In memo after memo, supporters of direct job creation argued that “work is the form of assistance desired by the unemployed themselves…. [T]he unemployed themselves want assistance in the form of work…. [W]hat the workers really want is continued employment.”84 FERA officials pointed to their experience in the CWA, when seven million unemployed workers who had refused to take relief lined up to apply for government work in the winter of 1933, as proof of the overwhelming preference of unemployed people for work over relief.85 Ordinary people supported a conservative self-help doctrine that “employment is the best cure for employment” and “work is the best antidote for poverty,” converting these cultural precepts into a populist demand for affirmation of the popular will.86
Direct job creation advocates pointed to the psychological and social benefits to the unemployed individual to bolster their policy recommendations. Just as they believed that relief had destroyed morale and allowed skills of the trade and habits of self-reliance to wither away, FERA officials believed that direct job creation would restore morale and self-respect and also maintain skills. “Projects must be planned to use the skills of the workers in need … but also the rehabilitation and retraining of persons whose ordinary means of livelihood has permanently disappeared,” FERA officials argued.87 Psychological well-being was also necessary for real economic security: “the worker … should feel that, both in terms of security and maintenance of skill, he gets something besides the wages paid…. [E]ach worker should be sure of his job.”88 This emotional sense of economic security would help combat the universal fear of destitution and helplessness that characterized the early 1930s.89
At the same time, FERA staffers had not yet reached a consensus. Still in the process of formulating their own position, they were evolving from a poor-relief mentality to a destination not yet fully elaborated. Indeed, one of their first priorities at the outset of the CES was still welfare reform.90 “It is proposed to abolish direct relief for the unemployed,” argued one memo. “Give no relief for the able-bodied,” urged another.91 In its place, FERA administrators urged a direct job creation program as a better alternative. At the same time, Eveline Burns, an economist hired by FERA to conduct research on direct job creation, argued that, given public hesitancy regarding federal intrusion into the economy, the administrative difficulties of bringing enough projects online, and the need to preserve the dominance of the private sector in a capitalist society, “work must be regarded as a desirable form of relief which cannot, however, be extended to all the unemployed.”92 The same sentiment was shared by Ross and Givens in other reports.93
In contrast, other staffers (including Baker and Alan Johnstone) argued that “work relief” had to be as large as possible in order to have the necessary impact on purchasing power across the entire economy. Even FERA officials who believed that direct job creation could not cover all the unemployed emphasized that it had to be deployed as a countercyclical measure on a large scale. “As a permanent policy, the federal government, without guaranteeing employment, should continuously interest itself in maintaining a high level of employment,” argued direct job creation advocates on the CES’s Executive Staff.94 Over on the Technical Board, Williams and others further emphasized that “the first effort of government should be to … encourage maximum … employment.”95
Thus within the CES, FERA staffers were doing more than fighting over social insurance—they were developing an entirely new policy program, an economic theory to explain it, and an ideology to justify it. The process was not complete. FERA officials differed between themselves and were not always internally consistent on major issues such as whether jobs should be limited to heads of households, whether workers should be paid a prevailing wage, whether the means test should be abolished, and whether a right to a job should be created.96 In mid-1934, they were still negotiating with each other over how distinctive this new program would be from what came before.
FERA officials would use the very mutability of these ideas when debating proponents of other programs. To promoters of social insurance, direct job creation advocates would argue that the UI program would not provide enough of a demand boost to restore the economy, a point familiar to their interlocutors who often relied on the same argument. In dealing with advocates for social assistance and mothers’ pensions, they would use the language of social work to argue that direct job creation offered more income and greater security than social assistance ever could, and that it provided the kind of psychological support that poor relief could not. Locked in battle with economic planners, the FERA administration claimed that their policies could help government planners manage long-term patterns of employment and demand. This rhetorical fluidity would be crucial in the next phase of the CES’s deliberations.97
Initial Conflicts
The first skirmish with the CES revolved around the scope of its policy remit and the breadth of empirical knowledge it needed to gather. Social surveys would serve as the basis for the separate reports issued by the Executive Staff, the Technical Board, and their specialized subcommittees. In a series of memos titled “Basic Questions of Policy” and “Possible General Approaches,” Edwin Witte, the executive director, attempted to steer the direction of knowledge gathering toward social insurance. Witte set forth what he considered to be the key questions about the economic security program that would have to be researched first. Unsurprisingly, these questions focused exclusively on social insurance: should it be funded by payroll taxes or from general funds, should the system be federal or combine federal and state administration, and so forth.98 He hoped to dominate the discussion of options such that the deliberations would become a debate between his own Wisconsin plan and the Ohio plan.
He went a step further by downplaying the role that alternative options could play in a system of economic security. Witte engaged in a preemptive defense by listing what he perceived to be direct job creation’s flaws. “Even if it [direct job creation] were attained,” he argued, “it would not eliminate the necessity for other methods of protection against the hazards of accident, sickness, old age, and death.”99 FERA staff would no doubt have agreed with this, except Witte did not extend the same standard to his own proposals for UI (which fewer than half of the workforce would be eligible for). Likewise, there was more than a little hypocrisy in Witte’s argument that workers’ compensation and health insurance were necessary, given that these were both rival projects that Witte viewed as inferior options to UI.
Above all, he argued that even if direct job creation were part of the solution, it could never be the main chance. Why? Because, the executive director argued, it “would very likely prove quite costly,” and employers would oppose prevailing wages and the production of usable goods.100 The traces of Witte’s push to have social insurance dominate the thrust of research efforts are visible in the legwork of the CES. Of 116 reports written prior to the passage of the Social Security Act, 65, or slightly more than half, dealt with some form of social insurance, with 36 reports devoted to UI specifically.101
Against this current, direct job creation advocates pushed for a different research agenda. In a memo titled “Outline of Work,” Emerson Ross laid out a strategy that emphasized gathering statistics favorable to including direct job creation, including “estimates of unemployment and/or employment as far back as possible, present unemployment by industries … emergency government employment, PWA [Public Works Administration], CCC [Civilian Conservation Core], CWA, [FERA] Work Program.”102 By focusing attention on unemployment as the major crisis of the Great Depression, FERA officials believed that their research would point the committee toward the conclusion that more direct job creation was essential. Ross labored over preexisting data sets collected by FERA’s Research Division on relief applications and relief clients, as well as surveys of poverty and unemployment conducted by the CWA’s research projects to set up a comparison between relief and work as rival options.103
To underline the contrast between direct job creation and public works, Ross pushed for statistics on the
