People Must Live by Work - Steven Attewell Politics and Culture in Modern America

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direct job creation efforts far outlasted the annus horribilis of 1937 that provides Brinkley with his demarcation point. Most important, in my view, is that these models portray different policy projects—especially social insurance and direct job creation—as having little to do with each other. I argue, by contrast, that they were intimately connected from the beginning.

      Following Schlesinger’s triumphal narrative of the expansion of the American welfare state, a new body of literature has challenged this optimism, pointing to ways in which the construction of social and economic citizenship within the CES had long-term consequences that entrenched and intensified pervasive gender and racial inequality.

      The economist T. H. Marshall’s definition of “social citizenship,” as “the right to a modicum of economic security and security … the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society,” has been a tremendously useful model for American historians interested in political economy, poverty, and inequality.16 It is fundamental to both many discussions of American exceptionalism (since America’s journey through Marshall’s three stages of citizenship was quite different from Europe’s) and the distinctive features of the U.S. welfare state. However, Marshall’s concept has also been usefully challenged or extended by Alice Kessler-Harris, who coined the term “economic citizenship” as a fourth category or stage of citizenship. In her book In Pursuit of Equity, Kessler-Harris argued that the distinctiveness of America’s welfare state, and much of its gendered nature, stems from the fact that in America social rights have been made dependent on economic citizenship. Defined as “the independent status that provides the possibility of full participation in the polity” (and buttressed by access to superior forms of social insurance, mortgage and tax rates, and other benefits), Kessler-Harris argues that economic citizenship has been used as a barrier against women through their exclusion from the world of male work.17

      Even those who disagree with Kessler-Harris’s ultimate emphasis on opening up economic citizenship have found her “economic citizenship” term useful. Several feminist historians like Linda Gordon, Eileen Boris, and Dorothy Sue Cobble take exception to Kessler-Harris’s emphasis on expanding the right of women to work in professions that guarantee access to economic citizenship. They noted that this objective would do little for nonworking poor women and mothers. Moreover, working-class women, despite having long been engaged in the same kind of industrial employment as working-class men, were still not included within economic citizenship. Finally, economic citizenship still leaves the issue of the “double shift” and women’s unwaged labor in the home to deal with.18 Even as they argue instead for expanding universal human rights to health care, childcare, and social supports, Gordon and others accept Kessler-Harris’s terminology of economic citizenship as a useful foil for their preferred categories of social citizenship and universal human rights. Similarly, historians who focus on race, such as Suzanne Mettler and Ira Katznelson, have picked up the “economic citizenship” term and have studied how economic citizenship was made white-only by defining heavily black industries as outside the field of recognized “work.”19

      The historiographical division over social and economic citizenship also plays into debates about the two-track nature of the American welfare state, because economic citizenship is roughly equivalent to access to the “first” track. Gordon, Mettler, Kessler-Harris, Robert Lieberman, Katznelson, and others have convincingly demonstrated that one of the major shortcomings of American social policy, especially policies enacted during the “big bang” creation of the CES, was the division of social welfare policy into social insurance programs and welfare programs. The systematic exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from all of the major social insurance programs, from Old Age Insurance, to Old Age Assistance, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, ensured that skilled workers who were predominantly white men gained disproportionate access to benefits that were national, categorical, and well funded through payroll taxes.

      By contrast, women, African Americans, and marginal workers were trapped in state and locally run programs. This left them vulnerable to discrimination at the hands of local officials. Benefits varied dramatically because they were shaped by state variation in the rules of eligibility and were subject to demeaning forms of social control through investigations, paupers’ oaths, and home visits. These programs were generally funded through grant-in-aid programs with limited federal matching, creating an incentive to keep benefit levels at a low level. Among scholars who have studied these programs, the major disagreements over the nature of the two-track welfare state revolve around which factors were responsible for the persistence of that two-track welfare state: did they include Dixiecrat insistence on maintaining the Southern labor market, traditional beliefs about the deserving versus undeserving poor, the impact of federalism, patronage systems, or a weak bureaucracy?

      Expanding the scope of welfare policies considered under the rubric of the two-track welfare state to include direct job creation complicates this framework. Edwin Amenta’s work on the relative benefits of social insurance payments and welfare payments during the 1930s, for example, argues that “most Roosevelt Administration policymakers did not see themselves as designing a two track welfare state; rather, the WPA was a means-tested program that gave relatively high benefits. Nor did American policymakers view economic security strictly as a matter of social insurance coverage; means-tested programs dominated social policy.”20

      In a similar vein, Jason Scott Smith, in Building New Deal Liberalism, deliberately sets out to prove that “public works programs were the New Deal’s central enterprise” and that they played an enormous role in accelerating America’s economic development from the 1930s through the 1960s.21 In this view, the Roosevelt administration can be seen as pursuing something like a “jobs and assistance” state, in which the state would use public works programs to spur private-sector economic development, thus steering as many people as possible into the protections of the employment-based welfare state. Similarly, Chad Allen Goldberg’s work on radical WPA unions suggests that WPA workers, while relief clients who theoretically should have been driven into the second tier of the welfare state, were able to use the concept of work to contest their status and demand the right to a job as an entitlement “earned” through their labor.22

      Direct job creation appears to have existed halfway between the two tracks of welfare, with interesting consequences for considerations of social and economic citizenship. On the one hand, this type of program very much traded on the rhetoric of earned rights, based in gendered conceptions of work, deployed by advocates for social insurance, and meant to serve a clientele (predominantly white men, blue-collar workers, frequently older heads of households) normally protected by social insurance. Indeed, the fact that the Great Depression plunged many millions of these normally economically secure workers into the same straits normally occupied by the marginalized might explain why policymakers were willing to countenance such a radical expansion of national provision for the unemployed. On the other hand, direct job creation was not a contributory program as traditionally defined. Its relatively privileged recipients were still those whose paupers’ oaths had ejected them from the ranks of the “worthy” poor in the eyes of many in society. Moreover, the origins of this job program in poor relief drew a straight line between these work programs and the welfare track of American social policy.

      Restoring direct job creation to the history of the origin of Social Security and the CES thus offers a new perspective on questions of social and economic citizenship and the two tracks of the welfare state. To begin with, much of this literature has focused on the role of private-sector employment and specific forms of private-sector work as the restrictive and discriminatory dividing line between the worthy and unworthy poor. Yet direct job creation programs like the WPA traded on the idea of work as a badge of worthiness. The state distributed work to those without, bringing them into the circle of worthiness, instead of penalizing the unemployed. Unemployment was defined as a failure of the labor market rather than a sign of individual failure, absolving the unemployed of economic sin.

      Direct job creation turned work into a benefit that was open to anyone who applied for it. If this was not precisely identical to the idea of welfare as a right of social citizenship, it certainly was moving in that direction. Moreover, the actual

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