June Hopkins. Presidential Studies Quarterly. Volume 29, Issue 2, June 1999.
One hot summer day in 1935, federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins presented his plan for alleviating the effects of the Great Depression to a group of shirt-sleeved Iowa farmers, not noted for their liberal ideals. As Hopkins began to describe how government-sponsored jobs on public projects would provide both wages for the unemployed and a stimulus for foundering businesses, a voice shouted out the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Who’s going to pay for all that?” Hopkins, with his characteristic flair for the dramatic, slowly took off his coat and tie, rolled up his sleeves, and looked out at the now-fascinated audience. Everyone knew the extent of Hopkins’s influence in Washington. His answer would reflect the attitude of President Roosevelt. “You are,” Hopkins shouted,
and who better? Who can better afford to pay for it. Look at this great university. Look at these fields, these forests and rivers. This is America, the richest country in the world. We can afford to pay for anything we want. And we want a decent life for all the people in this country. And we are going to pay for it.
Harry Hopkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s outspoken and often brusque relief administrator, brought with him to the White House the conviction that the ultimate responsibility for the welfare of citizens lay with the federal government. In the depths of the Great Depression, his sentiment that “there is no need for any American … to be reduced by the bondage of [unemployment and poverty] into either political or economic impotence” struck a chord with FDR. Hopkins had the president’s ear, and most Washington insiders knew that if something needed to be done, Hopkins was the man to see. A sort of harmonics existed between the two men, and they forged a deep and enduring friendship. Yet, despite the amount of power Hopkins wielded in the White House, his particular blueprint for the American welfare state did not make it past the drawing board; his plan for a permanent government job assurance program did not become part of the Social Security Act.
From 1933 to 1939, Hopkins acted as President Roosevelt’s federal relief administer, responsible for both direct and work relief. He headed the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Projects Administration CWPA). He helped formulate the Social Security Act of 1935, the revolutionary legislation that founded the American welfare state. This article focuses on Hopkins’s plan for countercyclical public works as an addendum to the act’s social insurance program.
By 1930, the Great Depression had plunged New York State into economic chaos. One million of the state’s workers were unemployed. Hopkins, New York City social worker, recalled conditions at the beginning of the Great Depression when “almost every time the clock ticked a man lost his job. He felt that it was time for the state to step in and provide jobs for the unemployed. Because large-scale public relief for the able-bodied unemployed was still anathema in the social work community, Hopkins sought solutions within the confines of the private relief community. In 1930, he and colleague William Matthews, under the auspices of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), raised $6 million from private contributions for a work relief project in cooperation with the Emergency Work Bureau (EWB). Hopkins and Matthews, supported by the park commissioners of Manhattan and the Bronx as well as Mayor James Walker, put approximately one hundred thousand people to work in city parks. Every worker was paid the same wage, five dollars a day, and was restricted to either three days a week or alternate weeks of work. There was a notable lack of red tape, with no means test and no supervisory social workers. This, of course, even in 1930, flew in the face of every tenet of scientific philanthropy. But the crisis situation demanded new procedures. When the inevitable criticism came pouring in from the conservative welfare establishment for the program’s rather unconventional methods, Hopkins merely told them to “go to hell.” Although he retained his acerbic personality throughout his career, Hopkins soon learned that he would have to defend government jobs programs with more appealing rhetoric stressing traditional American themes such as democracy, independence, and the Protestant work ethic.
From 1930 through 1933, the EWB spent $30 million from private contributions on hundreds of projects. Although it soon ran out of money, by the time it ceased functioning, the EWB had spent millions in relief wages, starting well before the nation had taken any such steps to meet the problem. Its activities not only tested the validity of work relief on a municipal level but also provided a body of experience for work relief projects in the not-so-distant future.
On the state level, Frances Perkins, Governor Franklin Roosevelt’s state industrial commissioner, reported that business and industry should do what it could to stabilize employment. The governor wholeheartedly agreed. Hopkins, dedicated to employment as the best antidote to poverty, chary of the profit motives of American industry, and convinced that the government had to take the lead in relieving the distress caused by the Depression, had little of Perkins’s confidence in the ability or desire of American business to take the lead in stabilizing industry. He was correct in this assumption. When unemployment throughout the state reached unprecedented proportions, Perkins, with the support of both labor and business, finally opted for public works projects as “the greatest source of hope for the future.
In January of 1931, Roosevelt spoke at a governors’ conference. He declared that the national economic emergency demanded new solutions for new problems, and he called for experimental programs, with government on all levels accepting responsibility for the welfare of people. He recognized the shortfall of private charities and local public agencies in the cities:
I am very confident that during the next few years State after State will realize, as we have begun to do in New York, that it is a definite responsibility for government itself to reach out for new solutions for new problems.
Under authority granted to him by the Legislature in Extraordinary Session, the governor created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) in October of 1931. The New York State Legislature appropriated $20 million for emergency relief of the unemployed and established an EWB to be responsible for the administration of both direct and work relief. The TERA board offered the job as executive director to Hopkins, who enthusiastically accepted. In August of 1932, he took over as president.
Hopkins concentrated on creating a program in New York that could set an example for other states. He made sure that TERA work relief projects were consonant with prevailing social and economic attitudes, insisting on socially useful projects that would not replace or duplicate normal municipal functions, would not interfere with private industry, and would pay wages in cash at the prevailing rate for the type of work performed.
TERA represented the first enactment under which a State, as such, had accepted any liability for the support of its population, viewed not as wards but merely as men and women unable temporarily to accommodate themselves to the social scene, without at the same time placing such men and women in the position of recipients of a bounty or a dole [and] in such a manner as to preserve the self-respect of every beneficiary.
Yet, because it was aimed at a particularly deserving population—the involuntarily unemployed worker—it was, according to Hopkins, as American as corn on the cob. TERA was not radical. Work as an antidote to poverty was deeply embedded in American culture. What was new was Hopkins’s open declaration that it was the responsibility of the government to provide this work.
Hopkins no longer told his critics to “go to hell.” He had developed a political astuteness by this time, and he therefore attempted to address the conventional bias against public relief by placing it well within the democratic tradition. The nation’s economic collapse, he explained, had caused the impoverishment of ordinary folks, good, hard-working people. It was the duty of a democratic government not only to ensure that citizens had the necessities of life to survive but that those able to work had employment.
With the election of Roosevelt as president of the United States, Hopkins geared for action. He believed that only a federal relief program could save the country. He also thought he could run it. By 1933, Hopkins had had twenty years of experience in social work and welfare administration. His experience had taught him that within the capitalist system, American industry could not be expected to act outside of the profit motive and that therefore, especially in times of depression, the federal government had to operate as mediator between competing interests. He had an almost religious commitment to the tenet that Americans should always be afforded the dignity of work at a living wage.
It took Harry Hopkins less than a week after Roosevelt’s inauguration to go into action. With Bill Hodson, head of New York City’s Welfare Council, he headed to Washington and met with their old colleague, Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor. They presented her with a plan they had devised for federal relief, which included the appointment of a federal relief administrator in charge of both direct and work relief programs. Perkins had already reviewed hundreds of such plans but, “impressed by the exactness of their knowledge and the practicability of their plan,” she agreed to take it to Roosevelt. The president quickly agreed to their strategy for a national relief policy. Consequently, two months after Roosevelt’s inauguration, Congress passed the Federal Emergency Relief Bill with an initial appropriation of $500 million. Roosevelt immediately signed the act, which would for the first time provide federal aid in the form of grants to the states to help them meet their relief needs. On May 19, the president offered the job as federal relief administrator to Hopkins. Within three days, Hopkins resigned from TERA and began his work as director of FERA. According to Frances Perkins, “it was as simple as that and the beginning of Hopkins’s rise.”
When Roosevelt appointed Hopkins as director of FERA, he called him to his office for a five-minute talk. The president told the Washington newcomer two things: give immediate and adequate relief to the unemployed, and pay no attention to politics or politicians. Hopkins did just that. Thirty minutes later, seated at a makeshift desk in a hallway in the RFC Building, he began a program committed to action rather than debate, a program that would eventually put 15 million people to work. Even more important, FERA established the doctrine that adequate public relief was a right that citizens in need could expect to receive from their government. On May 22, FERA assumed responsibility for 18 million people, representing 4 million families on public relief?
FERA money supported both direct relief and work relief. For Hopkins, however, the primary objective of FERA was to “remove from the relief rolls and place in gainful occupations as many persons as possible.” He was well aware of the innovative nature of FERA and knew that he would have to convince the American public that it was really not radical. To do this, he used rhetoric that would appeal to most Americans. Hopkins insisted that the unemployed were good people fallen on hard times. In a radio address, he asked,
Who are these fellow-citizens? Are they tramps? Are they hoboes and ne’er-do-wells? Are they unemployables? Are they people who are no good and who are incompetent? Take a look at them, if you have not, and see who they are. There is hardly a person listening in who does not know of an intimate friend, people whom you have known all your life, fine hard-working, upstanding men and women who have gone overboard and been caught up in this relief structure of ours. They are carpenters, bricklayers, artisans, architects, engineers, clerks, stenographers, doctors, dentists, farmers, ministers; the whole crowd is caught in this thing, the finest people in America. That is who they are—or were before they lost their jobs.
By autumn of 1933, it became increasingly clear to Hopkins that the FERA’s work relief program was not putting enough people to work. Overall, the outlook for the approaching winter seemed bleak. In October, while on a trip to Chicago and Kansas City, Hopkins began to formulate plans for a new work program. Aubrey Williams, a member of Hopkins’s staff, probably came up with the original idea for the CWA. He suggested to Hopkins that they set up a work program in which the government itself acted as contractor. Although Hopkins was excited by the idea, he knew that they would have to ensure the support of organized labor before any such program would even be considered by Roosevelt. Williams enlisted the assistance of John R. Commons, a prominent labor economist from the University of Wisconsin, who happily discovered that Samuel Gompers had recommended public work projects to employ workers during depressions. The discovery of Gompers’s endorsement of government work programs furnished Hopkins with an important precedent and was crucial for his plans to create the CWA. He saw clear parallels between 1893 and 1933, and he felt that he now had enough ammunition to convince Roosevelt to back this innovative emergency plan.
On November 9, 1933, an executive order of the president created the experimental and temporary CWA. Roosevelt appointed Hopkins director of the program and released $400 million of FERA money for the project. One week later, Hopkins had a plan ready to present to the nation. By November 20, all work reliefers were transferred to CWA rolls. Jobs, all of which were administered under force account (day labor), would fall between those undertaken as normal government activities and those long-term PWA projects. Hopkins was sure his plan would work and called the CWA “the most heartening thing that has happened to those of us in relief work.”
Unlike FERA work relief programs that based “wages” on a family’s estimated budgetary deficiency, the CWA provided real work for real wages. CWA jobs paid a minimum-wage rate of thirty cents an hour for a maximum of an eight-hour day. Half of the workers were taken from the relief rolls and the other half from those unemployed persons who more than likely had just been too proud to ask for relief. Workers seeking employment were not subjected to any means test or intrusive supervision by social workers. Because hiring was done through employment agencies rather than social welfare agencies, these projects had nothing to do with emergency relief. In the spring of 1934, more than two hundred thousand projects had been initiated, projects that Hopkins declared would be remembered for generations to come because they had “let loose a great economic and spiritual force.”
The CWA had become the largest employer in the nation’s history, spending almost $1 billion. It put 4 million to work on approximately four thousand projects within four weeks and mobilized as many people during a two-month period as were “called to the colors” during the First World War. Hopkins recognized the uniqueness of his program. He declared that “the CWA will stand out … like a precocious child among a family of slower-going, but more substantial children.” Yet, however committed Hopkins was to the CWA model, he accepted its temporary nature. When asked what would happen when it shut down, Hopkins responded, “You people have got to have faith in the Government.” Hopkins had faith in his government and in the president.
The CWA was criticized for its alleged slap-dash methods and its suspect administration, but Hopkins would give no quarter in his defense of this work program. He knew that the speed with which his program operated led to some blunders and to some waste. But he said, “we were not planning an expedition to dig up Egyptian mummies …. When a house is on fire, you don’t call a conference, you put it out.” Yet, despite his commitment to the ideals of the CWA, Hopkins, at the president’s behest, orchestrated its demise. The CWA closed down April 1, 1934, and its work programs were folded back into the FERA.
In early spring of 1934, more than 11 million workers were still unemployed and on the relief rolls. Eighty percent of them were employable. For New Dealers, this represented a deplorable waste of manpower. President Roosevelt felt that
continued dependence on relief induces a spiritual and mental disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for the able-bodied but destitute workers.
Hopkins had never been happy with the way limited funds forced him to organize relief under FERA. In July of 1934, while he was on a fact-finding trip to Europe to see how other nations were dealing with unemployment, a reporter in London asked him if he was satisfied with work relief under FERA. He replied in his customary no-holds-barred fashion, “No, I hate it. We all hate it. We hate having to pry into the family affairs of millions of self-respecting people. Hopkins was sure that there was a better way.
When Eleanor Roosevelt invited Hopkins to Hyde Park over the Labor Day weekend following his return, he leapt at the opportunity to get the president’s ear to discuss plans for a national system of social security. He suggested that the federal government establish a work authority corporation in each state, which would put the able-bodied unemployed to work on self-liquidating projects. Hopkins was convinced that this was absolutely essential to the nation’s economic health and consistent with American values. He insisted that the opportunity to work was an inalienable right for all Americans and that government unemployment relief in the form of jobs should be part of any proposed social insurance package. Roosevelt, however, wanting always to keep relief and social insurance separate, did not agree and felt that this would merely be an adaptation of the English dole.
The president, however, did realize that private enterprise would never be able to absorb the American workforce and knew that he had to devise a program to ensure the economic security of Americans. Roosevelt had a rather clear idea of what he wanted such a program to encompass—a contributory unemployment insurance, an old-age pension, public assistance for unemployables, a work program rather than relief, and health insurance. He set up the Committee on Economic Security (CES) in June of 1934 to investigate ways to accomplish this, declaring that
reconstruction does not require the creation of new and strange values. It is rather the finding of the way once more to known, but to some degree forgotten, ideals and values. If the means and the details are in some instances new, the objectives are as permanent as human nature.
These were the traditional values to which Hopkins felt so committed: democracy and the self-reliance of the American worker within the capitalist system.
The CES, assisted by an Advisory Committee and Technical Board, investigated old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to dependent children, all of which were incorporated into the Social Security Act of 1935. Recognizing that “economic security is a much broader concept than social insurance,” they also debated Hopkins’s suggestion for a permanent federal works program in concert with unemployment insurance. An early CES report concurred that unemployment insurance, “while a valuable first line of defense for the majority of our industrial workers, has distinct limitations,” covering only about one-half of American workers. Even those workers covered by this insurance may exhaust their benefits before finding another job. Therefore, countercyclical public works had an important place in any long-term plan for economic security.
Hopkins fully supported the unemployment insurance proposed under the Economic Security Bill, but he felt that those out of work for any extended period would fall too quickly into poverty. He also believed that the nation should not expect private industry, on its own, to stabilize employment. American business could not turn a profit while supporting superfluous workers on the payroll, especially during times of depression. President Roosevelt and Secretary Perkins both admitted that the fundamental purpose of unemployment insurance was to afford the unemployed worker protection for only a limited period of time and that “when unemployment benefits are exhausted, relief, preferably in the form of work, must be provided on some means test basis.”
The Advisory Committee, however, feared that a government employment program might be virtually indistinguishable from relief, especially if they adopted the work relief (FERA) model, which restricted jobs to those on relief rolls and paid wages according to individual need rather than ability. They realized, however, that some form of employment program had to be devised. Therefore, they recommended that candidates for employment be selected on the basis of ability rather than need and be paid according to work performed rather than an estimated budgetary deficiency. The proposed federal works corporation, which would provide diversified, self-liquidating jobs paying adequate wages, would involve enormous scope and expense. This model, reminiscent of the radical, controversial, and expensive CWA, proved to be problematic for those who feared socialism creeping into the government. Yet, no one wanted to continue direct federal relief.
As early as November of 1933, the president believed that he was speaking for the majority of the people when he stated, “I have a feeling that the temper of the American people is not going to stand for the payment of insurance benefits over long periods of time to people who do not work.” The CES agreed, and in its report to the president in January 1935, it recommended “the stimulation of private employment and the provision of public employment for those able-bodied workers whom industry cannot employ at a given time” along with unemployment and old-age insurance, aid to fatherless children, and a public health program. Nevertheless, a permanent federal employment corporation was not realized, and government jobs did not become a part of the 1935 Social Security legislation package.
If government work programs were consistent with popular attitudes of the 1930s, then why were they not included as part of the act that would form the basis of our welfare state? Instead, unemployment insurance, aid to dependent children, and old-age pensions became the mainstay of the American welfare system. Hopkins had consistently fought the idea that a comprehensive insurance program would eliminate completely the need for government employment in times of depression. Why did his attempt to integrate a permanent work program into the bill fail? At a 1955 ceremony in Washington, DC, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Social Security Act, Edwin Witte gave a clue. He recounted that in 1935, there had been real doubts that the legislation would ever get passed. The difficulties, he said, had to do with the continuing economic depression. “Because we were in the midst of a deep depression, the Administration and the Congress were very anxious to avoid placing too great burdens on business and also of adding to Government deficits.” Clearly, the form that the Advisory Council preferred for a jobs program (the CWA model) came dangerously close to these pitfalls.
Hopkins’s biographer Searle Charles suggested that economic and political reasons lay behind the rejection of Hopkins’s plan. A New York Times article published on Thanksgiving Day 1934 indicated that a federal work relief corporation was planned as a permanent part of the American plan for economic security, with a patently frightening price tag of from $4 to $9 billion. Furthermore, in light of strong opposition from the Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the United States Chambers of Commerce, as well as banking and finance groups, presidential support was essential. Despite the boost given his administration by the off-year elections, FDR, according to Charles, capitulated to conservatism. Believing that the road to recovery lay in cooperation between labor, business, and government, the president opted for conciliation rather than confrontation.
While these analyses help to clarify the situation in 1935, another explanation seems more likely. Hopkins’s commitment to a work component in New Deal relief programs derived from his emphasis on preserving the capitalist system as well as the morale of the needy unemployed forced to ask for assistance. Yet, he had to ensure that government jobs programs did not undermine capitalism while trying to preserve it. Work relief programs that duplicated wages, hours, and conditions of private businesses would surely have boosted the morale of the workers who found jobs through these agencies, but they also would have threatened private enterprise. The CWA did just that and was scrapped within four months. Hopkins’s plan for a permanent public works corporation, because it came uncomfortably close to competing with private industry, was much too radical a step for the committee and for the president.
The social insurance plans detailed by the CES would not kick in for months to come, and the idle industrial worker continued to suffer from the effects of the Depression. There were still well over 2 million families on relief. In his State of the Union Address on January 4,1935, Roosevelt emphatically stated that the federal government “must quit this business of relief,” and he agreed with Hopkins that useful work had to be found for the able-bodied unemployed. This would boost consumerism and get money circulating again. FDR’s plan was for a temporary government work program, and he requested Congress to appropriate $4 billion to provide jobs for those already on relief With the president’s vigorous encouragement, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act under which Roosevelt created the National Emergency Council. He appointed Hopkins head of its Works Progress Division, originally the least important of the three divisions, meant only to be a record-keeping, informational body. However, recognizing by this time that there was little chance of having his work program integrated into the Economic Security Bill, Hopkins used his influence with the president, along with his energy and aggressiveness, to turn his division into the powerful but still temporary WPA. The WPA, as an alternative to a permanent program of government jobs, marked an important signpost along the American way to welfare. It represented both a fear of excessive federal intervention and an economizing impulse.
In 1914, Harry Hopkins, AICP social worker, had warned that “there is always the danger that in our dread of making people dependent we shall cease to do good for fear of doing harm.” A belief in the pauperizing effect of relief in any form and a tendency to judge relief recipients in moral instead of economic terms has unfortunately always been an integral part of the national mind. Its persistence has prevented America’s welfare system from maturing into its complete form. Although Hopkins recognized this, he could not change it. Several months before his death, he challenged the fear that many of his critics expressed—the fear that if the government ensured its citizens of the opportunity to earn a living, “it would destroy the incentive for hard work which is so characteristic of our American tradition.” Hopkins did not believe in moralizing; he did not worry that people’s character would be destroyed if they received old-age benefits or government jobs. He argued that “full employment must and can be attained within the framework of our traditional democratic processes” and in 1945 declared that it was “a contradiction in terms” to fight for democracy abroad while admitting
that the system may not be able … to assure every man able and willing to work a right to an opportunity to secure the reasonable necessities of life that make up what we know as the American standard of living.
When Hopkins first arrived in Washington, he stated that the “first task of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration is to see that the destitute unemployed are cared for.” Although the Social Security Act did establish federal responsibility for the welfare of Americans, it did not create the welfare system that Hopkins had envisioned. Despite all of the bold strokes of the New Deal, Hopkins’s goal, a federal guarantee of a regular income for a minimum standard of living earned through the dignity of a job for those people who had been dealt “deuces and threes,” remains an unfinished task.