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The Survey

Russell H. Kurtz

Charity Organization Department Russell Sage Foundation
1. THE news that Civil Works is likely to be discontinued by the first of May has given the country a bad jolt. When the plan was projected last November, we Americans unitedly marveled at its audacity. As it was put into action, meeting each step in its impossible schedule right on the dot, we applauded its execution. We were sure that such a popular measure would command all the financial support from our government that it needed to keep it going full force, if not actually to extend its provisions, until other forms of employment would crowd it out of the national scene. We saw in it an expression of governmental acceptance of responsibility for job-security, a dynamic form of unemployment insurance.

2. The question of where the money was coming from kept bobbing up, but we persistently ignored it. New Deal financial magic would take care of that, we told ourselves. Wishfully thinking ourselves away from the sordid theme of relief, we saw a bright vista stretching ahead to a land "where every man who wanted a job would have one," if not in industry, then in government service. But we have had a rude awakening.

3. The return to realism puts everything back into the old, familiar perspective where Relief stands glowering in the foreground, shadowing the other figures of the Recovery group. Public Works is there, and Business and Farm Employment; but as Civil Works prepares to lay down its burden of the Four Million, we seem to see that it is Relief which strains forward to pick it up.

4. The President attempts to allay our fears on this score. With the nation clamoring in protest against discontinuance of Civil Works and with Congress eager to appropriate funds so that it may go on, he has asked us to recall that Civil Works when formed last November, was for an emergency of less than three months. He is agreeing now to extend that term to five. He asks us to consider the cost of keeping the program going and whether, after all, we are ready as a nation to meet it. He assures us of his confident belief that those other giant figures, Public Works and Business and Farm Employment, will step forward and take over the tremendous burden of the Four Million, as Civil Works prepares to give it up. We try hard to believe that this will happen. But after four years of depression it is difficult to be optimistic about the possibility of this happening so rapidly.

5. Yet the decision has been reached and we must make the best of it. Unless there is a change of heart, Civil Works will begin to demobilize, to taper off, shortly after this appears in print. Five hundred thousand men will be cut adrift each week. By May 1 the books will be closed.

6. The interim retrenchment in working hours, that sharp dip in the curve which began on January 19 and which is to last to mid-February in order that the first appropriation may stretch through the original budgeted period, will soon be over. Then the demobilization program will be resumed with full crews working full hours, but the numbers of men will be reduced until the end comes in May. Congress is being asked to provide several hundred million dollars for this clean-up job.

    

7. PROBABLY few men ever have had a more distasteful task to perform than fell to Mr. Hopkins' lot in that fateful third week in January. Ever since he had taken up the office of relief administrator he had enjoyed the growing admiration and confidence of the country, won by a rare display of courage in the face of obstacles, and vision in the execution of his job. He had built up a marvelous press. He had put Civil Works across in the time that it usually takes for a government agency to make up its mind to undertake a project of that magnitude. But the very qualities of speed and daring which had made these results possible carried their own penalty. The huge CWA organism, forced into such rapid growth, continued to expand by its own momentum ant went beyond the budget limits that had been set for it. Performance outstripped planning, and measurement trailed along behind. Average weekly wages, weighted by an unforeseen use of skilled labor and white-collar workers, crept up above the estimated $12 per man per week which lay at the cornerstone of the budget. Commitments for materials started to get out of hand. By the middle of January, these facts began to show up and demanded quick action. Either more money would have to be found to carry the project forward to the middle of February as scheduled, or immediate retrenchment would become necessary. Mr. Hopkins threw into the breach what he could spare from his FERA relief funds and looked about for more. He was unsuccessful in finding it. Retrenchment was the only way out.

8. The state Civil Works' administrations were instructed on January 18 to reduce hours sharply and at once. In the small towns and rural sections, fifteen hours became the new maximum. In the larger centers, the thirty-hour week was cut to twenty-four hours.

9. It was as a by-product to the news of this development that the country learned that Civil Works was doomed to an ultimate and early death. In its reaction over the temporary cut, the public displayed a sanguine confidence that the retrenchment was little more than a ruse to stir the nation into active support of the plan so that refinancing could go forward without hindrance. This illusion persisted for several days and was only dispelled by repeated declarations from the President that the project was definitely coming to an end. Then, for the first time, did the public realize that Civil Works was through, at least for the present.

10. Waves of protest rolled in upon the White House, the Capitol and the Relief Administration, but in vain. The President has remained adamant in his reiterated conviction that with the coming of spring the load can be successfully shifted over to the shoulders of orthodox public works and rejuvenated private employment.

     

11. THERE has been a disposition on the part of the press and certain other competent observers to read a variety of meanings into this action. One school sees in it the ascendancy of the balanced-budget group in the inner councils at the White House. Another thinks that it is the President's answer to the employers who have showered criticism upon the Civil Works wage-scale. Still another group believes that he feared the growing tendency on the part of petty local politicians to make a job grab-bag of CWA to the point that a national scandal might ensue. "The administration found that it had a bear by the tail," was a comment frequently heard.

12. It cannot be denied that there is considerable evidence in support of all these interpretations and it is particularly probable that the factors of employer-protest and local political interference may have weighed heavily in the decision to end the program. But the fact remains that the administration's position has been consistent throughout: Civil Works was conceived as a temporary measure, and it has fulfilled its purpose, as the instruments of Recovery are now, or soon should be, ready to relieve it. Therefore, let it go.

13. Protest over the wage scale and the attraction that Civil Works' jobs had for common labor, particularly in the rural South, was of major importance and resulted in a serious crippling of the CWA structure even before the financial crisis was reached. The pressure to lower the scale came from friends as well as political enemies of the administration. Mr. Hopkins resisted it as long as he could, but his defense that PWA scales must be observed because his funds came from that body, wore thin and finally gave way. Three days before the retrenchment order went out, he was obliged to yield on this point. States were authorized to allow staggered employment in their rural sections, cutting the hours per man from thirty to fifteen and adding a second crew to alternate with the first. This meant, in the southern states, Civil Works' wages of six dollars a week for the great mass of the workers—much more, it is true, than the relief allowances in that region, but a serious compromise with the basic Civil Works' principle of "real work at real wages." Thus the structure had begun to crumble from within even before its demolition had been ordered.

14. The charges of irregularity in local administration were also growing more prevalent, occasioning grave concern as they accumulated. From all parts of the country came rumors of political interference with selection of men for CWA jobs and allegations of impropriety in the choice of projects and fraud in their execution. Since they were received from members of both political parties in the same area it was perfectly obvious that many of these charges were imaginary and rooted in the disappointment felt by unsuccessful applicants. Complaints of racketeering by local labor leaders and by "kick-back" men were multiplying. Some of these various charges were substantiated by sufficient evidence to warrant thoroughgoing investigations, and special agents were sent into a number of communities a week or more before the cut in the CWA program was ordered. Later the Public Works Administration was instructed to make a sweeping check-up of the whole operation and a number of changes in personnel occurred. The press, seething with news bearing on CWA discontinuance, showed an unfortunate disposition for a few days to try this "fraud" issue in its columns, but as this is written, no startling revelations have occurred and other news has begun to crowd CWA items off the front page.

     

15. THERE has never been any conflict between the Public Works Administration and the Civil Works Administration as organizations or between the men that headed them, but there has been an essential conflict between their techniques. The PWA envisages its task as a slow, plodding program leading toward adequately safeguarded large-scale public employment provided through contracts carefully drawn. Every step is taken cautiously. The engineering, financial, legal, social and accounting aspects of each project are thoroughly checked. The CWA, on the other hand, was devised to create jobs which were critically needed during the period required by PWA to bring its slower processes to fruition. Speed, therefore, was essential in the latter plan. From the point of view of national government, the PWA method is vastly superior to the other except in an acute emergency. The logic of swinging from CWA to PWA at the right time is clear. By reverse reasoning, may we not expect that should another crisis occur similar to that which faced us last November, Civil Works might be revived and brought to the fore again?

16. The President has given informal assurance that such a revival might occur. In his request for a two-way relief appropriation of $950 million to cover the demobilization of Civil Works this spring and to finance FERA relief needs from February forward, he indicated that he had not relinquished his preference for employment over direct relief. If Recovery and Public Works fail to take up the slack by fall, it seems highly probable that some sort of emergency federal hiring may again be undertaken.

17. Relief workers are still too close to the upsetting events of the past few weeks and are seeing too many ghosts in their immediate future to be inclined to look ten or eleven months ahead for trouble. But after the proposed demobilization process is complete and they have taken stock of the wreckage which they will then have on their hands, they may be expected to voice their opinions as to the safeguards needed before relief employment is again under taken. That they will want such employment resumed if the load of their able-bodied relief recipients remains large, almost goes without saying. What their attitude will be toward wage-scales, staggered employment, the basis of selection and kindred matters will undoubtedly be determined as much by what happens in the forthcoming demobilization period as by what they have learned in the past three months. In this case the many sequels to the past winter's experience with Civil Works will probably be fully as informing as the experience itself.

18. For if it develops in the course of liquidating the present program, that we have made several million new relief cases in the past three months; if it appears that the reaction from the disappointment of being cut off from jobs that seemed permanent has plunged the unemployed to new depths of despair; if serious administrative weaknesses are revealed in the course of the check-up just started, then it is likely that some major changes will be recommended before emergency relief work on such a large scale is started again.

19. Take, for example, the matter of the selection of workers. The original plan called for the automatic transfer of two million from relief and the assignment of another two million from the rolls of the unemployed at large. The National Reemployment Service registered the latter group and piled up a total of applicants so large that less than one out of four ever got called for a CWA job. The disappointment of being left out in the cold made bitter critics of many of them and drove others to the intake offices of the relief agencies in the hope that this step would assist them in getting jobs. In a number of cities the relief load went up in the face of Civil Works' hiring, Detroit and Pittsburgh being cases in point. The only real answer to this problem, of course, is a work program great enough to provide jobs for all comers.

20. Another phase of this same troublesome question was the public's reaction to the provision that no means test should be applied to the selection of the second two million. It must be agreed that good statesmanship was shown in arriving at this policy for not only did it serve the man "on the edge" of relief but it acted as a safeguard against a mad rush to the relief agencies. But the general public could not seem to keep straight in its understanding of this policy for five minutes at a time; it insisted on thinking of Civil Works as relief and on criticizing placement of men who did not give visible evidence of being in dire need.

21. The county offices of the National Reemployment Service found this to be a most vexing situation but pursued a realistic course in dealing with it. Backed by their lay local boards, they followed a policy laid down at Washington: "When in doubt, assign those persons whose employment will be of the most advantage to the community." Even so, Smith, supported by his neighbors, was sure that he needed CWA employment more than Jones in countless thousands of instances.

22. In the liquidation process just ahead there are indications that the determination of who shall be laid off first and who kept on to the last will probably be made on a basis of relative need.

     

23. WHEN an effort is made to evaluate the success of CWA in devising projects that afforded a wide variety of occupation and a maximum of social value to the community, it is easy to become immoderately enthusiastic over some of the results achieved. The story of the draining of thousands of acres of swamp-land, the laying of miles of sanitary sewers, the building of unnumbered playgrounds, recreation centers and swimming-pools, is a saga in itself. There can be no doubt that a decided advance was registered in the American environment during these winter months and that much greater things were ahead had not the program been stopped. One contemplates the termination of many of these projects with keen disappointment. Will a way be found to continue the best of them under local auspices as a form of work relief? As this is written, it is too early to tell.

24. Civil Works Service too has been developed with imagination and vigor, not feeling the restraint on type of project which was laid upon Civil Works proper by the rules of the Public Works administration. The roster of fields in which CWS has extended its operations is almost as long as the list of professions and public-service agencies (see Civil Works for the Professional, page 55). As a matter of fact it has pushed its program so far that it has recently been in danger of establishing a vicious circle within many of these areas. Thoughtful persons have increasingly questioned the end result of this process by which playground directors, for example, are forced to leave their professional posts through local retrenchment and are returned to them as CWS employees. They ask whether it would not be better frankly to subsidize the established departments so that the regular workers may remain there in their proper professional status.

25. Civil Works, in the very nature of the case, was beset by administrative problems other than those already discussed. The task of providing tools in sufficient quantities; the need for attaining reasonable labor efficiency; the review of discharges and transfers; the physical protection of the workers on the job; payroll and pay-off difficulties: these were details that came to loom as major problems when projected against the employment of 4 million men and women on thousands of widely scattered projects. They were dealt with in business-like fashion and, except for a few local bunglings, were quickly reduced to workable terms.

26. In the sickness of heart with which the sponsors of Civil Works have watched their structure brought to earth, they have not adequately refuted the charge of fair-weather friends that "it was something of a flop." Despite its faults and its difficulties, it was a grand adventure. It gave America a lift when she badly needed it.