and employ more than ten million people.
Historical Perspectives
Direct job creation occupies a strange position in historiography. In contrast to social insurance and welfare, direct job creation has not been seen by historians as a major part of twentieth-century reform efforts like the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Direct job creation has not been discussed in most assessments of recovery from the Great Depression, the economic boom of World War II, postwar prosperity from the 1940s through the 1960s, or the economic crisis of the 1970s. Instead, policy historians have tended to subsume direct job creation within larger categories—“employment policy,” “job policy,” “public works”—in a way that obscures the specific ideas that inspired and justified this dramatic market intervention.
Because it languishes in relative obscurity, direct federal job creation is not easily distinguishable from similar policies. Indeed, during the period in question and in historical accounts, “relief works,” “work relief,” “public works,” “work programs,” “public employment,” and “public service employment” are often used interchangeably to describe direct job creation; but at the same time, not all job programs are the same thing. Subsidies to private employers and nonprofits helped to create jobs in the private sector; public works contracts to private contractors stimulated employment in the construction and materials industries; and subsidized jobs for specific groups of disadvantaged workers affected those workers specifically. In these schemes, the government provided funding to enable other economic actors to resolve gaping holes in the labor market. By contrast, direct job creation involves the government itself hiring, managing, and paying unemployed workers in order to directly lower the unemployment rate.
Direct job creation, thus defined, perennially competed with other policy options. Traditional public works (which involve contracts to third parties), job training programs, Keynesian stimulus, and other forms of planning for full employment were the leading alternatives that posed a challenge to the proponents of direct job creation. People Must Live by Work explores the interactions between these policies and accounts for the successes as well as the ideological and pragmatic conflicts that attended the beginnings of direct job creation.
Job Policy and the New Deal: Historical Debates
Given the extraordinary scope and scale of job programs during the New Deal, most works on job policy focus on this period and roughly break down into several categories of historical studies.
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL AND ITS CRITICS
The first important body of literature is the institutionalist study of the New Deal, centered around but not exclusive to the American political development (APD) school of political scientists and policy historians. These scholars point to a variety of mechanisms to account for the evolution of Depression-era employment policy. They give considerable weight to path dependency: the notion that decisions taken earlier in time have ripple effects later on, closing off alternatives. Policy feedback also plays a role because, they argue, public policy generates its own politics, building coalitions to defend or attack programs. Institutional autonomy and design, the view that governments can act independently of politics to shape policy and to deploy veto points, are key to understanding policy development. How do these theoretical tenets of APD impact our understanding of direct job creation?
In a pair of essays on the rise and fall of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Edwin Amenta, Drew Halfmann, and their collaborators applied the APD model of veto points to explore how the New Deal’s job programs shaped, and were shaped by, emerging congressional coalitions. Machine politicians in the North were resistant to large-scale federal programs because they offered no scope for graft through the letting of contracts. Liberal and laborist congressmen, committed to a progressive ideological agenda, were more enthusiastic because the WPA held so much promise for their central political constituency: the economically threatened working class. Southern Congressmen eager for agricultural subsidies and other federal assistance accepted the New Deal’s job programs initially, but eventually turned against them when these programs threatened the monopoly of Southern whites over control of the Southern labor market.28
Amenta and Halfmann deploy the idea of policy feedback to explain the remarkable endurance of the WPA, the way that a program that distributed desperately needed jobs and public works managed to build a political coalition that kept the WPA lasting longer than other New Deal initiatives. Most important for my purposes, they argue that New Deal job programs created a “jobs and assistance state.” The architects and managers of the WPA and other employment programs believed that they were creating a permanent system that provided an alternative to standard social welfare policies. This stands in sharp contrast to earlier historians of the New Deal, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and William Leuchtenburg, who described the WPA as a temporary response to economic catastrophe.
Other prominent APD scholars, especially Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, focus instead on institutional autonomy and structure.29 For them, the key story was how the limited and uneven establishment of economic policymaking institutions within the federal government shaped American job policy in a path-dependent process. Due to the weakness of these institutions (as opposed to the vagaries of congressional majorities, as Amenta and Halfmann would argue), job policy never quite made the jump from the New Deal into the postwar world.
Taking a very different track from the APD school, Brian Balogh instead argues that state autonomy was very limited. Federal authority has historically been exercised through joint public/private ventures and collaboration with private professional associations, allowing the government to hide its hand in a country suspicious of public power.30 Balogh’s point is well taken with regards to the nineteenth-century state that he examined in A Government Out of Sight. Yet in his subsequent volume, The Associational State, Balogh overextends the point beyond what the historical record can bear. Critically, Balogh regards job programs almost entirely as a joint public/private enterprise dominated by the public works contracting process. This view overlooks the WPA’s innovative character, in that the program involved the federal government directly in hiring and managing workers, much to the consternation of the contractors’ associations.31
Likewise, in sharp contrast to the occasionally Whiggish implications of APD’s reliance on path dependence, Jefferson Cowie believes that the New Deal’s reforms were a temporary aberration in an otherwise dominant trend of conservativism. In The Great Exception, Cowie asserts that the political strength of individualism and antistatism conspired to render New Deal reforms the exception rather than the transformative rule. Americans were simply not inclined to accept as durable this level of government intrusion into the market. Rejecting an activist policy like direct job creation was made all the more likely by the division of potentially progressive voters by cultural conflicts over immigration, religion, and race.
The historical record calls these pessimistic conclusions into question. Major reform movements—like post–Civil War Reconstruction or the Obama administration’s efforts on redistributive stimulus, health care, or financial reform—must all be defined out of the picture in order to cast direct job creation as an extraordinary exception rather than an example of an alternative perspective: reform and retreat.32 A case can be made that there are few “straight lines” in U.S. social policy. Instead, progressive causes advance new models that succeed for a time, get beaten back, and then reemerge again. The contested terrain is never settled.
PROGRAMMATIC HISTORIES
Nancy Rose, Thomas Frank, and Bonnie Fox Schwartz created what are the most comprehensive of what could be called programmatic histories that focus on the careers of individual job programs, and all three examine job programs as emerging from the broader world of poor relief and welfare programs. Their histories closely resemble the original administrative narratives written by Donald Howard, Arthur MacMahon, and Josephine
