American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (18 page)

5. A WORD IS BORN

H
arry Hopkins had greeted the new year with fever and a bad case of the grippe. Both he and Barbara were sick. They gulped orange juice between visits from doctors and nurses, and tried to prevent their illness from spreading to two-year-old Diana. But both were well enough to listen to Roosevelt’s address on the radio, and Hopkins congratulated himself when he heard it. “I thot it was a grand speech,” he wrote in his diary in his strong, forward-slanting hand, employing his usual shorthand for
thought
—“and particularly because I had worked on it with him.”

Hopkins was one of two obvious choices to command the forthcoming army of workers. Ickes was the other. Their stylistic differences—Hopkins’s brash, freewheeling ways and Ickes’s brooding attention to detail—already coexisted uneasily under the administration’s big top. It was part of Roosevelt’s style of governance to generate creativity from the dynamic tension between rivals, and with the announcement of the jobs program those differences became both more public and more pronounced.

The morning after the State of the Union speech, the
Post
reported that Hopkins was most frequently mentioned as the likely appointee. Ickes, however, thrust himself into the picture by reminding reporters that he had handled the existing public works program. He was sure that Hopkins would “have a very important part” in the new program, he said, thereby promoting the inference that Hopkins would work for him.

Roosevelt, of course, gave no sign of his preference one way or the other. On the Sunday following the Friday speech, he had his secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, call Hopkins to thank him for his congratulatory telegram. The subject of the job didn’t come up; Roosevelt too was bedridden with a cold, and he confined himself to flirting with Hopkins’s wife by calling out in the background, “Tell Barbara to come down and be sick with me—there is lots of room in my bed.” When asked about it directly, the president declined to say. “I am going to get my program first and I will not settle as to who is going to run it until I get my program,” he told treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. Morgenthau, however, showed up at Hopkins’s apartment on the same day as the call from Missy LeHand, and told him he thought Roosevelt was going to give him the job.

Ickes was the next to turn up there. He arrived at two o’clock on Monday, January 7. It was a rainy day and Hopkins, still ailing, had deemed it too miserable to go into the office. (It was also the day that Roosevelt made the cover of
Time
magazine as its Man of the Year for the second time.) Ickes told Hopkins he had heard all kinds of rumors and was worried about who was going to run the works program. He proposed that a new cabinet position be created to oversee social services, which Hopkins would run, while Ickes would remain in charge of public works. If the new department didn’t fly, he said, Hopkins could be his deputy, but he would resign if Roosevelt asked anyone else to do the job. “He thinks Pres. has treated him badly on one or two things,” Hopkins wrote in his diary, describing Ickes’s dark suspicions. “Feels sure Mrs. Roosevelt is after him—I told him that administration was up to Pres. and I was making no suggestions.”

But if Hopkins knew anything, it was that he wasn’t going to work for Harold Ickes. And thus the rivalry between the two men escalated as Congress began to debate the new program and its costs.

The House acted quickly. It passed the emergency relief appropriations bill that contained the jobs program on January 24, less than three weeks after Roosevelt made his case in the State of the Union address. There were only seventy-eight dissenting votes. The bill promised $4 billion for work relief, and another $880 million in funds already appropriated but unspent, to wind down current relief activities.

But the Senate moved more deliberately. Senators were being asked to approve a huge spending plan with virtually no strings attached, and relinquishing the power of the purse offended them, just as it offended them not to be consulted on high-level relief appointments in their home states. Hopkins and Ickes, called to testify about the administration’s plans, were vague. They weren’t dissembling; details would emerge only under the program’s administrator, whoever that would be, and all they had in the meantime were the broad outlines. Two months were to elapse while the upper chamber quarreled over patronage and other aspects of the program, such as wage rates and total spending. It was during that time that aldermanic hearings in New York City gave Roosevelt’s opponents something they had sorely lacked—an instantly recognizable shorthand for mocking the New Deal.

On April 3, 1935, as the Senate was nearing a vote on its version of the work relief bill, a committee of the Board of Aldermen was holding the last of three hearings on the spending of FERA relief funds in the city. Outside the French Renaissance–style city hall in lower Manhattan, the day was fair and cool, typical of early spring. Inside, the heat and pressure were intense.

Criminal trial attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker was the committee counsel. Stryker was a colorful courtroom performer, and he had brought his full arsenal of theatrics to the hearings to wield against a string of witnesses. On this day they were white-collar relief recipients who had been hired to teach in various recreational projects in the city. Stryker—and some of the committee members—treated the witnesses to a barrage of disbelief and scorn when they described the subjects they were teaching.

A supervisor of dance programs testified that she oversaw classes in social, tap, folk, and eurythmic dancing. “What is eurythmic dancing?” Stryker asked.

“A natural type, simple form of dancing,” Myra Wilcoxon answered. “Any kind of dancing is eurythmic dancing.” Stryker invited her to demonstrate, but she had the sense to keep her seat and her hands demurely folded in her lap.

When a recreational training specialist testified that he was in charge of a craft school for men and women, one of the aldermen pretended that he didn’t hear and asked, “Was that a ‘craft’ or a ‘graft’ school?”

“Craft. We do not have the other,” the witness said blandly.

But for sheer historical moment, the star witness was another training specialist and craft teacher, Robert Marshall of Brooklyn. Marshall told the committee that he taught “boon doggles.”

Asked to clarify, Marshall replied—“somewhat sadly,” according to the
New York Times
—“I spend a good deal of time explaining it. Boon doggles is simply a term applied back in the pioneer days to what we call gadgets today—to things men and boys do that are useful in their everyday operations or recreations or about their home.

“They may be making belts in leather, or maybe belts by weaving ropes, or it might be belts by working with canvas, maybe a tent or a sleeping bag. In other words, it is a chamber of horrors where boys perform crafts that are not designed for finesse and fine work, but simply for a utility purpose.”

At the time, other aspects of the hearings drew more attention. The white-collar jobs FERA was funding included work on various arcane research projects at New York City universities. These included the compilation of a standard Jewish encyclopedia, a study of the making of safety pins, and sociological investigations into matters such as the non-professional interests of nursery school, kindergarten, and first-grade teachers, and “The Task of Educating Public Opinion Relating to Socio-Economic Problems.”

“High-spun theoretical bunk,” snorted Stryker.

Critics first focused on these research projects. Hopkins bristled on cue when reporters in Washington asked him if he was going to investigate relief spending in New York as a result of the aldermanic hearings.

“Why should I?” Hopkins retorted. “There is nothing the matter with that. They are damn good projects—excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there—God damn it!”

He went on, “They can make fun of these white collar and professional people if they want to. I am not going to do it. They can say, let them use a pick and shovel to repair streets, when the city ought to be doing that. I believe every one of these research projects are good projects. We don’t need any apologies!” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia also defended the program, saying, “Educated persons and college graduates must eat.”

But nuances like these were ultimately lost in light of the
New York Times
’s indignant front-page headline over the story on the hearings. “$3,187,000 Relief Is Spent Teaching Jobless to Play,” it read, and below it at the top of a stack of subheads, “‘Boon Doggles’ Made.”

Marshall had testified that the classes weren’t that popular, but the term was. With the
Times
headline
boondoggle
leaped from the obscurity of the campfire to political prominence as a way of describing work of thin value. Indeed, it would outlive work relief itself, becoming a permanent addition to the language.

6. THE MACHINERY TAKES SHAPE

T
he Senate passed its version of the works bill on April 5. It contained restrictions against military spending, required Senate approval of all appointments to jobs paying more than $5,000, and said hirees would be paid a “security wage” below the local prevailing wage rate. By April 8, the two houses had agreed on all the details and passed the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act authorizing $4.8 billion to be spent on work relief. The measure reached Roosevelt aboard a train as he returned from a Florida fishing vacation, and he signed it the same day. His choice to head the program remained unknown.

But the deck was stacked in Hopkins’s favor. He already had Roosevelt’s ear on the work plans he had been outlining in sessions at the White House. After one such session Hopkins made an entry in his diary: “We went over the organization of the work program—more charts in pencil—he loves charts—no two of them are ever the same, which is a bit baffling at times.”

The goals of the work program also favored him. The “light” public works he had overseen at the CWA and FERA spent a far higher percentage of their budgets on labor—75 percent versus 30 percent—than Ickes’s “heavy” ones, which spent more on materials. This meant the government would pay less to reduce unemployment under Hopkins’s way of doing things, and also reduce the costs of direct relief since workers would be taken from the relief rolls. Moreover, these workers would spend their money right away, pumping their paychecks right back into the economy.

Finally, Hopkins had already demonstrated he could put people to work quickly. In the end, this tipped the balance. Roosevelt wanted speed. “Harry gets things done. I am going to give this job to Harry,” he told Donald Richberg, who had replaced Frank Walker as chair of the Executive and National Emergency Councils when Walker resigned from the two coordinating agencies in 1934 to attend to his private affairs.

So as not to upset Ickes, and if only to keep him from threatening to resign, the president assembled a structure for running the new program that gave him an illusion of control. It was a three-headed beast, one head each for receiving and screening applications, funding projects, and monitoring the work once it was started. The Division of Applications and Information was the funnel into which state and local governments, federal agencies, and any other sponsors poured their work proposals. It was headed by Walker, who had returned from his personal sabbatical. The proposals that passed the initial screening went to the next body, the Advisory Committee on Allotments. Ickes chaired this sprawling group, which included the secretaries of agriculture and labor as well as the interior; agency directors with responsibilities for soil erosion, emergency conservation work, rural resettlement, and rural electrification; the chiefs of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Forest Service, Bureau of Public Roads, Urban Housing Division, and various other governmental units charged with the country’s natural resources and its infrastructure. The Advisory Committee also included representatives of the Business Advisory Council, farm groups and organized labor, the American Bankers Association, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The committee was commanded “to meet in round table conference at least once a week,” and as Robert Sherwood has pointed out (though putting it mildly), the meetings “must have required quite a large round table.” Its recommendations went to the president for final approval.

The third unit was the Works Progress Division. This was the unit responsible for tracking the work projects and keeping them moving on schedule, and it was in charge of this that Roosevelt placed Hopkins.

Having decided on this structure, Roosevelt called Hopkins, Ickes, and a few others to the White House on the evening of April 26 and told them that he was committed to the program. He said he expected “everything to go like clockwork” and would “accept no excuses.”

Two nights later, on Sunday, April 28, he sat before microphones in the White House and delivered the seventh fireside chat of his presidency. It was his first address to the nation since the State of the Union address on January 4, and he used it to introduce the works program and ask the people to help keep it honest and free of politics.

“I well realize that the country is expecting before this year is out to see the ‘dirt fly,’” the president said. “Our responsibility is to all of the people in this country. This is a great national crusade to destroy enforced idleness, which is an enemy of the human spirit generated by this depression. Our attack upon these enemies must be without stint and without discrimination. No sectional, no political distinctions can be permitted.”

Anticipating attacks before they occurred, he forewarned his listeners, “There are chiselers in every walk of life. Every profession has its black sheep…. The most effective means of preventing such evils in this work relief program will be the eternal vigilance of the American people themselves. I call upon my fellow citizens everywhere to cooperate with me in making this the most efficient and the cleanest example of public enterprise the world has ever seen.

“It is time to provide a smashing answer for those cynical men who say that a democracy cannot be honest and efficient. If you will help, this can be done. I therefore hope you will watch the work in every corner of this nation. Feel free to criticize. Tell me of instances where work can be done better, or where improper practices prevail. Neither you nor I want criticism conceived in a purely fault-finding or partisan spirit, but I am jealous of the right of every citizen to call to the attention of his or her government examples of how the public money can be more effectively spent for the benefit of the American people.”

Roosevelt called the effort that was about to start “the most comprehensive work plan in the history of the nation,” and gave an additional hint of its scope when he referred to the “two hundred and fifty or three hundred kinds of work that will be undertaken.”

Applications for funding began pouring in.

At the same time, the machinery of the works program evolved. The Works Progress Division did not remain one of an equal trinity for long. When Roosevelt sat down at his desk on May 6 to sign the executive order creating the new organization, the Works Progress Division had become the Works Progress Administration. The order said it “shall be responsible to the president for the honest, efficient, speedy and coordinated execution of the work-relief program as a whole, and for the execution of that program in such manner as to move from the relief rolls to work on such projects or in private employment the maximum number of persons in the shortest time possible.”

The tone of the president’s order and the extent to which Hopkins commanded the new program was captured the next day in the
New York Times
. “Only a brief paragraph in the order is devoted to Mr. Walker’s and Mr. Ickes’s divisions, but two full pages refer to Mr. Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration,” the newspaper reported.

The name, inevitably shortened to the initials WPA, caused some contention. Ickes, used to seeing the initials of his Public Works Administration used as a shorthand for work relief, thought Hopkins had chosen it deliberately to create confusion. But Hopkins apparently didn’t like the name, either, and the choice is usually attributed to Roosevelt. No matter its origin, it captured two things the president wanted to convey—works were under way, and that meant progress.

The first meeting of the Committee on Allotments, held on May 7, found Ickes presiding in the White House Cabinet Room, self-consciously occupying the president’s chair. Roosevelt sat to one side. La Guardia had come from New York to represent the Conference of Mayors, as well as New York’s large sheaf of applications. (Roosevelt recognized him, saying, “Of course, the mayor will try to get as much as he can in the way of a grant and possibly as little as he can in the way of a loan.”) Projects totaling $100 million were on the table, having passed through the Division of Applications and Information. Roosevelt reminded the members that the jobs approved should stress employment, and Hopkins presented maps and charts he said showed how to spread the work around.

But while Ickes may have presided, Hopkins dominated that first meeting, and he would swing the allotment process to his advantage from then on. The executive order gave him the power to maneuver projects from the PWA if he could demonstrate that they would lighten the relief rolls, and he used it with impunity. He had agreed that the WPA should handle all projects costing less than $25,000, which seemed to give Ickes the pick of larger jobs, but in fact Hopkins also kept the option of taking on substantial projects if he chose. “For instance,” he said at a press conference in July when the agency was two months old, “the City of New York may want to build a new park…'which may cost three and one-half million dollars. That is a proper project to bring to us in the first instance, which we would approve. They may want to build in New York fifty swimming pools. That would be a proper project to bring to us irrespective of the cost. The same thing is true of playgrounds, also extensions, sewer systems, water systems or extensions to buildings. Many of those projects will be in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars. We might have one which would read, ‘repairing and repaving of twenty-seven miles of city streets in Los Angeles. The cost is four million, six hundred thousand dollars, of which the City of Los Angeles is prepared to put up eight hundred thousand.’ That would go directly to us in the first instance.”

Hopkins held the trump card whenever a project would reduce the numbers on relief. But his final and ultimately greatest advantage over Ickes lay in the fact that PWA projects required a 55 percent contribution of the cost from their state or local sponsors. WPA project sponsors were expected only “to contribute equipment, materials and services to the maximum amount possible.” Given the option of paying more than half a project’s cost or as little as nothing, city and state governments turned overwhelmingly to the WPA, while Ickes’s project reviewers looked at their empty in-boxes and fumed.

Ickes asked the president to draw a sharper line between the two agencies. “The demarcation…'should be clearly defined at once by you as the only one who can speak with authority,” he wrote in a memo that lobbied for a larger role for the PWA. “We have the personnel, we have the experience, and we have built up a reputation for integrity and efficiency that will stand the administration in good stead in the stormy political days that lie just ahead,” he wrote. “I do not even intimate that Harry Hopkins cannot do the work as efficiently as PWA, but he cannot do it short of building up what would amount to a duplicate organization.”

By then, however, the allotments committee had already relegated the PWA to a narrow range of activities. The first billion-dollar allocation announced by the committee, subject to the president’s approval, gave the PWA $250 million for clearing slums and building low-cost housing. The Rivers and Harbors section of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got $147 million for a variety of projects on navigable waterways. The remainder was designated for projects that would use WPA labor: to the Bureau of Roads in the Department of Agriculture for building roads and eliminating grade crossings, and to states and cities for more street and road work, public buildings, water and sewer lines, and a variety of other projects. These were the jobs the WPA was created to fill, and soon the sight of men wielding shovels and pushing wheelbarrows would be ubiquitous throughout America.