sector. Third, Lewis Baxter formalized their arguments into a model of the U.S. economy that had the public and private sectors as complementary halves that could produce full employment to absorb the whole of the labor-market surplus, and he argued that the business cycle could be corrected by public action.
These precepts would shape the WPA’s thinking and action in 1935. First, it convinced Hopkins and his aides that the scale of response was critical to the success or failure of direct job creation. Second, it made the WPA’s experts skeptical about whether traditional public works were capable of generating sufficient employment to close the employment gap in full. For the WPA then, the competition over the ERA funding was about more than money.
The WPA’s Ideology
Job creation advocates had already begun developing an ideology in 1933–1934, inspired by the new “democratic philosophy of relief.”
It departed sharply from the old poorhouse ideology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that had dominated American social welfare policy.15 Traditionally, the unemployed were seen as morally corrupt (thus requiring social control and reform) and responsible for their own sad plight. More important than this moral-flaw diagnosis, though, policymakers believed that work was inherently painful and undesirable. Fear and coercion had to be applied to drive the working class through the factory gates. FERA administrators rejected this view altogether. Their direct experience with the unemployed made it clear that the poor were perfectly ordinary workers who were cut off from employment by forces beyond their control, and that they wanted nothing more than to find work.
Much like the radical social workers in the 1960s and 1970s who fought for welfare rights decades after the Depression, direct job creation advocates in the 1930s wanted to eliminate the invidious distinction between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor. For them, work was the ideal vehicle for accomplishing this aim. In contrast to traditional paternalism, they came to view work as an expression of the creative spark and a critical component of self-worth in industrial society as opposed to a penalty imposed by capitalism. The provision of employment to the destitute unemployed was refigured from the terror of the Victorian workhouse to a liberating force that would restore morale, skills, and ultimately economic citizenship.16
Countless interviews with relief clients undertaken by FERA social workers and millions of CWA job application interviews both bolstered the findings of opinion surveys and made it clear that the unemployed overwhelmingly preferred work over relief. Moreover, work clearly had a psychological impact above and beyond the provision of income: unemployed workers hired onto job creation schemes developed a militant self-image that associated work with heroic masculinity. CWA workers described themselves in their newspapers as an “army of the unemployed” who would “slay the dragon of the Great Depression through work,” and they lionized a New York City administrator who died at his desk as a modern Leonidas at Thermopylae who had been “KILLED IN ACTION.”17
These influences led the experts who had worked for FERA, CWA, and now the WPA to expand direct job creation’s ideological objectives to encompass the “right to the job.” During his time on the Committee on Economic Security (CES) in 1934, Jacob Baker had argued that economic security had to begin with “job assurance for all…. [T]his will provide security for those who are now working as well as those at present employed” in that job assurance would give current workers the knowledge that, should they lose their jobs in the future, the government would provide new ones for them.18
This certainty offered an entirely new relationship between the citizen and the state. “If a government job is certain for every employable person,” Baker argued, “he will have economic security through job assurance,” as opposed to economic security through social insurance.19 As he saw it, this required a major sea change in federal policy—the government must “make certain that every employable person at the bottom get a job. Employment should gradually ascend the scale of need as far as necessary at any moment,” over time becoming an expected right for workers displaced by economic downturns.20
At the time, this perspective was held by only a few, even within this circle of experts. However, in the critical period between the completion of the work of the CES and the passage of the ERA, this kind of thinking had begun to spread well beyond Baker. In 1935 memos to President Roosevelt, Hopkins and his aides called for a “fresh, vital … real employment program” to take the place of work relief.21 As part of a “Program for Social and Economic Security,” they “propose[d] as fundamental policies … that the government assume the obligation of providing the opportunity for gainful work for all its citizens able and willing to work” (a phrase that would reappear in 1945).22 After the passage of the ERA, they went even farther: the act, they argued, implied that the government had “assumed the responsibility for those thrown out of work by the depression.”23
In addition to their growing commitment to the right to a job, WPA advocates came to see a sharp division between their views and those of PWA partisans intent on building traditional public works projects. The competition between these two schools sharpened their differences. After all, if direct job creation was to be the “fresh, vital” alternative to the status quo, it would have to displace both the PWA and public works. Throughout 1935, therefore, the WPA studied its rival and developed arguments about both why direct job creation was superior and why the counterargument could undermine the WPA.
Using the PWA’s own statistics against them, WPA analysts were convinced the PWA could not possibly achieve the goals of an expanded employment program, due to its insistence that local communities take out and then repay federal loans in order to keep the federal government’s balance sheet in balance. Local communities could not really afford to contribute more than 30 percent of the total costs of a job program, even with $10 million a month in additional federal support if communities borrowed money for self-liquidating projects.24 Moreover, the heavy construction favored by the PWA would dramatically increase nonlabor costs (land, materials, and machinery), which consumed 55 percent of the PWA’s budget. By contrast only 37 percent of PWA spending went to direct labor costs—so a PWA model would produce relatively few jobs per dollars spent.
Using FERA and CWA statistics, Baker estimated that the new WPA could limit nonlabor costs to 30 percent of the total, while providing federal grants rather than loans.25 In this way, poor communities where the unemployed and the poor were concentrated could actually be assisted by the federal government. Crucially, nonlabor costs would be limited, allowing a focus on the job-creating potential of a given amount of federal spending rather than fiscal orthodoxy.
This last point was the most ideologically salient—economic theory had primed WPA bureaucrats to think of larger payrolls as the straightest line to recovery; their growing commitment to the idea of a right to a job made every additional job that could be created out of the ERA’s appropriation both an economic and a moral advance. Direct labor and nonlabor costs allowed them to quantify the virtues of the two approaches. Every percentage of ERA funds that could be wrested from nonlabor to labor costs meant thousands and thousands of people saved from destitution. At the same time, the WPA’s experts were well aware that the great mass of the unemployed to whom they had provided relief through FERA and jobs via the CWA were overwhelmingly unskilled workers who had been out of the private labor market for several years. Private contractors who worked with the PWA preferred to use skilled workers, who knew how to use machinery to maximize productivity and minimize labor costs. If the PWA’s model were to succeed, the unskilled unemployed would have no place.26
In 1935, this was the ideology of the WPA, influenced by ideas about unemployment rates and consumer demand, rooted in an identification with the poor as frustrated workers and with work as a liberating force, and convinced that traditional public works would condemn millions to poverty. These policymakers cut across two tracks of social policy. The WPA primarily served a clientele that composed mostly white men,
