People Must Live by Work
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors:
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore,
Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
People Must Live by Work
Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan
Steven Attewell
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLYANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved.
Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-5043-5
Contents
Introduction. Prehistory of an Idea
Chapter 3. “One Third of a Nation”: WPA Direct Job Creation Reconsidered as a Policy Success
Chapter 4. Right to Work? Rethinking the Promise of Full Employment in the 1945 Moment
Chapter 5. Jobs and Freedom: The Missing Front in the War on Poverty
Conclusion. Jobs and the Policy Imagination
Abbreviations
| AAA | Agricultural Adjustment Administration |
| ACA | Advisory Committee on Allotments |
| AFDC | Aid to Families with Dependent Children |
| AFL-CIO | American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations |
| APD | American political development |
| ARRA | American Recovery and Relief Act |
| CAP | Community Action Program |
| CCC | Civilian Conservation Corps |
| CEA | Council of Economic Advisers |
| CES | Committee on Economic Security |
| CETA | Comprehensive Employment and Training Act |
| CWA | Civil Works Administration |
| EITC | Earned Income Tax Credit |
| ELR | employer of last resort |
| ERA | Emergency Relief Appropriation Act |
| FAP | Family Assistance Plan |
| FEB | Full Employment Bill |
| FERA | Federal Emergency Relief Administration |
| GMI | guaranteed minimum income |
| HEW | Department of Health, Education, and Welfare |
| HHA | Humphrey-Hawkins Act |
| NAIRU | non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment |
| NEC | National Emergency Council |
| NIT | Negative Income Tax |
| NRA | National Recovery Administration |
| NRPB | National Resources Planning Board |
| NWRO | National Welfare Rights Organization |
| NYA | National Youth Authority |
| OEO | Office of Economic Opportunity |
| OMB | Office of Management and Budget |
| OPA | Office of Price Administration |
| PBJI | Program for Better Jobs and Income |
| PECE | President’s Committee for Employment |
| POUR | President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief |
| PSE | public service employment |
| PWA | Public Works Administration |
| TERA | Temporary Emergency Relief Administration |
| UI | Unemployment Insurance |
| USES | U.S. Employment Service |
| WPA | Works Progress Administration |
Introduction
Prehistory of an Idea
People Must Live by Work discusses the history of an idea, one that seems completely alien to Americans today: that the government should fight unemployment (especially, but not only, in massive global depressions) by hiring the unemployed directly. The policymakers who invented and elaborated on this idea believed that the government had both a moral mandate and the practical capacity to obliterate unemployment altogether. It could deploy direct job creation measures to fine-tune the unemployment rate and eradicate mass joblessness, even in periods as calamitous as the Great Depression.
The concept was not merely theoretical. For ten years (1933–1943), direct job creation was put into practice on a national scale by the federal government, which became the largest single employer in the country. After World War II (during which millions of Americans worked for the federal government either in uniform or in factories), a furious debate ensued over whether the right to a job should be enshrined in law and whether direct job creation should be used to give it life. Arguments persisted for thirty years, culminating in a clash over a 1978 bill meant to abolish unemployment forever. Thereafter, there was silence,