on all three levels of government, increasing adequacy of benefits, and extension of public assistance.”35 A permanent department would have a “civil service staff” to ensure professional expertise, and “a change in the manner of making appropriations to permit great correlation between the extent of unemployment and the size of the program,” a policy that would permit both greater independence and permanent, countercyclical planning.36
The dream of a permanent status is visible in Gill’s proposal for the organizational setup of an independent WPA. He envisioned a Cabinet department, with a permanent bureaucratic structure. This “Federal Works Authority Board” would report directly to the president and link up with the NRPB to engage in economic planning that would coordinate a broad range of programs—conservation, rural electrification, drought and erosion programs, housing, poor relief, federal departments involved in construction, public work, and public works.37 It was a broad and ambitious agenda that would see the WPA become the center of virtually every plan or program that interacted with poor and working-class Americans. It would be married to major intellectual movements of national planning and administrative reorganization; it could become an NRA for the American worker.
Even Baker, whose proposals often differed dramatically from Gill’s, shared this enthusiasm for a united and permanent system. In his 1934 proposal titled “A Program for Social and Economic Security,” Baker argued that “the Federal Emergency Relief Administration should be abolished and in its place there should be established a Department of Social and Economic Security.”38 This proposal especially stressed the virtue of permanence: “a work program of this sort should be promoted from a central place in Washington—a single cabinet department” that could provide “central controls, engineering, and financial standards.”39
When we consider the amount of time and energy devoted to proposals for permanent job programs and a Cabinet-level department devoted to work or social welfare, it becomes clear that the WPA leadership no longer thought of its remit as a temporary response to economic calamity. Instead, it was a durable institution because capitalism displayed periodic imperfections that resulted in debilitating unemployment.40 While the WPA’s continued existence ultimately depended on the $4.88 billion authorized by the ERA and subsequent legislation, Gill, Baker, and others continued in their efforts to win a permanent status and viewed the scramble for the lion’s share of the funds as merely the first step in achieving their ambitions.
In multiple funding proposals put forward in 1935, the WPA’s advisors were unanimous that, in its first year, the WPA would require $1.8 billion to operate a job program for at least three million. Even to complete its first ten months would require $855 million. To expand the program to create 3.5 to 4 million jobs would require $3 billion a year.41 To get this money, given the limitations of the ERA’s appropriation, WPA planners needed to win the majority of unallocated funds and even get their hands on funds already allocated to the PWA and other programs that had not yet been spent. Since they had managed to grab $400 million of the PWA’s money to fund the CWA a year or two earlier, WPA experts turned their attention to the PWA as their rival in the work program.
Thus, by the time that the WPA’s proposals were brought to the ACA, they contained an economic theory that explained the Great Depression and how it could be fought, a political ideology that explained why the government’s response to the Great Depression should be the provision of jobs, and a plan for action that sought to use force account (i.e., direct employment by the government), light construction, and rapid mobilization to realize theory and ideology. The fiscal demands of these plans would limit the scope for compromise and shift the outcome toward a zero-sum game.
In the Other Corner: The Public Works Administration
In 1935, the PWA was in a strong political and intellectual position. To begin with, its advocates had more experience. They had lobbied longer and thought harder about the purposes of public works.42 In 1932, long before the advent of the New Deal, progressive senators such as Robert Wagner (D-NY) and Robert LaFollette (Progressive-WI) and congressmen like Sam Garner (D-TX) had pushed through a public works program over President Hoover’s opposition. They were seeking countercyclical reforms and had staked their public influence on battles over municipal socialism a generation earlier.
Ickes aimed to burnish the public image of his agency by emphasizing probity and efficient use of public funds, which gave public works a certain amount of political cover against accusations of inefficiency and corruption.43 Moreover, after three years of operation, the PWA had built up a strong clientele of supporters—construction firms, contractors, and subcontractors’ lobbies. American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions in the building trades, as well as heavy-industry lobby groups, profited from the demand for steel and concrete and similar products; hence these groups saw the PWA as a life raft in a time of desperation. Public works was comfortable, familiar, operated through time-honored contracts that offered “cost plus” guaranteed profits, and allowed contractors to operate freely.
A PWA chart regarding the “estimated total value of construction” showed that the volume of construction grew from $11.5 billion in 1925 to $12 billion in 1928, with private construction making up 78 percent of the industry and public construction a mere 23 percent. When the Great Depression hit, the volume of construction fell rapidly from $12 billion in 1929 to only $3 billion in 1933. The biggest toll was on the private side. Public construction held relatively steady. As a result, the ratio shifted dramatically, so that by 1932, the public/private ratio was exactly 50–50.44 (As the New Deal’s public works programs came online, this pattern would continue until after World War II, with public construction averaging 54 percent of all new construction from 1933 to 1945.45) As these figures make clear, the PWA had become the driving force in American construction, equal in size to all other firms put together, and in its impact it was much larger, given the critical importance of both its contracts to general contractors and subcontractors and its orders to materials firms.
The PWA cannot be understood solely for its material benefits, however. Ickes, his subordinates, and especially the civil engineers who staffed the institution all traded on their own vision of political economy, their own ideology, and their own plan for action, rooted within the mainstream of New Deal policies. In every way, the PWA was an equal contender to the WPA.
The PWA’s Economic Theory
The vision of political economy that the PWA’s administrators shared was broadly in sync with a variety of economic theories shared by the New Deal Left. They embraced a relatively loose understanding of countercyclical action that in 1935 had yet to be transformed by the theories of John Maynard Keynes. They admired the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans that had achieved rapid industrialization and modernization. They were convinced that economic planning was the solution to the Great Depression.46 The common thread was an understanding of the Great Depression as a crisis primarily in production, and only secondarily in consumption.47
From the perspective of PWA administrators, industrial corporations had overproduced in the 1920s, especially in the realm of capital goods. Supplies used to construct new factories, railroads, and highways—all the goods needed for an expanding economy—were left on the sidelines without sufficient buyers. When demand for these goods failed to clear the market, a glut produced paralysis in the core sectors of the economy. Producers sat on overpriced stocks of material and then slashed production in response. The glut led them to stave off restarting production even when the economy started to improve. The economy was experiencing a “demand crisis” to which the only effective response was government purchasing to stimulate demand. Contracts for public works construction increased the demand for raw materials.
In contrast to the proposals of the WPA, the PWA would create jobs indirectly, “bubbling up” from the foundations of the American economy. As Ickes wrote, “Who is to say which is the more important—the laborer who
