pursuing something like a “jobs and assistance” state, in which the state would use public works programs to spur private-sector economic development, thus steering as many people as possible into the protections of the employment-based welfare state. Similarly, Chad Allen Goldberg’s work on radical WPA unions suggests that WPA workers, while relief clients who theoretically should have been driven into the second tier of the welfare state, were able to use the concept of work to contest their status and demand the right to a job as an entitlement “earned” through their labor.22
Direct job creation appears to have existed halfway between the two tracks of welfare, with interesting consequences for considerations of social and economic citizenship. On the one hand, this type of program very much traded on the rhetoric of earned rights, based in gendered conceptions of work, deployed by advocates for social insurance, and meant to serve a clientele (predominantly white men, blue-collar workers, frequently older heads of households) normally protected by social insurance. Indeed, the fact that the Great Depression plunged many millions of these normally economically secure workers into the same straits normally occupied by the marginalized might explain why policymakers were willing to countenance such a radical expansion of national provision for the unemployed. On the other hand, direct job creation was not a contributory program as traditionally defined. Its relatively privileged recipients were still those whose paupers’ oaths had ejected them from the ranks of the “worthy” poor in the eyes of many in society. Moreover, the origins of this job program in poor relief drew a straight line between these work programs and the welfare track of American social policy.
Restoring direct job creation to the history of the origin of Social Security and the CES thus offers a new perspective on questions of social and economic citizenship and the two tracks of the welfare state. To begin with, much of this literature has focused on the role of private-sector employment and specific forms of private-sector work as the restrictive and discriminatory dividing line between the worthy and unworthy poor. Yet direct job creation programs like the WPA traded on the idea of work as a badge of worthiness. The state distributed work to those without, bringing them into the circle of worthiness, instead of penalizing the unemployed. Unemployment was defined as a failure of the labor market rather than a sign of individual failure, absolving the unemployed of economic sin.
Direct job creation turned work into a benefit that was open to anyone who applied for it. If this was not precisely identical to the idea of welfare as a right of social citizenship, it certainly was moving in that direction. Moreover, the actual functioning of such programs tended to undermine the racialized and gendered divisions of the two tracks of the welfare state: at any given time during its existence, four hundred thousand African Americans and another four hundred thousand women who would otherwise have been excluded from UI and Old Age Insurance gained eligibility through their WPA paychecks and the payroll contributions deducted from them.23
Direct job creation called upon work as a cultural, social, and political symbol, used to empower as well as to oppress. Social investigations of the kind studied by Mary Furner, Barry Supple, Alice O’Connor, and other students of social scientific knowledge and progressivism make this clear.24 They turned to research conducted in the 1930s by E. White Bakke, the eminent British social scientist and expert William Beveridge,25 the WPA’s Research Division, the U.S. Labor Department, as well as an array of public and private researchers to show that work had an important symbolic meaning for the poor and the working class. In industrial societies, work provided (and still provides) a huge source of social and psychological meaning. It defined the neighborhood one lived in; it circumscribed the friends and workmates who would occupy much of the day; it offered a sense of contributing to society, of being needed.
Given the influence of immigration in industrial labor forces in the United States especially (but to a lesser extent in Europe as well), where a person worked could also be a signifier of nationality, language, and religion, and vice versa, as professions and sectors were ethnically divided. As a consequence, unemployed workers and their families, even those on public relief, believed in the idea that work entitled one to a superior set of earned rights and they wanted access to it. As one wife of a WPA worker put it, “We’re not on relief any more—my husband works for the government!”26
Early public opinion surveys, conducted by Witte and the nascent Gallup organization, of the unemployed and of relief clients discovered that the most downtrodden were much more adamant about finding a job than they were about welfare for all. While scholars favoring social citizenship or universal human rights (or a guaranteed minimum income) might argue that this reflects the hegemony of American individualism, there is no escaping the evidence of millions of unemployed workers themselves who proclaimed, “[W]e don’t want relief, give us work.” The sentiment reflects the conviction shared by many (including Marx) that the creative potential of employment is missing from social citizenship. As Beveridge argued in 1944, “A person who cannot sell his labour is in effect told that he is of no use … a personal catastrophe. The difference remains even if an adequate income is provided, by insurance or otherwise, during unemployment … the feeling of not being wanted demoralizes.”27
In the context of full employment and the right to a job, work requirements lose something of their punitive or exclusionary force. Instead they become a constitutive element in a horizontal social contract between the employed, who agree to pay the taxes required to employ the jobless, who in turn agree to produce public goods and services to enlarge the commonwealth and beautify the public square. On this reading, economic citizenship becomes less a characteristic of laissez-faire systems, and more a characteristic of solidaristic systems—hence the reason job policy is a vibrant characteristic of social democracies.
Viewed through the lens of job policy, the distinction between social and economic citizenship breaks down. This in turn carries significant implications for the broader debate about American exceptionalism and the welfare state. Go/sta Esping-Anderson’s model of Anglo-American, Continental, and Social Democratic welfare state regimes relies on these distinctions.28 Yet if both the United States and Sweden were developing job policy simultaneously in the 1930s at a time when other nations within the Anglo sphere of influence (the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and so forth) and Continental nations such as France and Germany were not, we have a dilemma on our hands. How explanatory is the Anglo-American model of welfare states? How exceptional and separate was the United States? The model does not hold. Likewise, if at times Britain, France, and Germany balked at mass direct job creation (even in the midst of an economic crisis like the Great Depression) then the United States’ frustrated attempts to institutionalize job policy mean that the American social policy is not as far as some would have it from European models.
Direct Job Creation and the Welfare State
Social Security occupies a prominent place in policy history. Sociologists and political scientists have been interested in why the United States is a welfare laggard and why the country adopted certain structures of eligibility and their underlying “theories” of worthiness and not others. The American political development (APD) school has made particularly important theoretical contributions to our understanding of the ways institutional changes and structural features shape policy outcomes historically. In this model, initial policy decisions create a political dynamic that acts to reinforce them over time. This “policy feedback effect” entrenches one approach and excludes others, creating a “path dependency” in institutional development.
Theda Skocpol, Margaret Weir, Ann Orloff, Jill Quadagno, Jacob Hacker, and others in this tradition point to Social Security as a classic case of path dependency. Once a policy so controversial that after enactment it was targeted for repeal by the opposition party, it became a third rail of American politics, so strong that it was easily able to weather antistatist periods in American politics. APD studies have tended to focus almost exclusively on social insurance and welfare programs. They tend to treat other policy initiatives considered by the CES as examples of policy options that were ruled out as a consequence of path dependency.
