American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (15 page)

11. THE JOBS THAT PAID TOO MUCH

H
opkins’s success at job making had two consequences. The first was budgetary. Having already demonstrated that he could spend $5 million in two hours, he had no trouble burning through the CWA’s $400 million in three months. In mid-January, with the coffers running low, Roosevelt at Hopkins’s request asked the Congress for $950 million more, $450 million to keep the program going through the winter and then wind it down, and $500 million for the direct relief that would be needed when the jobs disappeared.

The second consequence was psychological. Among the workers, the euphoria of finally having paychecks faded with the falling needles of the Christmas trees, and in its place rose concerns about pay and job conditions. And the 4 million jobs still left some 9 million unemployed, spurring protests among those who had failed to land on the CWA rosters. The mayor of Chelsea, Massachusetts, Lawrence F. Quigley, wrote Hopkins in January to report that the unemployed in his town continued to be the lopsided majority. While 155 Chelseans worked at CWA jobs, 2,000 remained out of work and had taken their anger to city hall, where they were apparently milling inside the building as Quigley composed his letter. It would take only a spark, he wrote, to “change them into a mob.” He also suggested that the government, having acknowledged its responsibility by creating a jobs program, now was obliged to “put every unemployed man to work.”

Lorena Hickok, writing from Georgia on her first trip into the Deep South, reported a conversation with Lincoln McConnell, the state reemployment director. A day or two before he talked to Hickok, McConnell had been in the north Georgia town of Carnesville, where 1,800 men had registered for jobs. Told that the quota was filled and no jobs were available, the men threatened to riot, burn trucks, and sack the CWA offices.

At the same time that the CWA was facing the anger of men it hadn’t been able to employ, Hopkins had to cut the pay of those it had. With money running low and Roosevelt’s request for additional funds still pending, he wanted to stretch what was left of the $400 million as far as he could. When it began, the CWA had adopted the Public Works Administration pay scale, which for unskilled labor was 40 cents an hour in the Southern Zone, 45 cents an hour in the Central Zone, which included most of the Midwest and West, and 50 cents an hour in the industrial Northern Zone. Skilled workers made from $1 to $1.20. Unskilled and skilled laborers could work only thirty hours a week, clerical workers and professionals thirty-nine.

The pay rates were based on prevailing wages in the different regions of the country but were supposed to be low enough not to compete with private jobs. Farmers in the South, however, were used to paying black and poor white farm hands as little as 5 cents an hour. Southern politicians protested that the CWA wages would lure workers from the fields and leave farmers unable to plow their fields or plant their crops. These protests also had a racial component: as little as a white farm owner might pay white laborers for hoeing corn and picking cotton, it was an unspoken rule in the old plantation belt that he would pay his black workers even less.

The loudest protester of all was the governor of Georgia, Eugene Talmadge. Talmadge was a flamboyant, suspender-snapping country lawyer who had ridden into office on the farm vote. He opposed relief in general and federal relief in particular, and considered all the people on relief as “bums and loafers.” This judgment fell heavily on his constituents, since 28 percent of Georgians received some form of assistance. City dwellers on relief were a cut below the average; he viewed them as chiselers trying to “outsmart you,” while outside the cities reliefers were merely victims of temptation, being lured by fancy wages to abandon the moral virtues of a day’s work in the hot sun. Even the lowest payments were too much, since farmers typically paid black tenants $3 a week for an entire family’s labor during the planting and harvest seasons. Talmadge even opposed the CCC, deriding the goverment for letting “a lot of young fellows run around in the woods” and paying them for it; they were bums and loafers too.

Talmadge had set out from the beginning to frustrate FERA and the system of federal relief, installing patronage hacks to do his bidding. Field representative Alan Johnstone had reported to Hopkins in September 1933 that “days and weeks of delay interrupt the organization. Appointments are held up. The Governor insists on signing every check. Wants to know the name and address of every person on staff and almost the name and address of every person on relief. Harasses the administration by continued criticism.

“In order to do in Georgia what ought to be done,” Johnstone recommended, “it is literally necessary to take the State of Georgia away from Talmadge on the question of relief and the whole relief program.”

With the advent of CWA, Talmadge had renewed his complaints and continued to undermine the program. He fired the director of the women’s division, nurse Jane Van de Vrede, on the grounds that she was not a Georgia native and therefore could not understand Georgians’ problems. And he forwarded to the White House a note that a constituent had sent him protesting the wage scale: “I wouldn’t plow nobody’s mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH.”

Roosevelt, no fan of Talmadge, dictated a withering reply that eventually went to Talmadge over Hopkins’s signature. “I take it…'that you approve of paying farm labor 40 to 50 cents per day.” Calculating that this amounted to $60 to $75 a year for seasonal farm work, he added, “I cannot get it into my head that wages on such a scale make possible a reasonable American standard of living.”

Speaking for himself, Hopkins was more direct: “All that guy is after is headlines,” he said of Talmadge. “He never contributes a dime, yet he’s always yapping. Some people can’t stand to see others making a living wage.”

Hopkins said that since Talmadge didn’t want CWA jobs in Georgia, he would shut down the state program and use the money elsewhere. This triggered a flood of telegrams and letters from Georgia congressmen, local officials, and citizens urging him to keep the works program intact. With that ammunition, Hopkins used his power to federalize the program, dissolving the Talmadge-appointed relief board and naming a professional social work administrator, Gay Shepperson, to run the state program, reporting to him and not to Talmadge. At the same time he reinstated Van de Vrede as head of the women’s division. It was the first time, but not the last, that Hopkins would take a state work program from its politicians and run it through his own appointees.

The southern protests over CWA wages died down when, for budgetary reasons, the CWA cut workers’ hours to twenty-four a week in cities over 2,500 and to fifteen in rural areas. That cut the average weekly pay nationally from around $15 to $11.52, and below $10 in most places in the South.

Hickok wrote Hopkins from the southern Georgia town of Moultrie on January 23, 1934: “It meant cutting most of them from $9 to $7.20 and $4.50 a week and from $12 to $9.60 or $6, depending on whether they lived in Moultrie or out in the country and what kind of work they were doing.” But the consensus, she said, was that even the reduced pay was “better than being laid off.”

12. THE BRIEF SHINING LIFE OF THE CWA

B
efore long, however, they would be. Almost as soon as it began, the CWA began to wind to a conclusion. Roosevelt got from Congress the $950 million Hopkins had sought to complete the program and resume direct relief, but refused appeals from some senators and governors to ask for more. New York’s Governor Lehman said he feared “grave social and economic consequences” when the program was shut down. The American Association of Social Workers, citing a “serious feeling of insecurity,” urged that it continue. And after the announcement that it actually would end, the White House received more than 50,000 protesting letters and 7,000 telegrams in a single week.

CWA field workers reported that the program had raised expectations that might be difficult to bring back down to earth. “I’m a little afraid,” Hickok wrote from Georgia, “that some of these people down here do not realize that the CWA business can’t go on forever.”

But Roosevelt refused to relent. The program had cost more than he anticipated, and despite Hopkins’s largely successful efforts to find and expose corruption before it could fester, he worried that accusations alone, coming from Republicans and the anti–New Deal press, would become a liability in a midterm election year. Conservative Democrats had voiced fears, shared by some of Roosevelt’s advisors, that the government would never be able to wean people from their jobs if they got too used to them, and Hickok’s letter to Hopkins suggested the same thing. The Public Works Administration had at last broken ground on several multimillion-dollar projects, including the Boulder Dam across the Colorado River in Nevada and the Triborough Bridge in New York City, and Roosevelt hoped these would finally give the economy the boost he had anticipated when the agency was launched. He didn’t want citizens to think the depression was permanent, or that the jobs the CWA provided would “become a habit with the country.” And while the winter was hurling record cold and snowfalls at the East, he took it for granted that nobody was going to starve once the weather moderated.

The
Time
magazine issue that featured Hopkins on its cover reported that he agreed wholeheartedly with Roosevelt that the CWA had been intended as a temporary emergency measure and “should be gradually demobilized.” But in his heart of hearts, wrote historian Robert Sherwood, Hopkins was reluctantly “obeying orders.” As in the
Time
report, his public comments masked his disappointment. He had announced rules and regulations for the phaseout at a news conference three days earlier, which he opened with an anecdote. “You know, this is a great job,” he said. “Here is a letter from a man who had a faithful wife, but he was unfaithful to her. He wants me to write her to take him back.”

“Well, you are the relief administrator and he needs relief,” said one of the reporters.

After some more banter, Hopkins went on to say that the CWA would drop workers in families where more than one person was employed, as well as all people “with other resources,” in an effort to keep the program at full strength in all industrial cities through the winter. And again he repeated his support of Roosevelt’s position: “We have tried here to do an emergency job and we believe that it has been done, and these appropriations from Congress are for the purpose of meeting the emergency needs, and do not represent an indication of permanent government policy.”

Once it began in the third week of February, the phaseout first hit rural areas and the warming South. The pink slips that signaled the program’s end, advancing north with the weather, left remarkable changes in their wake. At the literal end of the United States in Key West, Florida, CWA workers had swarmed over the rundown buildings of the flat-broke town, hammering, plastering, painting, and even building an aquarium to encourage tourism that would be brought by a new road. In Palatka, Florida, azaleas and palm trees planted by the CWA had transformed a fifty-nine-acre ravine carved by the St. Johns River into a magnificent garden. Dozens of public buildings in Texas and Oklahoma displayed new western-themed murals. CWA workers in Pittsburgh had helped move the forty-two-story Cathedral of Learning at the heart of the University of Pittsburgh closer to completion. In Helena, Montana, they renovated parts of the state capitol and refaced the building’s copper dome. Atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, the walls and stairwells of the new Coit Tower were being filled with vibrant scenes of street life in the city by the bay. In Mississippi, sagging rural schools were shored up and plumb and sparkling with new paint; more money had been spent on them in the CWA’s brief life than in the previous twenty years.

New sanitary privies had appeared in great numbers, 150,000 or more. Hopkins joked that some of them might be named for him, since contractors had been told to put up CWA signs at each jobsite and one had cabled to ask if he wanted a sign on each privy or one for the whole site.

By February 23, 720,000 CWA workers had been demobilized, and some 3 million remained at work. CWA workers were still on the job in Salt Lake City on the morning of March 12, painting the inside of the capitol dome, when an earthquake struck; it wrenched their scaffold into a dizzying spin that then subsided so they were able to climb down, shaken but unhurt. In New York City, parks commissioner Moses kept men at work in three shifts around the clock, digging, paving, painting, and planting through snow, sleet, rain, and cold. Then, despite the appeals of Norman Thomas and others in a march on Washington, on March 31 the CWA’s construction program ended. Artists and researchers kept working under other programs, and half the remaining workers shifted onto FERA’s payroll to mop up unfinished jobs. The rest went back on direct relief.

In its brief life the CWA had spent almost a billion dollars. Earning an average salary of $13 a week, its workers had built or improved some half a million miles of road, not just in the United States but in every U.S. territory. They had built or renovated 40,000 schools and 3,700 playgrounds and athletic fields. Under the whip hand of Moses and his “ramrods,” they had restored every park in New York City. They had built 469 airports and improved 529 more. They had dug ditches into which they had laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe, and built 250,000 outdoor privies. CWA-paid masons, carpenters, painters, and cleaners had improved thousands of public buildings including state capitols, city halls, county courthouses, libraries, police stations, hospitals, and jails. Hundreds of other buildings that were beyond rehabilitation had been torn down. Workers had refurbished irrigation ditches in the drought-parched West. In the South, they had drained thousands of acres of swampland and in the process advanced malaria control. They had restocked countless lakes and streams with fish. Ninety-four Eskimos working in the Kodiak Islands of what was then the Territory of Alaska replenished the snowshoe rabbit population. CWA sewing rooms, using surplus cotton, made tens of thousands of mattresses that went to relief families. The agency took over a bankrupt underwear maker, rehired its workers at CWA wages, and produced sets of underwear for families who could not afford to buy their own. About 300,000 women worked at CWA jobs, in the sewing rooms, as teachers, and in professional roles such as nurses and home economists within the growing relief system.

Hopkins summarized the program this way: “I think it was a grand thing and that it was altogether successful…'these millions of men and women did excellent work, worked hard and earned their money. As an effort on the part of the government to meet a critical situation, it seems to me that it did the trick and that the stories about graft and politics and inefficiencies were relatively unimportant, and that it has resulted in works of social usefulness that will be beneficial for years to come. When you realize that not a single county in America was omitted from this enterprise, it seems to me that it speaks well for the kind of cooperative endeavor that can be done by the American people in a crisis.”

But by the time he said this, at a March 30 news conference as the clock was ticking to its zero hour, he was already backing away from his earlier statements supporting its demise. The CWA may have been a temporary program to meet an emergency need, but he hoped the government would stay in the business of providing jobs to the unemployed: “I would hate to see a decline in the work program and a return to direct relief. Of course, we have some serious financial problems to work out.”

He was working on these problems, Hopkins said. But for the moment, in the spring of 1934, the great surge of public works and jobs was in retreat as the hopeful administration awaited signs that the economy might finally be improving on its own.