and women were covered by the National Youth Authority [NYA].) After the New Deal, these workers would be covered by social insurance, which was a source of privilege and a spur to postwar inequality, as Ira Katznelson shows in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. Moreover, WPA clients contributed their labor in the same way convention retirees were seen to have “earned” their Social Security benefits through contributions deducted from their wages. That parallel put the WPA in a different light from noncontributory welfare programs.
Yet direct job creation was not wholly within the boundaries of social insurance, because it hired from among the ranks of those on relief. As much as they tried to also incorporate the unemployed not on relief, at the end of the day, the administrators of the CWA and WPA had to deal with the fact that there were twenty million Americans on relief, of whom 3.5 million were able-bodied unemployed workers that desperately needed jobs. As much as we would hope that the public would view them compassionately, more traditional attitudes that singled out those on relief as members of the “unworthy poor” (by making them take the pauper’s oath, for example) persisted.27 This attitude continued despite the fact that these workers were older white males, complicating the narrative of public assistance as an inherently female and nonwhite “track.”
Thus, the WPA existed between social insurance and social welfare, neither one nor the other.
The WPA’s Plan of Action
As a first step toward the right to a job, direct job creation advocates had developed a plan for action, using the CWA as a model. The WPA would employ the jobless, pulling as many as possible off the unemployment rolls.28
In 1934, these experts (then working for the FERA and the CWA) modeled a number of different scenarios in a series of studies, including “The Cost of an Expanded Public Employment Program,” “Summary of Relief Requirements,” “The Work Program,” “A Plan to Give Work to the Able-Bodied,” “Comparing PWA to FERA,” “Transition from Work Relief to the Work Program,” “The Works Program,” “Two Pages on Politics,” “Memorandum to the President,” and “A Program for Social and Economic Security.” They ended with “A National Work Program.” Collectively, these reports represent a spectrum of proposals, of which the initial plan to extract 3.5 million workers from relief rolls was only the starting point.
Following these proposals, Emerson Ross, Jacob Baker, Gill, and others in the WPA crafted a series of plans that sought to mimic the size of the CWA, providing three million jobs to relief workers and an additional 1.5 million jobs for the unregistered unemployed, on a long-term basis. Other proposals envisioned a graduating job program for six to eight million, where the majority would be ordinary, unemployed workers who had “graduated” from the ranks of relief recipients back into the status of “regular” workers. At the high end, WPA administrators proposed offering jobs to 60–80 percent of the unemployed, and they couched the plan as a first step toward realizing the right to a job.29 Their ambitions grew over time. In the early part of the year, they were thinking in modest terms. By October they were up to six million—covering a majority of the unemployed.
Rather than their ultimate goal, 3.5 million jobs was the minimum number that the WPA advocates were willing to live with, corresponding to the entire “employable” population of the twenty million on relief.30 While the WPA leadership hoped to be universal and take every person in need of work, the somewhat limited financial scope of the ERA led them to restrict their program to those most in need of support: relief clients who had been unemployed the longest, and heads of households (to uphold gender norms and spread available support across as many households as possible). However, they continued to plan for the future and lobby for an expanded job program down the road that would more closely resemble a universal “right to a job.”
Similarly, while WPA planners sought to establish wages well above the paltry limits of relief or work relief, they were trapped between their desire to hire as many people as possible and the limited amount of federal funds provided by the ERA. Wages would have to take a seat behind jobs as a priority. WPA administrators were willing to continue their policy of offering “security wages,” based on wage rates of relief programs. Some of them, like Gill, feared higher wages would disincentivize workers from accepting job offers from the private sector, if the latter offered wages lower than government scale—but most of them accepted the policy only as a matter of necessity and a way to maximize the number of jobs created. Even so, not a few WPA staffers welcomed more expansive “prevailing wages” when they thought it politically possible and also when they could win additional appropriations to pay for it.
Baker and Ross especially were creative about finding projects that were low in materials and equipment costs but very labor-intensive. Baker pointed to the “improvement of public resources” and publicly owned utilities and also included “housing and building construction for low-income groups and impoverished communities” and “production and distribution of goods needed by the unemployed” as key fields of action.31 A common thread there was attending to the human needs of city dwellers: “low-cost housing for cities” was conceived of as part of a package with “schools, auditoriums, community houses,” or “fuel, clothing, bedding, shoes, household furnishing, and a variety of food products.”32 These goods transcended the boundaries between public and private, which under a new WPA would be provided by and for the poor, under public auspices. Each category of goods was defined in terms of the workers it could employ. Public parks and utilities were thought of as skilled and common labor projects; production for use required factory, textile, and clothing workers (and were more likely to include women).
WPA analysts had a firm understanding of the difference between what they wanted to do and what public works traditionally did. In their minds at least, direct job creation and public works were two very different policies. As Baker explained in one of his policy memoranda, “The greatest difference between the programs … is in the fact that [direct job creation] is based on the maximum decentralization, a maximum use of force account, and an insistence that the one in need be the center of attention. This centering on individuals [sic] would be impossible if he were to be grouped in the usual [public works] contract methods.”33
His perspective conforms to the “jobs-first” thinking of the WPA by devoting the maximum percentage of funds to wages rather than machinery, materials, land, and profits (as was the case under traditional public works). Light construction projects were deemed preferable and given priority in the WPA because they provided for human needs, such as housing, education, and health care, rather than for the needs of industry. WPA advocates always viewed the projects themselves as more of a by-product of employment rather than the ultimate goal of their program. Production provided added legitimacy to direct job creation in the sense of “balancing” labor costs with production values and forestalling accusations of “boondoggling,” but the ultimate objective was putting people back to work.
Job creation advocates did share certain ideas with their counterparts in the PWA. Both WPA and PWA staffers saw housing as a critical issue. Baker referred to housing as “a great present need of the country.” Paralleling the arguments of PWA advisors, Baker wrote that “this is particularly true of low-cost housing which has to be built under public ownership so that it can be financed so that it can be developed without the heavy cost of private financing.”34 Even the WPA, with its focus on job creation, could not ignore the importance and potential of the product it intended to create.
Duration was also critical. The WPA’s administrators did not want their program to appear either “temporary” or “emergency.” Because their economic theory emphasized mass unemployment as a characteristic of “normal” economic life in a capitalist system and their ideology included work as a basic social right, WPA advisors like Gill argued that there was a need for a permanent job system. Just as social insurance advocates believed that a permanent Social Security Board would allow them to modernize their field, Gill called for a “permanent
