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People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan Steven Attewell Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 viii + 323 pp., $75.00 (cloth) Review by Eric Rauchway The historiography of the New Deal is a mess, according to Steven Attewell. Right-wing “New Deal denialist histories” argue that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic policy program slowed or prevented an economic recovery that, without intervention, would have sped to its conclusion more swiftly. Rather than explain why such interpretations are nonsense, “academic historians have been loath to engage with these narratives,” Attewell notes, because we have not wanted to give attention to slanted and obviously dishonest views of the past (17). But rather than cause New Deal denialism to wither without the sunlight of scholarly critique, our inattention has permitted it to flourish like unchecked kudzu. Worse: historians have actively if inadvertently abetted the growth of denialist interpretation. As Attewell explains, “historians have relied on a set of inaccurate statis- tics on unemployment rates in the 1930s that suggest the New Deal was less successful in fighting mass unemployment than it was” (91). Specifically, historians tend to recycle an old, once-standard unemployment series constructed by the economist Stanley Leb- ergott, which counted Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers as unemployed. This practice, Lebergott said, was proper because to count WPA workers as workers would be to imitate “the German practice during the 1930’s when persons in the labor force camps were classed as employed, and Soviet practice which includes employment in labor camps” (93). In Lebergott’s view, because the WPA was equivalent to the Nazi arbeitslager or to the gulag and the United States was more honest than Nazis or Soviets, the unfortunates on the WPA rolls should be defined, properly, as jobless. Lebergott’s series therefore not only made the New Deal look far more ineffective than it was in alleviating conditions of the Depression, it did so by diminishing the real human effect of Roosevelt’s jobs-creation programs. Merely to observe the powerful ideology underlying the Lebergott data ought to be enough to discredit them as a neutral representation of unemployment; but Attewell does more, noting that the Lebergott interpretation of joblessness wipes out the real human import of the WPA and other direct job–creation programs. WPA workers understood themselves as having dignified work at last. “We’re not on relief any more,” Attewell quotes the wife of a WPA employee as saying; “my husband works for the government” (27). Not all academic historians will be unfamiliar with this argument, and Attewell’s ability to make it depends on work by Michael Darby, David Weir, and the essay “New Deal Denialism,” by the author of this review—among many other works. But he is correct that it has yet to become the default analysis of the New Deal, and his effort to yoke this analysis to empirical work demonstrating that direct job creation—as distinct from public works—was always at the center of New Deal policy is welcome. Attewell shows that the short-lived Civil Works Administration of 1933–34 proved to its proponents (Harry Hopkins chief among them) that the federal government could, if it chose, put happily and usefully into work the millions of Americans then languishing on relief. Attewell then revives the internal administration debate between, on one hand, Hopkins and the other proponents of job creation and, on the other, those officials like Harold Ickes, who argued for a long-range program of massive public works to serve as counter-cyclical balance to business downturns and who regarded rapid job creation as irresponsible and wasteful. The debate, Attewell says, was largely one over ideological emphasis, between people (Hopkins) and projects (Ickes). Hopkins wanted to supply jobs, everywhere, immediately; Ickes wanted to plan economic development, like that of the Tennessee Valley Authority, on a national scale. In the short term, Hopkins won. The Emergency Relief Appropriations act of 1935 complemented the Social Security Act of the same year, creating a state that would provide work for those who needed it and insurance for those in work. And as Attewell argues, if one is bold enough to expose the dishonesty of New Deal denialists and the harmful neglect of historians who sustain them, one can show that indeed, Hopkins and the WPA were correct. But if the jobs-creators won the immediate political battle, they lost the longer political war—and so did the advocates of public works. In the latter part of the book, Attewell turns to a tale of the tribulations of the economist Leon Keyserling, who almost saw a job guarantee into law on several occasions. Each time, proponents of federal job creation found themselves undercut by their own partisan allies who did not wish to appear too leftist. In 1945, with the Full Employment Bill before Congress, liberal proponents of the law sought to downplay the role of the state and, in arguing against their own interests, opened the door for further conservative critique of the project. The job- creation provisions of the bill vanished before it reached Congress. Job creation resurfaced in the Great Society and again in the late 1970s debate over the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, but a proper job guarantee remained too ambitious for Democrats to put into law. Attewell concludes by saying, “This project has never been solely academic for me. . . . Direct job creation could and should be used again” (266). The book is thus valuable for its discussion of the theory, ideology, and politics behind job creation but will especially engage those readers wishing to see more academic historians of the New Deal bringing their scholarly knowledge to bear on these matters of pressing policy significance. Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-7790270 Sent from my iPhone _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
