“Americans have long been ambivalent about what is owed the weakest and most vulnerable among us, and public opinion has never been overly generous toward the welfare state. Not everyone is a snarling Scrooge with a heart of stone, but neither does everyone believe we are our brother’s keeper–not by a long shot. So what’s a President to do in the face of great human need and a divided, indifferent, or even hostile public mind? The answer, in one word, is: Lead. Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs have produced a timely and absorbing book about how Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and–yes–Richard Nixon refused to leave the fate of public policy toward the poor to a fickle public. Barack Obama, are you listening?”–Bill Moyers

“The deep ambivalence Americans feel about government has always been central to our politics, and it’s an especially vital matter now with the rise of Tea Party movements and other assaults on public power. Americans often want a smaller government that does more, a difficult recipe for politicians to follow. That’s why Who Cares? is so timely and so important. Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs have done a superb job tracing the history of our ambivalence and suggesting where we might go from here. They will be the talk of academia–and the talk shows.”–E. J. Dionne Jr., author ofSouled Out and Why Americans Hate Politics

“This timely and important book shows that Americans are willing to support social programs that help the poor and unfortunate–but usually only after those programs have been up and rolling for years. A just society therefore depends on politicians with the courage to lead rather than pander to current public opinion.”–Robert B. Reich, professor of public policy, University of California, Berkeley

“Americans have long been ambivalent about what is owed the weakest and most vulnerable among us, and public opinion has never been overly generous toward the welfare state. Not everyone is a snarling Scrooge with a heart of stone, but neither does everyone believe we are our brother’s keeper–not by a long shot. So what’s a President to do in the face of great human need and a divided, indifferent, or even hostile public mind? The answer, in one word, is: Lead. Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs have produced a timely and absorbing book about how Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and–yes–Richard Nixon refused to leave the fate of public policy toward the poor to a fickle public. Barack Obama, are you listening?”–Bill Moyers

“The deep ambivalence Americans feel about government has always been central to our politics, and it’s an especially vital matter now with the rise of Tea Party movements and other assaults on public power. Americans often want a smaller government that does more, a difficult recipe for politicians to follow. That’s why Who Cares? is so timely and so important. Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs have done a superb job tracing the history of our ambivalence and suggesting where we might go from here. They will be the talk of academia–and the talk shows.”–E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Souled Out and Why Americans Hate Politics

“This timely and important book shows that Americans are willing to support social programs that help the poor and unfortunate–but usually only after those programs have been up and rolling for years. A just society therefore depends on politicians with the courage to lead rather than pander to current public opinion.”–Robert B. Reich, professor of public policy, University of California, Berkeley

Katherine S. Newman is the Malcolm Forbes, Class of 1941, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Her many books include The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (with Victor Tan Chen) and No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. Elisabeth S. Jacobs is a senior policy adviser to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress

Who Cares?

Public Ambivalence and Government Activism from the New Deal to the Second Gilded AgeBy Katherine S. Newman Elisabeth S. Jacobs

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13563-2

Contents

List of Illustrations………………………………………….ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………….xiiiIntroduction Devoted to the Common Good?…………………………11 Dissent and the New Deal……………………………………..112 Warring over the War on Poverty……………………………….563 Economic Anxiety in the New Gilded Age…………………………1124 Searching for “the Better Angels of Our Nature”…………………149Notes………………………………………………………..167Bibliography………………………………………………….203Index………………………………………………………..211

Chapter One

Dissent and the New Deal

In the ranks of quite a few of the middle class white collar people and upwards, the mental havoc is pretty bad. Nobody really seems to feel that he is actually going to get an honest-to-goodness job or work in a hurry. —Julian Claff, writing from Philadelphia

There is an increasing feeling of despair—the feeling that they will never get their jobs back…. The winter shut-down of so many of these [work relief] projects brings men into headquarters begging that the county road work be continued through this winter. —Martha B. Bruere and Ernestine Ball, writing from Schenectady, N.Y.

I think there is a terrible problem here of salvaging human material; or letting it permanently rot…. Present relief is a kind of hypodermic; it doesn’t take long to realize that this ailment is chronic and needs long-time constructive planning to retrain these people and re-establish them. —Martha Gellhorn, writing from South Carolina

The president of the Braddock National Bank said that if relief were withdrawn before work comes to the steel towns there would be rioting. I believe there would be in Duquense. —Hazel Reavis, writing from Braddock-Duquense, Pa.

The morale of the jobless, generally, is bad…. It is my conviction that any drastic curtailment of relief in Chicago in the face of continued unemployment would provoke demonstrations of a violent nature. —Thomas Steep, writing from Chicago

In March 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt hired a group of journalists to provide him with firsthand impressions of the toll the Great Depression was taking on the country and the impact of his New Deal programs on the lives of ordinary people. Stationed in small towns and big cities in every region of the country, the reporters wrote back with these discouraging accounts. Hopelessness, despair, and anger threatened to metastasize into widespread disorder.

As historian Irving Bernstein notes in his study of American workers, in the 1920s and 1930s, “unrest, frequently under Communist leadership, erupt[ed] into violence and rootless veterans [of the First World War] in quest of government handouts.” This social disorder led many to believe that the United States was on the brink of a revolt not unlike the Russian Revolution (then less than twenty years in the past). Looking back from the vantage point of the late 1950s, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. deemed the period leading up to the New Deal the “valley of darkness” and argued that the nation was prone to a violent upheaval. In letters ordinary citizens sent to FDR, we see why Schlesinger came to this dire prediction. “It is now nearly two years since you pledged yourself to an attempt at bettering the lot of the ‘forgotten man,'” Mrs. Carl Brenden of Laurel, Montana, reminded the president in her letter of 1934:

As far as I can see the “forgotten man” is as forgotten as he ever was during the previous administrations. It is becoming increasingly apparent that slow starvation and attendant degradation is to be the lot of millions of forgotten men under either of the major parties and that we must look to the more radical groups for any relief.

Why were ordinary people suffering? Views on this question divided the nation. For those on the right, Depression “losers” were experiencing the natural consequences of their own moral collapse and a decline in the work ethic, and were developing an unholy expectation for handouts at taxpayers’ expense. For those at the other end of the ideological spectrum, the Depression was caused by the excessive, concentrated power of elites who were looking out for their own interests, ready to crush the common man if he got in the way. The Left urged Roosevelt to take radical action to curb the control of employers and redistribute wealth; the Right looked to Roosevelt to let the market exert its discipline. While millions of desperate families in the middle deemed the president a secular savior, and reelected him four times to underline the point, in its day the Roosevelt administration was pounded by critics on all sides. The dissension comes through in the opinion polls and letters to FDR on which we rely here.

Historian Lizbeth Cohen’s study of Chicago’s working class in the 1930s provides a vivid portrait of the turmoil that spread throughout the country as the crisis deepened. In Making a New Deal, she notes that the rising tide of unemployment soon overwhelmed the traditional ethnic charities and the institutions of welfare capitalism as firms buckled under the pressure of bankruptcy. Local organizations that had been able to cope with previous downturns watched helplessly as their constituents were evicted, the ranks of the “Hoover Hobos” swelled, and fathers were thrown out of work, only to find themselves dependent on the meager wages of their wives and children.

The breakdown of the usual mechanisms for coping with economic downturns gave way to increasing expectations for federal assistance and spurred the creation of Roosevelt’s New Deal, an unprecedented intervention by the federal government in labor markets, factory production, credit, construction, and housing. Money flowed into an alphabet soup of relief agencies that assumed unprecedented regulatory authority and organized agencies that did everything from build roads and schools to sew clothing and distribute food. In no other period of American history did the role of the state grow as fast as it did in the dark days of the 1930s.

The Federal Emergency Relief Act, enacted in 1933, forked over $3.1 billion to states and localities to develop public works during the two years it was in operation. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) was one of its first programs and, although short-lived, the $400 million it spent put more than four million unemployed workers back on the job in the space of nine months. Men employed through the largesse of this and related programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), understood full well whom they had to thank for the opportunity:

Personally, you have made it possible, for me, through the CWA to get steady work for nine weeks, through the toughest time in the year, when I am practically at wits’ end. I, my family, my immediate neighbors, stand fully behind your program, the NRA [National Recovery Administration], and anything that you may sponsor. (Max Baron, Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 11, 1933)

Yesterday I celebrated my thirty-second birthday. It was the happiest birthday I have had for many years. I had been out of work for a long time. But now I have work through the CWA. I have two little children to take care of…. I am not an educated man but you do not think only of that class. You have been a blessing to the American people every where. (John Binkley, Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 31, 1934)

All of the projects you have sponsored have been a blessing to our people. The CCC and the NIRA [National Industrial Recovery Act] … have proven master strokes in keeping the people steady. The SERA [State Emergency Relief Administration] project has been the most wonderful of all. I know some people have not kept faith with you in aiding the people of this nation but that in no way detracts from the purpose of real relief. (Rovaida T. Murray, San Diego, Calif., Mar. 17, 1935)

Others were not quite as appreciative. From the left, FDR was hit with the critique that he was too easy on business, too compliant in the face of demands to keep the wages of public workers low. Derogatory terms like “wage slavery” were thrown at relief work, which was in full swing by the time these letters from 1934 were placed in the White House mailbox. “You come along with this works relief bill and … demand that every man live on $50 a month,” one writer from Henrickson, Indiana, complained. Another wrote,

There is a widespread public opinion, especially among the 12,000 unemployed and their dependents that this Administration may go the way that Hoover’s battalions went … [if it doesn’t do more to help the] 30,000,000 people, after five years, are still struggling with unemployment, starvation, and industrial bondage. (B. A. Bonte, Bellevue, Ky., May 8, 1934)

What has, and what is, the administration and a democratic Congress doing to give reemployment to nearly a million men and their NOW POVERTY STRICKEN families who have been forced to wander in the valley of darkness and despair for going on four years? (O. Caswell, Kansas City, Mo., Apr. 18, 1934; emphasis in original)

Though we remember Roosevelt today as the man who did more for the poor and dispossessed than any president before, and arguably anyone since, in his own day leftists and labor liberals often complained that Roosevelt’s actions were too little, too late, and too tepid:

Your promise to limit immense fortunes and to redistribute the wealth—the only common sense solution for unemployment and over-production—has not been kept. In fact, it seems that the wealth has been further concentrated under your administration. (V. Lowell Bronn, Rochester, Minn., Mar. 8, 1935)

Pardon me for suggesting again that government owned and controlled banks is the solution for the trouble we have and we must wipe out those vultures in Wall Street, Pittsburg, and other centers. (S. H. Marsh, San Antonio, Tex., Sept. 29, 1934)

These complaints became more forceful as the expense of New Deal employment programs began to bite hard and the federal government considered cutting the wages below the $50 mark in the CWA, a forerunner of the better-known Works Progress Administration (WPA). The proposed decrease “can mean but one thing,” commented Harry Berg, a member of the Unemployed Industrial Workers of America:

The betrayal of your office, your people, your country, of the oath you had made to them during election campaign, mainly, “to remember the forgotten man.” … We demand that you take instant steps to see to it that the Civil Works Program is maintained, no further wage cuts or lay offs take place, and that all men laid off their jobs be reinstated—that you keep your pledge made to the “Forgotten Man”, who has elected you. (Cincinnati, Ohio, Feb. 17, 1934)

If the Left thought that FDR had done too little, the Right thought he had done far too much. Objections ran the gamut from ideological allergies to any form of government intrusion into the market to the conviction that even well-intentioned interventions ran the risk of undermining the work ethic. Laissez-faire advocates argued that the market functioned well only when left to its own devices. “Grievous as are the evils of poverty and unemployment,” a Washington, D.C., newspaper editorial intoned, “the loss of individual freedom is an incomparably greater loss to mankind.” The editorial continued,

The sufferers are now turning in despair to the government and asking it to take charge of this vast machine, manage it for their benefit, and distribute the rewards among all. This presupposes a faith that history has never yet justified in the competence as well as in the good intentions of the men and women chosen by government, that is, by political methods, to govern and control the national economy. (Sentinels of the Republic, Washington, D.C., May 8, 1933)

As fiscal conservatives saw it, government simply had no business involving itself in the world of commerce. This was partly a question of competence: politicians and policymakers, critics argued, simply did not know how to run the economy and were bound to make a mess of it. But for conservatives, and indeed for a fairly broad swath of public opinion, FDR’s remedies for the Depression would cripple the discipline of the market:

No country is stronger than its individual members and what we need is more rugged individualism and more real education and building up of character. Your continued interference in the function of natural business and social relations is ridiculous. These take care of themselves if left to flow freely along natural lines. (Kenneth de Vos, Detroit, Mich., May 11, 1934)

From this perspective, government had no role to play in stabilizing an economy in free fall. Whatever momentary good might come out of FDR’s interventions, they argued, would be more than overwhelmed by the long-term harm consequent on meddling, coddling, and disturbing the natural mechanisms of market self-correction. Two years into the New Deal, Roosevelt’s conservative critics were railing against the destruction of the work ethic, even as federal programs cut unemployment nearly in half. “Don’t you think it’s time for a frank admission that your present path leads to destruction of what industry, brains, and hard work of the people of the United States have built over the last 150 years?” asked Charles Stephens of Rochester, New York:

This country was built on individuality, and, true, while there have been some abuses, the result after all, speaks for itself…. The morale of our people is being destroyed through gifts by city, state and nation. (Apr. 4, 1935)

Some of the angriest voices emerged from Americans who were trying to manage on their own through the maelstrom of the Depression and believed that FDR’s remedies for other, less self-reliant, families were coming at their expense. “The forgotten man,” Roy Eldridge (a letter writer from South Ardmore, Pennsylvania) lectured Roosevelt, “is NOT the shiftless, indifferent individual, who believes the world owe him a living (and is now getting it). The forgotten man in your administration is the thrifty middle class who have striven to make this country worth living in—whom you are striving to wipe out of existence.”

Eldridge’s defiance was shared by many Americans who, though still employed, were struggling with the pressures of falling wages, foreclosures, and debt. The dole, they complained, was an unfair gift to the unemployed and undeserving. A letter from Burl Cross, a Lansing, Michigan, resident who described himself as a man “who wouldn’t ask for relief if he needed it, who has raised his family by hard work and by the practice of the good old fashioned principles of pay-as-you-go and who has earned every dollar he ever spent, by his own efforts,” makes the case to FDR in exactly these terms. “It is my considered opinion,” Cross argued, “that you have done more to tear down the morale of the American people.” He went on,

You are penalizing over 90% of the people who have had to make their own way and earn a living and educate their families, so that you can sell all the loafers, ne’er-do-wells and never-would-worker type of people that the world owes them a living, with little or no effort on their part. (July 2, 1936)

These refrains are all too familiar to modern ears, since they strongly resemble the complaints hurled at the welfare system and the provisions of the 2008 bailout plan to rescue delinquent home mortgage holders. Rather than view the down-and-out as worthy people temporarily in need of help, those who were fortunate enough to hold on to their homes and jobs deemed relief recipients slothful by definition. “There are hundreds of thousands of people like myself who have labored and denied themselves all their lives, who are now old, and very often ill,” E. E. Denne of Los Angeles wrote to the president:

Most of us would not accept public gratuities—they are the gift of providence to the profligate and lazy and foolish for the greater part, tho’ to be sure, all these have votes, and no doubt in excess of the hard workers and self respectors. (Nov. 23, no year)

Denne was in good company. A resident of Los Angeles wrote to Roosevelt to explain that he was at his wits’ end with the all the taxes he had to pay, so much so that he wasn’t sure it was worth it for him to stay in business. He wasn’t in the mood “to feed all the bums and malcontents within our shores.” He was of the view that FDR’s cabinet had moved so far to the left that he might as well let the legendary muckraker “Upton Sinclair function in their place.”

(Continues…)

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