People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
the New Deal to be.
Witte makes it clear that, from his perspective, the CES intended that social insurance would be the cornerstone of the New Deal. He was a partisan of this approach and did much to promote its importance for the long haul. From the beginning, he argued, the CES had hit on “unemployment insurance and old age security” as the “two major fields to which the staff would have to devote a great deal of attention.”31 “It was agreed that the committee would have to make careful actuarial studies” their first priority, given its foundational importance to Old Age Insurance.32 Witte went farther, claiming that direct job creation research was not a major undertaking of the CES. “No final report was ever made by [Emerson Ross] or his staff.… [T]he reports of Dr. Givens and his staff were able research reports, but did not figure very much in the final report of the CES.”33
Archival sources contradict this: Ross’s report was in fact presented to the committee; material from it was included in the first Executive Staff report and adapted in the final CES report. Witte had downplayed contributions of the pro–direct job creation members of the staff with whom he was not entirely in sympathy. The larger goal here was to argue that “the immediate relief problem came to be regarded as outside the committee’s jurisdiction,” that direct job creation was not a part of the committee’s deliberations, but social insurance was.34
Did all the committee members agree on this point? Did they see the remit of CES in the same way? In Development of the Social Security Act, Witte wrote that the committee had issued “a unanimous report,” that its members were “of one mind,” and that they “were able at all times to present a united front.”35 Those who disagreed are either subtracted from the story or described as foolish: “the advisory council … violated all requests of the committee,” he noted. The advisory council to the CES, a major institutional source of opposition to many of the characteristics of social insurance (it argued with the main committee over everything, from contribution levels and the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers to firmwide versus industrywide pooling of financial reserves to pay benefits), was not included in Witte’s account of the committee’s deliberations. Witte wrote that “it remains doubtful whether it would not have been better to have no organization at this time.”36 Witte’s narrative relegated comprehensive alternative models for economic security to historical footnotes (in this case, exactly two).37
Fortunately, there are historical accounts that contradict Witte and they deserve pride of place in the historiography of the CES. Josephine Brown, a FERA alumna of the committee, chronicled the rise of direct job creation in her book, Public Relief. As Brown described it, far from the placid consensus between committee members that Witte had described, the adherents of a “democratic philosophy” of provision for the poor pushed hard for direct job creation, challenged the principles of UI as inadequate, and came within a hairbreadth of total success.38 Social insurance advocates such as Witte sought to tamp down the more universal aspects of the economic security system, while FERA officials fought to maintain them.39 In a larger sense, Brown argued, Witte’s social insurance advocates were not the true inheritors of the New Deal’s spirit.
Similarly, in The WPA and Federal Relief Policy, Donald Howard, a researcher for the Russell Sage Foundation, emphasized the links between the WPA and the CES. In his opinion, the language of security—the idea that the employee-clients of the WPA should be sure that their jobs would be safe, the conviction that workers needed wages even when logistical issues or environmental considerations shut down projects, the requirement that monthly wages have a solid floor, all of these issues that the WPA would take as a common ideological foundation—was the handiwork of FERA staffers serving on the CES.40 In the course of developing plans for the committee, debates erupted within the WPA on whether the program should adopt prevailing wages or a security wage, whether it should accept any unemployed workers or demand a means test, and ultimately how far WPA wages should diverge from relief.41 Founded between the fall of the CWA and the rise of the WPA, the CES had “given a new lease of [sic] life” to the principle of federal provision for the unemployed. The CES’s arguments about the proper roles of federal and state action had the effect of more firmly establishing direct job creation as a federal responsibility, Howard noted.42
The Structure of the CES
When the CES first met in late June of 1934, it was a divided institution. Different groups of political actors assembled, each sensing limited space for policy action, each intent on winning that contest for their favorite vision of the new welfare state. The committee’s structure fostered the tension. While the Labor Department had the most representatives, Hopkins (as the administrative head of FERA) and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace also claimed membership, as a testament to the dominance of the “liberal bloc” on antipoverty issues.43 Although these parties shared common goals in extending the reach of the state to combat economic insecurity, they had their own distinct ideas about how to do so. Above all, they wanted to commandeer the results for their own agency or department.
As usual, the lion’s share of the committee’s work would be done by the Executive Staff, and hence Perkins’s choice of Witte to lead it was consequential. Witte, in turn, set about filling the slots with his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin and the Department of Labor—Joseph Harris, Thomas Elliot, and Wilbur J. Cohen, to name a few.44 These experts were mostly, although not entirely, students of John R. Commons, the American institutionalist economist. Prior experience in drafting the state of Wisconsin’s UI system just a few years earlier had led them to a common understanding that emphasized how UI, narrowly tailored to cover industrial workers, could counteract the natural cycle of unemployment in American industry by creating incentives for firms to regularize their employment. This perspective inclined Department of Labor staffers to emphasize UI over other forms of social insurance, contributory systems over noncontributory systems, and firm-level funds rather than industrywide funds.45
However, FERA was also well represented on the Executive Staff by six individuals (the second-largest contingent) in no small part due both to Hopkins’s position on the formal committee and to the fact that FERA had paid for and housed the CES.46 Other voices found no quarter. Social insurance promoters tied to the Ohio plan for UI (such as Abraham Epstein and Isaac Rubinow), advocates for national systems, and voices for public works were not included on the staff.47
Further complicating the debate was the Technical Board, a supposedly unbiased group of experts who would conduct research to inform the staff’s work. In practice, the board’s division into different topical working groups (on social insurance, direct job creation, relief, health insurance, and so forth) ensured instead that each camp on the Executive Staff could draw upon its own group of experts on the Technical Board to do the legwork on preferred policies. For example, the Department of Labor was represented by Altmeyer, Elliot (both University of Wisconsin economists, brought in by Witte), and Isador Lublin, all of whom would focus on UI research, while Aubrey Williams and Corrington Gill headed up the FERA contingent and conducted research on job programs.48
Although competition persisted throughout, conflicts intensified at specific and representative moments. Tension first surfaced in August 1934, when the CES set forth its initial plan for what topics it would research, what topics it would not, and who would be assigned to these studies. The second contentious period lasted from late September through early November of that year and book-ended the first round of presentations by the various research teams and Technical Board and Executive Staff preparation for their first report to the full committee. The CES’s final report to the president in January 1935 generated a third stage of conflict. Last, but not least, conflict occurred over the drafting of what would become the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, or what Roosevelt referred to as his “big bills.”49
Hopkins’s Team
In selecting staff to back up his political arguments, Harry Hopkins drew on an eclectic group of experts and bureaucrats drawn from among the first and second tiers of FERA administrators. Jacob Baker, an industrial engineer who had