one of the earliest theoretical frameworks applied by historians to the study of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s model of the First and Second New Deals understandably influenced many later historical investigations of the Roosevelt administration. This is certainly true for the history of the CES. Social Security was Schlesinger’s ür-case study in the transition between a New Deal oriented around cooperation with capitalist interests, and a New Deal that moved to challenge them.13 For Schlesinger, Social Security showed FDR acting to create a new relationship between the national state and individual citizens, a new federal responsibility for social welfare, and a new attitude to laissez-faire capitalism that saw it as a fatally flawed system that must be replaced by a mixed economy guided by an activist government.
Schlesinger argued that Social Security was a durable “reform” measure meant to shield Americans from any future recession and hence was a permanent contract between the working citizen and the state. Works Progress Administration (WPA) job programs were, on his account, a “relief” measure, a temporary effort meant to lessen the effects of the Great Depression rather than to become a permanent part of the New Deal order. Other periodization models have followed in the same vein: John Jeffries, Otis Graham, and Barry Karl built on Schlesinger’s model by hypothesizing a Third New Deal oriented around economic planning and the expansion of state capacity; they tended to place direct job creation efforts as part of both the Second and Third New Deals, while still seeing them as separate from the First, and as separate from efforts to construct and expand social insurance programs in the late 1930s.14 Alan Brinkley’s End of Reform reconceived the New Deal as either reconstructing or ameliorating capitalism and flipped the order of events, but he retained the two-period radical/reformist framework pioneered by Schlesinger. In Brinkley’s model, the WPA was part of the earlier radical phase that ended with the rise of the conservative alliance and the turn to a more moderate liberalism that no longer directly challenged the prerogatives of capitalism.15
Direct job creation does not fit particularly well with these periodization efforts. FERA work programs and the CWA chronologically fall within the First New Deal period but are virtually identical to the WPA of the Second New Deal, which calls into question the sharp discontinuities between periods described by Schlesinger, Graham, Karl, and Jeffries. Likewise, as we will see in Chapter 3, the WPA’s direct job creation efforts far outlasted the annus horribilis of 1937 that provides Brinkley with his demarcation point. Most important, in my view, is that these models portray different policy projects—especially social insurance and direct job creation—as having little to do with each other. I argue, by contrast, that they were intimately connected from the beginning.
Following Schlesinger’s triumphal narrative of the expansion of the American welfare state, a new body of literature has challenged this optimism, pointing to ways in which the construction of social and economic citizenship within the CES had long-term consequences that entrenched and intensified pervasive gender and racial inequality.
The economist T. H. Marshall’s definition of “social citizenship,” as “the right to a modicum of economic security and security … the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society,” has been a tremendously useful model for American historians interested in political economy, poverty, and inequality.16 It is fundamental to both many discussions of American exceptionalism (since America’s journey through Marshall’s three stages of citizenship was quite different from Europe’s) and the distinctive features of the U.S. welfare state. However, Marshall’s concept has also been usefully challenged or extended by Alice Kessler-Harris, who coined the term “economic citizenship” as a fourth category or stage of citizenship. In her book In Pursuit of Equity, Kessler-Harris argued that the distinctiveness of America’s welfare state, and much of its gendered nature, stems from the fact that in America social rights have been made dependent on economic citizenship. Defined as “the independent status that provides the possibility of full participation in the polity” (and buttressed by access to superior forms of social insurance, mortgage and tax rates, and other benefits), Kessler-Harris argues that economic citizenship has been used as a barrier against women through their exclusion from the world of male work.17
Even those who disagree with Kessler-Harris’s ultimate emphasis on opening up economic citizenship have found her “economic citizenship” term useful. Several feminist historians like Linda Gordon, Eileen Boris, and Dorothy Sue Cobble take exception to Kessler-Harris’s emphasis on expanding the right of women to work in professions that guarantee access to economic citizenship. They noted that this objective would do little for nonworking poor women and mothers. Moreover, working-class women, despite having long been engaged in the same kind of industrial employment as working-class men, were still not included within economic citizenship. Finally, economic citizenship still leaves the issue of the “double shift” and women’s unwaged labor in the home to deal with.18 Even as they argue instead for expanding universal human rights to health care, childcare, and social supports, Gordon and others accept Kessler-Harris’s terminology of economic citizenship as a useful foil for their preferred categories of social citizenship and universal human rights. Similarly, historians who focus on race, such as Suzanne Mettler and Ira Katznelson, have picked up the “economic citizenship” term and have studied how economic citizenship was made white-only by defining heavily black industries as outside the field of recognized “work.”19
The historiographical division over social and economic citizenship also plays into debates about the two-track nature of the American welfare state, because economic citizenship is roughly equivalent to access to the “first” track. Gordon, Mettler, Kessler-Harris, Robert Lieberman, Katznelson, and others have convincingly demonstrated that one of the major shortcomings of American social policy, especially policies enacted during the “big bang” creation of the CES, was the division of social welfare policy into social insurance programs and welfare programs. The systematic exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from all of the major social insurance programs, from Old Age Insurance, to Old Age Assistance, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, ensured that skilled workers who were predominantly white men gained disproportionate access to benefits that were national, categorical, and well funded through payroll taxes.
By contrast, women, African Americans, and marginal workers were trapped in state and locally run programs. This left them vulnerable to discrimination at the hands of local officials. Benefits varied dramatically because they were shaped by state variation in the rules of eligibility and were subject to demeaning forms of social control through investigations, paupers’ oaths, and home visits. These programs were generally funded through grant-in-aid programs with limited federal matching, creating an incentive to keep benefit levels at a low level. Among scholars who have studied these programs, the major disagreements over the nature of the two-track welfare state revolve around which factors were responsible for the persistence of that two-track welfare state: did they include Dixiecrat insistence on maintaining the Southern labor market, traditional beliefs about the deserving versus undeserving poor, the impact of federalism, patronage systems, or a weak bureaucracy?
Expanding the scope of welfare policies considered under the rubric of the two-track welfare state to include direct job creation complicates this framework. Edwin Amenta’s work on the relative benefits of social insurance payments and welfare payments during the 1930s, for example, argues that “most Roosevelt Administration policymakers did not see themselves as designing a two track welfare state; rather, the WPA was a means-tested program that gave relatively high benefits. Nor did American policymakers view economic security strictly as a matter of social insurance coverage; means-tested programs dominated social policy.”20
In a similar vein, Jason Scott Smith, in Building New Deal Liberalism, deliberately sets out to prove that “public works programs were the New Deal’s central enterprise” and that they played an enormous role in accelerating America’s economic development from the 1930s through the 1960s.21
