American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (14 page)

8. THE BIRTH OF THE CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION

F
ERA continued to compile data revealing the sweep of unemployment idling laborers, skilled-trades workers, and professionals. Harry Hopkins, looking at their full range of talents, could imagine “a stupendous and varied work program.” And as he looked at the approaching winter, the more he believed such a program had to be put together quickly.

Roosevelt shared his dismay at the slow pace of jobs growth, but unlike Hopkins, the president had politics to think about. He wanted to keep peace with organized labor, and he needed a sign that the unions would support a new federal jobs program. So Hopkins bided his time while he looked for a means of persuasion. Late in October, he boarded a train for a football weekend in Chicago and lunch with University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins. Frank Bane and Louis Brownlow, director of the Public Administration Clearing House, who like Bane was serving Hopkins as an unofficial and unpaid advisor, met him on arrival. As they drove him to his appointment, they laid out statistics that argued for a jobs program aimed strictly at unemployed workers on relief. The figures were persuasive and gave Hopkins new selling points, but they did not give him the labor endorsement that the president required.

His next destination was Kansas City, Missouri, where he was booked to speak at a conference. His contacts there included Judge Harry S Truman, the federal reemployment director for Missouri, who also told Hopkins more job projects were needed. It was when he was in Kansas City that he received an excited call from Aubrey Williams, who was overseeing FERA’s relations with the states. Williams said he had spoken with labor expert John R. Commons in Madison, Wisconsin, and Commons had told him that back in 1898, American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers had recommended a government work program for the unemployed. Commons had reported this in the union magazine, the
Federationist,
and it was just what Hopkins needed to sell his plan to Roosevelt.

Hopkins saw the president over lunch the day he returned to Washington, and pressed his case. He said he could create 4 million jobs if he had the money to do it. Roosevelt mused that with Ickes moving so slowly, the PWA’s $3.3 billion remained largely unspent. Maybe Hopkins could use some of that money to help the unemployed through one more winter.

Five years earlier, during a visit to England, Hopkins had found himself at the house where poet John Keats had written “Ode to a Nightingale.” A Keats enthusiast, he wrote home that in recalling the experience, “I fairly walk on air.” Now, leaving the White House, he had the same exhilarated feeling. Roosevelt had promised to take $400 million from Ickes’s PWA to allow him to build a short-term jobs program, and the president hinted at the new program in a press conference the next day, November 3. “There is a great deal to be said for it…. It adds to the self-respect of the country,” he said. He stopped short of committing himself publicly, but Hopkins read between the lines. When an aide asked if Roosevelt had approved his proposal, he replied, “Approved it, hell—he has just announced it at his press conference.”

Hopkins hurriedly brought his staff together to begin mapping out the details. Working through the night in sessions at downtown Washington’s Hotel Powhatan, Hopkins, Williams, Baker, Bane, and others sketched out their thoughts and refined them, and in two days’ time sent a plan to Roosevelt for a temporary jobs agency that would last through the deepest part of winter.

Ickes learned about the raid on his budget on November 6, when the president sent Hopkins and others to meet with him to work out the $400 million transfer. The normally fretful Ickes raised no objections. He, too, thought the need for jobs was critical, and he saw Hopkins’s plans as a pale and puny imitation of what real public works were all about. “It will put up no buildings. It won’t build any sewers or water works or incinerators or bridges,” he wrote in his diary, so the new agency’s projects would be “of a minor character.” Nevertheless, he attempted to rope off big projects for himself, sending out a decree that no project sponsor could withdraw its application for Public Works Administration funds in the hope of getting the same work done by the new agency without having to put up matching money. If it did so and failed to win approval, that sponsor could not resubmit its plans to the PWA.

On November 9, 1933, less than two weeks after Hopkins’s Chicago visit and exactly a week after the lunch at which Hopkins had presented him with the idea, Roosevelt signed an executive order using Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act to create the Civil Works Administration (CWA). He announced the program the same day, and jobless workers saw their prospects brighten beyond what FERA had been able to provide—if only for a time.

9. FOUR MILLION JOBS

H
opkins had high ambitions for the CWA, which he signaled right away. The United States had mobilized 4.7 million soldiers, sailors, and marines to fight in the world war. Summoning governors and mayors to a November 15 conference in Washington, he told them he intended to employ almost that many—4 million—within one month. Immediately, they started jostling for a share of the goodies. From coast to coast, in towns and cities crumbling from neglect, with thousands upon thousands of jobless families on relief, officials looked at their public buildings, playgrounds, streets, and—Ickes’s expectations notwithstanding—sewers and called back engineers they had laid off for lack of funds to start drawing up improvement plans. In farm states, officials mapped rural road improvements as a source of jobs for idle farmers. The planners moved quickly. In Massachusetts, when the state’s CWA coordinator called a meeting to explain what projects would be eligible, the mayors of Worcester and Lowell walked in carrying already completed applications, and left the same day with approvals.

By now Hopkins and Ickes had developed a clear rivalry, although it was still in its mild stages. Hopkins was impatient with Ickes’s careful style, while Ickes took Hopkins to be impetuous. Hopkins knew that Ickes dismissed the projects under his control as insubstantial and was determined to change that, to make them more than the works “of minor character” that Ickes had forecast in his diary. To ensure that they would have lasting value, he created an engineering division charged with helping develop project applications and shepherding through to completion the projects that were funded. Its head was John Michael Carmody, a former president of the Society of American Engineers, who had his pick of experienced supervisors to oversee state and local projects since it was estimated that half the country’s engineers were out of work.

CWA reviewers processed applications with astonishing speed. Indiana, for example, had 122 projects approved on November 20 and 109 more the next day. Less than a week later, on November 26, 920 projects had been approved for Indiana and 48,500 men were already at work there.

Half the workers came from FERA’s work relief rolls, which at the time numbered about 1.9 million. The remainder were new hires, who clamored for CWA jobs in part because they needed them, but also because Hopkins had rejected means tests, so people applying did not have to prove how poor they were in order to be eligible. From the beginning there were more applicants than jobs. CWA offices in North Carolina took 150,000 applications during the first week. In Chicago, 70,000 appeared on a single day. Within two weeks of the program’s beginning, about 1 million workers were on the payroll, and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving had to work three shifts just to print their checks. To distribute them, Hopkins commandeered the disbursement system of the Veterans Administration, which was the largest such system in the nation. More than 800,000 workers received checks on the CWA’s first payday, November 23.

Still, despite the rapid pace of hiring, Hopkins missed his initial target; CWA workers in mid-December numbered just over 2.6 million. Nonetheless, with Christmas approaching in a winter that would prove to be one of the worst in memory, hundreds of thousands of families suddenly had the means to fill their larders and put something under the tree. Moreover, field reports testified to the program’s popularity. Lorena Hickok, a former Associated Press reporter and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was one of sixteen field investigators dispatched by Hopkins under FERA to file no-holds-barred reports on conditions around the country. “Go out around the country and look this thing over,” he told her. “Tell me what you see and hear. All of it. Don’t ever pull your punches.” Among those reporting were the young Martha Gellhorn, who would go on to cover the Spanish Civil War and briefly marry Ernest Hemingway, and Lincoln Colcord, who had been born on his father’s schooner rounding Cape Horn and, with his sister, spent most of his youth at sea before becoming a poet, journalist, and maritime historian. Their reports supplemented the hard data that FERA’s research division was providing. They put faces on the numbers, providing vivid anecdotal evidence of the human devastation wrought by the depression. Hickok’s October 30, 1933, dispatch from Dickinson, North Dakota, was an example. She had met some farm families in a church there: “Of the men I saw this afternoon none had any income except a little here and there from cream checks. And this will soon be stopped, for their cows are going dry for lack of food. For themselves and their families they need everything. Especially clothing.”

One man told her everything he owned was on his back. “His shoes were so far gone that I wondered how he kept them on his feet. With one or two exceptions none of the men hanging about the church had overcoats. Most of them were in denim—faded, shabby denim. Cotton denim doesn’t keep out the wind very well. When we came out to get into the car, we found it full of farmers, with all the windows closed. They apologized and said they had crawled in there to keep warm. The women and children are even worse off than the men. Where there has been any money at all, it has gone for shoes for the children and work clothes for the men. The women can stay inside and keep warm, and the children can stay home from school.”

The field reports brightened once the CWA was under way. Hickok wrote from Sioux City, Iowa, to report on the city engineer’s astonishment at the changed attitudes of relief recipients: “You just can’t believe that these are the same men who were listlessly and unwillingly doing their time a week ago on work relief projects to get their grocery orders.” Moving north, she relayed the comment of the
Wisconsin State Journal
that the “click of pick and clink of shovel are Christmas bells to many at this time.”

There were stories of rejuvenated buying power, of workers thrusting cash and not chits across store counters to buy what they required, of shoes disappearing from store shelves so fast that factories reopened in order to replace them. Louise Armstrong, who headed her county CWA office in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, later wrote, “We saw a little less of sorrow and discontent and a little more of happiness in the faces in the office. Christmas during CWA was a cheerful episode.”

But not everybody was convinced. Al Smith, for whom opposing Roosevelt had become a full-time job, called the CWA a smokescreen for the Public Works Administration’s ponderously slow start. He charged that it would do no useful work, encourage idleness, and disrupt local wage scales. “Half way between a lemon and an orange is a grapefruit, and half way between a public work and a relief work is a civil work,” Smith said cryptically.

Hopkins popped off the kind of reply that was beginning to ruffle feathers in the anti–New Deal camp. If putting 4 million people to work meant he was in the grapefruit business, he was delighted to be in it. “Al Smith taught me the word ‘baloney,’” he added, “and now he has taught me sour ‘grapefruit juice.’”

Finally, around mid-January, Hopkins was able to achieve the employment numbers that he sought. He reached his goal by focusing on small, quick-starting projects such as road and street repair, repair of public buildings, playground development, and rural road improvements. At its peak that winter, the CWA employed 4,264,000 men and women.

10. EMPLOYMENT POLITICS

N
aturally, the bulk of the CWA money flowed to the largest states. Eleven of them—much of the industrial Northeast and Midwest, and Texas and California—got 57 percent of the total. This produced accusations that contradicted one another. Republicans charged the administration with buying votes with patronage, while Democratic senators in the job-heavy states complained that they were given no input in choosing CWA supervisors. Colorado senator Edward Costigan, a Democrat and a Roosevelt ally, said plaintively, “Is it too much to ask that names considered for important official administrative posts here be referred to me in advance for advice?”

In California, where administrator Ray Branion was running both the CWA and FERA, Senator William McAdoo went to war because Branion was a Republican and accused him of political corruption and incompetence. Although McAdoo was just entering his first term, he was seventy years old and others were already vying to succeed him, so political maneuvering complicated the scenario. The United States attorney in San Francisco, who had applied for Branion’s job, followed McAdoo’s lead and indicted Branion and Pierce Williams, Hopkins’s CWA field representative for California, on charges of conspiracy to defraud the government. Hopkins countered by dispatching a Justice Department attorney from Washington to investigate the charges, with Roosevelt’s consent to quashing the indictment if the department approved. The investigation proved them innocent and the charges were dropped, although Hopkins had to move both Branion and Williams out of California.

Everybody wanted a piece of the CWA money. The Chicago Democratic machine tried to steer it to projects that were not approved, forcing Hopkins to interpose engineers to enforce high project standards. Labor unions in some locales claimed that workers had to join their ranks before the CWA would hire them, and the American Legion tried a similar tactic aimed at enlarging its membership before the CWA halted these practices.

The Republican National Committee attacked the CWA from the outset, charging it with “gross waste” and “downright corruption” without ever mustering specifics. Almost all such accusations were politically inspired, and Hopkins, knowing that even the hint of graft or favoritism could undermine public support, did a good job of staying out in front of them. Following the advice he’d received from the president on his first day on the job at FERA, he continued to run the relief apparatus without favoring Democrats. He rejected political hacks in favor of professional administrators who knew how to identify the needy and get them what they needed, be it food, clothing, or jobs. It was inevitable that political interference would take place, but he had stopped getting mad about it, he told a congressional committee in January when CWA jobs were at their peak. He was “amazed at the number of people who are trying to horn in on making a little money,” he said, and was dedicated to exposing this himself. “I may have made a mistake in kicking a lot of this stuff outdoors,” he said. “But I don’t like it when people…'finagle around the back door.”

Hopkins’s quote, and his picture, made the cover of
Time
magazine on February 19, 1934, confirming his growing national prominence. The story described his efforts to run the jobs program and keep politics and fraud at bay. It credited him with “a thoroughly professional job.” On his orders, CWA payroll and purchase records were open to the public. He had a staff of 130 investigators checking reported cases of fraud. Accountants pored over the agency’s books. Accusations of graft and corruption far outweighed the reality. What cases there were mostly involved violations and irregularities that fell short of criminal magnitude. They were handled with dismissals and restitution, although seventy-seven cases eventually were referred for prosecution and resulted in seventeen convictions.

Roosevelt, aware of the potential political dynamite in the accusations, did some intelligence gathering of his own. He sent his old friend Frank C. Walker to test reactions to the jobs program and to look for signs of corruption, incompetence, and waste. Walker was a Butte, Montana, copper miner turned lawyer and New York businessman—he owned a chain of movie theaters—who had known Roosevelt since 1920 and been one of his earliest presidential backers. Now he directed the president’s Executive Council and also the National Emergency Council, both bodies consisting of department and agency heads and cabinet secretaries. The councils were supposed to coordinate the government’s multifarious initiatives but were just as likely to break down in bureaucratic squabbles, and Walker, a staunch supporter without ambitions of his own who was good at soothing tender egos, served as a peacemaker. To assess the CWA, he left Washington and roamed the country. Back home in Butte, where he had practiced law, he found men he knew digging ditches and laying sewer pipe in their business suits and shoes because they couldn’t afford work clothes. He was surprised, when he talked with them, to find that they weren’t bitter. One man pulled out some coins and told Walker, “Do you know, Frank, this is the first money I’ve had in my pockets in a year and a half. Up to now I’ve had nothing but tickets that you exchange for groceries.” Another said the CWA job had been all that prevented him from heaving a rock through the window of the local bakery and stealing bread to feed his children.

Returning to Washington, Walker told Roosevelt to ignore criticism of the CWA and the way Hopkins was running it. The jobs it provided had “averted one of the most serious crises in our history” and the threat, if not the reality, of revolution.

Obviously, not all of the CWA hires embraced their jobs enthusiastically, and many worked under poor conditions. CWA rules dictated that most project dollars be spent for labor, while local officials argued that leaving out equipment, material, and administration costs would make projects harder to complete successfully. Hopkins was able to ignore most of these protests, but not all. In late 1933, Fiorello La Guardia had just been elected mayor of New York City and had asked Long Island parks commissioner Robert Moses to take over the city’s parks as well. Moses, whose lust to build would prove to be equaled only by his love of power, had one single focus when it came to the growing number of projects under his iron control: they would be done his way or not at all. Anticipating the city parks job before the state legislature gave him permission to accept it, Moses and his top aides spied on some of the 68,000 CWA workers assigned to park cleanup and other projects in the city. They found a ragtag workforce that was ill-equipped and badly supervised. Workers laid asphalt roads and paths without adequate foundations, so these broke up from frost action within days. Other workers shoveled sand from truck beds to build up a reef off Staten Island, and as they waited for the next truckload they watched waves already washing away the sand they had just shoveled. Moses and his men saw thousands of laborers at Brooklyn’s Marine Park, 2,000 acres of undeveloped salt marsh at the entrance to Jamaica Bay, warding off the cold wind from the water by passing around wine bottles concealed in paper bags and huddling over fires made from the chopped-up handles of their shovels. The few men whose consciences prompted them to work had little to do but rake the sand or rearrange the landscape’s scattered stones.

Moses was sworn in as New York City’s consolidated parks commissioner in January 1934, and within days he strong-armed the city’s CWA administration into freeing money for plans, materials, and supervision. He used a favorite tactic: he threatened to quit if his demands weren’t granted. And once he forced the CWA to change its rules and put real oversight in place, he hired hundreds of architects and engineers from the ravaged ranks of those professions. He put them to work in the red-brick Arsenal in Central Park, kept them at their desks for fourteen-hour days, and told those who didn’t last not to bother coming back. The plans they turned out went into the field practically before the ink was dry. There, construction “ramrods” whom Moses had hired on loan from contractors as far away as Pennsylvania and New England ordered the CWA laborers to leave their wine and bonfires and get to work. Those who didn’t were fired on the spot.

In fact, most workers were conscientious, like those Frank Walker had encountered in Montana. Diligence was the norm, not the exception, in almost every city and town around the country. CWA crews worked into a winter that in much of the nation was one of the worst ever. Temperatures fell to 56 below zero in the higher elevations of New England, 14 below in New York City, and 6 below in Washington, D.C. Few of the men sent out to work in those conditions were equipped for it, as Walker too had observed. Former white-collar workers had never owned the right clothes and shoes for work as laborers, and the onetime factory workers and mill hands who might have had decent work clothes in the past had been unable to replace them. Working for the CWA, the $13.44 a week they made on average disappeared into hungry mouths at home, which took priority over any other needs. To stretch their budgets for necessities, some men walked long distances to their jobsites rather than pay carfare.

Laborers held most, but not all, of the CWA jobs. Hopkins and his staff saw no sense in forcing artists, writers, and musicians to become third-rate laborers when they had skills that could be used in other ways. About 190,000 CWA-paid workers were classified as “non-manual and professional.” Three thousand of these were artists, including painters, etchers, sculptors, and mural painters. Gutzon Borglum, the monumental sculptor who had been carving the profiles of four presidents out of the granite of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota since 1927, applauded the hiring of artists. He wrote Aubrey Williams in 1933 to say that Hopkins and the CWA had “almost immediately shifted public aid from cold business to human helpfulness” and created “an army of workers whose goal must be to better, to make more livable our towns and cities, our schools more cheerful, our playgrounds and our parks a pride and a delight.” As for the artists who were part of that army, Borglum wrote that they were hungry not just for food but with “unexpressed, creative longing” and were “anxious to be a part of the great comeback.”

Most of the white-collar jobs were held by teachers, as they had been under FERA. Around 50,000 of them taught at all levels of the primary and secondary public education system, and in adult education. For others, innovative job creation was employed. Window dressers and clerks were sent to museums to help build displays and put old records in order; statisticians reported to hospitals to track disease patterns; bookbinders went to libraries to repair tattered books; and historians and architects were dispatched to far-flung spots around the country to compile the beginnings of a list of historic American buildings.

Republicans and the anti-Roosevelt press were quick to criticize jobs such as these, but Hopkins had little patience for their views. Of the white-collar jobholders he said with his usual terseness, “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people.”