model of the origins of Social Security. To begin with, path-dependent studies rarely involve what we might call “dual origins” of public policies. To the extent that direct job creation has been studied by the APD school, it has been through the work of Edwin Amenta, Drew Halfmann, and others, who portrayed this type of job program as part of a policy agenda that was separate from the Social Security Act:
When people think of the origins of American social policy, they usually think of the 1935 Social Security Act…. [T]hese programs were somewhat marginal to New Deal social policy because they dealt with special categories of “unemployable” citizens…. Scholars miss the fact that most Roosevelt Administration policymakers did not see themselves as designing a two-track welfare state; rather, the WPA was a means-tested program that gave relatively high benefits…. These programs constituted an incipient “work and relief” state favoring the unemployed.29
I take issue with this perspective. As I will explain in greater detail, Social Security did in fact include “a commitment to work programs” as well as programs aimed at “unemployable” citizens. This raises the question of whether direct job creation was part of a “work and relief” state or rather a “work-insurance” state; the latter is what I believe the CES intended. Path dependency would seem to have limited utility as an overall approach to the development of the welfare state if we take the CES as the starting point. Social insurance and direct job creation shared very similar origins: they came out of the same committee, served much of the same clientele, used much of the same rhetoric of justification and similar economic theories, and yet, in the long run, met very different fates. This may well point to a more contested and contingent process by which different public policies win political support. Social insurance was, after all, not the most popular element of the Social Security Act—there was a long lag before benefits were paid out, payroll taxes were not popular (especially at the higher levels required for a prefunded Old Age Insurance program), and the program was challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court. And yet, unlike the WPA, which had a much stronger institutional base in many respects from an APD perspective, social insurance lasted much longer.
Shaping Historical Memory
One of the reasons why direct job creation has not generally been celebrated as an achievement of the CES is that a conscious attempt was made to write that type of program out of the historical record. The CES is seen today as the organ that created social insurance and social insurance alone.
In 1936, Witte wrote an account of the development of the Social Security Act that was used for many years as the official in-house history of the Social Security Board.30 While the memoir’s purpose was to serve as an eyewitness account of the CES, the effect was to serve as an official narrative of what FDR and his staff intended the New Deal to be.
Witte makes it clear that, from his perspective, the CES intended that social insurance would be the cornerstone of the New Deal. He was a partisan of this approach and did much to promote its importance for the long haul. From the beginning, he argued, the CES had hit on “unemployment insurance and old age security” as the “two major fields to which the staff would have to devote a great deal of attention.”31 “It was agreed that the committee would have to make careful actuarial studies” their first priority, given its foundational importance to Old Age Insurance.32 Witte went farther, claiming that direct job creation research was not a major undertaking of the CES. “No final report was ever made by [Emerson Ross] or his staff.… [T]he reports of Dr. Givens and his staff were able research reports, but did not figure very much in the final report of the CES.”33
Archival sources contradict this: Ross’s report was in fact presented to the committee; material from it was included in the first Executive Staff report and adapted in the final CES report. Witte had downplayed contributions of the pro–direct job creation members of the staff with whom he was not entirely in sympathy. The larger goal here was to argue that “the immediate relief problem came to be regarded as outside the committee’s jurisdiction,” that direct job creation was not a part of the committee’s deliberations, but social insurance was.34
Did all the committee members agree on this point? Did they see the remit of CES in the same way? In Development of the Social Security Act, Witte wrote that the committee had issued “a unanimous report,” that its members were “of one mind,” and that they “were able at all times to present a united front.”35 Those who disagreed are either subtracted from the story or described as foolish: “the advisory council … violated all requests of the committee,” he noted. The advisory council to the CES, a major institutional source of opposition to many of the characteristics of social insurance (it argued with the main committee over everything, from contribution levels and the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers to firmwide versus industrywide pooling of financial reserves to pay benefits), was not included in Witte’s account of the committee’s deliberations. Witte wrote that “it remains doubtful whether it would not have been better to have no organization at this time.”36 Witte’s narrative relegated comprehensive alternative models for economic security to historical footnotes (in this case, exactly two).37
Fortunately, there are historical accounts that contradict Witte and they deserve pride of place in the historiography of the CES. Josephine Brown, a FERA alumna of the committee, chronicled the rise of direct job creation in her book, Public Relief. As Brown described it, far from the placid consensus between committee members that Witte had described, the adherents of a “democratic philosophy” of provision for the poor pushed hard for direct job creation, challenged the principles of UI as inadequate, and came within a hairbreadth of total success.38 Social insurance advocates such as Witte sought to tamp down the more universal aspects of the economic security system, while FERA officials fought to maintain them.39 In a larger sense, Brown argued, Witte’s social insurance advocates were not the true inheritors of the New Deal’s spirit.
Similarly, in The WPA and Federal Relief Policy, Donald Howard, a researcher for the Russell Sage Foundation, emphasized the links between the WPA and the CES. In his opinion, the language of security—the idea that the employee-clients of the WPA should be sure that their jobs would be safe, the conviction that workers needed wages even when logistical issues or environmental considerations shut down projects, the requirement that monthly wages have a solid floor, all of these issues that the WPA would take as a common ideological foundation—was the handiwork of FERA staffers serving on the CES.40 In the course of developing plans for the committee, debates erupted within the WPA on whether the program should adopt prevailing wages or a security wage, whether it should accept any unemployed workers or demand a means test, and ultimately how far WPA wages should diverge from relief.41 Founded between the fall of the CWA and the rise of the WPA, the CES had “given a new lease of [sic] life” to the principle of federal provision for the unemployed. The CES’s arguments about the proper roles of federal and state action had the effect of more firmly establishing direct job creation as a federal responsibility, Howard noted.42
The Structure of the CES
When the CES first met in late June of 1934, it was a divided institution. Different groups of political actors assembled, each sensing limited space for policy action, each intent on winning that contest for their favorite vision of the new welfare state. The committee’s structure fostered the tension. While the Labor Department had the most representatives, Hopkins (as the administrative head of FERA) and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace also claimed membership, as a testament to the dominance of the “liberal bloc” on antipoverty issues.43 Although these parties shared common goals in extending the reach of the state to combat economic insecurity, they had their own distinct ideas about how to do so. Above all, they wanted to commandeer the results for their own agency or department.
As usual, the lion’s share of the committee’s work would be
