BACKGROUND PAPERS ON PUBLIC SERVICE From: Sheppard, et al, The Political Economy of Public Serv Congress and Public Service WILLIAM J. SPRING Despite the rhetorical commitment (beginning at least with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's request to Congress on January 4, 1935, for a program to "provide jobs for all those willing to work"), the country has failed to bring that promise even near reality. In fact, between the time of traumatic collapse of the entire economy in the Great Depression and the employment crisis of the 1970s, few Congressmen saw pressing need for a job creation effort beyond Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies. The nation is now paying the price through two decades of catastrophic rates of unemployment and underemployment in the poverty neighborhoods of its great cities, crime, welfare, despair, and the collapse of urban civility, if not of society itself. Chronic poverty, violence, and crime issues one might suppose inevitable only in the explosively growing urban areas of underdeveloped nations with unemployment rates of 20 percent or more - these issues are the most important domestic concerns of the richest nation the world has ever known. The nation has been willing to adopt direct action to assure jobs - a public service employment program - only during times of extraordinary crisis, and then only on a small-scale emergency or "transitional" basis. As late as 1967 a domestically liberal Democratic administration actively lobbied against a modest public service employment proposal. It is important to remember that the peaceful March on Washington in the summer of 1963 - where Reverend Martin Luther King proclaimed his dream of reconciliation in America - was for jobs as well as for freedom. The riots in successive summers, Watts in August of 1965, Chicago in July of 1966 and then the explosions in more than eight cities in the summer of 1967, including the dreadful two weeks of July in which sixty-six persons were killed in Newark and Detroit, have been claimed to be direct outgrowths of discrimination, poverty. unemployment, and underemployment. A Harris poll taken after the riots indicated that 66 percent of whites and 91 percent of blacks interviewed favored a massive public service employment program as preventative for riots. But in October of 1967, with cities in ruin, and national unemployment at only 3.8 percent, an effective coalition in Congress of moderates and conservatives, led by the administration, defeated by a vote of 42 to 47 a very mod blic service employment program offered by Senators Joseph Clark ›nnedy. 2 130 è 1967, opinion has begun to change. In the fall of 1970 the Congress an Employment and Manpower Bill including authorization of $9.5 to create 310,000 public service employment jobs over a three year The month the bill cleared Congress - December 1970 unemployment 6.2 percent of the workforce, with 5.1 million unemployed. bill was vetoed December 16, 1970, but in April 1971, with oyment at 6.1 percent, the Senate voted 62 to 10 for the Emergency ment Act, a bill that became law with the president's signature on July what extent the change in Congressional support, between 1967 and or public service employment legislation represents a genuine commitfull employment for all Americans, including the residents of the inner open to some question, for the modest public service employment ($1 billion and 130,000 jobs) was approved by Congress on an ncy" and "transitional" basis. Like Roosevelt's 1935 Emergency Relief iations Act, the Emergency Employment Act of 1971 was passed in a f national unemployment crisis. The earlier crisis was the collapse of the onomy, with unemployment levels approaching 25 percent of the work 1971 the crisis, while much less severe nationally, was extraordinarily d rising in some cities (Seattle, 12 percent: Wichita, 10 percent) and tied to the loss of government contracts in defense and space ure and a deliberate slowing down of the economy. Laid-off aerospace and the unemployed Vietnam war veterans both staked claim to deral treatment. irst public service employment program was launched in the bitter f 1933-34, when a quarter of the American work force was on the launched under Harry L. Hopkins' vigorous leadership without benefit ic Congressional authorizations. Hopkins had been lured down from k the previous May to become Federal Relief Administrator. The or the Hopkins effort nearly a billion dollars during the short, -a-half-month life of the program came out of funds already ted to Harold Ickes' Public Works Administration. et me digress for a moment into the alphabetical underbrush that has d comprehension of New Deal programs. The Ickes agency, the Public dministration (PWA), concerned itself with massive construction ike Boulder Dam, not with low overhead labor-intensive projects. The orks Program was enacted into law, with a $3.3 billion authorization, as e National Industrial Recovery Act during the "100 days." Title I of uthorized the National Recovery Act. Public Works money under Title o act as a significant stimulus to improve the desperate economic However, Ickes, in his curmudgeonly honesty moved so slowly in oney spent that by the fall of 1933 very few projects had been started. 131 Roosevelt then simply assigned a billion dollars of Ickes' appropriation to Hopkins for the crash job creation program. Between December and March, Harry L. Hopkins hired over 4 million Americans at a cost of some $933 million to teach, build roads, airports, and recreation centers. He also hired some 3,000 writers and artists in Federal Arts projects and unemployed rabbis to compile a Jewish dictionary. The reception the program received seems to have set a pattern for congressional attitudes toward public service employment. The word "boondoggle" was coined by opponents of the program to describe some of the Hopkins projects. The idea that direct federal appropriations could never provide a real job was very prevalent in 1934 and durable enough to be employed by Nixon in his message of December 1970 vetoing the Employment and Manpower Act of that year. The program was very unpopular with many conservatives, especially those who had become reliant on cheap labor, and who feared the program would rot the moral fiber and disrupt the economy of the country. Governor Talmadge of Georgia forwarded to F.D.R. a letter from an irate plantation owner who claimed that work relief made it impossible to get cheap black farm labor. "I wouldn't plow nobody's mule from sunrise to sunset for $.50 a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH”. Support for the program came from participants who actually got work. Lorena Hickock, a field investigator for Hopkins, reported: "... and did they want work? In Sioux City they actually had fist fights over shovels..." Even some normally conservative Republicans came out in support of the effort. Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, for instance, said: "This civil works program is one of the soundest, most constructive policies of your administration, and I cannot urge too strongly its continuance." The issue of state and/or local vs. federal control was also raised. The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce organized businessmen to urge returning welfare exclusively to the states. Of thirty-seven governors replying to their questionnaire, only Georgia's Talmadge agreed. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina said: "Turning federal funds over to the states for administration would mean more politics instead of less politics in administration." Despite the program's success, and the continuing need, Roosevelt let the program die in the early spring of 1934. He listened to conservative critics, and his budget advisors who still sought with him the grail of a balanced budget. The legislation that led to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was not enacted until the following year April 8, 1935, to be precise. One wonders what happened to the 4 million so briefly working for the government in the winter of 1933-34 during that year. Certainly the rate of unemployment did not markedly slacken during those months. After the Democratic sweep of the 1934 Congressional elections, Roosevelt 132 92 ed himself for the first time to the proposition "that Washington should ve every employable worker a job through a massive public-works effort, perhaps $5 billion the first year and less in succeeding years . . . January 4, 1935, message to Congress, Roosevelt asked $4.86 billion to million to work at a so-called "security wage." The Emergency Relief iations Act of 1935 passed the House quickly and the Senate more The American Federation of Labor was opposed to wages below the g rates. Senator Pat McCarran attempted to raise the wage rates, but a tial veto threat - not the last such threat to affect Congressional public mployment policy defeated the effort. VPA was one of three agencies set up to administer the new program. e aggressive Hopkins, it just about ran away with the show. The Works Administration, and its variants, carried on until World War II took over bility for job creation. The summary statistics are very impressive: Over on spent between 1935 and 1943, over 600 thousand miles of roads ted, nearly 78,000 bridges and 35,000 public buildings, among other n 1939 there were over 4 million Americans engaged in federally d work in one program or another. en the death of WPA in 1943 and the Emergency Employment Act of nation was without a major federal job creation program. end of the war approached, Roosevelt, in his 1945 State of the Union rededicated himself to "an American Economic Bill of Rights." rights the most fundamental, and the one on which the fulfillment of s in large degree depends, is the right to a useful and remunerative ull employment means not only jobs - but productive jobs. Americans gard jobs that pay substandard wages as productive jobs. tain high employment we must, after the war is over, reduce or taxes which bear too heavily on consumption. osed a program of cooperation between government and private to provide "a decent home for every family" and "to make a frontal the problems of housing and urban reconstruction." He also proposed or public works: T.V.A. which was constructed at a cost of $750 million the cost of is war for less than 4 days was a bargain. By harnessing the resources ) river basins... we shall provide the same kind of stimulus of as was provided by the Louisiana Purchase and the new discoveries in uring the nineteenth century. lation, not depression, marked the American economy after the war. reat-hearted program that Roosevelt envisoned - including tax cutting public construction undertakings - was laid aside. |