People Must Live by Work

Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan

Steven Attewell

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780812250435, 9780812250435
• eBook ISBN: 9780812295313
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In People Must Live by Work, Steven Attewell presents the history of an idea—direct job creation—that transformed the role of government in ameliorating unemployment by hiring the unemployed en masse to prevent widespread destitution in economic crises. For ten years, between 1933 and 1943, direct job creation was put into practice, employing more than eight million Americans and making the federal government the largest single employer in the country. Yet in 2008, when the most dramatic economic crisis since the Depression occurred, the idea of direct job creation was nowhere to be found on the list of policies deemed feasible or advisable for government at any level. People Must Live by Work traces the rise and fall of direct job creation policy—how it was put into practice, how it came within a hairbreadth of becoming a permanent feature of American economic and social administration, and why it has been largely forgotten or discounted today. Contrary to more conventional arguments, Attewell reveals that the New Deal ended the Great Depression before the United States entered World War II and its jobs programs continued to influence policy debates over the Employment Act of 1946. He examines the deliberations surrounding the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act that was signed into law in 1978 and demonstrates the ways in which direct job creation played a significant and polarizing role in dividing the economic establishment and the Democratic party in the 1970s. People Must Live by Work not only chronicles the ambition, constraints, and achievements of direct job creation policy in the past but also proposes a framework for understanding its enduring significance and promise for today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Prehistory of an Idea
• Chapter 1. First Objective of Reform: Direct Job Creation in the Committee of Economic Security and the Designing of the New Deal
• Chapter 2. People or Projects: The Works Progress Administration Versus the Public Works Administration Reconsidered as Economic Theory and Ideology
• Chapter 3. “One Third of a Nation”: WPA Direct Job Creation Reconsidered as a Policy Success
• Chapter 4. Right to Work? Rethinking the Promise of Full Employment in the 1945 Moment
• Chapter 5. Jobs and Freedom: The Missing Front in the War on Poverty
• Chapter 6. The 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act: The High-Water Mark for Direct Job Creation in “the New Deal That Never Happened”
• Conclusion. Jobs and the Policy Imagination
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments