The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism?

1. The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism?Cameron M. WeberPhD student in economics and historical studiesNew School for Social Research

2. Photo of Philip Guston, Maintaining America’s Skills, WPA Building, New York World’s Fair 1939, from Francis V. O’Connor, The Deal New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs (1972).

3. The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism? “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.” – Harry Hopkins, Administrator of the Works Progress Administration, in 1938

4. The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism? Research is combination of History of Economics, History of Public Policy, Political History, Political Economy and Historiography. Motivation for Research is to understand development of welfare state in American society.

5. Research Methodology: “a conscious approach to a subject of research by means of theoretical questions and methodological principles,“ Georg J. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (1997). Attempted to find all journal articles and monographs over the last 20 years which mention both the New Deal and the WPA in order to answer research question, Was the WPA a social safety net, central planning or was it political pragmatism? The WPA (1935-1943)

6. What was the WPA ? • US Government acted as long-term “qualified” employer of last resort (first and last time this has happened). • Largest peacetime program in American history until that time (initial appropriation in 1935 almost 7% of GDP). • Almost 25% of all American families received income from the WPA during its life-of-program.

7. What was the WPA ? • Operated in all 48 states. • Built approx. 480 airports, 78,000 bridges 40,000 public buildings, 67,000 miles of city streets, 24,000 miles of sidewalks, 24,000 miles of sewer lines, 19,700 miles of water mains, 500 water treatment facilities and 572,000 miles of rural highways. • Employed approx. 5,000 artists, with art centers in all states, created 2 million pro-WPA lithographs and created continuous series of WPA art exhibits.

9. Results of Research on WPA • Long historiography on New Deal but WPA itself has only been object of analysis for around the last 10 years. • WPA has been “understudied”, Amenta and Halfmann, “Who Voted with Hopkins? Institutional Politics and the WPA”, The Journal of Policy History 13 (2001). • Historians have “missed” changing priorities of American state by overlooking large spending on public works during the New Deal, Jason Scott Smith, “The New Deal Order,” Enterprise and Society 9 (2008) and Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (2006).

10. Results of Research on WPA • Skocpal, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992) and Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (1996) contain no index reference to WPA. • Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999); Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003); Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007) and Cohen, FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (2009) all do contain WPA index items.

11. WPA as Central Planning ? • Historiographical consensus (for example Kennedy 1999 and Goldberg 2005*) show that there were two New Deals. • “First” New Deal (“the first 100 days” in 1933) was attempt at economic recovery with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Truth in Securities Act (establishment of SEC). • “Second” New Deal (1935-1936) was social reform and the National Labor Relations Board, the Social Security Act, the FDIC, the FHA and the WPA. • WPA was part of social reform agenda not economic recovery agenda. • * Chad Alan Goldberg, “Contesting the Status of Relief Workers during the New Deal: The Workers Alliance of America and the Works Progress Administration, 1935-1941”, Social Science History 29 (2005).

12. WPA as Central Planning ? • Additionally, • Roosevelt (1932, unemployment approx. 23%), “I regard reduction in Federal spending as one of the most important issues in this campaign.” • Roosevelt (1935, unemployment approx. 20%), “Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed.” • Roosevelt’s public proclamations show that WPA intended as safety net, not central planning.

13. New Deal as Social Reform • Until 1980s scholars were classifying New Deal historiographies as “traditionalist” or “revisionist”. • Traditionalists believe Roosevelt and New Dealers controlled agenda and allowed only just enough social reform to save capitalism. This is “Institutionalist theory of history” where the state has agency. • Revisionists believe state power is tempered by need to garner votes and thus the New Deal pushed its social reform as far as possible on American populace. This is “political theory of history”. • * See Wallis, “Employment, Politics and Economic Recovery during the Great Depression,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 69 (1987), for a survey on revisionist and traditionalist New Deal literature.

14. WPA as Social Safety Net? • In the 1990s a new New Deal historiography developed which synthesized the traditionalist and revisionist approaches and which uses the heretofore “understudied” WPA as the object of analysis. • Flanagan, “Roosevelt, Mayors and the New Deal Regime: The Origins of Intergovernmental Lobbying and Administration,” Polity 31 (1999) finds that WPA funding was higher in cities which supported Roosevelt in the Presidential elections. • Amenta and Poulsen, “Social Politics in Context: The Institutional Politics Theory and Social Spending at the End of the New Deal,” Social Forces 75 (1996) uses Institutional-Political model to show that WPA funds were spent at a higher per capita level in cities and states which supported the New Deal goal of pro-labor legislation. • Therefore the WPA cannot be seen as a social safety net where WPA funds are given to those hardest hit by unemployment but rather a program where funds are given for political purposes.

15. WPA as Political Pragmatism • Goldberg 2005 finds that the WPA was “hybrid” between a social spending program and an employment program, balancing labor union calls for a prevailing wage (mandated by Congress in 1939) and the Administration’s wish to prevent prioritizing “relief” over “recovery” (Kennedy 1999). • “The Roosevelt Administration designed the WPA as a compromise institution in part to manage these conflicts” (Goldberg 2005). • And thus in the end, the WPA as implemented was political pragmatism balancing competing political interests while furthering the Administration’s pro-labor agenda and using WPA funds to reward electoral support.

16. WPA as Political Pragmatism Graph from Weber, “How Flexible was the Works Progress Administration in Responding to Unemployment during the Great Depression?” (2009), Draft available from cameroneconomics.com.

17. WPA as Cultural Change Agent ? • Literature review finds that not enough has been written on the WPA to determine a historiographical consensus. However, • Smith 2008 finds that the massive and pervasive federal public works throughout the 48 states created a cultural shift for a larger federal government presence in the American people’s lives. • Flanagan 1999 finds that the WPA represented a major shift in American federalism as the WPA was used to reduce fiscal burdens of American cities for public works projects, and, represents “the origin of intergovernmental lobbying and administration.“ • Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (1995), states that the WPA art projects helped to create ‘cultural populism’.

18. WPA as Cultural Change Agent ? • During 1921 – 1928 state and local governments accounted for approx. 90% of US public works spending and the federal government for approx. 10%, from Barber, From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921-1933 (1985). • During 1931 – 1938, public works spending averaged approx. 50% federal and 50% state and local, from Hansen, Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles (1941).

19. WPA as Cultural Change Agent ? • “By using the lens of political economy to focus on the New Deal’s public works spending, we can begin to see the outlines of a different interpretation. The huge amounts of funds devoted to public construction, the far-reaching federal efforts invested in directing this money, and the long-run impact of infrastructure itself form the components of the story of a public works revolution. This revolution helped justify the new role of the federal government in American life, legitimizing – intellectually and physically – what has come to be known as Keynesian management of the economy” (Smith 2008).

20. The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism? • The Pump Priming Act of 1938 was passed by a Congress in opposition to the New Deal. • “With so many Federal dollars flowing into every Congressional district, the first Keynesian-style appropriations expenditure passed virtually without Congressional opposition” (Flanagan 1999).

21. The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism? Conclusions of Research: Historiography since the 1990s has shown the WPA to be a program of political pragmatism, not central planning nor a social safety net. Other writers have additionally determined that the WPA helped to encourage a major shift in American culture and American federalism, to one of an accepted larger role for the Federal government in the lives of Americans. Keynesian economics has been a part of American culture for more than 70 years, beginning with the Pump Priming Act of 1938.