to securing its position within the economic security program and largely succeeded. The result was a document resoundingly in favor of direct job creation: “The first requisite of security is a useful job,” the board wrote. “[It] is recognized that extensive public employment will … be necessary.” Moreover, the board argued, in the event of political pressure regarding the cost of the economic security program, “employment … should receive first consideration. To the extent of the maximum funds which can be made available, public employment should be provided until the bulk of the people … are absorbed.”119
Indeed, the Technical Board essentially recommended in its first report the major provisions of the proposals advanced by Ross and Baker. “All unemployed who are at the same time employable and also in need … [or] not covered by unemployment insurance and also recipients … [whose] benefits have lapsed,” should be eligible for direct job creation, the report’s authors urged.120 A large direct job creation system funded by general taxation would complement a contributory social insurance system. The crowning glory was a recommendation for a yearly appropriation of $3–4 billion, which would go into effect immediately. Although social insurance and direct job creation would be separated into independent programs, both sides saw potential for collaboration and cooperation.
But moving up the policy chain was not a simple process, and Witte was not done with the debate. As the Technical Board passed on their work to the Executive Staff for refinement, he blocked the efforts of FERA advocates to place direct job creation at the center of the CES’s framework for reform. In their report, the Executive Staff largely sided with the UI crowd. Witte argued that “it would be equally unsound to ignore the 80% of all workers now employed in the concern for the 20% who are unemployed. The 80% are in need of protection as well as the 20%.”121 By phrasing the debate in terms of majority and minority, the Labor Department was able to elide the fact that UI would not cover half of the 80 percent because they were not eligible. The Executive Staff followed Witte in arguing that direct job creation for all would not help the aged, children, or the sick, and in any case it would be too expensive. The staff insisted that the committee recommend a broad system of UI and Old Age Insurance as the “first line of defense,” and that these programs should be put into place “on a nationwide basis at the earliest time possible.”122 Both direct job creation and UI advocates seemed to have understood that those acting first, claiming budgetary and conceptual space, would be much better positioned to move from plan to law. Witte had grabbed the largest share for himself.
Ross, Givens, Burns, and other FERA members of the Executive Staff fought hard to keep direct job creation on the agenda and had succeeded to a degree. Thus, the report stressed that “the only effective cure for unemployment is employment.”123 Although FERA members were unable to win jobs for all, they did make progress. Thus the CES report notes that, “as a permanent policy, the federal government, without guaranteeing full employment, should continuously interest itself in maintaining a high level of employment.”124 Building off agreement on purchasing power theory among the Executive Staff, the report recommended that “the government should undertake an extensive public employment program by next summer at the latest … financed from general federal funds” to boost the economy.125 (That would happen in 1935.) Thus, the basis of Williams’s draft from the Technical Board managed to pass through the process of revision by the Executive Staff without being eliminated outright.
Indeed, this first report suggests that the CES was coalescing around Ross’s third option of separate and complementary systems of direct job creation and UI. “[A] program for economic security may well be built around the concept that work is the greatest need of the wage earner,” the staff report argued, “but this does not preclude unemployment insurance.”126 Similarly, UI advocates conceded that “a program for personal economic security cannot be confined to social insurance alone, as this will not meet the problem of the unemployed and the people on relief.”127 By the end of the first round of reports, direct job creation advocates had succeeded in establishing their program as a major component of the economic security program.
In these back-and-forth exchanges, FERA administrators and Labor Department advocates for social insurance had marshaled votes, appointments, experts, and ideas, to try to sway the CES in their preferred direction. And while the process did not end in a conclusive victory for either side, the fact that the CES had been pushed from its initial stance of studying social insurance programs alone, through a period of either-or conflicts between social insurance and direct job creation, to an ultimate compromise where the two networks fused points to a tactical draw and a strategic victory for job creation advocates. They had pushed their way into the process and retained a substantial foothold.
Reporting to the President
The CES made its final report to President Roosevelt in January 1935. It was the longest and most developed argument for a system of economic security produced by the committee. Both an internal memorandum and popular propaganda, it simultaneously proposed a program of action and sought to establish a consensus on Capitol Hill that these options were within the bounds of legitimate state activity. The recommendations went well beyond the limited scope of social insurance. In its public statements and publications, the CES embraced a hybrid mentality that saw overlapping spheres of protection as a pragmatic solution to insecurity that neither challenged outright the structure of American capitalism nor ruled out further challenges.
Philosophically, the report blended approaches from multiple factions into a coherent New Deal perspective. Insecurity was seen to stem from multiple causes: the mass unemployment of ten million workers, the effects of bank failures and illness on workers’ savings, and basic volatility built into the very bones of an economy that evinced high average unemployment, frequent industrial accidents and disease, and a lack of support mechanisms for the elderly and the young.128 This comprehensive perspective left space for multiple programs to deal with the crisis, allowing rivals within the CES to accept the presence of their critics. It also had the advantage of pointing toward a common insecurity—a lack of a steady income—and a common cure: “The one almost all-embracing measure of security is an assured income. A program of economic security, as we [en]vision it, must have as its primary aim the assurance of an adequate income to each human being.”129
It was the very looseness of “income assurance” that made this system seem so “all-embracing.” Direct job creation partisans and social insurance advocates could agree on the importance of incomes without having to compromise on what form the income should come in. Moreover, the two different sides could agree on the importance of achieving security and recovery by swelling purchasing power even as they disagreed about how it was best stimulated. Compromise bred political advantage. The appearance of “a piecemeal approach” helped to blunt charges that the CES was an institution of radical partisans, rather than an objective agency. Committee members emphasized their pragmatic eclecticism as proof of their program’s place in the liberal mainstream: “the program for economic security we suggest follows no single pattern. It is broader than social insurance and does not attempt merely to copy European methods,” they argued.
Even so, the political significance of direct job creation was not lost on anyone who read the report to the president. The committee made it clear that direct job creation singled out the CES program as distinctively American: “in placing primary emphasis on employment, rather than unemployment compensation, we differ fundamentally from those who see social insurance as … all-sufficient.”130 It was symbolically aligned with the tenets of American culture. President Roosevelt was not proposing a new dole in the form of UI; he was emphasizing self-reliance in the form of work. “Since most people must live by work,” the CES report noted, “the first objective of a program must be maximum employment,” which would be provided by a combination of social insurance and “stimulation of private employment” and “provision of public employment.”131
Ultimately, the CES portrayed “employment assurance” and
