earn their own support.8 Aid would be provided under the Social Security Act to three categories of poor Americans: the elderly through Title I (Old Age Assistance), single-mother families with dependent children through Title IV (Aid to Dependent Children), and the blind through Title X (Aid to the Blind); a program of Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (Title XIV) was added in 1950. For varying reasons, each group was considered “unemployable.” As one FERA official explained, “An ‘unemployable’ person is one that is incapable of performing a day’s work on account of age or physical disability, or where home and family duties will render it impossible for the individual to work.”9 Assistance to people in the three categories would be provided through federal grants-in-aid to match expenditures by the states, which would administer the programs. Planners reasoned that aid to the poor had long been handled at the local and state levels, and primary responsibility should remain there, particularly as the federal government was now assuming a major new burden in confronting unemployment and creating social insurance programs on a national scale.10
Differences arose, however, over the purposes and parameters of public assistance. The most robust of the main contending visions was articulated by the CES Advisory Committee on Public Employment and Relief and key leaders within the FERA.11 The Advisory Committee lobbied for a dense and broad safety net that would provide both a larger public works program and income assistance for all those in need who could not participate in it. The committee urged a sober realism about the limits of employment to ensure adequate economic security and the resulting need for public assistance on a permanent basis, arguing that “the social hazards to which millions of persons and families are subjected, are too varied and too complicated to make it safe to assume that work would remove the need.”12 It also advised against a limited, categorical approach to determining who among the poor deserved assistance. The Advisory Committee argued instead for a unified program with appropriate federal authority, to address, in Josephine Brown’s words, the needs of “the ‘employables’ who would not fit into the practical work programs” and the “unemployables” who did not fit into designated categories.13 This vision of a broad program of federally supported general assistance to all poor Americans would surface repeatedly in subsequent decades.
The leading women activists at the federal Children’s Bureau, who were tasked with submitting recommendations for assisting children in poverty, held a different view of public assistance. The bureau had championed the development of state-level “mothers’ pensions” during the Progressive Era and saw New Deal public assistance as an opportunity to expand these programs. The aim would be to assist and enable eligible single mothers to provide proper care for their children in their homes without an undue burden of wage-earning. The bureau’s vision emphasized a casework approach that combined income assistance and counseling by trained social workers.14
The CES was charged with crafting the administration’s draft legislation, and many of its leaders—including executive director Edwin Witte and technical director Arthur Altmeyer—held a third position. Witte and Altmeyer were economists from Wisconsin who had helped create that state’s pioneering social insurance programs. Along with other prominent New Dealers, they wanted to make federal social insurance the centerpiece of the proposed legislation. They embraced the need for a more comprehensive, fair, and equitable system of public assistance for the poor, but they had a different assessment of its trajectory—one that would later be exploited by critics of public assistance. They were convinced that the need for public assistance would diminish as employment and social insurance grew. They therefore sought to keep the public assistance programs limited, in part to ensure that the new social insurance initiatives gained broad popular and congressional support.15
Despite their differences, these three positions shared significant common ground, and New Deal welfarism ultimately reflected elements of each.16 As the CES drew up recommendations, it adopted the more limited, categorical approach to federal public assistance (providing aid to those in the three categories of “unemployables”) rather than its Advisory Committee’s recommendation for a unified program of general assistance for the poor. The CES was persuaded, according to its report, that if all of its recommendations were adopted, this categorical approach would be adequate because the relief problem “will have diminished to a point where it will be possible to return primary responsibility for the care of people who cannot work to the State and local governments.”17 The CES plan did affirm the need for a more extensive and fairly administered system of aid for the poor—one with federal funding and oversight, however. In the case of poor families with children, the CES report stated bluntly that a “large group of children at present maintained by relief will not be aided by employment or unemployment compensation. There are the fatherless and other ‘young’ families without a breadwinner.” For these groups, “increased State appropriations and Federal grants-in-aid are essential.”18
The CES’s proposed ADC program would provide cash assistance to help eligible poor single mothers support their children at home. The programs, according to the CES report, “are designed to release from the wage-earning role” these single mothers.19 This principle was amplified in testimony before Congress by Grace Abbott, one of the authors of Title IV, who served on the CES Advisory Committee and had directed the Children’s Bureau. Because a “mother’s services are worth more in the home than they are in the outside labor market,” Abbott testified, she “should be enabled to stay home and take care of the children, and we expect she will have to do so until the children reach working age.”20
As the ADC provisions moved through Congress with the other public assistance proposals, they quickly became the victim of intraparty conflict, as historian Linda Gordon and other scholars have documented.21 Disagreements between the Northern liberal and Southern conservative wings of the Democratic Party emerged in both the House and Senate committees charged with producing the legislation, chaired by Representative Robert Doughton (D-N.C.) and Senator Pat Harrison (D-Miss.). Southern committee leaders ultimately rewrote the terms of assistance, including benefit and eligibility
