… public works to strengthen the nation … aiding commerce and uniting the widely separated colonies” both physically and (through the effort to finance them through federal taxation or deficit spending) politically.34 Notably, there does not seem to be any disagreement that early public works were intended to spur economic development of the young republic or, later in the nineteenth century, “to solve social problems of cities” like public health, water and sanitation needs, education, and housing.35
This consensus runs aground where public works during the New Deal are concerned. Scholars ask whether they should be conceptualized as forms of work relief, with the attendant connotations of charity or poor support, or as a continuation of earlier traditions of national and local improvement through construction. Udo Sautter argues that public works in the 1930s served both purposes simultaneously: “It seems possible to differentiate between public works for relief purposes and work relief,” he wrote, since, “according to one definition, the former term would designate ‘needed public improvements,’ which may have been advanced [in time] to provide employment, but which must have been undertaken in the near future regardless…. [W]ork relief, by contrast, would consist of ‘operations definitively undertaken to provide employment.’”36 However, Sautter argues that this distinction was essentially artificial, because both programs involved hiring workers and producing certain categories of goods (buildings, roads, bridges and tunnels, and so forth), and both tended to concentrate on building projects as an object of federal spending.
Smith offers an amendment to Sautter’s view, arguing that public works and “work relief” were identical, but neither aimed to provide employment. Smith departs from an earlier tradition of economic historians who “generally draw a distinction—unwarranted, in my view, between spending on ‘public works’ done by the PWA and ‘work relief’ performed by the PWA, neglecting the fact that both efforts produced substantial infrastructure throughout the nation.”37 Specifically, Smith “break[s] sharply from previous accounts that dismissed [these programs] simply as temporary efforts that failed to solve the crisis of the Great Depression,” including both consensus historians like Schlesinger and New Left historians like Howard Zinn, Barton Bernstein, and Ronald Radosh, seeing public works and relief programs instead as “important, wide-range investments in national infrastructure” that constituted a “public works revolution.”38 This revolution, in turn, “helped justify the new role of the state, legitimizing—intellectually and physically—what has come to be known as Keynesian management of the economy … and remade the built environment that managed the movement of people, goods,” and much more.39
Leighninger splits the difference, seeing New Deal public works as directed at both unemployment and economic development. In his narrative, “the argument that consumption can revive a sagging economy … got its first test during the New Deal by the Civil Works Administration (CWA)…. [U]nderconsumption theory became a major defense in the continuation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration [PWA].”40 At the same time, he points to the federal government’s deep investment in economic development when it came to transportation, power generation and electrification, and other areas as proof that underconsumption theory was matched by the focus on economic development.41 Whether these historians see public works in the 1930s as aiming to reduce unemployment or further economic development, public works and direct job creation are seen as part of the same project.42
In my view, this is a mistake: public works and direct job creation were not the same. Treating them as equivalent makes it difficult to explain why the two programs came into conflict, or why conservatives sought to eliminate the last vestiges of direct job creation from the federal government but were perfectly comfortable with Dwight Eisenhower proposing the Interstate Highway System, one of the largest public works programs in history.43
Conflating public works and federal direct job creation also minimizes the disparate origins of the two programs and how the divergent intellectual and ideological outlooks that gave birth to them shaped how their proponents diagnosed the calamity of the Great Depression and remedies for the employment collapse that it precipitated. WPA staffers saw traditional public works as obsolete and myopically focused on fiscal probity over human need, and they saw themselves—proponents of direct job creation—as an enlightened vanguard that would end the Great Depression. PWA experts saw direct job creation as both a waste of public funds and a potential source of corruption that would rake leaves or dig holes and leave nothing of value in its wake.44
Finally, as I will show, these intellectual differences had real material consequences for how these projects operated. These programs determined whether skilled and relatively economically secure workers or unskilled workers off the relief lines would be hired; whether public funds would be spent to maximize the delivery of jobs to the unemployed to increase the return on taxpayers’ money; and ultimately how the federal government in general would fight the Great Depression.
Direct Job Creation and the Public’s Memory
Policy historians have created a lively historiography on different periods of state activism, but they have been less successful in shaping the public’s historical memory, especially in the political news media. Over the past thirty years, conservative historians (mainly outside the academy) have put out book after book, a cottage industry in itself, proclaiming that the New Deal failed, that the War on Poverty was lost, that liberalism was responsible for stagflation in the 1970s. Their ultimate message is that the government cannot deal with unemployment (and that state action only makes things worse). Their arguments have been reflected and amplified by conservative talk radio, mainstream newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and partisan instruments from the Washington Times to Fox News.45
These New Deal denialist histories include Amity Shlaes’s Forgotten Man; Burton W. Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal?; Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly; Richard K. Vedder and Lowell Eugene Galloway’s Out of Work; and Gary Dean Best’s Pride, Prejudice, and Politics.46 The argument is standard throughout conservative historiography: the New Deal made things worse, by raising deficits and taxes; by instituting the central planning of manufacturing and agricultural goods; by “attacking business” with taxes, regulations, and rhetoric; by encouraging disruptive and radical labor unions; and by committing a panoply of other liberal sins against the free market. Following from Charles Murray’s arguments, they draw a straight line from the interventionist legislation of FDR to the sins of the War on Poverty, which they argue actually intensified poverty by encouraging “welfare dependency” and single motherhood. Likewise, 1970s stagflation is blamed on liberal social spending and greedy unions.
Academic historians have been loath to engage with these narratives, believing that this lends credibility to politically motivated amateurs. This is a mistake. Without a public rebuttal, readers beyond the ivy walls have only heard from the conservatives. Pessimism about the capacity of government to fight unemployment has shaped American economic policy profoundly, especially following the 2010 midterm elections. Historians, especially policy historians, have a responsibility to correct the record, given their original mission “to inform policy makers through a historical approach to public policy.”47
Direct job creation, a public policy born to solve mass unemployment, has been erased from public memory and excluded from the realm of possible alternatives in the national political discourse. People Must Live by Work argues that direct job creation was abandoned for reasons entirely other than the efficacy of the policy, reasons grounded in political institutions and environments that are no longer relevant today. At a time when so many in politics or the media argue that “there is no alternative” to laissezfaire economic policy, or that attempts to fight recessions or alleviate unemployment make things worse, I believe the record shows that there is—and long has been—another and better way.
In this way, this
