choice of Witte to lead it was consequential. Witte, in turn, set about filling the slots with his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin and the Department of Labor—Joseph Harris, Thomas Elliot, and Wilbur J. Cohen, to name a few.44 These experts were mostly, although not entirely, students of John R. Commons, the American institutionalist economist. Prior experience in drafting the state of Wisconsin’s UI system just a few years earlier had led them to a common understanding that emphasized how UI, narrowly tailored to cover industrial workers, could counteract the natural cycle of unemployment in American industry by creating incentives for firms to regularize their employment. This perspective inclined Department of Labor staffers to emphasize UI over other forms of social insurance, contributory systems over noncontributory systems, and firm-level funds rather than industrywide funds.45
However, FERA was also well represented on the Executive Staff by six individuals (the second-largest contingent) in no small part due both to Hopkins’s position on the formal committee and to the fact that FERA had paid for and housed the CES.46 Other voices found no quarter. Social insurance promoters tied to the Ohio plan for UI (such as Abraham Epstein and Isaac Rubinow), advocates for national systems, and voices for public works were not included on the staff.47
Further complicating the debate was the Technical Board, a supposedly unbiased group of experts who would conduct research to inform the staff’s work. In practice, the board’s division into different topical working groups (on social insurance, direct job creation, relief, health insurance, and so forth) ensured instead that each camp on the Executive Staff could draw upon its own group of experts on the Technical Board to do the legwork on preferred policies. For example, the Department of Labor was represented by Altmeyer, Elliot (both University of Wisconsin economists, brought in by Witte), and Isador Lublin, all of whom would focus on UI research, while Aubrey Williams and Corrington Gill headed up the FERA contingent and conducted research on job programs.48
Although competition persisted throughout, conflicts intensified at specific and representative moments. Tension first surfaced in August 1934, when the CES set forth its initial plan for what topics it would research, what topics it would not, and who would be assigned to these studies. The second contentious period lasted from late September through early November of that year and book-ended the first round of presentations by the various research teams and Technical Board and Executive Staff preparation for their first report to the full committee. The CES’s final report to the president in January 1935 generated a third stage of conflict. Last, but not least, conflict occurred over the drafting of what would become the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, or what Roosevelt referred to as his “big bills.”49
Hopkins’s Team
In selecting staff to back up his political arguments, Harry Hopkins drew on an eclectic group of experts and bureaucrats drawn from among the first and second tiers of FERA administrators. Jacob Baker, an industrial engineer who had worked for left-wing publishing firms on the West Coast before the Depression and an advocate of “cooperative enterprise,” wrote most of the policy proposals for direct job creation programs. Emerson Ross, a Dartmouth-educated statistician who had formerly worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Corporation, was both Hopkins’s chief numbers man and a key architect of direct job creation proposals. Corrington Gill, a University of Wisconsin–trained economist of the John R. Commons school who had been studying unemployment in New York State before being hired on by FERA, provided the economic theory and empirical analysis to undergird their arguments. A French-trained social worker and white racial liberal from Alabama, Aubrey Williams contributed his training in social work and his on-the-ground experience as the chief administrator of the Alabama Relief Administration.50
Aubrey Williams, Emerson Ross, and Josephine Brown had all entered into the relief business in the early days of the Great Depression; Brown was a social worker who had been hired as Hopkins’s assistant, and Ross was a staff statistician for FERA. These FERA staffers additionally leaned on Meredith Givens, another University of Wisconsin–trained scholar, and Eveline Burns, one of the few women economists working at Columbia University, for additional firepower. While Jacob Baker and Givens and Burns had no formal training in social work, they were passionate amateurs and picked up much of the social work culture from their peers. Harry Hopkins himself was a professional social worker trained at Grinnell College, and he acted as a synthesizer and popular advocate for the ideas developed by these specialists; he was assisted by Brown, who would later write a history of FERA and its successor agencies.51
As Brown described in Public Relief, many FERA staffers came out of the new generation of social workers (both professional and amateur) in the late 1920s who imbued their work with a new “democratic philosophy of relief” that emphasized the systemic nature of unemployment, the importance of treating individuals on relief with dignity and respect, and the obligations of all citizens to help people in need.52 This view, she argued, diverged sharply from earlier philosophies of social work that had emphasized personal responsibility and individual failings. The massive failure of private industry produced a concurrent need for public provision for the poor.
Beyond this binding philosophy, three factors crafted a cohesive intellectual community out of these disparate individuals. First, they shared similar backgrounds. They were all well educated, either in the Ivy League, the Midwest, or Europe.53 Most had been trained in the social sciences or were amateur social scientists with backgrounds in engineering or statistics. Most important, they had all come of political age in the 1920s and were hence somewhat disinterested in Progressive Era debates about the state and economy.
Second, they shared the common experience of administering poverty programs during the Great Depression. As both Brown and William Bremer point out, the 1930s had a transformative effect on those in the relief fight, overthrowing existing orthodoxies in economics and social work, leaving intellectuals scrambling for new explanations and prescriptions for ending the crisis.54 Simultaneously, the unprecedented scope of economic collapse and human suffering created a deep sense of urgency and impatience with inadequate local institutions and traditional methods of relief administration.
Third, they shared a common institutional home—all of them had come to work for the federal government during the early days of the New Deal. Some of them had either worked in state relief agencies or had been hired by Hopkins to work in New York’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) prior to the New Deal. Most of them signed on to the federal government in the First Hundred Days through the FERA. These activist-intellectuals were charged with coordinating national relief policy across the country, and they had to come to grips with the inadequacies of local methods and the sheer scope of the poverty crisis. And, most important for our purposes, they were steeped in job creation experiments. Indeed, for five months immediately prior to the establishment of the CES, they had run the CWA, the first and most ambitious effort to put the unemployed back to work across the country.
As social scientists and experts, these individuals were expected not only to produce plans for action, administer programs, and evaluate outcomes—the raw stuff of “policy learning”—but also to explain to the government and themselves what they were doing or propose how it would work or how it was working, and why it should be done. The CES relied on research programs, iterative proposals, and a final report to the president, all of which provided FERA staffers the means and the opportunity to convert their explanations into an economic theory of the Great Depression and the wisdom of government intervention, and into a series of formal policy proposals that translated ideas into agencies, budgets, and boots on the ground.
Direct Job Creation Emerges
The idea of direct job creation as developed by FERA experts in 1934 was this: that in order to respond to a crippling unemployment rate of 20 percent, the federal government had to create jobs for the unemployed on a mass scale. This action would reduce unemployment rates
