The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America: The Movement for Economic Democracy 9781350179141, 9781350203952, 9781350179158

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Political Struggle and the Promise of Full Employment
1 The Horizon of Possibility: The Great Depression and the Idea of Full Employment
2 The Expandting Horizon of Full Employment: Thought and Activism in the 1940s
3 A War against Want: Senator James E. Murray and the Political Campaign for Full Employment
4 The People’s Struggle for Full Employment in the Aftermath of War
5 Out of Rebellion and into the Morass: Full Employment in the Postwar Years
6 “The Day of Structural Economic Reform Is Not Over:” The Full Employment Revival, 1960–1973
7 The Vitality of the Improbable: The Campaign for a Job Guarantee and the Radical Possibilities of Full Employment in the 1970s
8 Regeneration and Stasis: An Idea in Search of a Movement
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America

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The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America The Movement for Economic Democracy Michael Dennis

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Michael Dennis, 2021 Michael Dennis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: African American woman war worker with her white co-worker. Long Beach Plant of Douglas Aircraft Company had a racially integrated workforce during World War 2. Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dennis, Michael, 1967- author. Title: The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America : The Movement for Economic Democracy / Michael Dennis. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020038003 (print) | LCCN 2020038004 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350179141 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350205703 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350179158 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350179165 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Job creation–Government policy–United States–History–20th century. | Full employment policies–United States–History–20th century. | Unemployment–United States–History–20th century. | Employee ownership–United States–History–20th century. Classification: LCC HD5724 .D365 2021 (print) | LCC HD5724 (ebook) | DDC 331.12/042409730904–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038003 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038004 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7914-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7915-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-7916-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Private Limited To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To the memory of Eric Alcorn, a good friend, a great colleague, a better guitarist, and the model of a humane and decent person; and in dedication to my wife, Melanie, who patiently endured endless discourses on full employment, raised important objections, accompanied me on more than one research trip, and has been there through the rocky ride that is the process of researching, writing, and publishing a book—my infinite love and gratitude.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Political Struggle and the Promise of Full Employment 1 The Horizon of Possibility: The Great Depression and the Idea of Full Employment 2 The Expanding Horizon of Full Employment: Thought and Activism in the 1940s 3 A War against Want: Senator James E. Murray and the Political Campaign for Full Employment 4 The People’s Struggle for Full Employment in the Aftermath of War 5 Out of Rebellion and into the Morass: Full Employment in the Postwar Years 6 “The Day of Structural Economic Reform Is Not Over:” The Full Employment Revival, 1960–1973 7 The Vitality of the Improbable: The Campaign for a Job Guarantee and the Radical Possibilities of Full Employment in the 1970s 8 Regeneration and Stasis: An Idea in Search of a Movement Conclusion Bibliography Index

viii 1 15 37 65 87 129 153

183 229 257 259 277

Acknowledgments You know you are getting to the end of a project when you write the acknowledgments. It has been a long road, but several people have made the burden lighter and the rewards of research that much more enjoyable. I would like to thank in particular Timothy Horning, archivist at the University of Pennsylvania; Donna McCrae, archivist at the University of Montana-Missoula; Lauren Stark, archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Marsha Mills, archivist at the Hagley Museum and Library, and the staff at the Minnesota Historical Society. For her encouragement, support, and enthusiasm for the project when it was in the hands of another press, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Bridget-Flannery McCoy. For her considerable determination in hunting down key sources and looking up obscure citations, I must not forget to thank Wilma Carty of the Interlibrary Loan Department at Acadia. Conducting research at a small liberal arts university can be challenging at the best of times; Wilma has made it much easier. For their indispensable support, insight, and professionalism, I would like to thank Maddie Holder and Abigail Lane of Bloomsbury Press. Similarly, my gratitude to project manager Shanmathi Priya Sampath for her dedication to this project and patience throughout. Researcher Peggy Ann Brown provided indispensable and meticulous assistance through her work on my behalf at the Library of Congress to which I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Kamlesh Pant for his editorial inputs. In addition Afnan Farooqui exceptly prepared the bibliography and Kelsey McGowan read the entire manuscript with a keen and discerning eye, I am grateful to both. I would also like to express my gratitude to the three referees who contributed invaluably to the revision of and rethinking about the book. For being a great sounding board and a having terrific insight into the American experience, even though he’s a Kantian philosopher, my Acadia colleague and friend, Paul Abela; for his knowledge and insight into modern monetary theory, my Acadia colleague John Murimboh. For comments and conversation on a paper I delivered on women and the movement for full employment in the 1970s, I would like to thank Dorothy Sue Cobble and Shelton Stromquist. For continuing to be an excellent supervisor even years after I graduated as well as a scholar of unparalleled erudition and a great friend, W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Finally, for her indefatigable support, patience, and comradeship, I would like to thank my wife, Melanie. This one’s for you.

Introduction: Political Struggle and the Promise of Full Employment Full employment is in the air now. Touted as the solution to chronic inequalities of wealth by a growing list of policy experts, proclaimed as an existential fact by mainstream economists, and probed by scholars convinced that an updated New Deal is the answer to the seemingly inexorable tide of corporate downsizing and automation, the idea has achieved a kind of purchase on the public discourse it has not had since the 1970s. The proximate cause of the full employment revival was the financial collapse of 2008, which exposed the yawning gap between the “1 percent” and the rest of American society. In a deeper sense, the rejuvenation of interest in the kind of economic planning that would in fact create enough jobs for all those who seek them reflects the return of class consciousness to American society. Using this language immediately conjures up the image of Marx—and so it should—since a revival of interest in Marxism developed alongside the renewed interest in full employment. So too did an interest in right-wing populism. In response to the malfeasance of Wall Street financiers, many Americans who had been told that class divisions no longer mattered, that distributional struggles were over, that a consumer utopia was available to any and all who accepted an unregulated market economy, and that the war on terrorism was the only legitimate focus of public policy and public attention said, in effect, nonsense. Instead of the product of some sea-change among professional economists, the majority of whom still believe that markets operate efficiently when left alone, the renewed interest in marxism and economic planning is the result of a rupture in the dominant consensus. Put differently, absent the jargon, it’s the product of frustration at a bipartisan elite that failed to advance a program of genuine social reform during a moment of nearly unprecedented crisis. The rise of white-wing populism and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency added an element of fear to the equation. Now, it seemed, the mythic white working class, the allegedly new forgotten men and women, had turned for answers to a nationalist

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xenophobe who also happened to speak in the language of class. Crisis, promises of change (Obama), frustration, right-wing populist wave: the way that the 1930s might have gone had it not been for a resurgent labor movement and the activism of the unemployed. Absent any social movement of significance on the  left, progressive intellectuals have reason to worry about what will happen if the Democratic Party continues to ignore the economic miasma in which workingclass Americans find themselves. For a growing number, the answer is a universal basic income guarantee or a Green New Deal. For many, it is full employment, or in the parlance of today, a “job guarantee.” Big Ideas have returned, it would seem. The technocratic class, those who would admit to a light liberal allegiance and prefer a posture of Olympian detachment, get the most press. What is particularly intriguing, however, is how the renewed interest in full employment has accompanied a regenerated enthusiasm for unambiguous alternatives to capitalism. The most notable of these is democratic socialism. One might even make the case, with a nod to Marx and Hegel, that the two have emerged dialectically out of the tumult of the crisis of capitalism in the early twentyfirst century. Whether this is another case in which moderate reformers co-opt ambitious ideas and strip them of their radical content is a story that is still playing out. What is certain is that the discussion has moved beyond the bounds of technocratic managerialism. Even those liberal commentators who have been accustomed to an audience now talk in terms of a massive redistribution of wealth, the restructuring of the economic system, the utilization of the state on a massive scale to address unemployment, and the shifting of class forces in the favor of average people.1 In the throes of the 2020 pandemic, the calls for genuine economic equality, for the establishment of a universal health-care system, and for the empowerment and just remuneration of “frontline” and “essential” workers have only grown. Beyond the think-tanks and the editorial columns of the respectable journals, the discussion of full employment is even less tethered to the wonkish functionalism of macroeconomic utility. There, in the blogosphere and in the fledgling journals of a revived left, intellectuals probe the possibilities that full employment might generate a genuine social transformation. Leaving behind the discussion of bank bailouts, quantitative easing, and retraining for global competitiveness, a growing swath of journalists, independent intellectuals, and tenured academics are contemplating what a job guarantee might really look like. This has been the central historical significance of full employment in modern America. In moments of economic crisis, in periods of uncertainty that also produced expectations of transformative change, the discussion

Introduction

3

of full employment moved beyond technocratic pragmatism into areas that most economists considered irresponsible, impossible, or dangerous. In those episodes that strained the political and cultural consensus supporting free market enterprise, full employment provided an arena for considering the outlines of a humanistic, cooperative society, one in which work was dignifying, meaningful, and compatible with the desire for greater personal autonomy, community cohesion, workplace democracy, and material abundance. In these circumstances—during the Great Depression and the Second World War, the immediate aftermath of the war, the political upheaval of the 1960s, the economic crisis of the 1970s, and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus following the financial crisis of 2008—thinkers and activists advanced ideas that went well beyond simply putting people to work. They certainly promoted the idea that full employment meant more than putting people back to work in exploitative jobs that paid poorly. It meant creating enough jobs through government initiative to ensure that there were always more jobs available than job seekers. It meant eradicating the blight of involuntary idleness. It also meant imagining a fundamentally more egalitarian, democratic, and humane America. For many, full employment became the avenue to achieving racial justice, to ending the gender discrimination that underpinned modern American society, and to including those discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity or disability in the mainstream of American life. In short, most advocates believed that full employment would create the path toward a much more robustly social democratic state than the one that emerged out of the New Deal. For some, however, it fostered visions of a more radical democratization of American society. It generated the belief that the movement could produce a society in which workers not only derived the benefits of social protections but actively determined the shape and contours of society itself. In other words, the movement for full employment raised such fundamental questions about the nature of capitalism that it led at least some to believe that only democratic socialism could resolve the inequalities intrinsic to a system in which people sold their labor power just to survive. Just as important, these protean moments produced lines of inquiry among heterodox economists and activist citizens that challenged the comfortable commercial Keynesianism of the postwar world. Despite their stated support for full employment, policymakers from Truman to Nixon never did eradicate the pockets of poverty and despair that afflicted rural and urban America and imposed particularly egregious suffering on African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. Nor did the policymakers who allegedly presided over a full

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employment economy in the 1950s and 1960s pay particular attention to the demands of women from across the racial spectrum for economic opportunity. The commercial Keynesianism that prevailed in American policymaking failed to consider the remuneration of stay-at-home mothers. It certainly did not guarantee adequate childcare for women who did enter the paid workforce. Neither did Keynesian fiscal management do anything to prevent women workers from being paid grotesquely inequitable wages. Nor, for that matter, did it attend to the hollowing out of industrial centers such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, where black unemployment tracked steadily upward and the attendant social pathologies of mass idleness closely followed. On the one hand, then, genuinely progressive full employment thought invariably pointed to the limitations of Keynesianism itself. Thinkers like Michael Harrington, journalists like I.F. Stone, but also largely anonymous champions like African American activist Sadie Alexander and Communist Party activist Ferdinand Smith pushed beyond the boundaries of liberalism, neoclassical economics, and an emergent Keynesian consensus. They dared to imagine a version of full employment that would radically transform American economic and political institutions. Most began by hoping that full employment could at least ameliorate the worst aspects of free enterprise capitalism. Yet in advocating for comprehensive full employment measures, liberal proponents such as Senator James E. Murray and economist Leon Keyserling found themselves conceding that full employment did, in fact, challenge fundamental business interests. These concessions only underlined the potential for full employment to empower workers and challenge the distribution of wealth in America. While many liberal advocates failed to champion women’s emancipation or racial equality, the very measures they promoted stirred the imagination of oppressed Americans who understood precisely what a full employment regime could do for them. Deviating from the focus of most studies on the development of full employment policy, The Full Employment Horizon seeks to illuminate the ideas and actions of those who probed the outer limits of full employment thought. It is not primarily concerned with policymakers or how a better job creation bill might have been crafted. Nor does it wallow in the disappointment of their failure at the hands of conservative congressmen and antagonistic business interests. If anything, this study takes that opposition for granted, as it does the defeat of measures that directly threatened business interests. Full employment, at least of the kind imagined by the Congress for Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1940s or by the feminists connected to the Full Employment Action Council in

Introduction

5

the 1970s, stood little chance of being legislated into existence through Congress, at least given the circumstances that prevailed in those moments. Instead, what this study highlights is how expansive visions of full employment, those which fostered notions of visions of democratized workplaces, personal liberation, and gender equality, took hold of the imagination of people who would not reconcile themselves to the claim that unemployment was natural and inevitable. Quite apart from the inevitable fluctuations in policy, this study explores the ideas of admittedly marginal characters who never really abandoned a more radical vision of “jobs for all.”2 It examines the intellectual ferment that developed out of moments of class struggle and challenged the privileges and presumptions of business in America. In moments of rupture, the notion of full employment resurfaced, questioning again and again the presumed prerogative of capital to determine when and where jobs would be created and who would have them. More than the labor movement itself, the proponents of a progressive vision of full employment continued to challenge the presumptions of capitalist power in the postwar era. In an assessment of the failure of employment policy in the twentieth century, historian Gary Mucciaroni captures something of the spirit of this challenge. “Full-employment proposals are the most conflictridden of all,” he argues, “because they are perceived as presenting fundamental challenges to the existing order.” As Mucciaroni argues, “the role of the state in resource allocation and spending would have to expand significantly,” a point which most liberal proponents tried to deny but ultimately could not. More than this, “enhancing opportunities to compete in the market would be superseded by enlarging democratic rights to include guarantees of employment.” Unlike labor unionism, which is itself a product of capitalism, and which operates to extract excess profits and benefits from companies while defending workers on the job, the idea of full employment goes to the very core presumptions about the privileges of private enterprise in a democratic society. Challenging notions of individual competition, the sanctity of “private” property, and the virtue of self-reliance, the full employment promise suggests the primacy of social solidarity. Instead of protecting corporate interests from the alleged threat of state encroachment, it implicitly seeks to protect society’s workers from their arbitrary power.3 Instead of focusing on how policies were framed for public consumption, then, or how promising congressional alliances fell apart (or were never forged), or whether a more dexterous mix of programs aimed at resolving structural unemployment (i.e., training and education) might have saved the day, this study starts from the premise that business has never supported full employment. This

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also includes periods when certain economists advanced convincing arguments that a commitment to full employment would promote profitability. The reasons for this opposition have remained unsurprisingly consistent. As Don Yalung Matthews explained, corporate leaders objected to the Full Employment Bill of 1945 because they believed government intervention represented an infringement on entrepreneurial independence, because government spending would translate into higher taxes, budget deficits, inflation, and a decline in business confidence; and that any sort of long-term government planning was unrealistic. Perhaps most disturbing, business opponents believed that achieving full employment would lead to government investments that would invariably compete with existing private interests.4 The objections remained consistent from the 1940s until the twenty-first century, but that does not suggest that they were purely the product of the overheated imaginations of corporate executives operationally conditioned to oppose any and all government intervention. Instead, as we shall find, some of these anxieties, though rooted in business self-interest, did, in fact, reflect certain truths. They did capture at least some of what full employment promised to working people: greater public control over the economic decisions that directly affected their lives. Business opposition to government intervention in the private sector was nothing new, then. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this opposition found support from successive administrations committed to “business-centered strategies” that stood in stark contrast to the “egalitarian” and “guardian” strategies pursued by many other Western industrialized countries.5 So, while The Full Employment Horizon explores the popular mobilization behind legislation for direct job creation, it does not operate on the assumption that conventional political tactics alone could puncture the airtight pro-business consensus that envelopes the political establishment.6 Instead, it highlights those moments when the debate over the most rudimentary question of who works when and under what circumstances exposed the contradictions of capitalism, the inherent limits of Keynesianism, and the possibilities of democratic socialism in the United States. What is interesting is not business opposition—the conservative reaction to the New Deal, the Great Society, and the labor movement is now well-established historiography—but how the notion of full employment generated greater awareness of the class structure in American society.7 In these moments—and admittedly, they were few—social workers, feminists, civil rights advocates, academics, labor leaders, journalists, and those who made their livings as

Introduction

7

blue- and white-collar workers began to ask this fundamental question: if I need to work, and if work defines who I am as an American citizen, then in what sense is the society in which I live just and fair when I cannot find it despite my best efforts? Is something so fundamental to my survival, my connection to a larger community, and my access to political and social and political resources, really dependent on the whims of a given business owner? On the unpredictable undulations of the business cycle? On the unilateral decisions of business to invest here and not there, to hire this many and no more? Perhaps most importantly, it is in these moments that some Americans have asked this discomfiting question: is another system possible? It is that willingness to question the institutions and intellectual boundaries that effectively depoliticized the entire question of unemployment in the postwar years that occupies most of our attention here. The case that political scientist Anais Miodek Bowring advances for the ideological limits on public job creation makes eminent sense. As she writes, “two strands or ‘currents’ of American liberalism” constrained the debate on employment policy. One current fused citizenship to employment in the private sector, while another presented “an anti-statist bias” against government intervention in the labor market, particularly against the notion of a right to employment. Yet as Miodek Bowring acknowledges, “the influence of these two liberal ideas does not mean that political actors had no choices, or that alternatives were not proposed.”8 It is these alternatives that we propose to explore in greater depth. And while Miodek Bowring rightly points to the influence of a bipartisan liberal tradition, she and others downplay the entrenched power of capital in defending its prerogatives in whatever language proved persuasive.9 So while the The Full Employment Horizon explores the vibrant coalitions that maximized the political possibilities for full employment, which some scholars now acknowledge is the sine qua non of achieving full employment,10 and while it addresses the intellectual and ideological constraints on government job creation programs, it seeks to keep the attention on the question of economic power. It was primarily in the collision of class interests, not only the clash of competing ideas, that the horizon of full employment expanded or receded. And it was through the movement for full employment, which intersected at key moments with the drive for racial equality, the rights of labor, women’s equality, and working-class emancipation, that average Americans began to glimpse the possibilities for a democratic restructuring of American society. Instead of positing the primacy of activists over intellectuals, The Full Employment Horizon suggests the dynamic interdependence of the two.

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Frontline organizers joined intellectuals, activists, journalists, academics, writers, and politicians in moving the idea of full employment into the legislative arena. More importantly, intellectuals and activists—categories which frequently overlapped—participated in refashioning, reinterpreting, and investing their own meaning in the notion of full employment. In the social and political turbulence produced by the Second World War and “the sixties,” Americans on the margins of power came to believe that joblessness really could be banished. Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates effectively capture this dynamic relationship between intellectuals, activists, and mass movements: Masses of oppressed people, given their humanity, do not spontaneously or telepathically come up with collective plans of action based on shared analytical perspectives. This comes through complex social and political processes: individuals and small groups develop analyses and strategies and tactics, which are communicated from a few people to more and finally many more people; and then there are the steps necessarily proceeding from ideas to implemented realities—all of which involves leadership and organization.11

This account of how “history is made and society is changed”12 seems entirely appropriate for understanding how Americans interpreted full employment, explored its implications, and considered what lay beyond it. What it leaves out, however, is historical contingency, what political scientist Margaret Weir describes as the recognition that policy decisions “are often the product of circumstances that cannot be readily anticipated or controlled.”13 The crisis of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the rise of a national security state, and the social tumult of America that followed from it in the 1960s invariably conditioned the movement for full employment. As scholars have noted, there were certainly antecedents for the direct job creation ideas of the 1930s. The social workshop proposals of French socialist Louis Blanc, which would provide a cooperative and worker-directed solution to unemployment, provided an early template for ameliorating the forced idleness that followed from capitalist production. It also suggested the close and early connection between socialist sensibilities and the idea of full employment. In the American context, “Coxey’s Army,” which saw thousands of idled workers join Civil War veteran Jacob Coxey for a march on Washington in 1894 to demand

Introduction

9

public employment, became the first mass demonstration in favor of government support for the unemployed. Progressive era reforms, labor union activism, the ideas of labor intellectuals George McNeil and Edward Bellamy, social theorist Thorstein Veblen, living wage proponent John Ryan, and the larger canvass of working-class struggle in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era provide the intellectual fabric of what would become the idea of full employment. All things considered, however, the notion of government involvement in eradicating unemployment really belongs to the Great Depression. In no meaningful sense can we speak of the full employment horizon outside the context of this unprecedented crisis of capitalism. It was only at this moment that radical activists began to find an audience for their ideas and a response to activism. In 1929, the Communist Party began to organize a national movement of “unemployed councils.” These were communist-led local groups that provided assistance to the unemployed, tried to pay rents, and pressured local authorities to provide more relief. They organized rent strikes and anti-eviction efforts. When banks or landlords had people evicted, communist activists would organize and move the families’ belongings back into their homes. They also led groups into housing courts in order to appeal to judges not to issue eviction notices. On March 6, 1930, the Communist Party launched a series of protests across the country demanding government action. The turnout was astonishing. In Boston and Chicago, more than 50,000 protestors attended the demonstrations. When demonstrators in New York tried to march on city hall, the police retaliated violently. They waded into the crowd swinging nightsticks, blackjacks, and fists, indiscriminately striking men and women. The police then arrested the demonstration leaders and sentenced them to six months in jail. At the national level, the Communist Party advocated for major federal government intervention to provide for the unemployed. To press the point, the party organized demonstrations, petitions, and two “hunger marches” on Washington. They did force local authorities to improve relief assistance and raised the question of unemployment insurance to a national issue. In 1930, only months into the Depression, the party unveiled its plans for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, a measure designed to provide a living wage to be administered by democratically elected local workers’ and farmers’ councils. By 1934, the bill had generated widespread support among the working-class movement and its progressive allies. Labor activists, left-wing economists, teachers, social workers, and other white-collar workers advocated for the measure. At the center of agitation stood the Unemployed Councils, which

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mobilized mass support for the measure. It eventually took legislative form in 1935, when Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party decided to sponsor it. In congressional testimony, working-class organizations not only championed the measure but presented a class-conscious critique of capitalism that challenged the very legitimacy and morality of unemployment. Backed by thousands of letters from industrial laborers, farmers, and white-collar workers in support of the bill, the mobilization for the Lundeen bill offered abundant evidence of a working-class movement demanding radical change. Not surprisingly, the bill went down to defeat. Yet it set in motion forces that would ultimately produce the Social Security Act and further the effort to politicize unemployment. It is important to understand, then, that as much as full employment captured the imagination of working-class people, the notion of challenging the powerbrokers responsible for unemployment was a product of grassroots activism. The communists could march on relief stations, engage in rent strikes, and fight evictions because they had begun to win the support of the unemployed and the destitute. The movement had such an impact that the Socialist Party started its own unemployed organization. The two eventually joined to form the Workers’ Alliance of America in 1936.14 Similarly, it was only in the maw of the Great Depression that a critical mass of writers, intellectuals, activists, and politically conscious Americans came to the conviction that capitalism on its own could not solve the problem of unemployment. The combined pressure of unemployed workers’ activism, organized labor, social insurance advocacy, socialist agitation, and the appeals of economic planning advocates moved the Roosevelt administration to engage in an unprecedented experiment in direct job creation. It set this period apart as a turning point in the decades-long struggle to anchor “economic democracy” in the foundation of guaranteed work. We use this term, in the sense that Robin Archer used it, to indicate “an economic system in which firms operate in a market but are governed by those who work for them,” not simply the extension of social services and the improvement of wages. Similarly, we use this term, in the sense that Eric Olin Wright used it, to indicate a society in which “rule by the people” through collective organizations such as labor unions and community organizations displaces the social power of capital and its political auxiliaries.15 That is not to suggest that the Roosevelt administration initially set out to create the template for economic democracy, but to argue that the combination of its key programs, the social forces to which it responded, and the political milieu that it fostered did indeed advance the possibilities for working-class self-determination. Full employment was a product of this impulse for economic democracy. As

Introduction

11

Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security concluded in its 1935 report, “In periods of depression public employment should be regarded as a principal line of defense. Even in prosperous times it may be necessary, on a smaller scale, when ‘pockets’ develop in which there is much unemployment.” While paying homage to the primacy of private job creation, the committee asserted that direct job creation “should be recognized as a permanent policy of the Government and not merely as an emergency measure.” The crisis of the 1930s had ruptured the ideological and political consensus that had kept the idea of governmentsupported employment assurance on the margins of civil discourse.16 Although Franklin D. Roosevelt turned his attention almost exclusively to the war effort after Pearl Harbor, his enunciation of the Four Freedoms in 1941 and the Economic Bill of Rights in 1944 validated the notion that the sphere of social security built by the New Deal should be expanded in the postwar years. Similarly, the actual achievement of at least macroeconomic full employment during the Second World War accelerated the expectation that racial justice, working-class democracy, economic security, women’s emancipation, and union rights would be won in the postwar years. Each of these became central elements of the full employment vision. Even while that vision declined in the postwar years, it would revive again in the fashion that Le Blanc and Yates describe, tied to the fortunes of capitalism and the political conditions in modern America. Rather than concentrate on the delegitimizing of certain economic schools of thought, then, or the institutional constraints on employment policy, this study situates the struggle over the right to employment in the currents of the history of American capitalism.17 Looking beyond the partisan conflict that undoubtedly had the final word on any prospects for full employment legislation, The Full Employment Horizon focuses on how the distributional conflict between labor and capital generated opportunities to expand the meaning of full employment. This struggle in turn raised the prospects of a more democratic and egalitarian organization of society. The intellectual and social contest to define full employment and legitimize it in the public sphere is center stage. In this sense, the Full Employment Horizon leans on the invaluable contributions of Margaret Weir, Steve Mucciaroni, David Stein, Anis Bowring Miodek, Frank Strickland, Philip Harvey, and Steven Attewell to illuminate the hegemonic notions, social conditions, cultural reflexes, economic insights, and political institutions that shaped the question of direct job creation.18 At the same time, it moves in a different direction, underlining how the repeated return of the full employment idea to the public forum opened avenues of personal and political liberation for movement participants.19 Sensing historic

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opportunities to contest prevailing arrangements, activists, journalists, and simply bold-hearted people infused their own frequently radical expectations of change into debates designed to respect the ideological boundaries of liberal capitalism. Both blue- and white-collar workers took part in this struggle. In those few moments of intensified conflict, community organizers, labor activists, feminists, and a range of social observers formulated egalitarian and cooperative alternatives that moved well beyond the boundaries of liberalism and even social democracy. Their target became the structural imperatives of business itself. In other words, the logic of full employment, not to mention the momentum of the movement, often carried participants beyond reforms that left economic power in the hands of private enterprise and toward a vision of a society predicated on the elimination of the wage labor system itself. Instead of a more humane capitalism, they fought for a fundamentally more democratic society. They had the audacity to imagine that the exploitation built into capitalism might be replaced by a society in which working people exercised control over the production process. The movement for full employment fostered the conviction that they might create a genuinely “cooperative, egalitarian, democratic, and ultimately classless society.” In short, it fostered the belief that democratic socialism, not just social democracy, was attainable.20 Even in the years when the distributional struggle diminished, then, small groups of activists and intellectuals maintained the radical conviction that capitalism could not on its own eradicate unemployment, that consistent government intervention was necessary, and that this intervention could fundamentally alter the contours of American society.

Notes 1

2

Take, for example, Dani Rodri. What Does a True Populism Look Like: It Looks Like the New Deal, February 21, 2018; Robert Reich, “Robert Reich to ‘Essential Workers’: When This Is Over, Go on Strike,” Daily Kos, May 22, 2020, https://www. dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/22/1946981/-Robert-Reich-to-essential-workerswhen-this-is-over-go-on-strike This runs contra to historian Steven Attewell’s observation that “economic planning and price controls, which emerged in the Great Depression and were reinforced in World War II, were excluded from the realm of possibility thereafter.” As we will see, both ideas maintained a strong following among a variety of progressive intellectuals, activists, labor unionists, economists, and policy thinkers, even those

Introduction

13

close to the levers of power, particularly in the 1970s. It suffices to mention here that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of these. See Steven Attewell, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2018), 13. 3 Gary Mucciaroni, The Political Failure of Employment Policy, 1945–1982 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 267. 4 Don Yalung-Matthews, “Business Perspectives on the Full Employment Bill of 1945 and Passage of the Employment Act of 1946,” Essays in Economic and Business History: Selected Papers from the Economic and Business History Society 8 (1989–1990): 336. 5 David Brian Robertson, “Governing & Jobs: America’s Business-Centered Labor Market Policy,” Polity 20 (Spring 1988): 426–56. 6 Like many commentators, Philip Harvey focuses on the policies that should be developed in order to win over supposedly rational lawmakers or persuade a skeptical public immersed in the mythology of rugged individualism. Yet Harvey also acknowledges, albeit briefly, that full employment has failed not for a lack of public support but because of the “entrenched political power of special interest groups that oppose the idea.” See Securing the Right to Employment: Social Welfare Policy and the Unemployed in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 7–10. 7 Sam Nakayama and Alexander Koloktronis, “Why Socialist Job Guarantees Are Better than Universal Basic Income,” Truthout, March 29, 2017, https://truthout. org/articles/why-socialist-job-guarantees-are-better-than-universal-basic-income. 8 Anais Miodek Bowring, “Why Is There No Right to Employment in America? Liberal Limits on American Employment Policy, 1933–2000,” 12, 86–9, 418–19. PhD dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz, 2015; Margaret Weir, “Full Employment as a Political Issue in the United States,” Social Research 54 (Summer 1987): 377–83. 9 For example, Ruth Ellen Wasem, Tackling Unemployment: The Legislative Dynamics of the Employment Act of 1946 (Kalamazoo: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2013), particularly chapter five. 10 See, for example, David Stein, “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears,” 10–11, 251–2; Mike Beggs, “Jobs for All,” December 6, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag. com/2016/12/full-employment-jobs-inflation-wages-labor-economics; also, Mitchell, Reclaiming the State; Helen Ginsburg made this point earlier in Full Employment and Public Policy: The United States and Sweden (New York: Lexington Books, 1983), 223. 11 Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates. A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). 12 Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggles for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 16.

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13 Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 164. 14 For more on the unemployed councils and their local impact on working-class mobilization, see Michael Dennis, The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 37–43; for the importance of the development and historical significance of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, see Chris Wright, “The History of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill,” Dissident Voice, August 7, 2018, https://dissidentvoice. org/2018/08/the-history-of-the-workers-unemployment-insurance-bill/. 15 Robin Archer, Economic Democracy: The Politics of the Feasible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4–5; Eric Olin Wright, “How to Think About (and Win) Socialism,” Jacobin Magazine, April 27, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag. com/2016/04/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-capitalism-socialism. 16 Philip Harvey, “The New Deal’s Direct Job-Creation Strategy: Providing Employment Assurance for American Workers,” in When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal, ed. Sheila D. Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 146–79, especially 166–9; L. Randall Wray and Matthew Forstater, “Full Employment and Social Justice,” in The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics, ed. Dell P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), 253–7; “Report of the Committee on Economic Security,” Report of the Committee on Economic Security of 1935 and Other Basic Documents Relating to the Development of Social Security, 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. National Conference on Social Welfare (Washington, DC: National Conference on Social Welfare, 1985), 7–9. 17 With varying degrees of emphasis, this is the focus of Weir’s Politics and Jobs as well as Gary Mucciaroni’s The Political Failure of Employment Policy, 1945–1982, Anais Miodek Bowring’s “Why Is There No Right to Employment in America?,” Philip Harvey’s Securing the Right to Full Employment, Wasem, Tackling Unemployment, and Attewell’s People Must Live by Work. 18 Weir, Politics and Jobs, 168–71; Mucciaroni, The Political Faiure of Full Employment Policy, 23–5; Bowring Miodek, “Why Is There No Right to Employment in America?” 6–9, 412; Attewell, People Must Live by Work, introduction. 19 Although Stein’s “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The End of Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State” focuses primarily on the conditioning influence of race on the full employment debate and the function of Federal Reserve Board policy in limiting the prospects for racial justice, his analysis addresses the central place of capitalism and class in the efforts to advance and oppose the right to employment. 20 Ralph Milliband, “Counter-Hegemonic Struggle,” in The Retreat of The Intellectuals: Socialist Register 1990, ed. Ralph Milliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin Press, 1990), 349.

1

The Horizon of Possibility: The Great Depression and the Idea of Full Employment

If the central paradox of the American experience is the persistence of racial inequality in a nation predicated on the idea of freedom, its corollary is the existence of want amid plenty. That contradiction was never more evident than in the 1930s. Despite the social and political reforms championed during the Progressive Era, it was only in the crisis of the Great Depression that American commentators, economists, and social critics began to grasp that economic planning could banish the ravages of the business cycle. This sense of possibility emerged out of the struggle to explain how a society capable of generating abundance now faced economic calamity. In the aftermath of the great crash, liberal intellectuals at journals such as The New Republic and The Nation began shifting from cultural criticism to an analysis of modern capitalism itself. In doing so, they joined social critics such as Felix Frankfurter, Rexford Tugwell, Lewis Mumford, and Charles Beard, each of whom had advanced the progressive analysis of industrial capitalism in the 1920s. New Republic editor George Soule proved critical to this movement. In the desperate days of 1930, he argued that rapid technological advancement had created a situation in which the ability of manufacturers to produce had far outstripped the capacity of existing markets to consume what was relentlessly rolling off the assembly lines. Beginning in 1923, the wages of industrial labor steadily fell behind rising productivity. That translated into reduced demand for consumer goods. At the same time, the prices of consumer goods failed to decline sufficiently to sustain aggregate demand. In Soule’s estimation, this was a house of cards built on installment buying, a fleeting construction boom, and an exploding automobile industry which consumers could no longer afford to sustain. The failure to raise wages or salaries would spell a chronic period of stagnation. Familiar though Soule’s insights would become in the 1930s, his observations would provide the seedbed for full employment thought.1

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This seedbed would be cultivated by economists and journalists throughout the 1930s. Stuart Chase, who also wrote for the New Republic, believed that the nation faced a transition from a political economy rooted in scarcity to one founded on abundance. Americans were beginning to recognize the contradiction between productive capabilities and the profit system. The “operating plant has been constructed primarily in the vendibility frame,” Chase argued, “to sell either its output or itself at a pecuniary profit. Its vendibility has been measured and remeasured on the ledgers of banks, the balance sheets of great corporations, the tickers of stock exchanges. Its serviceability is unmeasured and unknown.”2 If one theme would come to dominate the imagination of full employment proponents, it was the notion that modern productive capabilities could be liberated from the calculating grasp of “vendibility” and utilized to distribute abundance more equitably. As Soule observed in his 1935 A Planned Economy, “It is now commonplace to speak of the absurd contrast between ‘overproduction’… and the fact that many persons are in want. This fact sets the stage for our effort.”3 In this conviction, journalists like Soule and Chase joined professional economists like Rexford Tugwell in exploring the idea that the economic dynamo of modern industrial capitalism required the expansion of consumption.4 Engaging in this analysis, a widening band of intellectuals regenerated the idea of economic planning that had been so endemic to Progressive Era thought. Shaped by Lester Frank Ward, Herbert Croly, Thorstein Veblen, and others, the progressive impulse toward greater social efficiency provided the foundation for economic during the Great Depression.5 In the 1930s, institutional economists struggling with the problem of technological and structural employment joined a group of left-leaning intellectuals in supporting a planned approach to stimulating consumer demand. This line of thinking appealed to the belief common among left-liberal intellectuals that capitalism had not only failed to deliver on the promise of success through hard work, but had also been proven to be wasteful, reckless, and destructive.6 Even though some intellectuals more famously turned toward communism to substitute for what seemed like a failed capitalist experiment, their search for political meaning echoed economic planners like George Soule and Stuart Chase.7 While Soule, Chase, and Tugwell appreciated greater economic rationality, they proposed solutions to the crisis that would drastically alter the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation. For a nation clawing its way out of the Depression, economic planners turned to the promise of full employment as an avenue

The Horizon of Possibility

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toward a fundamentally different kind of society. Instead of a society in which productive capabilities stood idle for lack of market demand, Stuart Chase celebrated the “economy of abundance,” which “promises presently to socialize the bulk of commercial and industrial property [original italics].” This was no mere formula for fiscal tinkering. Having arrived at the stage at which technological capabilities had apparently solved the perennial problem of generating enough, Chase was convinced that American society was prepared to challenge the entitlements to private property that stood in the way of survival. “If the bulk of the owners have no use for it,” he argued, then “the community has. Without its regular operation, the community must starve or freeze.”8 Amid the wreckage and human suffering of the Great Depression, Chase was untangling the central puzzle of modern industry: its capacity to generate consumer goods on a massive scale while routinely plunging the society on which it depended into the icy waters of insecurity. At the core of Chase’s analysis was a critique of market economics itself. “The function of capitalism is not to supply people with things which they want.” Instead, it was to produce consumer goods in sufficient quantity in exchange for revenues that would absorb the cost of production, pay off the interest, and ensure a tidy profit. Echoing the famous analysis of economist Karl Polanyi, who argued that, under capitalism, primitive markets embedded in the fabric of their societies had developed into anti-social instruments of private accumulation that legitimized acquisitive individualism, Chase posited an elemental antagonism between free market capitalism and the public good.9 “Markets are not made by human need,” he warned. “The ten million unemployed in this country today would gladly take a volume of goods which would make factory wheels hum. The factory wheels are silent because the unemployed have no money.”10 Contrary to the notion that modern business had created the conditions in which people could fulfil their wildest consumer dreams, Stuart proposed the sobering assessment that the modern market was designed to sustain private enterprise. It was not “a place where people want things” since increasing the money supply threatened inflation. Instead, it was a “place where people who have money are able to buy things.” Any effort to provide direct financial assistance to consumers threatened the precarious system built by capitalism and would be vigorously resisted by bankers and financiers alike. “It is more feared—see almost any American editorials in 1933—than the loss of markets.”11 As Chase pointed beyond technological change to the market economy itself, he underlined the powerful countermovement against market logic that had

18

Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America

gained traction in American policymaking circles. Writing in 1934, nothing impressed him more than the National Recovery Act, which provided for collective bargaining but also legislated maximum hours and minimum wages. The measure did not simply aim to increase purchasing power but announce “in effect that labor was not a commodity. In prescribing maximum hours and minimum wages, [Roosevelt] took it clear out of the vendibility system.” The measure addressed the central problem facing workers: the over-supply of labor at a moment of quickly contracting demand. “Wheat can be burned, cotton plowed under,” Chase wryly observed; “the unemployed are not disposed of so easily.” What mattered was not the minimal impact of the National Industrial Recovery Act on the problem of decommodifying labor. Instead, it was the fact that “the principle has been laid down [original italics],” the precedent established, that workers should not sell themselves to the lowest bidder in exchange for their livelihoods.12 While crafting a case for economic planning in the maelstrom of the Depression, Chase unwittingly harkened back to a lineage of progressive labor thinkers that included Orestes Brownson, George McNeil, Eugene Debs, and John Ryan. Each had questioned the capacity of capitalism to protect human dignity. The dilemma that Chase sought to elucidate in 1934 was the same with which labor activist George McNeil had wrestled in 1887. “The problem of today as of yesterday and to-morrow,” he wrote to those who had just witnessed the exhilarating Eight-Hour Movement the year before, “is how to establish equity between men.” If McNeil’s language reflected the typical gendered assumptions of the era, it also resonated with the sense that the American movement was part of a worldwide movement for democratic justice. “The laborer who is forced to sell his day’s labor to-day, or starve tomorrow, is not in equitable relations with the employer, who can wait to buy labor until starvation fixes the rates of wages and hours of time.”13 Chase’s analysis emerged out of the peculiar circumstances of the 1930s, but it belonged to a long and rich tradition of critiquing the contradiction between capitalism and the vaunted American principle of equality. At its foundation, the search for full employment continued this tradition. In 1937, a collection of leading thinkers and scholars that included political scientist Harold Lasswell, philosopher Sidney Hook, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and economist Wesley Clair Mitchell revived the discussion of economic planning. In a symposium titled Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, the contributors posited an overarching theme: that the system of laissez-faire, competitive capitalism had amassed considerable fortunes and forwarded modernization even while it had produced a trail of destruction. More than this,

The Horizon of Possibility

19

it constituted an historical anachronism, one that was incompatible with the needs of a complex and interdependent society.14 Lewis Mumford captured the idea that defined so much of the left-wing thought of the era: the self-regulating marketplace of capitalist lore was a myth. According to Mumford, this notion of a “self-equilibrating” economy had only served to justify blithe indifference to the social consequences of industrial capitalism. If the pursuit of untrammeled self-interest invariably satisfied the widest range of human needs, why question its methods? Yet this “theology,” as Mumford described it, was a “superstition and its practical results were disastrous.” In fact, the “waste of natural resources, the unbalance of regional life, the mis-building of cities, the pauperization of labor, the duplication of effort, the recurrent jars and wrenches in the economic organizations themselves—all these characteristics of industrial society during the last century showed that order was something less than providential.” In Mumford’s estimation, the expansion of industrial capitalism in the globe had only produced growing instability, monopoly concentration, and the threat of totalitarianism in Europe.15 Critically, Mumford had captured the extent to which business had become the arbiter of what passed for social order. This was exactly the scenario which Polanyi had detailed in The Great Transformation: a society subordinated to the caprices of private enterprise, one in which community bonds and needs are submerged under the roiling seas of competitive capitalism. For Mumford, however, there was no “double movement” against the imperatives of capital formation and profitability. The Depression had exposed just how fragile this interdependent society built around the requirements of private enterprise had become.16 What Mumford and the contributors to Planned Society hoped to foster was the conviction that social democratic reform could contain the destructive forces of unfettered capitalism and avoid the dangers inherent in administrative centralization. The recession of 1937 reignited interest in subordinating the market economy to social needs. As cuts to job creation programs such as the Works Progress Administration thrust the United States back into economic crisis, proponents of economic planning began to focus greater attention on the idea of guaranteed employment. Those working on Roosevelt’s National Planning Commission began to formalize what historian Patrick Reagan describes as a “moderate version of compensatory spending policy,” which would achieve greater coherence in the run up to war between 1939 and 1941.17 Together with independent economists and intellectuals, the authors of Planned Society established the broad outlines for a maximum production

20

Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America

policy. Few considered it a panacea for Depression. Instead, measures to achieve full employment intersected with efforts to establish a minimum level of social security and to regulate the labor market. Opposing those factions within the administration that advocated for aggressive anti-trust measures or a return to balanced budgets, economic planners such as Henry Dennison and Charles Merriam crafted the justification for the revitalization of private enterprise through compensatory spending. Independent of Keynesian theorists, they fashioned the argument that government fiscal policy could stimulate mass consumption, generate a sustained recovery, and achieve maximum employment. Edited by Henry Dennison and published in 1938, Toward Full Employment represented a singularly important crystallization of these ideas. Dennison made his way in the world as a corporate executive in his family’s box-manufacturing business. In this process, however, he developed an affinity for scientific management, experimenting in administrative and industrial innovations that aimed at increasing productivity. Working for voluntary associations and the Wilson administration during the First World War, he came to believe in the necessity for a more rational and efficient version of private enterprise. Business and labor cooperation, systematic research, and intelligent planning could round out the sharp edges of the profit motive, reduce workplace frictions, and mitigate the wasteful inefficiencies that seemed the constant concomitant of competitive capitalism. If Dennison managed to deceive himself about the pacifying possibilities of company paternalism, he cultivated a sincere conviction that only enlightened business practices could stave off the dual challenges of labor militancy and market instability. The Depression only strengthened these convictions. Once an adviser to the Hoover administration and a proponent of its voluntarist ideas of economic recovery, the deepening crisis forced Dennison to revise these ideas. Steadily, he moved toward the belief that underconsumption and the maldistribution of wealth stood at the center of the economic crisis.18 These convictions brought him into the New Deal orbit. Between 1933 and 1935, he would move from the Business Advisory and Planning Council to the National Recovery Administration, the National Labor Board, and eventually the National Resources Committee (which eventually became the critically important National Resources Planning Board). There, he joined economic planner Beardsley Ruml in advising the National Planning Board on strategies for a more ambitious reconstruction of American capitalism. Joining three other prominent private sector advocates of reform, Dennison produced Toward Full Employment.19 It exemplified the progressive conviction that compensatory techniques and graduated taxation could pave the way toward a

The Horizon of Possibility

21

sustained recovery. The book posited the inherent instability of capitalism even in periods of maximum employment. Furthermore, it argued that the system tended to operate at levels considerably below full capacity. Paralleling the Keynesian analysis, the authors posited that capitalism did not produce a natural equilibrium characterized by full employment. The solution was compensatory federal spending, a national budget that allowed for countercyclical measures, and the recognition that business would also benefit from fiscal policies that favored mass consumption. As historian Robert M. Collins put it, “The authors sought to continue and extend on a more rational basis what the administration had been doing haphazardly for years. They recognized that such a policy would inevitably lead to deficit spending; indeed, this was the raison d’etre of the exercise.”20 Rather than simply a prescription for mass consumption through an increase in purchasing power, however, Toward Full Employment questioned the prioritizing of capitalist accumulation over human dignity. Animated by the spirit of Edward Bellamy, the authors observed that “the depression brought demoralizing want in the presence of ample resources for wealth production, and large-scale unemployment while there was work crying to be done on every hand.” To the authors, this presented “glaring evidences of maladjustment” both shocking and sobering.21 “We hold that a just economic society is one in which each individual has an opportunity and duty during the working period of his life to contribute his share to the general welfare,” not through mindless drudgery but “in work for which he is fitted and for which he shall receive a fair return.” Toward Full Employment nearly reverberated with the idea that the right to decent, fulfilling, humane employment would redefine post-Depression America.22 The danger was not too much government assistance, but too little employment, which tore at the fabric of American society and raised questions about the system of capitalist production itself.23 As Toward Full Employment suggests, the idea of democratic economic planning captured the imagination of progressives from across the left spectrum.24 Through popular publications, scholarly treatises, and the organizational activities of action groups such as the National Planning Association, planning advocates expanded the meaning of full employment, transforming it into a vessel of the progressive imagination in the New Deal era. Perhaps no group of dissident dreamers was more exhilarated by the possibilities of economic planning than the socialists of the 1930s. Although writer and literary critic Granville Hicks joined the Communist Party in 1935, he espoused a brand of democratic socialism that continued to respect small

22

Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America

property ownership, civil liberties, individual fulfillment, and cooperative social institutions. Like so many of his intellectual contemporaries, who either joined the party or supported its broad aims, the Communist Party’s turn toward the popular front suited Hicks’ temperament. With its veneration of American folk culture, its promotion of cultural pluralism, its virulent opposition to fascism, and its tenacious support for racial equality and industrial unionism, the American Communist Party seemed less a franchise of the totalitarian Soviet state than an instrument of democratic social justice. A graduate of Harvard University and the author of The Great Tradition, a groundbreaking Marxian interpretation of American literature since the Civil War, Hicks joined the Communist Party in 1934, convinced that it had “the clearest conception of how a society of abundance was to be brought about” and the determination to work toward it.25 The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 eventually disabused him of this conviction.26 Even so, his 1938 I Like America advanced a case for economic planning that aimed at a middle class in flux. Written in an accessible and homespun fashion, Hicks sought to ground his vision of socialism in the American soil of small property ownership and democratic production. In legitimizing individual possessions while criticizing the ownership of private property used to exploit workers, Hicks made the point which Marx made most forcefully in The Communist Manifesto: that socialism did not aim to subordinate people to yet another form of tyranny but to emancipate them from the forces that inhibited genuine human liberation.27 Addressing the anxieties of American white-collar workers facing unprecedented insecurity, Hicks joined the ranks of the democratic planners who pointed to the possibilities of an economy of abundance. Like almost all who championed planning in the 1930s, Hicks emphasized the contradiction between a technologically advanced society capable of generating enough for all and the evidence of a working-class majority facing constant insecurity. The upheaval of the Great Depression now threatened white-collar workers with the same fate. Traveling through the steel districts of Pennsylvania, Hicks tabulated a record of social suffering that seemed positively Victorian. Capitalism not only inflicted insecurity, he argued, but disease, physical impairment, and spiritual emptiness. “And then there are industrial accidents,” he wrote, “steadily on the increase. There were 16,000 deaths caused by industrial accident in 1935, and 18,000 in 1936. Eighteen thousand deaths, 70,000 injuries resulting in permanent disability,” and a state compensation system that proved routinely “inadequate and hard to get.” By the logic of the same system, more than 40 million found themselves inadequately housed, 50 million poorly fed, and almost all of them

The Horizon of Possibility

23

susceptible to disease “because of their surroundings, because of their jobs.” Instead of a clinical assessment of excess labor capacity and underutilization, he offered a portrait of acute social despair.28 Yet Hicks’ reportage aimed at more than cultivating sympathy for the underclass. Harkening back to Walter Rauschenbusch as much as Karl Marx, he castigated a society that blamed the poor and unemployed for their condition. “If we were wise, we would recognize that they are an indictment of our civilization. They are men and women who have been so reduced by years of undernourishment, so battered by jobs beyond their strength, so terrified by the threat of unemployment, so utterly robbed of confidence and hope, that they have given up the battle.” Echoing Stuart Chase, Lewis Mumford, and economist Wesley Mitchell,29 Hicks revolted at the recklessness of unfettered capitalism. “For the deterioration of these human beings, quite apart from its tragic aspects, represents an incalculable waste.” Hicks was appalled not only by the disparities of wealth and power exposed by the economic crisis but by the evidence of human degradation. “The courage of the working class is one of the things that make me like America,” Hicks assured his readers, “but at that same time, it makes me realize with what fatuous irresponsibility we are squandering our human resources. Instead of these men and women having the best possible chance to develop their talents, their lives are so difficult that many of them are beaten into dullness and most fall far short of their potentialities.”30 Quite aside from his affinities for the Soviet Union and its experiments in economic planning, it was the callous indifference to human indignity and the scale of living wreckage that motivated Hicks’ analysis. And if Hicks was as appalled by the recklessness of competitive capitalism as Stuart Chase, he was equally animated by the conviction that the remedy was within reach. Like the socialist Upton Sinclair who ran in 1934 for the governor’s office under the banner of “End Poverty in California,” Hicks believed that now was the time to utilize the idled factories, coal mines, farms, and labor power to begin producing for use rather than for profit. His convictions about the necessity for socializing the means of production set Hicks apart from most institutionalist economists, but his convictions about the failures of atomistic individualism and the potential of rational planning situated him in the same intellectual cosmos as Tugwell, Means, and Mumford.31 A member of the Communist Party who nevertheless advocated for democratic socialism, Hicks was prepared to assert the incompatibility between the pursuit of profit and the achievement of a planned economy. Others closer to power were more reluctant to acknowledge any fundamental contradictions. Yet in

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exploring the implications of compensatory spending, government-business cooperation, and the idea of shared prosperity through maximum employment, many mainstream thinkers inadvertently exposed the tensions between economic democracy and capitalist production. Economist Mordecai Ezekiel was one of these. The chief architect of the Agricultural Adjustments Administration and a leading influence on the Agricultural Adjustments Act, Ezekiel enjoyed access to the inner circle of New Deal policy in his capacity as economic adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture. In his 1939 Jobs for All through Industrial Expansion, Ezekiel mapped out a breathtaking program of government intervention. According to Ezekiel, it would raise labor’s share of the national wage, ensure greater profits, and curb market volatility. To increase production and maximize employment, the federal government would subsidize capital investments through a sales tax that simulated the one used in the Agricultural Adjustments Act. Ezekiel also proposed that the government use a system of licensing for interstate commerce that would encourage the participation of large firms. Increasing production would simultaneously lower costs and enhance productivity, enabling business to raise wages for workers and lower prices for consumers in a virtuous cycle of “industrial expansion.”32 The overarching idea was to calibrate production, wages, and prices to the cadence of the market. The key was “advanced budgeting.” This required not only cooperation between government and industry, but a cooperative arrangement which Ezekiel described as the “central program-making unit.” In this system, workers, consumers, and management would haggle over the division of company profits. “The government representative will try to see that the division is best in the national interest,” Ezekiel assured his readers. “There will, however, be one big difference from the present situation. There will be more to divide, so every interest can get more for itself.” However idealistic his belief that business would cooperate in any arrangement that impinged on its presumed prerogatives, he aimed to resolve the contradiction that perplexed Granville Hicks: the chronic persistence of want amid plenty. “If we can be regimented for destruction,” Ezekiel wrote in a decidedly un-clinical fashion, “we can organize ourselves democratically for production. If we can sacrifice our savings and our democratic institutions in the futile effort to defeat the Enemy abroad, we can far more joyfully join a great campaign to rout the enemy of poverty at home.”33 Ezekiel expressed the common progressive frustration that scientific management and industrial engineering only seemed plausible to the American people under the conditions of mass mobilization. Yet he was also

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addressing the technical problem that preoccupied institutional economists of the era—how to resolve the disparity between rising productivity and labor’s share of the national income, the underlying affliction of the 1920s.34 Resolving this dilemma moved Ezekiel toward a conception of industrial planning that inadvertently expanded the prospects for working-class democracy. Although he vigorously defended private enterprise, Ezekiel outlined an ambitious program of social democratic protections that powerfully countered business autocracy. Along the way, he excoriated the insecurities that capitalism invariably inflicted on working people. Achieving the “full-volume operation” of American industry would create the conditions for a five-day, eight-hour workday. It would provide protections for workers displaced by technology. It would deliver paid vacations as well as sickness and retirement benefits to people for whom savings were negligible and the prospect of destitution all too real. It would simultaneously expand public institutions and affordable housing while neutralizing the speed-up as a technique for maximizing production. Management would not suddenly become altruistic. Instead, labor unions would achieve representation in determining industrial programs and planning.35 This also meant encroaching on the presumed prerogatives of business over investment. Ezekiel continued to insist on the protection of the right to accumulate profit from private investment. Yet a subversive cross-current ran through his thought. Paying homage to private enterprise, he simultaneously advocated “certain modifications in its structure to make it more workable,” offering methods through which business would overcome “blind haphazard fumbling.” Once again, the theme of minimizing the destructive tendencies of capital competition permeated the discussion of economic planning.36 Ezekial outlined the emancipating implications of this vision in an intriguing chapter titled “Will Industrial Expansion Destroy Democracy?” Reading almost like a CIO broadside, it declared: In industry as it exists today there is little real democracy in production. The worker is free to take whatever job is offered him. If he does not care for the job, if the pay is too small or the working conditions are too unsanitary or too arduous, he is perfectly free not to take it. But his alternative is to starve.

Echoing Eugene Debs as much as George McNeil, the economist drew a portrait of a workplace transformed by employee participation. Industrial expansion will introduce effective democracy into many economic areas where no democracy exists today. The very administrative structure for Industrial Expansion is so devised as to stimulate democratic discussion and

26

Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America participation in economic life. Workers will be doubly represented on the industry authorities [councils], through voting for the representatives from labor unions and from consumer groups. The program for each industry will be discussed at public hearings to develop all the facts. In each concern the representatives of labor and management will conduct open hearings with all employees… Once the program has been approved and accepted, it will become binding on all parties for the year.37

Unwittingly, perhaps, he had elaborated a program of economic planning for full employment that decisively checked the authority and power of capital. This was a “structural modification” that promoted nothing less than industrial democracy. It outlined the institutional framework for a collectivized economy and reduced the independence of business over pricing, investment, and wage determination. Starting from the logic of full employment itself, Ezekiel drafted a program that anticipated workers and consumers participating in the equivalent of German-style industry councils that would determine investment priorities, control prices, and regulate working conditions. The implicit challenges to the prerogatives of business would only grow stronger in the following years. These dissident cross-currents were plainly evident in the musings of John H.G. Pierson, an economist who would become a key player in the struggle over the Full Employment Bill of 1945. In historian Stephen Bailey’s estimation, Pierson, an analyst with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was “one of the pioneers in seeing the implications of Keynesian thinking for an integrated federal full employment policy.”38 Pierson’s belief in the virtue of augmenting purchasing power through the subsidizing of private consumption certainly emerges in the pages of his 1941 Full Employment. But so too does the critique of the political and social influence of capitalism. In a study that sought to integrate Keynesian insights into the solution of unemployment, other, more radical perspectives emerged. They raised uncomfortable questions about the benefit of preserving private enterprise and opened avenues toward a more fundamental transformation of American society. Citing both Marx and Keynes, Pierson challenged the classical economic consensus that underemployment was no longer an intellectually respectable subject. Citing Marx’s theory that capitalism by its nature required a reserve army of surplus labor as well as Keynes’ belief that the conditions producing the British industrial engine of the nineteenth century would not recur in the twentieth, Pierson argued that the causes of unemployment were endemic. They

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were “deeply rooted in our society,”39 he argued, intrinsic to the very economic system that so many claimed to be the corollary of freedom and liberty. Pierson was not only arguing that unemployment and crisis accompanied capitalism; he was presenting a brief against economic imperialism. Writing in the tumult of the Second World War, he had every reason to interrogate the economic origins of international aggression. His startling thesis harkened back to the Populist Party’s opposition to social imperialism. “The crux of sound policy for the United States is the knowledge that domestic economic measures and domestic economic measures alone can bring permanent prosperity and full employment.” Against a generation of imperialists who had justified American interventionism in the name of colonial markets and access to raw materials, Pierson contended that the United States could have prosperity “without resorting to external expansion or aggression in any shape or form.” What it required was economic planning.40 The problems of economic nationalism and international aggression that loomed over the 1930s provide the mis en scene for Pierson’s more direct challenge to the priorities of profit maximization. Acknowledging that “centralization” and “American values” might be inimical, Pierson warned against the illusion that resolving the crisis of capitalism would not require a fundamental reorientation. “The difficulty of abolishing unemployment is bound to be underestimated if attention is focused entirely on questions of method,” he argued. As so many commentators from across the ideological spectrum would soon note, full employment meant strengthening the hand of workers. For the basic fact about full employment, regardless of whether it is achieved under production planning or under production for market, is that the removal of the threat of involuntary idleness would give labor a stronger bargaining position—unless, of course, undemocratic means used to bring about the new conditions should destroy labor’s bargaining position entirely. Full employment would therefore tend to give labor a larger share of the national income. This ought to be recognized from the outset. (emphasis added)

Deferring to American tradition, Pierson came down on the side of a “full employment market economy.” Through a combination of subsidies, monetary policy, and planned public works, the federal government could provide a “national income insurance” that would avoid the twin evils of inflation and crippling deficits.41

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Yet the tensions inherent in Keynesian full employment theory came quickly to the surface. Eager to reassure readers that all would benefit from increasing production, Pierson admitted that increased wages might come at the expense of the rentier class and its unearned increment. Echoing other full employment proponents, the author was convinced that few in this class would trade the safety of their inflated profits for “the general security resulting from the abolition of depressions.”42 The virulent opposition of right-wing opponents would soon prove the error of this sentiment. For Pierson, however, full employment promised to advance the progressive ideals which had emerged out of the turmoil of the previous decade. The historical moment offered “the opportunity for the distribution of income to be settled in a truly democratic manner,” yet it also presented the risk that democracy could be thwarted by those “who object to submitting this question to the bar of public opinion.” Through price controls, progressive taxation, and the subsidizing of payrolls, if need be, the technical objections to full employment could be overcome. The field would be cleared for the political transformation to occur.43 Here was a frank acknowledgment that the permanent elimination of unemployment required a political solution, not simply technical proficiency. This solution would augment working-class power at the probable expense of the rentier class, not to mention corporate capitalism. It might also require the kind of national economic planning that only wartime mobilization could demand.44 Even so, the evidence that New Deal programs had done little to shift the balance of economic power proved distressing to many planners. Mordecai Ezekiel noted that while the Fair Labor Standards Act had established a baseline for most wages, and the National Labor Relations Act promoted collective bargaining and higher wages, they had “made at best only a moderate change in the distribution of income as paid out by business.” The problem of maintaining buying power for full production,” Ezekiel contended, “still remains to be solved by other means.” Regulation alone could not solve the problem of business restoring profitability at “relatively low levels of output.” When businesses did operate close to full capacity or utilize labor-saving technology, they steered the additional savings into higher profits, not increased wages or lowered prices. Only economic planning could achieve “low prices, high wages, and full production,” since no company would unilaterally adopt these measures.45 Although a vigorous proponent of rational economic planning, Ezekiel sidestepped the implications of a national policy that would require firms to operate this way. While he acknowledged that companies would have to “adjust production” to meet the shifting needs of consumers, it would also force them

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to modify their profit expectations. Full employment promised an end to the chaotic decentralization of the market economy. It even promised profitability. What it threatened, however, was the labor flexibility that had underwritten the soaring profits of the 1920s.46 The transformative possibilities of full employment became increasingly enticing in the early years of the new decade, as wartime contracting increased and high unemployment proved stubbornly persistent. The planning enthusiasts who became the forerunners of full employment thought also challenged the equation of democracy and capitalism. George B. Galloway, one-time field representative for the National Economic and Social Planning Association, harkened back to the metaphors of the sectional conflict to describe the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It represented nothing less than an “irrepressible conflict.” In a period of contraction such as the Great Depression, this presented only two alternatives: “either capitalism must consent or be forced to sacrifice some of its privileges in order to promote social and economic democracy, or it must destroy or suppress democratic institutions.” The United States may have staved off the collapse of democracy, but this was only because capital chose to grant “limited concessions” rather than travel the road of fascism. “In every country the forces of privilege feared that the people might employ the institutions of democracy to reconstruct the economic system.” So much for American exceptionalism. Only by cultivating an economy of abundance and repudiating the logic of scarcity, Galloway argued, could “the inner contradiction between capitalism and democracy” be resolved.47 Economist Alvin Hansen, frequently portrayed as the representative Keynesian liberal of the 1940s, channeled these expectations of a more rational economy into a series of studies that championed fiscal policy as a safe alternative to more radical interventions.48 Focusing exclusively on the shift from regulation to fiscal Keynesianism, however, obscures the heterodox cross-currents in Hansen’s thought. It also overlooks the ideological elasticity of this historical moment.49 Writing in 1942 on planning for the postwar world, Hansen challenged the classical theory that government intervention “distorted” the marketplace. “The view that it is dangerous for a government to play any important role in the initiation and promotion of developmental and innovational projects requires re-examination in the light of the historical development of modern capitalism,” Hansen calmly observed.50 Yet he also questioned the prerogatives of capitalism itself. “In the past,” he reflected ruefully, “we have for the most part permitted the economic order

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to serve us as best it could on the automatic functioning of this mechanism,” namely, the pursuit of profit in an unregulated market economy. Whatever benefits it conferred, society accepted it as the “inevitable concomitant of a system of free enterprise operating under the price system.” What Hansen found most discomfiting was not the failure to achieve utopia but the fact that market mechanisms determined the most basic questions of production and distribution. The “system” had the capacity to distribute adequate housing, nutrition, and social security, but when it failed to produce these goods in adequate abundance, Americans “accepted the result with a stern, ascetic fatalism.” Turning to this feckless economic order to fulfill the “needs, desires, and aspirations of human beings,” society persistently found it wanting.51 The problem was not obnoxiously wealthy tycoons but a system capable of producing enough for all that was geared only to generate as much as was profitable. It was this humanistic critique, this egalitarian and democratic sensibility, more than any dream of a consumer’s cornucopia, which motivated Hansen’s economic analysis. This was the case even when he insisted that the objective of full employment theory was to save free enterprise. This was anything but an innocuously liberal vision of economic growth. In Economic Problems of the Post-War World as well as The Postwar Economy, Hansen advocated for measures that did not simply increase consumer demand but advanced working-class interests and power. Having worked through the logic of full employment, the Harvard economist called for high corporate income and excess profit taxes, significantly progressive estate taxes, increased income taxes, and expanded public health care. He also advocated for a generously stocked “shelf ” of public investments that included urban redevelopment, express highways, education, rail transportation, and public housing.52 Ostensibly protecting the interests of private enterprise, Hansen simultaneously expected business to map out “adequate plans” for investment in manufacturing, transportation, housing, and utilities. These were not simply automatic stabilizers but decisive impingements on the presumptive unilateral control of investment by business.53 The intellectual cross-currents permeate Hansen’s voluminous outpourings on the question. He insisted that the “basic political and economic institutions of our country” would survive the crisis of war and its attendant dislocations. For democratic planners, it was not simply a matter of survival, since “in a real sense we are already in the midst of a transition to a new order.”54 Full employment promised—and threatened—to usher it in. Roosevelt’s National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), on which Hansen served, explicitly outlined

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the political issues at stake in a war against fascism. “It is not merely a war of words, or of empires, but a fundamental battle over the ideals of civilization,” the board submitted in a 1942 report. In language that would soon be anathema in public policy debates, Hansen and the NRPB argued that the “many and the few are again at grips, determining whether an aristocratic or a democratic, fraternal view of life, shall prevail.”55 The struggles for economic and social justice had yet to give way to the polarization of the Cold War. Both were intimately connected to the question of full employment. While NRPB members paid homage to private enterprise as the engine of capital investment, they simultaneously advocated for policies that challenged the most cherished prerogatives of capitalism.56 The “profit-motivated system of private enterprise” could not sufficiently develop American productive capacities to meet the needs of a society that had only recently been left to the tender mercies of unfettered capitalism. Even more boldly, board researchers advocated for the “democratic participation of working people” in the determination of working conditions, wage rates, and working hours. They insisted that “no new system” was required—only a “clear realization and bold determination to push government into lines where it is needed.” Even so, promoting full employment while professing to protect the privileges of private enterprise produced contradictions that government planning advocates failed to resolve.57 Unlike most on the NRPB, Hansen at least acknowledged the disjunctions. In his estimation, redistributing income would promote full employment but also eat into corporate profits. It would fuel demand and expand production but also threaten the “cost-price balance.” Anticipating the political headwinds that would gather against full employment, Hansen assured his policy-minded audience that redistribution through progressive taxation would minimize the “disruptive” impact on business profits. The idea was to target only those companies that actually made a profit. Still, he reiterated, “These methods are feasible up to a certain point, but the point is fixed by the requirements of the cost-price balance.” Conservative opponents would soon contest the idea that liberals, let alone socialists, could ensure the sanctity of this delicate equilibrium. More than this, they would object to the assertion that limits would have been set on the accumulation of profit and that government should have any hand in directing their investment agenda. To do so would indeed “encroach” upon their presumed privileges of private property, social stewardship, and unilateral control over production.58 Economist Mordecai Ezekiel understood this as well. Just like Hansen, he assiduously downplayed the contradictions. Asked to present a paper on “desirable

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changes” in the national economy to the American Farm Economic Association in 1943, Ezekiel identified the structural changes necessary to achieve full employment. In addition to progressive taxation to lever investment capital from private enterprise and compensatory measures to stimulate consumer spending, Ezekiel endorsed lower prices, higher wages, and “more reasonable profit levels.” Ezekiel, Hansen, and John G. Pierson joined institutional economists in calling for an unprecedented intervention in both labor and capital markets. Of course, the justification was to preserve “free enterprise” and promote social security. Yet while increasing aggregate spending might indeed benefit industrial enterprise, the individual capitalist heard one thing: the lowering of profit margins. More than this, a general increase in the magnitude of profits did not mean that individual firms would not suffer.59 *** Despite the dissolution of the National Recovery Administration at the hands of the Supreme Court in 1935, the idea of democratic economic planning had crystallized as a legitimate alternative on the political landscape. For conservative opponents, any mention of “planning” implied a connection to the Soviet Union. The visits of leading intellectuals, including Roosevelt cabinet member Rexford Tugwell, to Stalin’s Russia only confirmed the suspicion that planning meant communism. Yet, for the time being, proponents of the concept had effectively insulated the notion against such attacks by emphasizing its compatibility with American traditions of property ownership, individual liberty, and democratic self-determination. Still, the cross-currents of democratic socialism and the desire for a cooperative society challenged some of the more placid assertions that planning and capitalism could be harmoniously reconciled. If anything, Mordecai Ezekiel was compelled to acknowledge the distance that American capitalism had traveled away from the laissez-faire, pure market image entertained by its more vigorous defenders. Rather than a coherent social doctrine, economic planning had become an intellectual movement that drew adherents from across the left spectrum. What bound them together was the idea that the coordination of production and consumption could foster a more humane, egalitarian, and rational society. Advocates proposed a battery of measures under its banner, including compensatory spending, public investment, national budgeting, monetary and tax policy revisions, countercyclical public investment designed to stimulate aggregate demand and a job guarantee. Challenging the policies of anti-trust prosecution and fiscal austerity, it represented a more vigorous model of

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government intervention than the voluntarist versions of planning that had developed out of the Hoover administration. It also stood in contrast to the state centralization that defined the Soviet and Nazi solutions to unemployment. Above all, the discussion of democratic planning fostered the belief that the maintenance of maximum employment was an attainable goal.

Notes Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973; reprint, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 46–7. 2 Stuart Chase, The Economy of Abundance (New York: Macmillan Company, 1934), 21. 3 George Soule, A Planned Society (New York: Macmillan Company, 1935), 232. 4 Kathleen G. Donahue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2003), 165–9. 5 Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 14–24. 6 This was a theme that Stuart Chase had been exploring since the 1920s in articles for The Nation as well as his 1925 The Tragedy of Waste. See Gary Dean Best, Peddling Panaceas: Popular Economists in the New Deal Era (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 88–9. 7 Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 1984 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), 204; Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 60–1. Pells makes the point that younger intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and Robert Cantwell turned to socialism out of an “intense desire on the part of many writers to participate actively in a compelling cause,” while Chase and Soule remained committed to a planned and rational capitalism. 8 Chase, The Economy of Abundance, 193. 9 Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 248–9 and, more broadly, chapter five. 10 Chase, The Economy of Abundance, 138. 11 Ibid., 138–9. 12 Ibid., 225. 13 George McNeil, The Labor Movement: The Problem of To-Day (Boston: A.M. Bridgman and Co, 1887), 454. 14 For the theme of social interdependence, see Wesley Clair Mitchell, “The Social Sciences and National Planning,” in Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, 1

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ed. Findlay Mackenzie (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1937), 124–5, and Harry Gideonse, “Freedom and Planning in International Economic Relations,” ibid., 685. On the rejection of laissez-faire economic individualism, see C.J. Ratzlaff, “Economic Control in the Nineteenth Century,” ibid., 130–47 and Lewis C. Gray, “Planning the Use of Land,” 165–70. 15 Lewis Mumford, “Foreword,” in Planned Society, v. 16 Ibid., vi, vii. 17 Reagan, Designing a New America, 199. 18 Ibid., 4, 115–31. 19 Lincoln Filene was the founder of Filene’s and Sons, a Boston-based clothing goods retailer that promoted corporate welfare programs for its employees, including health clinics, insurance policies, and profit-sharing plans. Ralph Flanders was a machine tool entrepreneur who later served in the US Senate. Morris E. Leeds was a partner in an electrical instruments manufacturing firm and an inveterate inventor. A proponent of improved industrial relations, Leeds served on several government agencies that addressed the question of industry and labor, including Hoover’s President’s Committee on Economic Security as well as the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration and the President’s Committee on Economic Security. 20 Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynesianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 65. 21 Henry Dennison et al., Toward Full Employment (New York: Whittlesey House, 1938), v. 22 Ibid., vi, 4. 23 Dennison et al., vii. 24 Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Response to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 146. 25 Granville Hicks, I Like America (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), 142. On the significance of The Great Tradition, see the contrasting interpretations, Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 172–6, which excoriates Hicks for his allegedly rigid classification of American literature according to the dogmatic requirements of Stalinist Marxism. By contrast, Daniel Aaron argues that Hicks acknowledged the limitations of vulgar Marxist readings of literature, which seemed to criticize novelists for failing to engage in agitprop, which also applauded the effort to expose the economic forces and class dynamics that invariably influenced the world of literary creativity. See Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism 1992 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 262–3. Similarly, Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century (New York: Verso Press, 1997), 237–9, a sympathetic

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treatment of a social realist critic understood that the central, defining development of modern American society was the emergence of the working class. 26 Hicks, 146. 27 Leo Panitch, Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination (Exeter: Merlin Press, 2008), 118. 28 Hicks, I Like America, 57–60. 29 Mitchell, “Social Sciences and Planning,” in Planned Society, 114–15. 30 Hicks, I Like America, 61–2. 31 Ibid., 131–3. 32 Mordecai Ezekiel, Jobs for All Through Industrial Expansion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 19–20. 33 Ibid., 7. 34 Ibid., 31–2. 35 Ibid., 42. 36 Ibid., 283. 37 Ibid., 287. 38 Stephen Kemp Bailey, Congress Makes a Law: The Story Behind the Employment Act of 1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 47. 39 John Pierson, Full Employment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 5–7. 40 Ibid., 9. 41 Ibid., 25. 42 Ibid., 13. 43 Ibid. 44 This is a point which Pierson conceded and which economist Calvin B. Hoover underlined. “While just now our immediate concern seems to be to get full employment under any circumstance, the problem is not only to attain full employment but to attain it without using means which are in themselves socially disastrous, such as war or setting up a totalitarian regime, and to attain it so that there will be the minimum of forces pushing towards a new collapse with recurrent unemployment of resources.” See “Economic Planning and the Problem of Full Employment,” American Economic Review 30 (1940): 268–9. 45 Mordecai Ezekiel, “Lines of Action in Economic Reconstruction,” Antioch Review 1 (Autumn 1941): 339–41. 46 Ibid. 47 George Galloway, “Next Steps Forward,” in Planning for America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1941), 662–3. 48 E. Cary Brown, “Alvin Hansen’s Contributions to Business Cycle Analysis,” “Working Paper,” Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 1989, http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63263/ alvinhhansenscon00brow.pdf?sequence=1, accessed June 19, 2015. According to proponents of the “end of reform” thesis, Hansen fashioned a Keynesian program

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designed to stimulate consumption while relegating aggressive regulatory and antitrust measures to the fading memory of the 1930s. Wasem, Tackling Unemployment, 3–6; Alan Brinkley, “The Idea of the State,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 98–100, 108–11. 49 Reagan, 202–4; Rutherford and Desroches, 29–31. 50 Alvin Hansen, Economic Problems of the Post-War World: Democratic Planning for Full Employment (Washington: National Council for the Social Studies, 1942), 10. 51 Ibid., 10–11, 13. 52 Alvin Hansen, “The Postwar Economy,” in Postwar Economic Problems, ed. Seymour Harris (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943), 21–2; After the War–Full Employment (Washington: National Resources Planning Board, 1942), 15. 53 Hansen, After the War—Full Employment, 19. 54 Hansen, Economic Problems in the Post-War World, 10. 55 Post-War Planning: Full Employment, Security, Building America, 31. 56 Elliot A. Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 216–17, 229. 57 Ibid., 13, 22–3; National Resources Planning Board, Security, Work, and Relief Policies (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 2–3. 58 Economic Problems in the Post-War World, 20–1. 59 Mordecai Ezekiel, “Desirable Changes in the National Economy for the Postwar Period,” Journal of Farm Economies 26 (February 1944): 103.

2

The Expanding Horizon of Full Employment: Thought and Activism in the 1940s*

More than any other force, the American working class and its middle-class allies provided the impetus behind full employment.1 The idea of democratic economic planning, once the purview of institutional economists and leftleaning journalists steadily captured the imagination of progressives from across the left spectrum.2 It was the widespread support for the idea of full employment as a necessary and attainable goal, argues Margaret Weir, which gave the policy its intrinsic legitimacy.3 Full employment did not simply represent the culmination of piecemeal liberal reforms. Nor, in its most radical formulations, did it constitute a less threatening alternative to anti-monopoly reform. Instead, full employment proposed to deprive business of the sting of dismissal. Proponents did not disparage labor unionism. Instead, they considered it a necessary concomitant, the ground-level clout behind democratic economic planning.4 In that sense, full employment offered the most comprehensive vision of workingclass democracy in the 1940s. Because it did, it threatened business interests and the defenders of white supremacy in the South. These groups had already mobilized against New Deal job creation, social security, labor protections, as well as wage-and-price legislation that threatened to give workers additional leverage. Business interests operating through the US Chamber of Commerce and the California Farm Bureau Federation were the first to attack the Civil Works Administration (CWA). A product of the Federal Emergency Relief Act and the Roosevelt administration’s earliest effort at solving the economic crisis, the CWA under Harry Hopkins put more than 4 million Americans to work, providing assistance to some 20,000 families. Building campgrounds, installing sewer pipe, repairing 40,000 schools, subsidizing Native Americans to repair their own homes, and hiring unemployed African American women to work as domestics for the down and out, the CWA functioned as more than a work relief agency.5 It assisted

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some of the most marginal and dispossessed in American society. Above all, by interfering even nominally in local labor markets, the CWA extended the power of the federal government into the economic sphere, the terrain over which business claimed almost exclusive authority. Southern white segregationists found the agency profoundly disturbing. To the defenders of white supremacy, the CWA and other works programs threatened tax increases and the region’s low-wage advantage. It also challenged planter control over black agricultural labor. Together, northern business leaders and southern elites fashioned the arguments that would be wielded against full employment in the 1930s. Even though the CWA employed only a third of the American labor force idled by the Depression, consistently paying less than the national averages afforded by private enterprise, employers complained that wage rates were too high, that workers enjoyed too much job security, and that the program was nothing more than a boondoggle.6 Business critics and southern obstructionists aside, the working-class majority supported the CWA. The unemployed strongly preferred it to direct relief. While the CWA would only create 4.2 million jobs, it received applications from an astonishing 9 million jobseekers. Most importantly, it erased the indignities that accompanied direct relief by providing the unemployed useful and remunerative work. While business leaders and southern planters castigated the CWA, those who benefited from the program began to believe that the federal government had an obligation to provide them a job. The contrast between the prerogatives of private enterprise and the claims of economic citizenship could not have been stronger.7 *** Even as the regulatory drive of the early New Deal seemed to wane, the democratizing possibilities of economic planning excited the imagination of progressive intellectuals, policy analysts, and journalists alike. Wartime full production convinced economic planners that the specter of unemployment could finally be banished. Yet the horizon of victory also stoked fears of a return to depression. The combination of these fears and the expectations that full employment could banish chronic destitution and historic inequalities produced a feverish interest in the promise of full employment.8 It was the liberating possibilities of maximum production, not simply the lure of abundance, which stimulated expectations of institutionalizing a more humane, democratic, and rational economic system. As we have already seen, however, pursuing the logic of full employment to some of its discomfiting conclusions, progressive

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intellectuals questioned the customary entitlements of private enterprise itself.9 Fueled by working-class activism, years of policy experimentation, and by the nagging persistence of mass unemployment in the years before American intervention in the Second World War, journalists, social workers, progressive activists, intellectuals, and rank-and-file workers fostered a climate favorable to the serious discussion and of a job guarantee. Progressive religious organizations took a special interest in the problem of unemployment. By 1940, Europe was fixated on an impending war, but Americans still struggled to end the seemingly interminable depression. That year, unemployment still stood at a shocking 14.6 percent.10 In June of 1940, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America joined the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Social Justice Commission of the Conference of American Rabbis to sponsor an Interfaith Conference on Unemployment. Reflecting the cultural pluralism and cross-class character of the regenerated popular front, the conference brought religious leaders together with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), African Americans, women, representatives from both major parties, as well as economists, farming interests, and other professionals. As James Myers, industrial secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, noted, the problem of unemployment crossed class lines, but it also produced class antagonism, racial antipathy, and the willingness to violate civil liberties. As the rise of fascism in Europe seemed to confirm, the “psychology of despair” could provide the tinder for solutions to unemployment that could entirely incinerate democratic government.11 Adopting the language of morality and social justice, the conference moved the discussion of unemployment away from the technical issues of fiscal policy toward a consideration of its impact on the human condition. At the same time, conference participants absorbed the structural analysis of society at the center of the economic planners’ worldview.12 Echoing Chase, Soule, and the economic planners of the era, the Findings Committee condemned the social disintegration that accompanied unemployment. “Enforced idleness demoralizes personality,” proclaimed the conference’s findings report, making “it impossible for families to live normal, healthy lives” and to participate in community life. Led by livingwage activist Father John A. Ryan and Father R.A. McGowan, who represented the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the Findings Committee eschewed moral platitudes and band aid solutions. Instead, it followed the planners in calling for the abolition of unemployment. The specter of fascist dictatorship loomed over the proceedings, as the participants warned that “people haunted by insecurity are most likely to become the easy prey of ruthless leaders, including

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would-be dictators who make large promises but take away liberties.”13 Like Pierson, the conference looked skeptically at the notion that defense spending was a suitable path to full employment. Yet paralleling Chase, Ezekiel, and others, the Findings Committee of the Interfaith Conference on Unemployment called for a national commission composed of the key interest groups in American society, including consumers, labor, education, and manufacturing. To address persistent unemployment, the committee did not shy away from advocating for aggressive government intervention and control. “For enforceable and coordinated action by the organized social forces of the country, government leadership is necessary.” Only government leadership could establish the machinery for “devising cooperative, democratic measures to solve the unemployment problem.”14 Catholic corporatism and left-oriented collectivism blended in this unique illustration of the cooperative impulse that still surged despite the decline of New Deal reform. Foregrounding the structural sources of poverty, the liberal-labor alliance that dominated the conference advocated for a turn toward planning. A.F. Hinrichs, chief economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, addressed the conference. So too did Mordecai Ezekiel and George Soule. Hinrichs, who would soon pen a long memo to Senator James E. Murray on the mechanics of achieving maximum employment through legislation, emphasized the need for postwar planning to absorb those made redundant by the inevitable contraction of the defense industry. Soule corroborated Hinrichs. He argued that planning for maximum employment was both democratic and indispensable to navigating “the great social convulsion,” which saw average people demanding economic security in a period when throngs of the disaffected had been drawn to “Hitlerism.” Ezekiel revisited the major arguments advanced in Jobs for All, calling for massive public expenditures on public works and relief that would stimulate the purchasing power of low-income groups. He also attacked monopolies that exercised unilateral control over pricing, production, and markets. George Meany of the American Federation of Labor agreed. He called for a “long-range program of permanent public works, planned in advance, which could be expanded and curtailed to offset fluctuations in private construction activity.” In short, conference participants championed public investment to put people to work and counter the oscillations of the business cycle.15 Race and class consciousness permeated the papers delivered at the interfaith conference. Olive Streator, director of the Service Bureau for Negro Children at the Children’s Aid Society of New York, stressed the economic roots of lynching and racial violence. In what was probably the understatement of the conference,

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Streator asserted, “it is becoming apparent that race relations are correlated with prosperity.” If Streator’s analysis was reductionistic, it captured the fact that race profoundly bisected the working class. The evidence could be found in the racial pogroms—what Streator described as the “terrors”—that gripped Chicago, East St. Louis, and Washington, DC, following the First World War.16 Similarly, Philip Murray of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) made the case that organized labor represented the interests of the wider working class. Its stake in the question was clear, since “its people are the ones who have to bear the brunt of unemployment.” Seasonal unemployment, part-time work, episodic lay-offs, technological unemployment: each followed from the “failure of our economic machinery to maintain a steady flow of orders in our industrial plants.” Only through a “cooperative undertaking” between business, government, agriculture, and labor, Murray argued, could an effective solution be found.17 The left did not monopolize the conference. Scientific management consultants, liberal business representatives, and proponents of tax and investment incentives leavened the discussion of how to eradicate the persistence of chronic unemployment after eleven years of depression. Most conspicuously, participants understood that this was a national crisis, one which had its origins in the very machinery of capitalism itself. It was an affliction that continued to grip the attention of policy analysts, academics, social workers, and as many as seventy congressional representatives who met under the auspices of the House Conference on Unemployment that had been gathering weekly since February 1940.18 For all the veneration of the New Deal’s job creation programs by the contemporary American left, it is bracing to consider California representative Jerry Voorhis’ contention that these represented “palliatives” which had failed to provide a “fundamental solution” to the most pressing issue of the era.19 Now, in the year before the war dominated American public life, a broad coalition of progressive forces united under the auspices of religious liberalism to express widespread support for economic planning. Defense spending alone did not offer a permanent solution—only democratic cooperation that looked beyond the horizon of the present crisis could pave the way.20 Most pivotal, the conference highlighted the momentum behind the idea of guaranteed employment. From the confines of government planning committees, the expostulations of the labor intellectuals, and the express interest of masses of workers and activists, the notion of a commitment to guaranteed employment had coalesced. That it was so prominent at an interfaith conference some seven months before Franklin D. Roosevelt would advocate for “freedom from want” tells us quite a bit about the shifting balance of class forces at this time. “To cut

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the Gordian knot of unemployment,” observed E.A. Goldenweiser, the director of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, “why should not the government provide a job for every man and woman who is able and willing to work but unable to secure a job in private enterprise?” Almost unimaginable today, the naturalized Russian immigrant and Cornell, PhD argued that cutting the knot would require the federal government to “undertake socially desirable but commercially unprofitable tasks on a sufficiently large and varied scale to absorb the unemployed.” The idea of direct job creation would become a tenet of the full employment movement in the twentieth century. Echoing Hicks and Soule, Goldenweiser made the case that public infrastructure spending offered the most promising avenue of countercyclical investment in an economy defined by “abundance” rather than “scarcity.”21 Goldenweiser’s address encapsulated the key elements of the planning perspective that endure despite the end of substantive New Deal reform. Eradicating unemployment required an aggressive expansion of the national income. Progressive taxation and deficit financing would fund a program of adequate public investment. The problem was not simply the lack of sufficient demand, but the underutilization of American productive capacities, which left vital social needs unmet. At a conference that deliberately sought to open channels between social organizations and government agencies, Goldenweiser endorsed the idea of guaranteed employment. “We have the necessary ingredients for providing full employment and adequate incomes,” he argued; “we have the natural resources, the manpower, and the financial machinery for their distribution.”22 The problem of enforced idleness resisted easy panaceas; yet, Goldenweiser and most of the participants at the interfaith conference understood that it was ultimately a political problem, constrained not by technical or material limitations but by the economic interests that governed American society. So it was that Father Raymond McGowan, assistant director of the Catholic Social Action Department, lent his support to the Committee for the Defense of the National Labor Relations Act.23 By this time, Goldenweiser was not operating in isolation. The notion of maintaining a “shelf ” of practical infrastructure projects became an increasingly standard feature of the discussion.24 *** Liberal religious figures and organizations sustained the discussion on unemployment into the war years, demonstrating that the question engaged those besides the contributors to the New Republic and the advisers to the Roosevelt administration. They articulated a collection of values that transcended the

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pragmatic idiom of policy experts. They helped formulate a set of ideas that bridged divisions between white- and blue-collar workers, binding elements of the labor movement and progressive middle class together in a moral worldview that considered the redistribution of wealth indispensable to material and spiritual improvement. These values found purchase in a milieu that combined hope and fear about the prospects for steady employment in the postwar years. For example, one survey suggested that 68 percent of the American public believed that government intervention would be necessary in the postwar period to maintain adequate employment.25 Excited by the achievement of full employment through wartime production but troubled by the prospect of a return to depression, social workers, liberal religious groups, labor unions, progressive middle-class professionals, political action committees, and left-leaning social reform organizations vigorously explored the problem of involuntary idleness. In September 1944, as the Allies planned for Operation Market Garden and as momentum for postwar reconstruction gained steam, religious liberals intensified the call for guaranteed employment. The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America reminded its faithful that “the Church must have an active sympathy with all who are in any kind of need, suffering from any form of injustice or struggling for a better life.” According to the Council, the leading social justice problem confronting the nation was the challenge of maintaining full employment after demobilization. What it required was a planned response that transcended the narrow interests of business and organized labor and looked instead toward the larger society. Minimizing the tenacity of business’s opposition to any thing that would concede additional power to workers, religious liberals urged high-minded cooperation in service of the “common good.”26 Even so, they advanced the underconsumptionist argument from a position of ethical principle. The lack of purchasing power had produced a situation in which “basic human needs in terms of food, clothing, and adequate housing have never fully been met even in prosperous America.” Proponents of the industrial system had a moral obligation to support the needs not only of American workers but also of a wider world reeling from the trauma of the war. Convinced of “the essential worth of personality,” the Federal Council enunciated its “belief that a Christian society is under sacred obligation so to organize itself [so] that every one willing and able to work may be guaranteed some meaningful occupation.” However limited its understanding of the nation’s religious complexion, the church emphasized its “deep concern for the spirit and motive of our economic life.”27

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Echoing these sensibilities but also raising questions about the economic order itself, L.E. Keller, research director for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes, addressed the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems in March 1944. The theme of the conference was labor and postwar planning. “Are we just planning for the retention of private ownership and operation of industry, rather than government operation?” Keller asked rhetorically. “Or, do we have in mind a plan for the economic security of the people as a whole, a plan for a real industrial democracy, a sound social order, a plan for a Christian way of life?” Only by creating an economic system that placed the interests of people ahead of profits could the United States hope to insulate democracy against the shock of another crisis like the Great Depression.28 W.E.B. DuBois also weighed in on the question of full employment. What intrigued him the most was its apparent capacity to usher in democratic socialism. Raising the familiar objection that fascism could banish unemployment just as well as democracy, DuBois asked the question: full employment for what? “We must have Full Employment for maximum social welfare—for a rising standard of material, moral, and cultural welfare benefitting all members of the community. This is what distinguishes our socialist policy of Full Employment from the policies offered by the various conservative groups.” Yet DuBois’ vision of full employment had more in common with the variety offered by the National Resources Planning Board and the CIO than he may have realized. DuBois asserted that “a community working harmoniously together for social ends” could only be achieved under socialism. But the very idea of economic planning for a postwar era, the notion of a national budget, and the belief that only a vastly expanded program of social security investments could ensure full employment united the progressive-labor alliance and moved it toward a more expansive vision of economic democracy. If many of its members would have eschewed the socialist label, they still believed, like DuBois, that the programs they advocated would foster “a community working harmoniously together for social ends.” This egalitarian, cooperative sensibility also found routine expression in the support that a majority of Americans expressed for postwar planning, a job guarantee, and redistributive policies aimed at increasing the social wage.29 In short, they embraced an emancipatory and humanistic vision of full employment that incorporated many of the distinguishing features of democratic socialism. Perhaps the most profound expression of a commitment to full employment based on the foundation of religiously influenced moral conviction appeared in 1945, in the form of an address by Catholic bishop Bernard J. Sheil, which

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Senator Scott Lucas read into the Congressional Record in June of that year. An accomplished pitcher who turned down an offer from the Cincinnati Reds to enter the seminary, Sheil became a vigorous advocate of workers’ rights, an early supporter of the CIO, a prominent opponent of anti-Semitism and racial bigotry, and the founder of the Catholic Youth Organization. In 1945, President Truman appointed him to head a study of social problems facing the youth of war-torn Europe. In the summer of that year, as the struggle over postwar planning intensified, Sheil had the occasion to address the Social Science Forum at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. It was here that Lucas encountered Sheil’s analysis of the problem of unemployment. Sheil proclaimed that nothing less than a “social revolution” of the oppressed for “the attainment of full human rights for all people” was percolating up from the soil of nations scorched by the Second World War. The bishop’s observations echoed those of former Vice President Henry Wallace and heterodox economist Stuart Chase. Writing only two years earlier, Chase suggested that a “muffled roar” was resonating around the world. “It is the voice of the people demanding security and an end to the paradox of plenty. It is the revolt of the masses,” Chase believed, a “subterranean roar [which] is the most powerful force in the world today.”30 Similarly, Sheil argued that fascism was only the latest and most egregious incarnation of a despotic tradition that sought to dominate the “poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.” Echoing the left populism of Henry Wallace, which venerated the “common man,” Sheil posited that the “disinherited” and “dispossessed” should be at the center of religious consciousness but also the agents of historical change. Extolling the internationalism that defined Wallace and the left-liberal Democrats, the bishop linked the fate of America’s poor to the struggles of the global oppressed for “dignity and liberty.” While the United Nations and representative government came in for praise, Sheil believed that only economic democracy could provide the foundation for achieving the “primacy of the human person.” That meant full employment.31 It is easy to miss the anti-capitalist critique that informed the bishop’s discussion of the idea. In arguing that economic depressions and mass unemployment were not inevitable, Sheil expressed a worldview that extended well beyond the circles of institutional economists and left-wing journalists. The bishop was not simply suggesting that the suffering of the afflicted could be alleviated but that economic calamities on the scale of the Great Depression could be avoided altogether. He frankly challenged the classical economic dogma that only exogenous shocks and labor market distortions could undermine a system that tended toward equilibrium. “Depressions and widespread unemployment

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are not acts of God,” Sheil argued, questioning the immutability of the supposed laws of economic behavior. Instead, “they are produced by us through inhuman economic practices.” Rather than “social first-aid,” the prelate advocated for “economic and social surgery.”32 Supporting the Murray Full Employment Bill (discussed in the next chapter), Sheil contested the supposed prerogatives of business. In fact, he disputed the central assertion of the bill’s opponents: that the question of postwar employment should be left “to the natural forces of private enterprise as if the jungle tactics of unrestrained competition were natural.” Instead, he advocated for an ambitious vision of social democracy, including both a guaranteed annual wage and labor’s participation in industrial management. The bishop anticipated nothing less than that organized labor would soon enjoy a steadily increasing share in the ownership, profits, and management of company affairs. While Sheil assured his listeners that he did not advocate for worker control of industry, he insisted that labor should “have a voice in things that affect them vitally.” This was something more than the Catholic corporatism of CIO leader Philip Murray and Pope Pius XI, whose 1931 Quadregesimo Anno informs the bishop’s analysis. On the progressive perimeters of full employment thought, the idea of protecting the right to work and shielding average people against the caprices of the labor market through a guaranteed income now merged with the movement for industrial democracy, in which workers actively shaped managerial policy, exercised a measure of shopfloor control, and intervened to defend workplace protections.33 Mirroring the Federal Council of Churches and L.E. Keller, Bishop Sheil highlighted the humanistic implications of worker empowerment under a full employment regime. Beyond job security and higher wages, worker participation fulfilled “the need for self-expression and freedom at work,” the need “to feel satisfaction in his daily job, so much of which his life is devoted.” Like the progressive economists and labor leaders who championed the right to a job, Sheil understood that it would empower workers on the job. The conception of business and labor cooperation he envisioned was predicated on workers becoming “citizens” rather than “subjects.” They would become active participants rather than passive recipients of government handouts, dignified human beings rather than commodities in an unforgiving labor market. Where the Federal Council and Keller remained silent on racial injustice, Sheil addressed it directly, expanding the conception of full employment to reach the most glaring inequalities in American society. Intolerant of Nazi racial mythologies, most Americans blithely accepted homegrown variations that reinforced racial and ethnic subordination. “We have not erased racism from the conscience of

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the world by defeating Germany. It is still a live and bitter issue to millions of Americans that very day. I am thinking of the toiling and sweating Negro; of the hated and driven Jew; of the bewildered and lonely Mexican; of the isolated and cowering Nisei.”34 Sheil deplored racial inequality, but his vison of full employment made no room for women as independent producers and participants in the workforce. His image of the industrial laborer was decidedly male. His conception of social change was rooted in the patriarchal belief that universal “man” would only be liberated when the independent male wage worker exercised power in the marketplace. Keller’s address reflected the same gender bias. In his estimation, the measure of a civilized society was the ability of the male breadwinner to earn a wage that would relieve his wife and children of the burden of paid labor. Any other scenario threatened to undermine a “sound Christian social order.”35 The irony is that the achievement of full employment during the war, which Keller and Sheil cheered as the standard for the postwar period, had already eroded the foundations of the patriarchal worldview that romanticized the male— and usually white—industrial laborer. The wartime demand for labor created opportunities for women to occupy high-paying industrial jobs once exclusively controlled by men. Despite the gendered classifications that companies continued to use as well as the limited commitment of organized labor to women’s equality, the gender terrain had shifted irrevocably. As historian Ruth Milkman explains, “The possibility, indeed the partial reality, of eliminating job segregation by sex appeared to exist for the first time in the twentieth century.”36 Despite the gender prejudice that most male religious leaders shared, Sheil and others helped legitimize the idea that full employment was the surrogate of economic democracy. Relying on the power of organized labor and the insights of economic planning, a working-class majority could extend the New Deal in a much more egalitarian direction, possibly challenging the very pillars of capitalist privilege and opening up space for a fundamentally more democratic America. For all the overtures to democracy, the full employment ethos contained the seeds of some less than democratic notions. The most conspicuous of these was the belief that technical experts should monopolize the key decisions that informed economic planning. Grassroots activism and assumptions about topdown, technocratic control coexisted uneasily in the movement.37 Internal tensions aside, the continuing discussion of unemployment contested the assertion that business alone could solve the problem of mass unemployment. At its most fundamental, the idea of full employment encapsulated the belief that only government intervention could mitigate the intrinsic problems that

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afflicted modern capitalism. The tendency toward the accumulation of excessive capital relative to the profitable opportunities for its investment could not be resolved through the operations of the free market on its own. In 1943, two years before the congressional debate over full employment, economist Alan Sweezy encapsulated the growing consensus in progressive circles that only an increase in consumption could redress the accumulation of excess capital. Writing for the staid American Economic Review, Sweezy argued, “We must manage somehow to direct part of the excessive volume of saving we tend to do at a high level of income back to consumption spending and thus prevent its having a depressing effect on income and productive activity.” Short of successfully exploiting new markets or using the stimulus of war to produce a floodtide of armaments, the only effective solution that a market economy had provided for overproduction to date was depression.38 For Sweezy, as much as for Ezekiel, this bleak prospect left only the “instrumentality of government” to resolve it. Only through some combination of public investment, redistributive tax policy, the expansion of the social wage, and guided production targets could society compensate for the inability of the free market system to generate sufficient employment.39 As wartime defense contracting finally began to put Americans back to work, activists and intellectuals focused on maintaining maximum employment. As political economist Mark Blyth argues, the ideas we’ve been examining functioned to reduce social uncertainty by explaining the nature of the crisis that Americans faced and by establishing the framework for new social institutions. At the same time, they informed collective action and strengthened developing coalitions. Additionally, they served as “weapons” in the struggle for control over key political instruments.40 And yet, as we’ve discovered, actors beyond the field of economic and labor policy shaped the intellectual horizon of full employment. The Federal Council of Churches, the Catholic Social Action Department, the National Council of Jewish Women, and a constellation of groups that supported postwar planning poured their own ethical and ideological views into the vessel of full employment.41 As much as some of its proponents may have wished to reduce the question to one of technique alone, the broadening scope of discussion about what full employment meant ensured that it remained a debate over social values, ethical principles, and political priorities. *** Despite the widening enthusiasm for full employment discussion, the overarching reality governing the progress of any program of social democratic reform was the steady advance of a right-wing movement during the war. In 1942,

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the Republicans made dramatic inroads on the Democrats. When only some 28 million out of a potential 80 million voters cast a ballot in the midterm elections, the Republicans capitalized, winning nine Senate and forty-four congressional seats. Republicans also took control of the governorships of California, New York, and Michigan. Since urban areas seemed to be the source for the 22 million vote decline, Democrats concluded that working-class support had deteriorated. If the fortunes of the New Deal were to improve, the Democrats would have to renew their efforts to mobilize urban industrial laborers.42 The activities of the new Congress only confirmed the urgency of this program. In power, the right-wing alliance between southern Democrats and northern Republicans crystallized around opposition to the New Deal. The alliance wasted no time in dismantling the National Youth Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farm Security Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Resources Planning Board. Senate obstructionism thwarted an anti-poll tax bill that the House had endorsed. Congress eliminated subsidies provided to consumers under the provisions of the Commodities Credit Corporation. Southern legislators repeatedly denounced the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In response to repeated walkouts by the United Mine Workers, conservatives drafted legislation to curb the power of organized labor. They combined to pass the Smith-Connally Act over a presidential veto. The measure authorized the president to seize war production facilities threatened by a strike. It required unions to give thirty-day notice for any planned walk-out, and authorized the arrest of strikers engaged in any unlawful job action. Still not satisfied, the conservative Congress repudiated the Kilgore-Murray bill. The measure had provided for federal supervision of unemployment insurance and economic planning through a suite of initiatives that included public housing, works projects, regional economic development, industrial coordination, the extension of social protections, and progressive taxation. Justified in the language of wartime efficiency, the conservative backlash focused its attention on organized labor and the movement for racial equality.43 Conservative forces mobilized against specific New Deal programs, but the larger objective was to discredit economic planning altogether. The Wall Street Journal captured the right’s animosity toward government encroachment on the presumed prerogatives of business. Planning, it proclaimed, should not be assigned to “theorists or advocates of collectivism or professional officeholders. Master plans, prepared and administered by agencies of political origin, mean control of industry by such agencies.”44

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The National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) quickly became the target of right-wing hostility. Since its incarnation in 1934 as the National Planning Board, it had gathered together an eclectic group of policy experts and academic specialists to explore comprehensive solutions to the problems of housing, electrical power, natural resources, public investments, social welfare, and the organization of the economy itself. Suffused with social democratic sensibilities from the beginning, the National Resources Planning Board became the major government exponent for the democratization of the economic order. While in theory the board celebrated the idea of private enterprise, in practice, it lauded the capacity of planned industrial manufacturing to generate managed abundance. Although some historians describe the board’s efforts as the ultimate statement of New Deal liberalism,45 a broader perspective produces another conclusion. By critiquing the unregulated industrial system, advocating for a dramatically expanded system of social welfare, and making the critical case that government should “guarantee the right to his place as a worker and the right to income received under conditions compatible with self-respect when he is unable to work,” the board made a major departure from any tradition recognizable as liberalism. In fact, the board made the transition from liberalism to social democracy explicit. “Our efforts to establish life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Charles Merriam and his associates argued, “are not effective until they rest on a firm foundation of social and economic security.” Just as important, the programs they promoted for democratic economic planning struck at the presumptions of capital to control labor markets and make investment decisions according to their own narrow interests.46 At the basis of the NRPB’s promotion of a commitment to full employment in the postwar era was the belief that American society required economic democracy. This conviction echoed Bishop Sheil’s belief in a “social revolution.” “Although the most pressing job at present is speeding up production of defense materials and strengthening our armed forces,” the board conceded, “it is imperative to begin planning for the tremendous economic and social readjustments which must be made after the war [emphasis added].”47 This included long-term planning in the area of community services. Here, the board  set out to extend its jurisdiction into education, social assistance, nutrition, and public welfare. In addition to public works, urban renewal, the expansion of hospital, sanitation, and recreational facilities, the board cast its planning net over the development of water resources, transportation, industrial development, and, most disturbingly for private insurers, over medical and dental care. Even more boldly, board researchers advocated for the “democratic

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participation of working people” in the determination of working conditions, wage rates, and working hours.48 Although NRPB members paid homage to private enterprise, they simultaneously advocated for policies that challenged the most cherished prerogatives of capitalism.49 The “profit-motivated system of private enterprise” could not sufficiently develop American productive capacities to meet the needs of a society that had only recently confronted the consequences of unfettered capitalism. This startling admission moved the board to call for a fundamental realignment of political and economic power. Although they insisted that “no new system” was required—only a “clear realization and bold determination to push government into lines where it is needed”—their own analysis highlighted the irreconcilable tensions between the objectives of full employment and profit maximization.50 The board’s bold probing of the perimeters of American liberal political culture was fully evident in its 1942 report titled Security, Work, and Relief Policies. Published in 1943, it made the case that the growing opposition to federal  power  was really aimed at stopping the movement for economic democracy. The study advocated for an expansion of social security to protect farm and domestic laborers, the establishment of a national health insurance system, and massive public investments in public works programs. Again, the board aimed not simply to correct a temporary downturn but to create the conditions for an expansive, radically democratic version of full employment. At almost the same time, the board released economist Alvin Hansen’s After the War—Full Employment. Like Security, Work, and Relief, Hansen’s study advocated for a massive expansion of the New Deal safety net, including old age pensions, family allowances, and public health.51 In linking the extension of social insurance to full employment, the expansion of the social wage to the empowerment of working people, the NRPB went beyond the more exploratory and more famous Beveridge Report published in Britain at the same time. Together, these reports represented the most ambitious expression of the belief that business alone could not guarantee economic security.52 Indeed, both moved beyond social democracy to envision a much greater degree of workingclass control over the production process itself. The possibility that a comprehensive social democratic program could open the door to racial improvement profoundly alarmed the defenders of white supremacy. By May 1943, Senator Harry Byrd, chair of the Joint Economic Committee, had announced his determination to dismantle the NRPB. He had plenty of southern support, including Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings.

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Congress certainly objected to the shift of power toward the executive branch, but it did little to stop it. Dozens of administrative boards materialized or consolidated power during the war, including the War Production Board, the Office of War Mobilization, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under Jesse Jones, the inveterate adversary of Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace. Most of these drew power to the executive branch and to the benefit of the business interests that profited so handsomely from the cost-plus contracts that accompanied mass mobilization. Few southerners or conservative Republicans raised any objections. The opposition to the National Resources Planning Board was an exception. It was not motivated by a tug of war between two branches of government. Nor was it the expression of some abstract American anti-statist tradition.53 Instead, it was designed to stave off federal government intervention into private enterprise and the racially bisected labor market of the South. In the debates over appropriations for the NRPB, Robert Taft, perennial defender of the prerogatives of business, underlined the real source of concern about its activities. “A policy of deficit spending is implicit in the measures the board proposes and in its attitude toward the spending of government money. In the second place, the board’s plans are based on unlimited government interference in and regulation of all business activity, plus a very large amount of government regulation of what is now private industry.” In short, Taft, along with the Chamber of Commerce and the anti-New Deal press, objected to higher taxes for business but also to any infringement on its presumed authority over investment priorities and labor policies.54 For their part, white southerners opposed the board because it threatened to encroach on a racially stratified labor market that maintained an abundant supply of agricultural labor, black subjugation, and low wages in the manufacturing sector. The combined opposition of northern Republicans and southern conservatives was enough to terminate congressional funding for the NRPB, which folded in 1943.55 Congressional conservatives and their business allies may have deplored the board’s recommendations, but working-class Americans cheered them. In a public opinion poll conducted in 1944, Americans were asked about the board’s Security, Work, and Relief, which advocated for an aggressive expansion of the social security system. A commanding 76 percent endorsed the plan while only 15 percent disapproved. Support broke down along class lines, as business executives and the wealthy expressed the most virulent opposition to the program. The board’s proposals to provide targeted financial and educational assistance to

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veterans generated strong support. It provided the seedbed for the 1944 GI Bill. Soldiers still on the battlefields of Europe wrote to express their enthusiastic support for the board’s report. “These efforts put forth by yourself and staff amidst the trials and tribulations of a world at war adds only to our devotion of the country we serve,” wrote a sergeant stationed in Italy, providing a comforting “assurance that we are not to be forgotten.”56 Citing a 1944 Fortune poll on what workers wanted after victory, popular economist Stuart Chase underlined the primary place that economic security occupied in the American working-class imagination. An annual guaranteed wage, the chance for advancement, the desire to be treated “like human beings,” and the yearning for social purpose in their work meant more than higher wages and shorter hours. “Most workers,” Chase concluded, “feel that the federal government should guarantee security in the form of full employment.”57 The wider impulse for social security through guaranteed employment now ran directly counter to the conservative reaction that had become the prevailing voice in Congress. *** The anti-progressive tidal wave also galvanized organized labor in support of the New Deal. Economic planning for full employment became a key element of this renewed program. In July 1943, only months after the fateful debate over the NRPB, the CIO leadership launched the Political Action Committee. As Philip Murray, president of the CIO, observed at the organization’s sixth annual convention, “the deplorable record of the 78th Congress has brought sharply home to labor the dire results of its political apathy in 1942, and has made manifest the necessity of more effective intervention by its members in the political life of our nation.”58 Under the leadership of Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and political confidante of President Roosevelt, the CIO-PAC would try to shape Democratic Party policy while mobilizing working-class support at the base.59 The CIO-PAC sought to build a political presence through ward and precinct organization. Through a steady stream of pro-labor propaganda and social democratic pamphleteering, the CIO-PAC would raise the political consciousness of workers and elect candidates committed to “enlightened domestic and foreign policies.”60 At the same time, the organization founded the National Citizens Political Action Committee, which sought to build a cross-class alliance between labor and white-collar workers, religious and civic groups, left-wing intellectuals, and progressive professionals dedicated to advancing the leftward movement of the

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New Deal.61 By 1944, it had come to include some of the most prominent and talented progressives in the United States.62 Representing progressive agricultural interests, the National Farmers Union figured prominently in the movement for full employment. From its ranks would be drawn two of the key exponents of the right to a job through legislation: James Loeb and Paul Sifton. Loeb, Sifton, and Sifton’s wife, Claire, would in turn fashion the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), a primarily middleclass group, which would lobby Congress for progressive legislation. While the National Farmers Union functioned at the grass-roots to mobilize agrarian support for economic planning, the UDA operated primarily in Washington, DC, to advocate, agitate, and report on legislative developments. Established in 1941 by a group of pro-intervention socialists, middle-class progressives, union leaders, and New Deal figures, the Union for Democratic Action predicated its activism on the exclusion of communists and support for economic justice. Despite its impressive progressive bona fides, by 1944 it could only claim one chapter and a paltry 5,000 members. Yet the group’s voice in Washington was disproportionate to its membership. By 1944, it had emerged as the leading champion of full employment legislation.63 Assessing the political landscape in early 1944, Paul Sifton of the UDA recapitulated Hillman’s critique of the resurgent business ideology that harkened back to the 1920s. “You are handicapped,” he told the readers of the UDA Congressional Newsletter, by media that is “largely dominated by business thinking that now promotes a return to Hooverism under the phoney ‘free enterprise’ slogan.” Instead of relying on leading political figures (including Roosevelt) who had failed to defend working-class interests, Sifton called on UDA supporters to develop effective organizations of political mobilization. “Democracy is going to have to learn to live with Abundance & like it or give way to increasingly anti-democratic enforcement of artificial scarcity,” Sifton proclaimed. Following the disastrous election of 1942, big business had only increased its control of war production and the wider economy. For its part, Congress had done everything in its power to obstruct progressive taxation, undermine the expansion of social security, and derail plans for demobilization. As the momentum toward military victory increased, and as the prospect of a postwar economic collapse loomed larger, left-labor political action groups intensified their appeal for a national commitment to full employment planning.64 They finally received a signal of support from the president. Inspired by the National Resources Planning Board, President Roosevelt used his January 1944 State of the Union address to announce an Economic Bill of Rights that set out

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the terms of a new struggle for social democratic justice. Enunciating the right to “useful and remunerative jobs,” to “earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” and to “adequate medical care” as well as “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,”65 Roosevelt seemed to articulate the aspirations of working-class Americans for an end to the tyranny of the business cycle. The address regenerated the left and reinvigorated the drive for full employment. The social democratic ideas that had been submerged by wartime patriotism surfaced again, leading the UDC and other popular front groups to simultaneously rail against and rally for Roosevelt. “Farmer and labor have been vainly urging Administration to cut them into reconversion and postwar planning.” The failure to follow through on these promises would mean a return to the economics of scarcity, marked by lower wages, declining farm incomes, and unemployment.66 At the same time, Roosevelt ally and left-leaning Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace launched a tour of the West to champion economic planning and full employment. In the process, Wallace became a “lightning rod for the Economic Bill of Rights.”67 The blocking of his renomination to the Democratic ticket at the hands of party conservatives and with the blessing of FDR represented a bitter defeat for progressives. Wallace’s ouster convinced James G. Patton, president of the National Farmers Union and a vigorous supporter of the former vice president’s policies, to agitate for an amendment to the MurrayKilgore Reconversion Bill that would require lawmakers to commit firmly to a policy of public spending to achieve full employment. “Your wires, your letters, your statements in public prints and radio will stiffen FDR in his intent to make full employment ace domestic issue in campaign.” The idea was now materializing into a political possibility.68 No less than the UDC, the CIO-aligned National Citizens Political Action Committee clarified what was at stake in the general election of 1944. “It is a contest between two ways of life,” announced NCPAC secretary Clark Foreman. “One way offers co-operation among nations for enduring peace, and a program to give full employment and real security at home by using our resources for the benefit of all.” The other, Foreman warned, included “economic imperialism,” the “exploitation of the many by the few at home,” as well as a prescription for unemployment and international frictions.69 In advance of the general election, the CIO-PAC enunciated its “People’s Program of 1944.” It placed economic planning and full employment at the center of its vision of postwar prosperity. Recapitulating the president’s Economic Bill of Rights, the committee argued that the United States already possessed the “natural, industrial and human

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resources and the technical skills to make these rights a reality.”70 This had little to do with a consumerist vision of capitalist affluence. Instead, it resonated with the language of rights and obligations that a “new life of plenty” made possible.71 Voting rights activist and CIO-PAC organizer Henry Lee Moon advanced the case that a society of abundance made the achievement of racial equality possible. While the principal point of his address to the Nation associates conference in 1944 was to extol the virtues of FDR, Moon argued that “we must have an economy of abundance—a society with jobs for all, decent housing, plenty of food, and adequate educational, health, and recreational facilities.”72 In the pivotal election year of 1944, it meant democratic economic planning. To immunize the CIO-PAC from the accusations of communism, or as an expression of their disappointment at its failure to articulate more radical proposals, historians have played up the program’s compatibility with capitalism. Instead of a statement of radical political economy, it was—in the estimation of one leading historian—a reflection of the committee’s “social Keynesianism” and commitment to social welfare reform.73 Yet the concessions to private enterprise had less to do with the CIO-PAC’s deference to competitive capitalism than its determination to deflect criticism. Almost since its inception, the CIO-PAC had been subjected to accusations of communist subversion, toadying to the Roosevelt administration, and violating the Smith-Connally Act by illegitimately funneling union contributions to the Democratic Party. A 215-page report by the Dies Committee fueled the accusation that Hillman and the CIO-PAC were agents of communist infiltration. He became the focus of a vicious red-baiting campaign. Aided and abetted by Martin Dies and representative Clare Booth Luce, wife of media mogul Henry Luce, right-wing newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and anti-New Deal columnists such as Westbrook Pegler hurled a torrent of invective against the labor statesman. Much of the abuse targeted his ethnicity, national origins, and evident willingness to tolerate communists in the interest of labor unity.74 Hillman may have become the focus of right-wing antipathy, but he understood that the underlying objective of the campaign was to extinguish the political influence of organized labor. The CIO-PAC’s opposition to the poll tax, commitment to black voting rights, and support for interracial unionism alarmed southerners who had increasingly considered the New Deal a dangerous exercise in social engineering. Its campaign to politicize rank-and-file workers and challenge the right-wing assault on labor unionism proved equally objectionable

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to big business. In an address to the United Electrical Workers in September 1944, Hillman dissected the political motives of the right-wing crusade: There is nothing new about any of this. Anti-Semitism and the Bolshevik bogey have been the basic propaganda lines of German, Italian, and Spanish fascism for years. They are the basic propaganda lines of America reaction. The truth of the matter is that to the reactionaries anything is Communism which tends to curtail the prerogatives of the privileged few. For the reactionaries the TVA is Communism; the FEPC is Communism; collective bargaining is Communism. For those who think exclusively of property rights, any use of the Federal power to assure a more equitable distribution of the fruits of free enterprise—to assure equality of opportunity in a free enterprise system—or to cure the evils of overconcentration of wealth and abuse of special privilege—is Communism.75

The libertarian rhetoric did little to distract Hillman from the class imperatives behind the anti-PAC campaign. By promoting racial equality, a social wage, and constraints on the power of industrial capitalism, the CIO-PAC aimed at preventing business from playing off elements of the working class against each other. Hillman’s address was not simply an appeal for fair play but a challenge to the presumptions and “prerogatives of the privileged few.” Defending the CIOPAC against right-wing attacks, Hillman argued that the Republicans and their business allies “dare not openly advocate” the laissez-faire principles which they applied while in power. Instead, he told the United Electrical workers, they “try to hide their discredited do-nothing doctrine under a smokescreen of states [sic] rights” and rugged individualism, even while the American people implicitly rejected those doctrines. The reactionary assault on the New Deal and the CIO-PAC was not simply political jousting but a “class war” against the social democratic imperative of the New Deal era. The movement for full employment now seemed to encapsulate this imperative.76 *** It was in the context of the ideological and political struggles over the Great Depression and at a time when the very structures of American capitalism were changing under the force of current events that the idea of full employment crystallized. Wartime mobilization produced demographic dislocations that altered the character of the industrial working class. It created new geographic concentrations of economic power. It undermined racial and gender hierarchies already shaken by the developments of the 1930s. In this maelstrom of change, exponents of full employment did more than fashion fiscal tools to correct the

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business cycle; they participated in a wider movement to expand the reach of working-class democracy.77 The CIO understood this better than most. The war had revolutionized the working-class perspective because it had demonstrated that the eradication of unemployment was not some distant and elusive dream. Workers understood “the production possibilities of American industry,” as the CIO explained in its 1994 pamphlet “Steel Fights for the Nation.” Workers had seen “full employment in action.” Unlike the armies of the dispossessed who cast a shadow over the American experiment in the early 1930s, the industrial laborer of the 1940s knew that the nation had the resources and the political capacity to banish misery. “They are convinced, therefore, that a job at an annual living wage is a right, not a privilege.”78 Achieving full employment during the war only increased the expectation that it could be sustained in the postwar period. But it would depend in large part on political leadership. Roosevelt won a fourth term, but by only 3.6 million votes or 53 percent of the vote, smaller than in 1932, 1936, or 1940.79 Despite growing skepticism that Roosevelt would champion a progressive agenda, despite mounting hostility from the right toward this very program, full employment had become integral to the vision of postwar economic democracy.80

Notes *

Portions of this chapter first in Michael Dennis, “The Idea of Full Employment: A Challenge to Capitalism in the New Deal Era,” Labor 14 (2) (2017): 69–93. 1 Weir and Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Response to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” 146. 2 Ibid. 3 Weir, “Full Employment as a Political Issue in the United States,” 379–80. 4 On the connection between full employment, labor militancy, and social democratic reform, see Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 125–7. 5 Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: Free Press, 2011), 163–4. 6 Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment, 102–5. 7 Ibid., 102–5; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 175–6.

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Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 38–47, 234. 9 For example, Steve Fraser describes a “keynesian elite” at the head of the Labor Department, the Interior Department, the National Labor Relations Board, and the National Resources Planning Board. But the suggestion that Beardsley Ruml and Frederic Delano presided over a “welfare state” overlooks the protean, evolving, and frequently contentious policies that were developing in an ideological and political environment that was not nearly as stable as Fraser suggests. In the conflict over full employment, liberals would discover how fragile this “state” really was. See “The Labor Question,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 71. 10 The debate over how to calculate the unemployment rate, which pitted labor statistician Stanley Leberbott against economist Michael Darby, the latter of whom pinned the rate at 9.5 percent for 1940, still historically high judged against the levels of the interwar years, is captured here: http://socialdemocracy21stcentury. blogspot.ca/2013/07/us-unemployment-in-1930s.html, accessed May 26, 2017. 11 James Myers, “Opening Statement,” Report of the Interfaith Conference on Unemployment, Washington, DC, June 4–6, 1940, 4, Records of the Department of Social Action, National Catholic Welfare Council, box 7, folder 4, “Unemployment Conference Reports 1940,” Catholic University of America Research Center and Archives, hereafter cited as Social Action Department, CUA. 12 For more on the prevalence of this worldview and its disintegration across the twentieth century, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge: The Belnkap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2011), 4–10. 13 “Findings,” Report of the Interfaith Conference on Unemployment, 6, Social Action Department papers, CUA. 14 Ibid., 4–5. 15 John Ryan, “The Concern of Religion with the Unemployment Problems,” 9–10; A.F. Hinrichs, “Where Can the Unemployed Be Absorbed?” 12–13; George Soule, “Factors Involved in Planning,” 32–3; Mordecai Ezekiel, “Agriculture’s Interest in Full Employment,” 18–19, in Report of the Interfaith Conference on Unemployment, ibid. 16 Olive D. Streator, “Effect of Unemployment on Race Relations,” ibid., 13–14. 17 Philip Murray, “Labor’s Interest in Democratic Planning,” ibid., 33. 18 Jerry Voorhis, “The House Conference on Unemployment,” ibid., 27–8. 19 Ibid., 27. 20 Reverend R.A. McGowan, “Role of Government and Voluntary Organizations in Dealing with Unemployment Problem,” Unemployment Must Be Abolished!, Interfaith Conference, June 4, 5, 6, 1940, Washington, DC, box 7, folder 4, “Unemployment Conference Reports 1940,” Social Action Department, CUA. 8

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21 E.A. Goldenweiser, “Unemployment and Finance,” Report of the Interfaith Conference on Unemployment, 23, Social Action Department papers, CUA. 22 Goldenweiser, “Unemployment and Finance,” 23. 23 Raymond McGowan to Colston E. Warne, August 16, 1940, box 14, folder 11, “Special Topics Files, Legislation, National Labor Relations Act,” Social Action Department papers, CUA. 24 Note, for example, economist John G. Pierson’s assertion in 1942 that “a planned program of federal, state, and local emergency public projects should be maintained as a regular part of the nation’s economic apparatus, and employment thereon should be expanded and contracted as may be required to keep the total number of jobs adjusted to the labor supply.” See “An Economic Policy to Insure Full Employment,” Antioch Review 2 (Summer 1942): 229. The idea also reflected the legacy of the National Resource Planning Board’s Public Works Committee but also the continuing influence of the Progressive Era’s enthusiasm for public works programs. See Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 234–5. 25 Arthur R. Williams et al., “Cutting the Deck: New Deal, Fair Deal, and the Employment Act of 1946: Problems of Study and Interpretation,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress: The New Deal and Its Aftermath, ed. Thomas P. Wolf et al. (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 137–8. 26 Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, “Labor Day Sunday Message, 1944,” Union Postal Clerk, September 1944, 51, box 15, folder 10, “Special Topic Files, Protestant Labor Activities, Federal Council of Churches,” Social Action Department papers, CUA. 27 Ibid. 28 L.E. Keller, “Labor’s Contribution to Postwar Planning and to the Future,” Address to the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems, March 28, 1944, box 15, folder 1, “Special Topics, Post-War Reconstruction, 1940–1945,” ibid. 29 W.E.B. DuBois, “A Chronicle of Race Relations,” Phylon 5 (Winter 1944): 73–4; as Jerome Bruner noted, the week after President Roosevelt released the National Resources Planning Board’s Security, Work, Relief, the Office of Public Opinion Research at Princeton University submitted the following question to a survey: “According to a new plan for social security announced by the President, the government would provide higher social-security payments to everybody, young or old, who is in want because of unemployment or illness or disability after the war. Would you approve or disapprove of such a new social-security law?” The answer was a commanding 76 percent in favor, suggesting support not only for the expansion of Social Security but for the redistributive principles which undergirded it. See Mandate from the People (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), 159. 30 Stuart Chase, The Road We Are Travelling, 1914–1942 (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1942), 83.

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31 “Postwar Economic and Social Problems: Lecture by the Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago, Most Reverend Bernard J. Sheil,” Speech of Hon. Scott W. Lucas of Illinois in the Senate of the United States, June 27, 1945 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1945), 2–3. 32 Ibid., 3. 33 Ibid., 4. 34 Ibid., 5. 35 Ibid., 5; Keller, “Labor’s Contribution to Postwar Planning and to the Future,” 4. 36 Ruth Milkman, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 105. 37 Stuart Chase was not alone in this assumption, but he was particularly convinced that technical specialists should determine the outlines of a planned society and formulate the techniques for stimulating mass consumption. As historian Robert Westbrook writes, “Chase was as interested in promoting the power of the technical intelligentsia as he was in providing for the economic well-being of the consumer. Indeed… the interests and ideals of these two groups were, for him inseparable.” For Chase, as for many planners influenced by a progressive tradition that emphasized expert leadership, “social efficiency” was as much the objective of reform as democratic abundance. See Robert B. Westbrook, “Tribune of the Technostructure: The Popular Economics of Stuart Chase,” American Quarterly 32 (Autumn 1980): 399. 38 Alan R. Sweezy, “The Government’s Responsibility for Full Employment,” American Economic Review 33 (March 1943): 19–22. 39 Sweezy, ibid. 40 Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34–40, 74–9. 41 As the drive for a full employment bill intensified in Congress, the National Council of Jewish Women opened the pages of its monthly magazine to Senator James Murray, who also recruited the organization to testify in support of the bill before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. See Murray’s “The Threat of Unemployment: America’s Number One Problem” and article titled “Council Endorses Full Employment Bill” in The Council Woman, September–October 1945, pp. 3 and 13, box 855, folder 1, “79th Congress, Full Production,” James E. Murray Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana-Missoula, hereafter cited as Murray Papers, UM. 42 Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 500; Albert A. Blum and J. Douglas Smyth, “National Political Action Committee: An Example of Liberal-Labor Cooperation,” Societas—A Review off Social History 1 (Summer 1971): 188. 43 Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery, 228–9; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 500–2; Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the

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Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013), 344–6, 389–402; Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II 1982 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 207–8. 44 Quoted in John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 237. 45 Reagan, Designing a New America, 219–20. 46 National Resources Planning Board, Security, Work, and Relief Policies (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 1–2. 47 National Resources Planning Board, Post-War Planning: Full Employment, Security, Building America (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 2. 48 Ibid., 12–22. 49 Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery, 216–17, 229. 50 Ibid., 13, 22–3; National Resources Planning Board, Security, Work, and Relief Policies, 2–3. 51 Hansen, After the War—Full Employment, 19. 52 Brinkley, The End of Reform, 252–4. 53 The arguments that Brinkley makes in The End of Reform, 255–7. 54 Quoted in Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 232. 55 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 378–9; When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). 56 Suzanne Mettler, “The Creation of the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944: Melding Social and Participatory Citizenship Ideals,” Journal of Policy History 17 (Fall 2005): 355–6 quotation on 356. 57 Stuart Chase, Democracy Under Pressure: Special Interests vs. the Public Welfare (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1945), 88–9. 58 Quoted in Joseph Gaer, The First Round: The Story of the CIO Political Action Committee (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), 61. 59 Ibid., 503. 60 Blum and Smyth, “National Political Action Committee,” 189; Philip Murray report in Gaer, 61. 61 Ibid., 189–90; “Hillman Outlines New Group’s Aims: Citizen’s Committee to Drive Home the Campaign Issues by Every Available Means,” New York Times, August 6, 1944. 62 George Norris, senator from Nebraska and consistent advocate of regional economic planning, functioned as honorary chairman, while Sidney Hillman became the effective leader of the new organization. Liberal economists, academics, theologians, lawyers, union leaders, writers, progressive politicians, and entertainers dominated the executive, bringing to its work the commitment to economic planning that pervaded the middle-class progressive perspective of the 1940s. See Gaer, The First Round, 215–17.

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63 Brinkley, The End of Reform, 260. 64 UDA Congressional Newsletter, January 3, 1944, box 25, folder titled “U.D.A. Congressional Newsletters,” Library of Congress Paul Field Sifton and Claire Sifton Papers, hereafter cited as LC. 65 Matthew Jones, “Freedom from Want,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 138. 66 UDA Congressional Newsletter, February 15, 1944, box 25, folder titled “U.D.A. Congressional Newsletters,” Sifton Papers, LC. 67 Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 87. 68 UDA Congressional Newsletter, September 20, 1944, box 25, folder titled “U.D.A. Congressional Newsletters,” Sifton Papers, LC; Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century, 141. 69 NCPAC, “This Is Our Plan,” January 6, 1945, box 18, folder titled “NCPAC 1945,” Baldwin papers; Clark Foreman, “Statement of the National Citizens Political Action Committee,” The Antioch Review 4 (Autumn 1944): 475. 70 “The People’s Program for 1944,” in Gaer, 199. 71 In particular, see CIO-PAC 1944 pamphlet titled “This Is Your America,” which stressed the themes of American abundance, plenty, and prosperity, the basis for a more equitable distribution of wealth and the achievement of racial equality. Box 16, folder II, “CIO Leaflets, Pamphlets, Broadsides 1943–46,” Baldwin papers. 72 CIO Political Action Committee press release, October 9, 1944, box 16, folder titled “CIO-PAC September-November, 1944,” Baldwin papers. 73 Steve Fraser also refers to Economic Bill of Rights and the “People’s Program for 1944” as the constituent elements of a “Keynesian cooperative commonwealth,” suggesting that the tendencies in public policy toward centralization, social engineering, and economic planning had more to do with “twentieth-century Capitalism than Soviet Communism.” In fact, it had to do with neither. As cautious as CIO-PAC leadership was politically, the vision it outlined in its program and its pronouncements on full employment anticipated a vigorous transformation of the American political economy. Insisting on the need for continuous management of employment and continuous regulation of the labor market at the expense of business authority, the CIO-PAC, the NCPAC, and its allies established the groundwork for an administrative form of democratic socialism. See Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 525–7. 74 Gaer, The First Round, 149–51; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 524–9; Curtis D. McDougall, Gideon’s Army, Vol 1: The Components of the Decision (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965), 49; “Calls PAC Agency of Red Aims Here: Dies Subcommittee Assails Both Groups, Say NCPAC Is ‘Supreme’ Communist Bid,”

64

75

76

77

78

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Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America New York Times, October 30, 1944; Louis Waldman, “Will the CIO Capture the Democratic Party?” Saturday Evening Post 217 (July 15, 1944): 22–3, 98–102. “Address to United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers by Sidney Hillman,” September 27th, 1944, box 16, folder titled “CIO-PAC September-November 1944,” Baldwin papers. “Address to United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers by Sidney Hillman,” September 27th, 1944, box 16, folder titled “CIO-PAC September-November 1944,” Beanie Baldwin papers, Special Collections, University of Iowa. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 40s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180–99. Hansen’s own contribution to the NRPB proved critical. In his 1942 study After the War—Full Employment he outlined a program of economic expansion that challenged the shibboleths of balanced budgets, advocated for a substantial redistribution of wealth, and anticipated the need for massive public works projects to compensate for the priorities of private capital. Hansen’s report, as well as the NRPB’s ambitious 1943 report titled Security, Work, and Relief Policies, established the groundwork for the idea of an “economic bill of rights,” which President Roosevelt enunciated in 1944. Wasem, Tackling Unemployment, 22–6; Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment, 106–7. CIO pamphlet “Steel Fights for the Nation,” 1944, 1–3, box 18, folder titled “Undated 1944,” Elmer Benson papers, Minnesota Historical Society; William Haber, “Economic and Social Readjustments in the Reconversion Period,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Selected Papers, SeventySecond Annual Meeting 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 30–1. The appeal of full employment and fair employment legislation among organized labor and civil rights groups is addressed in Lisa Phillips, A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 75–7. Alan Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 92–3. Frank Kingdon, An Uncommon Man: Henry Wallace and 60 Million Jobs (New York: Readers Press, 1945), 78.

3

A War against Want: Senator James E. Murray and the Political Campaign for Full Employment*

By the end of 1944, the struggle to advance a postwar conversion strategy had coalesced into a legislative campaign for full employment. The re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed like a vindication of the Economic Bill of Rights and the case for postwar planning. Even though the Murray-Kilgore bill and James G. Patton’s full employment amendment expired in Congress, the idea of legislating the right to work had gained widespread legitimacy. Now, Senator James E. Murray of Montana became its principal sponsor, and Henry Wallace one of its earliest and most eager supporters.1 Murray and the remaining New Dealers in Congress faced the daunting task of moving a bill that directly challenged the prerogatives of capital through an increasingly hostile Congress. That task only became more difficult when Roosevelt died in April 1945. Conservative maneuvers to rollback the New Deal only highlighted the class divisions which even wartime patriotism could not dissolve. Reactionaries in Congress and their business allies confronted a working-class movement that championed an activist government committed to postwar planning. Polling conducted by Jerome Bruner of the Office of Public Opinion Research at Princeton in early 1944 confirmed it. Asked whether they supported the idea of a central government agency authorized to manage postwar conversion, an astounding 75  percent of respondents answered in favor. The contrast between the conservative phalanx in Congress and popular opinion was not lost on Bruner. “Several weeks after the public thus expressed themselves,” he observed mordantly, “the National Resources Planning Board, the nearest thing to a coordinating agency, closed shop for lack of Congressional funds and authorization.”2

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Additionally important, Bruner’s surveys had uncovered a desire for democratic economic planning. Those surveyed did not long for faceless and authoritarian bureaucracies. Instead, “nine out of ten of those who want a central agency want to see business, labor, and agriculture represented in the agency’s councils.” The cooperative, participatory vision of planning that had animated Bishop Sheil’s prescription for the postwar order and which George Soule, Phillip Murray, and Mordecai Ezekiel also espoused now found widespread support. Leaving aside for a moment the yearnings for a society in which business would play by some new corporatist arrangement, a full 73 percent of those surveyed supported the notion that the government should provide work to those who could not find a job in the private sector. In other words, optimistic expectations of collaboration between business and labor ran headlong into support for a full employment regime that most business leaders had already decisively rejected. What Bruner reflected was the popular conviction that “the principle of the Right to Work” had become an “American credo.” Surveying the evidence of polls that captured the opinions of some 1,500 to 3,500 Americans from across the country, Bruner concluded that the Roosevelt administration had received a “mandate” for economic planning. “Planning should be courageous, aggressive. Rationing, price control, subsidies to small business, fiscal controls—we are willing to accept any or all of these and more if they are necessary steps in averting depression.”3 It was in this atmosphere that a Canadian transplant to Montana became the leading voice for full employment. Born in the farm country of southwestern Ontario, Senator James Murray attended the Catholic St. Jerome’s College in Berlin, Ontario, but moved to Butte, Montana, to live with a wealthy uncle when his father died in 1897. After graduating from NYU law school, Murray returned to Butte to establish a practice. Drawn to local politics, he found himself identifying with the plight of hardscrabble copper miners, whose fortunes only deteriorated when the Great Depression struck. At the same time, Murray inherited a substantial sum from his entrepreneurial uncle. Yet watching some of his investments turn to ash following the 1929 stock market collapse only solidified his populist antipathies toward the malefactors of wealth. By the time that Murray secured the Democratic Party nomination for senator in 1934, the wealthy, small-town attorney had become a noted ally of organized labor and a vigorous supporter of Roosevelt. He also championed small business against growing corporate influence, a development conspicuously evident to him in the power wielded by the Anaconda Copper Company in Montana. By

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1944, he subscribed to an expansive vision of social security that would ensure employment and advance economic democracy.4 Murray’s social democratic, anti-monopoly bona fides and his loyalty to the Roosevelt administration won him the chairs of key committees. It positioned him to be a leading voice in reconversion policy and democratic planning. During the war years, he lent his support to a plan for regional development of the Missouri River Valley that would imitate the achievements of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the Murray-Wagner-Dingle bill, he championed a dramatic extension of Social Security and a national health insurance system, the kind envisioned by the 1942 Beveridge Report and the National Resources Planning Board. Chairing the War Contract Subcommittee, Murray joined senators Harvey Kilgore and Harry Truman in fashioning a measure that provided systematic planning for postwar conversion, only to see southern white supremacists amend it beyond recognition. Contrary to Murray’s intentions, the War Mobilization and Reconversion Act provided no minimum national standards for unemployment benefits. It also deprived federal employees who had lost their jobs of adequate unemployment assistance and denied relocation subsidies to workers laid off due to military production cutbacks.5 Besides the landmark GI Bill, Murray and the progressive Democrats in Congress had little to show for their efforts to legislate the Four Freedoms into existence. Yet in the debates on the reconversion bill, Murray had established the legitimacy of economic planning as an alternative to handing the economy back to business interests. Under the direction of Bertram Gross and planners such as Gerhard Colm and Louis Bean from the Bureau of the Budget, Murray’s War  Contracts Subcommittee crafted a bill that fused conversion and the right to a job.6 The resulting full employment measure carried forward the ambitions of democratic planners stretching back to the 1930s. If Murray and his congressional allies steadily downplayed the role that federal government intervention would have to play in maintaining wartime-level employment, the proposed augmentation of federal planning power did not escape the notice of contemporary observers. “In brief,” the United States News observed in a special report published in December 1944, “the plan offers a formula for a planned economy in the United States.” The program would be predicated on a government commitment to provide work for those seeking employment when the private sector failed to produce adequate jobs. Despite the designers’ overtures to the primacy of private enterprise, their insistence that no individual

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would be guaranteed a specific job, and their aversion to deficit spending as a principal avenue to job creation, astute observers understood the overarching message. If the “right to a job” were to have any substance at all, the federal government would have to pick up whatever slack remained when private hiring fell short of the public demand for employment.7 More than this, the United States News article underlined the potential for government intervention in areas which business had considered sacrosanct. “The program calls for Government supervision of private investment,” the report concluded rather prosaically, “and for other controls to keep the business machine in balance as that investment goes on. In it is room for many TVA’s, for broader social security, for help to farmers, aid to small business and curbs on big business.” Despite Murray’s insistence to the contrary, United States News considered deficit spending the “keystone” of the program.8 This was legislation that promoted a program of coordinated postwar conversion, maximum employment, and government-directed economic planning. Combining these objectives, the Murray bill would draw on the deep reservoir of public enthusiasm for economic security. And yet as much as it represented a rupture with the laissez-faire past, Murray’s 1945 Full Employment Bill harkened back to the elusive Progressive dream of business and government cooperation in the public interest. Mediating between the interests of business and workers, the federal government would supervise the creation of a high-wage, maximum production economy that would guarantee security and private enterprise. For each of Murray’s conciliatory overtures to business interests, however, for each of his earnest invocations of a common interest between business and workers in the revival of prosperity, the senator exposed the internal contradictions of Keynesian full employment thought as well as the tensions inherent in democratic planning. At the same time, he revealed his own implicit if unconscious desire to fashion a social order that looked quite a bit different than the free enterprise system he venerated. Writing only a few years later, economist Edward Everett Hale of the University of Texas would untangle some of the more contradictory tendencies in the Keynesian demand management scheme that undergirded Murray’s Full Employment Act. In an unpublished address given at a seminar in 1949, Hale argued that Keynes could deceive himself about the compatibility between his political economy and the existing system of capitalism only by denying the conclusions to which his analysis invariably led. Reducing interest rates to zero, for example, could not be achieved short of socializing the banking system, the very anchor of modern capitalism. Yet Hale was interested in more than

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critiquing the implications of Keynes’ plan to render the “marginal efficiency of capital” negligible. He wanted to outline the contradictions of the Keynesian full employment vision itself. If, as Keynes’ contended, no mechanisms existed under the prevailing order to compel private investment to redress the disparity between the income that would be produced under maximum employment and the quantity of that income which society would actually expend on consumer items, the “encroachment” on private enterprise would have to continue apace. As Hale explained, the federal government would eventually exhaust the public works programs that society really needed. It would then turn to those sectors that had “been posted and held for private investment only.” Industrial and finance capital would find itself increasingly under government management. “A program that could have no other result than the socialization of the entire economy is indeed a strange way to preserve capitalism,” Hale noted wryly.9 In effect, Hale was highlighting the contradictions of full employment capitalism, which its advocates, from Pierson to Ezekiel to Hansen, had resisted.10 Despite the inherent tensions, Murray’s bill enshrined the idea of the right to work, contesting one of the most powerful assumptions about the privilege of capital in American society. “All Americans able to work and seeking work have the right to useful, remunerative, regular, and full-time employment,” the bill stated. It was a right which the US government would guarantee by ensuring the availability of “sufficient employment opportunities.” The notion that people had an entitlement to decent employment struck at the assertion that labor was a commodity, a factor of production lacking any unique dignity or claim on the nation’s vast material resources. “The people of America,” argued Senator Robert Wagner, a co-sponsor of the bill, during hearings conducted by the Banking and Currency Committee in July 1945, “also have an economic right to continuous full employment because that means the full enjoyment of the boundless resources and wealth with which providence has blessed us.”11 At the same session, co-sponsor Senator Elbert Thomas made the case that the bill represented a repudiation of President Grover Cleveland’s assertion in the midst of the Depression of 1893 that the government owed no responsibility to the people. The Constitution was “the companion of the American people in the accomplishment of the people’s social, economic, and political purposes,” not a bastion of privilege and private property, Thomas seemed to say.12 Despite its bold assertion of a universal right to work, the bill came accompanied by discriminatory qualifications. The measure guaranteed the right to work, at least for those who had finished school and “did not have fulltime housekeeping responsibilities.”13 In an historical moment of heightened

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democratic sensibilities, this sexist clause highlighted the gendered premises that underlay “full employment.” To ensure that veterans had access to employment opportunities, the bill’s sponsors and those who joined the congressional debates were prepared to sacrifice the interests of women, thus joining the wider effort to restore the conventional gender norms that had been so drastically upended during the war. The Senate eventually excised the discriminatory clause. Yet as historian Alice Kessler-Harris argues, the debates had revealed “that as late as 1945 no commitment to jobs would be allowed to undermine the prerogatives of families by tempting women to believe that they, too, might benefit from even the most abstract right to work.”14 The contradictions inherent in an allegedly democratic movement for full employment cut more ways than against the grain of capitalism. They also exposed the gendered limits of the New Deal social democratic imagination. The central administrative innovation proposed by the Full Employment Bill illustrated additional tensions. The bill provided for a National Production and Employment Budget, which the executive branch would prepare on an annual basis and submit to Congress for approval. The budget would estimate the projected size of the labor force, the “aggregate volume of investment and expenditures” from private enterprise, consumers, and all levels of government, as well as the gross national product necessary to maintain a “full employment volume of production.” If the estimate fell short of what was required to employ all those who were willing and able to work, the president would be expected to present a program that would close the gap. Fiscal and monetary policy would be deployed to resolve the disparity. Murray, Wagner, Thomas, and the other supporters routinely emphasized the bill’s preference for private investment over government spending. The idea was that government and business would collaborate in planning a level of production that would soak up the excess in the labor market. In Keynesian fashion, wage supports would ensure sufficient demand. Through nonintrusive tax and investment policies, the supporters argued, an unprecedented level of consumer demand would be unleashed, thus pacifying manufacturers queasy about the risk of overexpansion.15 The bill achieved far less than its most visionary proponents imagined. It conspicuously lacked the National Resources Planning Board’s proposal to use government agencies and Work Progress Administration-style direct job creation programs to compensate for private sector shortfalls. As it moved from under Murray’s control into the hands of Senator Robert Wagner’s Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, advisers steadily stripped it of its democratic socialist features. Again, promoters would have vigorously

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denied this, and historians such as Alan Brinkley have described this merely as “social Keynesianism.” Yet in its initial incarnation, the bill featured measures that significantly amplified the power of workers, impinged on the presumed prerogatives of capital, and looked toward an activist state. Fiscal Keynsians proved critical in this revisionist process. In its final version, even before it was turned over to the ultra-conservative House Committee on Expenditures, the architects of the measure had deliberately chosen not to defend the idea of direct job creation in the tradition of the Works Progress Administration.16 Responding to an inquiry from bill sponsor Robert Wagner in May 1945, perennial planner Beardsley Ruml offered a skeptical assessment. Now working as treasurer for Macy’s Department Store but still on the periphery of policymaking through his involvement in the Committee for Economic Development and the National Planning Association, Ruml identified some of the bill’s weaknesses. “I am afraid the program will fail if it is not implemented by appropriate measures that will automatically swing the pendulum in the right direction and keep it from swinging too far.” To remedy the weakness, Ruml called for specific measures, including progressive taxation, the expansion of social security, conservation, and, perhaps most important, public works programs. While Ruml consistently advocated a corporate perspective that applauded government support but resisted government direction,17 he underlined the deficiencies in a program long on bold proclamations but short on specific prescriptions. It reduced the power of the president in shaping policy. It also ensured that the more progressive economists who had contributed to planning theory would not have a voice.18 At the same time, it cut out any role for organized labor, consumer groups, and local constituencies in determining the shape of full employment policy. While applauding its noble intentions, some planning enthusiasts simply found the bill insufficiently clear on the redistribution of income and the prevention of excess savings necessary to avoid another crisis.19 Murray’s full employment bill certainly abandoned the NRPB’s most ambitious plans for democratic planning.20 Even so, it amounted to more than economic forecasting. Anais Miodek and Steven Attewell have argued that Wagner, and by association Murray, had clearly acquiesced to the liberal boundaries that insisted on limited government intervention in the provision of employment. Even so, their liberal defensiveness warred against their New Deal desire to challenge corporate power and ensure against the calamity of mass unemployment. We see continuing evidence of this underlying progressive strain in the policy options that implicitly contested business dominance. The bill provided that the executive branch could examine

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policies related to “banking and currency, monopoly and competition, wages and working conditions, foreign trade and investment, agriculture, taxation, social security, the development of natural resources,” as well as other issues bearing on nongovernment investment. Cheekily, Murray made the point that full employment would put the priorities of the working majority and the national interest ahead of the profit motive. “It is charged by some,” Murray announced to a Chicago conference of the National Association of Manufacturers in May 1945, “that while American business is willing to cooperate on any policy which works in its favor, business is not really willing to cooperate in mapping out a post-war policy and program for the maintenance of full employment. This, of course, is not true.” Repeating a theme which planning advocates had been making since the beginning of the war, the senator insisted that “every businessman knows that a man on a payroll is a better customer than a man on relief. American business realizes that another depression such as we experienced in the 1930s might well mean the end of capitalism itself.” Murray and others would continually appeal to this seemingly common-sense self-interest. Yet he simultaneously challenged the capitalist presumption in favor of surplus labor. If corporate executives adopted the position that “business needs and wants a standing army of unemployed,” it would invariably produce another collapse.21 Echoing the advocates of economic planning from Alvin Hansen to Granville Hicks, Murray made the case that full employment would finally interrupt the business cycle. It would counter the destructive business practices that had become the source of persistent economic insecurity in modern America. Full employment would prevent businesses from using depressions to reduce costs, liquidate competition, and restore investment opportunities. As Murray noted incredulously in his July 30th statement to the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, “I have found periods of widespread unemployment are actually welcome because they provide opportunities to squeeze out or buy out smaller competitors who are unable to weather the storm.” Although the senator frequently used his addresses to woo, appease, or flatter business interests, a seething indignation at what he considered the willful ignorance of the plutocrats occasionally disrupted the charm offensive. I wish I could bring the opponents of full employment face to face with a handful of ordinary people selected at random as they walk down Main Street in Butte, Mont.—my home town. I should like to see the defender of ‘a floating pool of unemployed’ present his case to a few hard-rock miners who lived through the misery and anguish of the last depression. I should like to hear someone from the New York State Chamber of Commerce argue the necessity of depressions

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with the small businessman whose properties were gobbled up by the big interests after the 1929 crash. I can imagine nothing more interesting than the spectacle of Chrysler’s chief economist arguing against jobs for all with some of the youngsters now back in Butte after going through the living hell of Anzio and Iwo Jima.22

The notion that guaranteed employment fulfilled a debt of obligation to both the veterans of the Second World War and the victims of the Great Depression permeated the speeches and writings of the bill’s proponents. So too did the critique of corporate power. So while proponents of the bill scrupulously defended free enterprise, they argued for legislation that would make economic planning a central responsibility of the executive branch. By doing this, they sought to resolve the central dilemma of modern America, the conflict between individual freedom and concentrated economic power. “The greatest problem of modern democracy,” Senator Robert Wagner argued in committee hearings, “is to reconcile our essential freedoms with reasonable efficiency in meeting our economic problems. There will be no such thing in the postwar world as the possibility of continuing freedom plus continuing mass unemployment.”23 Instead of a narrow, technocratic conception of fiscal management, Murray sought to achieve nearly the full spectrum of social democratic reforms promoted by the NRPB but defeated by a reactionary Congress. And while the senator from Montana defended the prerogatives of private enterprise and insisted that Congress was under no obligation to implement the president’s budget, he advocated for a sweeping range of policy tools that threatened to circumscribe business autonomy. In its original form, the bill also revived the possibility of anti-monopoly action, a theme which Murray promoted aggressively. The senator and his allies had a completely different understanding than their business adversaries of what “free” enterprise meant. Having championed in vain the interests of small business during the war, Murray now considered his full employment bill a weapon against administered prices and corporate concentration. In an address to the Senate during debate on the bill, Murray revisited the Progressive Era’s brief against corporate consolidation. “It was believed by many that these corporate expansions and consolidations would result in greater efficiency, bigger profits and beneficial results generally to the economy as a whole,” Murray submitted. Yet “serious ills” and “defects” had developed in the economy, effectively “distorting its original principles” and producing a situation akin to corporate “collectivism.” He criticized the relentless drive toward greater and greater levels of concentration. “For a long time, it has been recognized that real

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competition has been blotted out in the basic industries of the United States, and instead of competition, we have a system of controlled prices and production.” Full employment policy would aim at more than increasing consumption. It would also target un-democratic agglomerations of wealth.24 Despite paying elaborate homage to private enterprise, the senator used the debates to recapitulate the jaundiced view of capitalism that permeated full employment thought. “The constant fear of an impending depression causes these large corporate units to take advantage of every opportunity to increase earnings beyond a reasonable degree.’’ More than this, he ventured, “they exercise control over production and prices, thus interfering with free competition” (emphasis added).25 At a point when some historians have suggested that anti-monopoly thought had been almost entirely eclipsed, Murray advocated for structural reforms that would mitigate the worst abuses of monopoly capitalism.26 The movement for full employment had created an opportunity for a wider critique of industrial capitalism. The senator proclaimed—idealistically, sarcastically, or both—that forward-looking business leaders understood the merits of economic planning. “These intelligent and far-sighted businessmen recognize the need for cooperation between labor and capital and Government. They recognized that industry cannot be benefitted through the exploitation of labor—that full employment with good wages is essential to the successful operation of our economic system.”27 Murray was prodding business not only to endorse a high-wage economy, but to acknowledge the inherently exploitative nature of the exchange between capital and labor. He saw precious little evidence of a benevolent invisible hand in modern capitalism. What Murray and his progressive counterparts wanted to eradicate was the narrow-minded, shortsighted, fear-driven decision making that had produced the Great Depression. “Self-interest,” he announced, “is notoriously unenlightened as to the true exigencies of the capitalist system.” Instead of stimulating demand in the alleged decade of prosperity, manufacturers stifled it “by skimming off larger and larger profits and sterilizing more and more of those profits in surpluses invested in the form of uneconomic plants.” For Murray and the economic planners, this was not an exercise in economic theory but the only intelligent response to the irrational, destructive waste that had preoccupied so many commentators in the 1930s.28 Despite Murray’s best efforts to submerge them in a bath of business conciliation, the transformative possibilities of full employment kept floating

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to the surface. In the same address, he raised the prospect that most business owners must have found deeply troubling—that full employment could take a bite out of profits. “The high volume market is what businessmen want,” Murray tried to assure his Senate colleagues. “It means more efficient production at lower costs.” (Once again, Murray refrained from reconciling his support for small business and his enthusiasm for economies of scale.) “This in turn means better profits.” Yet here was the key: “Although the profit margins on each unit will be smaller, they will be more stable, and there will be more units.”29 The road to prosperity, Murray argued, was through high-volume production and lower prices sustained by high wages and dependable demand. Without expressly promoting it, this amounted to a form of cartelization that would tamp down competition, ratchet up production, and ensure a market for manufacturers justifiably wary of over-expansion. It was the dream of economic planners going back to the National Recovery Administration. What was perhaps most notable about this astonishing address was the assertion that government planning was essential to the survival of free enterprise. To correct the inherent deficiencies in modern capitalism, to disrupt the seemingly inexorable logic of overproduction, mass unemployment, destructive competition, and the drive toward further concentration, the federal government would have to intervene more decisively. “Only the federal government itself,” Murray insisted adamantly, “acting on behalf of all the people, can cope with these evils. Only the Federal Government can assure the sustained markets that will allow business to forego restrictive practices and move forward aggressively with the minimum amount of interference on the part of the Government.”30 Murray effectively repudiated the idea of the beneficently self-regulating free market. Instead, he justified a tradition of social democratic intervention stretching back to the Granger Laws and the Agrarian Movement of the 1870s. Yet his address also channeled the ideas that economic planners, intellectuals, social critics, and labor activists had advanced since the onset of the Great Depression. Like them, Murray did more than offer innocuous policy proposals. He engaged in an understated but discernible critique of capitalism.31 Even so, many of the inherent tensions remained. As noted previously, the senator seemed at once to want to restore the world of small business competition and to eliminate it altogether through regulated production and guaranteed profits. Whether he really believed that “far-sighted businessmen” understood the need for full employment, had relinquished the impulse to dominate labor, and repudiated the tooth-and-claw methods of a monopolistic past is not clear. What is clear is that the problem of the profit motive could not be suppressed. Was

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Murray’s bill any more realistic about business voluntarism in the achievement of maximum production than the National Industrial Recovery Act, or Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, for that matter? Representative George Outland, a supporter of S. 380, seemed to have an answer. Business not only does not want this responsibility, but cannot undertake it. For business to prevent unemployment would be inconsistent with the individual’s drive for profit. Moreover, the only way in which business could succeed in such an undertaking would be by organizing to do so—and such an organization, if adequate to the job, would undoubtedly violate the anti-trust laws.32

While the sponsors of the bill insisted that it conferred no new authority on the executive branch, emphasized long-range planning over short-term deficit spending, and ensured that legislative remedies be left to a Joint Committee on the National Budget, the entire logic behind full employment suggested the need for decisive executive action. As Emerson P. Schmidt of the Chamber of Commerce put it in an AFL-sponsored radio forum in which Murray participated, “I think Senator Murray’s plan is deficit spending under a new name. How can the government give this encouragement to private effort? Unless private efforts lead to prosperity public works must raise the debt.”33 In its rhetorically titled Can Government Guarantee Full Employment?, the Chamber of Commerce repeated the familiar refrain. The executive branch, it asserted, could never possess enough information to plan adequately for the exigencies of a volatile capitalist economy. Almost all “the spokesmen of government-created full employment are finally driven to the conclusion that such a program calls for a very wide discretion of administrative authority.” Neither the Chamber of Congress nor Murray nor any of the other sponsors said a whit about southern hostility toward the extension of federal authority that might challenge white supremacy in the South. Even so, on the level of administrative technique alone, the Chamber highlighted what Murray believed politically expedient to underplay.34 The question of deficit spending and executive action was one with which many left-wing economists wrestled. In January, Murray wrote to economist Michal Kalecki to solicit his opinion on the necessity of deficit spending to achieve full employment. Kalecki was a Polish economist who had already worked out several dimensions of the effective demand theory before John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. That year, Kalecki arrived in England on a Rockefeller scholarship, moving from the London School of Economics to the University of Cambridge and into the orbit of heterodox economists Joan Robinson, Piero

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Srafa, and Keynes himself. Although his British counterparts took little notice, Kalecki had already established a reputation for himself as a theoretician of the business cycle. He formulated a mathematical model of the ebb and flow of business investment that placed him on the leading edge of critical economic thought. Yet as important as his analysis of price formation and the distribution of income were to professional economists,35 it was his contribution to a study on full employment published by the Oxford University Institute of Statistics that brought him to the attention of powerbrokers. After working at the Institute, the Polish émigré economist took a position at the International Labor Organization, which was temporarily housed at McGill University in Montreal during the Second World War. It was there that he received a letter from Senator Murray soliciting his opinion on the question of deficit spending to achieve full employment. Kalecki outlined the dangers of swearing off budget deficits to appease political opponents. If Congress rejected budget deficits, full employment architects would have three options remaining: stimulating private investment, redistributing income from profits and high salaries to wages, and financing public expenditures through taxation. Yet the inadequacies of private investment as a vehicle for achieving genuine full employment exposed the contradictions of the Keynesian dedication to reviving monopoly capitalism. “For if private investment will increase productive capacity at a higher rate than that at which full employment output increases as a result of the rise in population and productivity of labour,” Kalecki argued, “this will tend to create excess capacity and thus to depress private investment,” creating an ultimately “self defeating” mechanism for resolving unemployment.36 If deficit spending were cut out of the equation, then the difference between what business could profitably produce and what society needed to ensure full employment could only be resolved by the redistribution of income or the progressive taxation of profits. In effect, Kalecki expanded on one of the central problems facing the economic stagnationists: the evidence that mature capitalism generated enormous productive capacity but consistently faced diminishing investment opportunities because of the legacy of previous investment.37 Critically, Kalecki explained that the question of full employment was ultimately a political rather than an economic problem. From a “purely economic point of view such a solution is quite feasible,” Kalecki argued, provided taxation did not discourage investment, as Hansen had worried. “But there is no doubt,” the economist assured the senator, “that such measures will encounter a formidable political opposition which may render them impracticable.” Kalecki concluded emphatically that the “the most realistic policy seems to me to push

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the redistribution of income from profits and high salaries to wages as far as it is politically possible and to deal with the remaining deficiency by means of a Budget deficit.” He stressed that this did not require massive public works, a politically volatile issue considering business opposition to New Deal planning. It could also be achieved through deficit financing of family allowances, price subsidies, and other measures that would support the social wage. What becomes clear is that compensatory and redistributive policies other than public works did not represent a retreat from full employment but a politically pragmatic path toward it. Equally important, Kalecki and other advocates understood just how politically contentious the supposedly less intrusive version of Keynesianism would prove to be. Even so, it meant abandoning the commitment to direct job creation, which would have implications for how the working-class movement responded to it in its final version.38 It was no wonder that Murray, Wagner, and others wanted to soft peddle deficit spending. Instead of absorbing Murray’s soothing message of ineluctable prosperity through ever-rising demand, many companies heard higher wages, higher costs, lower profits, and increased government intervention. What Murray considered the avenue to economic democracy, many business leaders considered the “road to serfdom,” as Friedrich Hayek famously put it. The contest over the real implications of full employment would only intensify in the decisive year of 1945. *** This was because it had become steadily evident that the idea of full employment in almost any shape it took challenged the most fundamental privileges of American business. It questioned the authority of private enterprise to determine the shape and contours of the economic order. It challenged the entire idea of a flexible labor market which business could exploit to maintain working-class discipline and downward pressure on wages. As Mark Blyth argues, by ensconcing in law the idea that underconsumption lay at the core of modern capitalism’s tendency toward crisis, the full employment bill “enshrined a stagnationist analysis that by definition deemed private initiative and investment inadequate and necessitated permanent compensatory spending.”39 Additionally, the debate over full employment exposed the internal contradictions of compensatory fiscal policy itself, which promised to stabilize capitalism while consistently pointing beyond a system predicated on production for profit alone. More than social democratic amelioration, the idea of full employment probed the very horizons of a post-capitalist society.40

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By politicizing unemployment and encouraging workers to adopt a more militant position, the job guarantee promised to advance organized labor’s vision of industrial democracy. Murray’s exhortations on the meaning and measure of full employment were no mere exercise in political posturing. It was never simply a question of financial technique, as Pierson and Hansen understood. The senator’s sincere commitment to ending the business cycle was inextricably connected to the class conflict that broke through the surface of wartime patriotism. The cost-plus contracts, the corporate tax breaks, the Surplus War Property Act giving companies the right of first refusal over government-owned factories, the anti-labor measures designed to discipline the American workforce, and the entirely inadequate protection of wages against the cost of living sent the message that business was once again ascendant. As historian George Lipsitz explains, “Taxpayers financed the costs of industrial expansion, but business kept all the profits and all of the increased money-making opportunities for new plants, equipment, and research.” At the same time, average citizens “endured shortages of food and other necessities while government planning guaranteed resources for large corporations.” What planning took place seemed to disproportionately benefit large corporate interests but deliver few assurances of continuing economic security.41 Despite the accommodations to liberal barriers, and conservative opposition, the Full Employment Bill still became a key flashpoint in the class struggle of the 1940s. CIO President Philip Murray captured the sentiment at a union conference on full employment in 1944: “Control over the war program… is today in the hands of those who are returning us to an economy of scarcity,” Murray announced. “Through financial controls, interlocking directorates and other corporate devices, these firms which figure so prominently in war production also interpenetrate the firms which control distribution of civilian goods and services.” More than this, they “have prevented planning not only by abolishing the National Resources Board, but more immediately by preventing the growth of any planned production within the war production agencies.” Phillip Murray and probably most in the labor movement believed that the real threat of “totalitarianism” in the United States came not from economic planners but from “monopolistic business” that opposed “full employment and democracy in industry.” Senator Murray could not have agreed more.42 Commenting on the conservative campaign to defeat Roosevelt’s appointment of Henry Wallace as secretary of commerce, the progressive Union for Democratic Action captured the larger struggle. “Let it be remembered,” Paul Sifton wrote in the UDA Congressional Newsletter in

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February 1945, that “if this great democratic people’s struggle to control their destiny come to bitter fruit in the U.S.A., in picket lines, tear gas & political earthquakes, that our so-called wartime ‘unity’ was broken, not by the people, but by banking, industry, and business, grown fat on profits of war & determined to control & shape the peace their way.”43 Writing from Montana, state attorney general R.V. Bottomly corroborated Sifton’s argument. Commenting on the deluge of anti-full employment materials disseminated by conservative opponents of the bill in 1945, Bottomly concluded that “this appears to be another program which has been started several times by the fascist-minded groups in this country against any liberal legislation.”44 The maintenance of full employment now confronted the business drive to contain and control a labor movement that showed signs of revived militancy and resistance to the no-strike pledge.45 Henry Wallace, the leading champion of New Deal progressive reform, now became the target of the conservative campaign against government planning. Yet “in declaring war on Henry Wallace,” Sifton of the UDA pronounced, “these great forces & their sincere and conscientious collaborators in the commercial press & Congress have declared war on every citizen who took FDR seriously when he pledged full employment after the war.” As innocuous as Murray, Overton, Wagner, and co-sponsor Senator Joseph O’Mahoney tried to make full employment sound, it belonged to a battery of legislation that progressives promoted during the war that aimed at decommodifying working people and banishing the use of unemployment as a weapon of labor control. Reactionary forces, Sifton argued, wanted “a return to worship of the job givers, with burnt offering of lower taxes to high incomes; less regulation of employers, more regulation of labor.”46 What James Murray confronted was an extension of the business campaign to restore a deregulated marketplace and maintain the political power it had gained during the war. His working-class supporters in Montana understood this as well. “Let me congratulate you on your ability to understand the plight of the average person,” G.W. Durand wrote, “and the remedy necessary to correct a situation which is becoming too much of a common occurrence to exclude the possibility of the common man exercising a little more judgment and vigor in future political activity.”47 The message was getting through: full employment meant economic democracy. It was the idea of employee control that disturbed management the most. Workers continued to engage in sporadic wildcat strikes, to raise questions about the disparity between wartime profits and wages, and to challenge working conditions that violated the tenets of industrial democracy. Shopfloor production

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had already been politicized through agencies such as the War Labor Board and the Fair Employment Practices Committee.48 Full employment promised to institutionalize these gains and realize the promise of Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights.49 It was not simply the culmination of piecemeal liberal reforms. Nor, in its most radical formulations, did it constitute a less threatening alternative to anti-monopoly reform.50 In that sense, it offered the most comprehensive vision of working-class democracy in the 1940s. As the bill moved into hearings and toward a vote, the prospect of advancing working-class democracy seemed to hang on its success.

Notes *

Portions of this chapter first in Michael Dennis, “The Idea of Full Employment: A Challenge to Capitalism in the New Deal Era,” Labor 14 (2) (2017): 69–93. 1 Henry Wallace to James Murray, December 15, 1944, box 855, folder 1, Murray Papers, UM. 2 Jerome S. Bruner, Mandate from the People (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1944), 174–6, quotation on 176. 3 Ibid., 177–80, 186–7, quotation on 187. 4 Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 72–5; James E. Murray, “Labor in the Post-War World—Social Security,” radio broadcast in Australia, Office of War Information, July 1, 1944, box 947, folder 12, Murray Papers, UM. 5 Thomas H. Nilsen, Senator James E. Murray and Reconversion, 1943–1945, MA Thesis, University of Montana, 1973, http://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=4545&context=etd; John Morrison and Catherine Wright Morrison, Mavericks: The Lives and Battles of Montana’s Political Legends (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2003), 208–14; Wilbur J. Cohen and Jessica H. Barr, “War Mobilization and Reconversion Act of 1944: An Analysis of the ‘George Bill,” Social Security Bulletin, October 1944, 10, https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v7n10/ v7n10p10.pdf. 6 Wasem, Tackling Unemployment, 71. 7 “Blueprint for 60,000,000 Jobs: How Work Plan Would Operate,” United States News, December 29, 1944, 49, box 971, folder 3, Murray Papers, UM. 8 Ibid. 9 Edward Everett Hale, “Some Implications of Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (December 1976): 35–6. 10 Ibid., 36–7.

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11 “Statement of Hon. Robert Wagner, Senior Senator from the State of New York,” in Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session on S. 380 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 1. 12 “Statement of Hon. Elbert D. Thomas, Senior Senator from the State of Utah,” 121–2, ibid. 13 “The Full Employment Bill, by James E. Murray, U.S. Senator from Montana,” box 948, folder 22, Murray Papers, UM. 14 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63. 15 “National Policy and Program for Continuing Full Employment—Speech of Hon. James E. Murray of Montana in the Senate of the United States, January 22, 1945,” 4–5, box 854, folder 26; “The Full Employment Bill,” box 948, folder 22, Murray Papers, UM. 16 Attewell, People Must Live by Work, 158–60. 17 Reagan, Designing a New America, 165–6; Beardsley Ruml to Robert F. Wagner, May 22, 1945. 18 Jytte Klausen, “Did World War II End the New Deal? A Comparative Perspective on Postwar Planning Initiatives,” in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, ed. Sidney Milkis and Jerome Milieur (Boston: University of Massachusetts, 2002), 216. 19 Reagan, Designing a New America, 234; A.F. Hinrichs to Frances Perkins, December 29, 1944, both in box 12, folder titled “Correspondence,” Louis Bean papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. 20 On the expansiveness and social democratic boldness of the NRPB, which expressly called for the renewal of a Works Progress Administration-style job creation program, see Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 6–63; Brinkley, The End of Reform, 250–3. 21 “Address by Senator James E. Murray Before the Chicago Reconversion Conference of the National Association of Manufacturers, Thursday, May 24, 1945, Palmer House, Chicago Illinois,” box 949, folder 21, Murray Papers, UM. 22 “Statement of Hon. James E. Murray, Junior Senator from the State of Montana,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 17. 23 “Statement of Hon. Robert Wagner,” 5. 24 “Address by Honorable James E. Murray, United States Senator (Montana), Senate Floor,” n.d., 1–2, box 855, folder 3, Murray Papers, UM. 25 Ibid., 6. 26 “Address by Senator James E. Murray Before the Chicago Reconversion Conference of the National Association of Manufacturers,” 7; “Address by Senator James E. Murray before luncheon meeting of the Union for Democratic Action, Friday, May

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32

33 34

35 36 37

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18, 1945, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, New York City,” 9–10, box 949, folder 19, Murray Papers, UM; Alonzo Hamby, “Sixty Million Jobs and the People’s Revolution: The Liberals, the New Deal, and World War II,” The Historian 4 (August 1968): 582. “Address by Honorable James E. Murray, United States Senator (Montana), Senate Floor,” 12. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17. The most important of these was Alvin Hansen. Writing in 1942 on planning for the postwar world, he challenged the classical theory that government intervention “distorted” the marketplace. “The view that it is dangerous for a government to play any important role in the initiation and promotion of developmental and innovational projects requires re-examination in the light of the historical development of modern capitalism,” Hansen observed. Hansen, Economic Problems of the Post-War World, 10–11, 13. See also for example Murray’s interview on NBC radio in January 1945. See “America United: A Radio Forum Conducted by the American Federation of Labor on Jobs for All,” January 14, 1945, box 948, folder 23, Murray Papers, UM; Murray, “National Policy and Program for Continuing Full Employment,” 4–5; “Full Employment and Social Security Under a Free Enterprise System,” 14–22, April 16, 1945, box 949, folder 11; Murray, “National Policy and Program for Continuing Full Employment,” 4–5; “Full Employment and Social Security Under a Free Enterprise System,” 14–22, April 16, 1945, box 949, folder 11, Murray Papers, UM; Full Employment in America: Speech of Hon. George E. Outland of California in the House of Representatives, Thursday, July 5, 1945 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1945), 28, box 855, folder 3, Murray Papers, UM. Full Employment in America: Speech of Hon. George E. Outland of California in the House of Representatives, Thursday, July 5, 1945 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1945), 28, box 855, folder 3, Murray Papers, UM. “America United: A Radio Forum Conducted by the American Federation of Labor on Jobs for All,” 6. Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, Can Government Guarantee Full Employment?: Postwar Adjustments Bulletin No. 13 (Washington: Chamber of Commerce, 1945), 9–10, box 82, file titled “Publications, Volume 1945,” United States Chamber of Commerce papers, Hagley Museum and Library. Julio Lopez G. and Michael Assous, Michal Kalecki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), vi–viii. Michal Kalecki to James Murray, May 5, 1945, Louis Bean papers, box 12, folder titled “Correspondence,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. And the problem with which Hansen grappled was the one that troubled Keynes as well as Marx. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis:

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How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 59. 38 Kalecki to Murray, May 5, 1945. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins supported Kalecki’s general recommendations. Responding to an inquiry from James Murray, she recommended an analysis of the bill presented by A.F. Hinrichs, acting commissioner of Labor Statistics. Hinrichs underlined the benefits of taxation aimed at redistribution, including subsidies, progressive taxation, and income transfers, which would mitigate the accumulation of “idle savings” and avoid public works projects that smacked of “leaf raking.” A.F. Hinrichs to the Secretary of Labor, December 29, 1944, Frances Perkins to Senator Murray, December 29, 1944, box 12, folder titled “correspondence,” Louis Bean Papers, FDRL. 39 Blyth, Great Transformations, 82. 40 Full employment exponents occupied a continuum with the mid-century intellectuals who espoused what Howard Brick describes as a “post-capitalist vision.” This connected economic planners such as Rexford Tugwell, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Adolph Berle, and Gardiner Means to an intellectual “long wave” that extended back to the progressives’ search for a new social order, forward to industrial democracy, and toward a psychological and cultural critique of capitalism. This expansive “postcapitalist vision” applied to the proponents of full employment, who consistently believed that maximizing production would produce the foundation for a more humane society, not just a consumer’s horn of plenty. While Brick is reluctant to admit it, this expansive vision also embraced notions of democratic socialism. See “The Postcapitalist Vision in TwentiethCentury American Social Thought,” in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 21–35. 41 George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 58. 42 “Phillip Murray, President, Congress of Industrial Organizations,” Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment, CIO Political Action Committee, New York City, January 15, 1944 (New York: CIO Political Action Committee, 1944), 63–4; Nelsons Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 219–21. 43 UDA Congressional Newsletter, February 2, 1945, 1, box 25, folder titled “U.D.A. Congressional Newsletters,” Claire and Paul Sifton Papers, LC. 44 R.V. Bottomly to Murray, October 25, 1945, box 855, folder 1, Murray Papers. 45 Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 28; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 125–7, 133–5. 46 UDA Congressional Newsletter, February 2, 1945, 1–2.

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47 G.W. Durand to James Murray, October 1, 1945, box 855, folder 1, Murray Papers. 48 Ibid.; Jennifer Klein, “The Politics of Economic Security: Employee Benefits and the Privatization of New Deal Liberalism,” Journal of Policy History 16 (Winter 2004): 44. 49 “Possible Employment Policies,” ibid.; see also “What the Bill Proposes,” same edition, which explicitly links the Murray Full Employment measure to Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. See pp. 396–7. 50 On the importance of full employment and productivity to the social democratic project of the postwar period, see Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s 1985 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 26–32.

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As Senator Robert Wagner’s Committee on Banking and Currency moved toward hearings on the bill, the broader campaign for full employment escalated. So too did the opposition. Recognizing that this measure might impinge on the cherished prerogatives of capital, business groups and their allies in Congress mobilized. What played out in the fading moments of the war was more than a dispute over one admittedly ambitious bill. It was a contest over whether the egalitarian principles and social democratic achievements of the New Deal would define the path forward in postwar America. The question of who would govern, in whose interests, and according to what ideals moved to center stage. The legislative struggle for a measure that would commit the federal government to economic planning and compensatory spending has generated considerable scholarly attention. Historians such as Stephen Bailey, Herbert Stein, Alan Brinkley, Ruth Wasem, and Steven Attewell have examined the legislative maneuvering, ideological posturing, and rank political coercion that fundamentally altered the Full Employment Bill, reducing it to a shadow of its former self. Shorn of the language of a “right to work” in “remunerative, regular, and full-time employment,” the Employment Act of 1946 represented a vacuous concession to the supporters of full employment. It became a measure that promised simply to foster the “conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment, for those able, willing, and seeking work.” It would do little more than “promote maximum unemployment, production, and purchasing power.”1 Only recently have scholars elucidated the impact of southern obstructionism in neutralizing a measure that promised to equalize wage rates between whites and blacks, improve the mobility of black labor, undermine the region’s comparative wage advantage, and threaten the racialized socioeconomic order in the South.2 Still, nuances aside, most historians agree that the measure represented an “end to reform,” the collapse of New Deal planning as a viable

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alternative to fiscal management of capitalism, and an abject failure of the left to organize an effective opposition to the forces of reaction.3 Let us take another tack and assume for a moment the shortcomings of the liberal-labor campaign for a full employment bill. Instead of focusing on mounting business opposition and its hyperbole about government “regimentation,” let us look at what the idea of full employment came to mean to those progressive and labor groups that are so often cited in the literature but so frequently considered peripheral to the main show on the Senate floor. How did they understand “full employment”? What did it mean to them? What hopes and expectations did they invest in this movement? Through this kind of inquiry, we discover how working-class Americans appropriated ostensibly arcane economic concepts, molding them in the image of economic democracy, racial justice, and even socialist transformation. The popular embrace of full employment tracked the achievement of it during the war, but the effort to interpret its meaning and consequences crystallized as the interest in postwar planning increased. As we have seen, the eagerness for postwar planning developed out of a social context profoundly influenced by anxieties about a return to depression but also by business interests that had gained considerable leverage over public policy in the 1940s. Business did not, however, speak with one voice. For example, the Committee of Economic Development, which Beardsley Ruml had founded in 1942, promoted what historian Brian Waddell argues was “a new era of economic growth based on a business-oriented Keynesianism” as an alternative “to either a return to a mythic laissez-faire economy or a redistributive welfare state.” While favorable to government assistance in difficult times, this was a position that never anticipated any reduction of unilateral corporate control. It was also a voice that would gain decisive influence over the Murray Full Employment Bill at the critical stage.4 Despite the influence that this mildly Keynesian, pro-corporate voice would achieve within policymaking circles in the postwar era, it was neither the most vociferous nor the most influential at the time. Then, a militant labor movement and an organized intellectual defense of social democracy sought to stamp its ideas on the American political economy.5 In 1944, it confronted a movement to restore the preeminence of corporate capitalism, to reinforce racial segregation, and to return to the gendered status quo. It was in this polarized climate that the CIO’s Political Action Committee advanced a program of economic planning that cannot be described as anything but an exercise in democratic socialism. It also demonstrated how vital the idea of planning continued to be in the labor movement and the left of the 1940s.6

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The CIO-PAC proposed a level of government involvement in the economy that went well beyond Keynesian fiscal and monetary strategies. While the proposal echoed Philip Murray’s Catholic corporatism, it also opened vistas for the democratization of economic power. It did this by advocating for the restriction of managerial prerogatives through industrial councils. It called for a national planning board that would bring together representatives of organized labor, consumers, and business operating under the mediating influence of the federal government. Labor, consumers, and a New Deal government would have an automatic veto on business policies detrimental to the interests of “the people.” In addition, the CIO-PAC called for increased public housing, progressive taxation, an ambitious program of public works, assistance to small businesses, the expansion of social security, and the achievement of genuine racial equality. Each initiative started from the premise of public cooperation in economic management.7 At the same time, the CIO-PAC called for an annual wage as a mechanism for increasing workers’ incomes and ensuring sufficient demand. The union also expected that postwar planning would include public construction and social service projects, the expansion of unemployment and social insurance, the establishment of a national health-care program, and, more radically, continued government ownership of industry if the private sector proved unwilling to maintain maximum production. While the CIO tacitly supported the prerogatives of private property, it did not, as journalist Julie Meyer pointed out in 1944, “make a fetish of the principle of free enterprise.”8 Through full employment, the protection of the rights of labor, and government subsidies that promoted consumption and a social wage, the CIO-PAC echoed the cumulative sentiments of a mass movement that had its origins in the unemployed councils of the 1930s. The CIO as well as the American Federation of Labor now became instruments of the widespread working-class conviction that permanent economic planning could deliver economic security. As economist Michal Kalecki explained it, “What the masses now ask for is not the mitigation of slumps, but their total abolition.”9 Above all, the CIO-PAC insisted in 1944 that government intervention become a fixture of the postwar landscape. “The full employment program must, however, be guaranteed by government with a prepared program of jobs at useful work, with standard wages and working conditions, if and to the extent that private industry falls short of the goal.” This was not simply countercyclical Keynesian spending but a program of persistent public management to ensure full employment.10 “Whenever workers and capital are unemployed,” the PAC

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writers asserted in a draft of the organization’s postwar reconstruction plan, “the national government has the responsibility for their productive employment” (emphasis added).11 “The vote of the CIO, I feel sure,” Philip Murray told the 1944 CIO-PAC conference, “will be cast in favor of a world in which full employment will be permanently built into the American system as part of our way of life.”12 Inspired by Catholic social teachings, Murray spoke the language of economic democracy, not technocratic managerialism. Organized labor translated the NRPB’s notion of a right to a job into their policy statements. Despite its tactical conservatism, the United Steelworkers made the case that “a job right is a property right.” Consistent with the ideals of the popular front, the CIO’s 1944 pamphlet “Steel Fights for the Nation” established a parallel between industrial laborers and white-collar professionals. Just as the farmer, teacher, civil servant, and doctor enjoyed a measure of autonomy and tenure in their work, so too should the industrial laborer have a right to their job, which currently operated at the caprices of “an absentee owner” more interested in profits than production.13 Examining the problem of automation, the CIO challenged the prerogatives of private property. “The machine through which the worker earns his livelihood by producing goods for the nation must not be taken from him by economic accident over which he has no control,” the CIO pamphlet argued, “or by the whim of a more powerful man.” The argument resonated with the values of democratic socialism, which traditionally placed human needs ahead of market caprices and managerial authority. For the CIO, it was the flipside of full production. In 1944, workers understood “the production possibilities of American industry,” having seen “full employment in action.” Contrary to the “forgotten man” of the 1930s, the industrial laborer of the 1940s knew that the nation had the resources and skill to banish unemployment. “They are convinced, therefore, that a job at an annual living wage is a right, not a privilege.”14 Yet the suggestion that organized labor and consumers should have permanent representation in a planned economy struck at the very heart of the capitalist control, something which E.A. Goldenweiser had also pointed out. It was economist Leon Henderson, speaking at the CIO-PAC’s conference on full employment in New York in January 1944, however, who addressed the issue most directly. “Are we going to trust the future of our country,” the former Office of Price Administration director asked the CIO-PAC conference, “the future of democracy itself—the two things are tied together, democracy and full employment—to the same kind of economic leadership [anti-New Deal big business] that this is? Are they going to make the post-war plans, or are we going

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to create democratic mechanisms in which we can implement these wonderful objectives for which this war is being fought?”15 By challenging managerial control, the CIO-PAC contested the very premises of capitalist production. Labor unionism, industrial councils, and economic planning aimed at more than increasing consumption; in the aftermath of the capitalist calamity of the 1930s, they sought a fundamental alteration of the relations of power. The opponents of the CIO-PAC understood this clearly. In the estimation of the Farmer Union’s Dairy Farmers’ Digest, the organization sought “the complete socialization of America,” which it would accomplish through two tactics. The first was through a joint resolution in support of the Economic Bill of Rights, a “sleight-of-hand” that would concentrate power in the federal government. “Federal education, socialized medicine, control over industry and labor, and invasion of the insurance field are all contained in these harmlessly-worded documents.” Equally alarming was the plan for a National Planning Board. The Farmers’ Union was particularly disturbed by the involvement of Eveline Burns in designing the board. Burns was a product of the London School of Economics and a former student of socialist Harold Laski. An architect of the Social Security Act and a director of research for the National Resources Planning Board, Burns had a progressive pedigree that made her a veritable stockholder in “Browder, Hillman and Company.”16 Despite the opposition, Sidney Hillman made the anti-capitalist case forcefully. Joining those who clamored for an “economy of abundance,” Hillman took the opportunity to identify the class divisions that obstructed full employment. According to Hillman, the National Association of Manufacturers’ campaign to exalt “free enterprise” amounted to a crusade for the restoration of business dominance. “Under the guise of free enterprise,” Hillman argued, “the NAM proposes that the American government surrender all responsibility for the functioning of our economy.” What it amounted to was a plan to ensure that monopoly capital could “restrict production, peg prices, cut wages and stagnate our economy at the expense of workers, farmers, and small businessmen—and finally at the expense of big business itself.”17 The criticism of free enterprise propaganda ricocheted throughout the CIO-PAC conference proceedings. Walter P. Reuther, vice president of the United Automobile Workers and a leading advocate of union participation in economic planning, argued at the same conference that free enterprise rhetoric provided a smokescreen for “business as usual.” What it spelled was “unemployment as usual, chaos as usual, suffering as usual, and we intend to have no part of that after we have fought and won the war.”18 James Patton, president of the National Farmers Union and

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leading proponent of full employment, echoed the anti-corporate critique. The business argument that maximum employment be left to private enterprise in return for a hospitable investment climate amounted to a demand that “the government will not tax unlimited profits, and will emasculate the SEC, freeze the social security program, forego planning and take no action to sustain full employment and purchasing power.” Patton was convinced that the motives of most business leaders who mouthed the platitudes of free enterprise were transparent. “Stripped of ambiguous phrases and unsupported pledges to be good, business and industry propose a return to Hooverism.” It was shorthand for business dominance of economic affairs.19 *** The CIO conference on full employment signaled a deepening commitment to postwar planning that renewed labor’s challenge to business primacy. It also accelerated other forces of progressive change, not least of which was the movement for racial equality. Integral to the popular front of the 1930s and 1940s, the black movement for equality benefited from wartime production, geographic migration, and the racial egalitarianism of both the Communist Party and the CIO. Black activists in the labor movement, the NAACP, and the radical left championed the continuation of Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, but the policy of full employment promised to maintain the industrial job gains that had benefited African Americans. It would also prevent a return to the hardscrabble conditions that pitted black against white workers, a contest that blacks invariably lost. If blacks increasingly came to accept the sincerity of the CIO’s interracial industrial unionism,20 they also came to believe that economic planning would provide the material foundation for the achievement of genuine racial equality. Again, the CIO convention on full employment provided a forum for promoting this vision. Grappling with the problem of race and class, Willard S. Townsend, president of the United Transport Service Workers of America, argued that “the racial problem is a workers’ problem.” Townsend did more than recapitulate the dominant left-wing position that the solution of economic problems would necessarily resolve racial antagonism. Offering a more nuanced analysis, he argued that the achievement of full employment during the wars had not magically erased years of mutual antipathy. Yet like the steady increase of African Americans in industry and the labor movement itself, the achievement of full employment created the conditions for extinguishing racial enmity. “The compulsion of full production,” Townsend explained, “has forced the relaxation

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of many taboos which have heretofore prevented the full use of our manpower.” And despite the persistence of racial discrimination, which continued to consign blacks to lower-skilled, lesser-paying jobs that offered little in the way of mobility, Townsend asserted that racial job segregation was “being challenged and actually being broken down in a score of tight labor markets outside the South.”21 Aggressive government intervention in the labor market assisted full employment in ameliorating racial inequality. Using statistical evidence collected by the War Manpower Commission, historian William J. Collins challenges the familiar image of an ineffective Fair Employment Practices Commission. “Between 1940 and 1950,” he demonstrates, “the proportion of black male workers classified as operatives (semiskilled workers) in the Census rose from 12.6 to 21.4 percent (whites went from 19.0 to 20.2 percent), and the proportion in manufacturing industries rose from 16.2 to 23.9 percent (whites went from 25.5 to 27.7).” Through a detailed regression analysis, Collins demonstrates that this was not simply a function of black migration, wartime demand, or even local black activism. It was, in fact, the evidence that federal government pressure was opening opportunities that had been entirely closed to African Americans prior to the war.22 Yet if Townsend neglected the impact of the FEPC, not to mention A. Philip Randolph’s planned march on Washington, he understood the dynamic relationship between government intervention and social activism. The war had produced “unmistakable evidence of economic advances among Negroes.” It was a development that had been “dramatically and unpalatably brought to the attention of the white community by the scarcity of Negro domestics.” Economic planners had to accept that blacks now demanded full inclusion in American society—they would no longer tolerate the accusation of “impatience” and misbegotten “militancy.” The global implications of the war against fascism and the struggle for the New Deal resonated loudly: “He is demanding for himself more of those freedoms which the nation is dedicated to secure for peoples all over the world.” Establishing the machinery for full employment would reduce the anxieties of white workers about the prospect of renewed job competition between blacks and whites. Conversely, failing to maintain maximum employment would risk a return to the practice of companies using blacks as scab labor during strikes.23 Townsend did not consider full employment a panacea, but he did believe that it would create the framework for social democratic progress. It would not completely dissolve racial tensions, “but it would set the economic stage

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for the effective educational programs designed to reduce the frequency and intensity of one of the basic causes for racial conflict.” Full employment would create the conditions in which labor unions and public agencies could promote interracial cooperation. It would increase the momentum behind the movement for better housing; for expanded educational, transportation, and recreational opportunities; and for a more egalitarian and decent society. These social reforms would not simply reinforce a culture of abundance but deliver the social improvements that would erode the caste system. They would make economic democracy a living reality.24 Townsend also skewered the proponents of political “realism” who claimed that full employment was but a utopian vision. These same realists were once the isolationists who obstructed preparedness, stood by while Italy occupied Ethiopia, and remained silent as Nazi aggression stamped out democracy in Europe. What excited visions of racial equality was not utopian dreaming but the evidence that maximum employment had created the conditions for interracial labor solidarity. Full employment could not only deliver material abundance but also extend democracy into the furthest reaches of American life. Townsend simultaneously challenged powerbrokers and economic planners to incorporate the black perspective into their defense of full employment. They did not. Nor did some CIO unions even at full employment during the war. It was a discomfiting reality that Howard University law school dean and veteran New Dealer William Hastie bitterly pointed out. Citing the discriminatory treatment of black workers by a militant minority of miners and auto workers, the Harvard-educated future jurist called on the unions to impose sanctions on its racist members. Despite the hate strikes and the sporadic examples of racial intolerance, the evidence suggests that black and white cooperation was increasing between 1943 and 1944. Episodes of interracial class solidarity challenged the notion that race was the constant enemy of working-class unity.25 Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican-born Communist Party member, testified to the evidence of interracial solidarity in the left-led National Maritime Union (NMU), which prided itself on racial and ethnic equality. As treasurer, Smith had championed the agenda of racial equality by advocating for a nondiscrimination clause in the union’s constitution. “So firmly is this policy of equality adhered to by our membership that even in the deep South,” Smith told the assembled at the CIO-PAC conference, “where it supposedly couldn’t be done, [that] Southern whites ship out with Negroes and work together to smash fascism.” The seasoned steward-turned-union-leader similarly celebrated the evidence of black and white workers marching together on an NMU picket line in

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defiance of journalist “Westbrook Pegler’s anti-union lies.” Smith was equally delighted to report that the radical experiment in trade union egalitarianism had translated into greater productivity. Echoing popular front ideology and socialist principles, he held the NMU up as an example of the kind of unionism that could produce full employment: “We want neither economic nor social ghettoes for Negro seaman or any patriotic American workers,” he argued. “Labor must quickly recognize that there can be no effective program for full employment in the post-war period which fails to include Negro workers on an equal basis with white workers according to merit and ability.” This was an activist vision of full employment, one that seemed the most promising avenue toward a more just and humane society.26 Like others in this moment of heightened class struggle, Ferdinand looked beyond taming capitalism to transforming American society. Yet like Townsend, he was equally aware that the North did not provide an asylum from racial hostility. The restrictive covenants, the racial pogroms, the discriminatory hiring practices, and the reactionary mood of the 1920s convinced black migrants that “economic democracy was an illusion in the North.” It was this recognition, not wide-eyed idealism or fealty to Roosevelt, that explained why blacks now “pressed for upgrading; pressed for training,” and pressed to become full American citizens. And while opponents of black militancy dismissed “the fight for economic democracy” as the work of a few radicals, Townsend assured his union counterparts that it was “the will of the Negro people.”27 Freed from its technocratic trappings, the notion of full employment that Smith espoused placed American workers at the center of a system built on racial equality and economic security. William Hastie may not have agreed, Murray may have found it too radical, and both would have objected to a communist having any input into postwar economic planning. Yet full employment had become the prism through which literally millions of Americans filtered their aspirations for a rational, decent, and democratic society on the postwar era. And while some would have recoiled from the suggestion, many rank-and-file workers, activists, and sympathetic intellectuals looked beyond regulated capitalism to democratic socialism. Perhaps more than even the most zealous workers or planners, it had become the horizon of possibility for African Americans in the final years of the war. *** The critique of free enterprise ideology that had emerged out of the ranks of organized labor and the ruminations of independent intellectuals now resonated

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among a constellation of social groups that championed full employment.28 In 1945, many of these progressive organizations had the opportunity to bring their message to the corridors of power when the Senate held hearings on the Murray Full Employment Bill. Appearing before the subcommittee of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, president of the Federal Council of Churches, recapitulated the liberal Protestant vision of full employment. At its root, it expressed the hope that a job guarantee would produce the material abundance necessary for an egalitarian and just society. But Bromley echoed the CIO’s more penetrating critique of free enterprise hyperbole. Addressing the bill’s homage to free enterprise, Bromley contended that the entire discussion of postwar planning had raised questions about the nature of freedom itself. The framers of the bill “realize that freedom to engage in free competitive enterprise is, in the long run, dependent upon another aspect of freedom; namely the right to of the individual worker to a job.” Bromley was making the case that labor intellectual George McNeil, just wage advocate John Ryan, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had made before him: the person lacking employment was in no meaningful sense “free.” Bromley eloquently captured the human indignity of unemployment: “The bruised knuckles that have knocked at door after door seeking a job may heal, but the hurt in the heart of the self-respecting man who is denied the opportunity to earn his own living with his hands and brain seldom heals.” Although Bromley added the predictable sexist cliché about a husband returning empty-handed and emasculated to a forlorn wife, he reiterated a theme that was germane to full employment thought. “The sorry spectacle of idle machines, unused materials, and unemployed men present at one time do not make sense. No nation is poor when it possesses men, materials, and machines.” Structural unemployment was irrational as well as irreligious. It violated the Christian principles of solidarity, equal rights, and human dignity. Extolling the bill’s provisions for “useful and remunerative labor,” Bromley argued that it would underwrite “socially necessary labor” and encourage the celebration of work that contributed to society rather than simply to the individual’s aggrandizement.29 In the process of debating, examining, and promoting economic planning, progressive social groups, including the Federal Council of Churches and the Catholic Social Action Department, crafted their own vision of full employment. In doing so, they adopted a moral and ethical analysis that transcended the agenda of mass consumption. The notion that full employment offered an indispensable avenue to black freedom also garnered a hearing. Appearing before the Senate Committee of Banking and Currency in late August 1945, Walter White, executive secretary for

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the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, drove home the point that the economic and social discrimination that blacks routinely faced justified their interest in a policy of full employment. If the prospect of the war’s end troubled most working-class whites, it positively alarmed working-class blacks who could remember the tradition of “last hired first fired” dating back to the First World War. Like many of his allies, White expressed a mixture of anxiety and optimism about demobilization. “The present war has opened wide new doors of employment, thereby permitting hundreds of thousands of Negroes to master new skills and industrial techniques.” The prospect of demobilization produced “serious misgivings” about maintaining the foothold that blacks had achieved in the manufacturing and munitions sectors.30 Important as these gains were, they redounded largely to the benefit of African American males. Most African American women who entered the expanding job market found themselves excluded entirely from the best paying industries or hired into the lowest-ranking and least-skilled positions. Their late admission to the ranks of industrial labor, their limited seniority, and the practice of historic racial discrimination made them vulnerable to dismissal when the guns fell silent. Despite the paeans to full employment, the experience of black women during the Second World War conspicuously highlights the persistence of discriminatory hiring and job-assignment practices even at maximum production. Achieving full employment had not magically banished racial inequality.31 Unfortunately, White had nothing to say about the race and gender nexus that continued to oppress black women. He was, however, positively prolific about the consequences of failing to provide adequate employment for African Americans. “If there are no jobs, there will be hatred and fear; where there is hatred and fear there can be and probably will be riots. We want white Americans to have jobs because if they do they will not be tempted to gang up on Negroes who have employment.” If White had said no more, he would have encapsulated the coda for the postwar black experience in urban America. Yet he made two additional points that distinguish this testimony. First, he contended that the bill was so “mild in its provisions that no one in his right mind can object to it.” By the time that White testified, the sponsors of the bill had made multiple concessions to the anti-New Deal sentiment ascendant in Congress. They had trimmed the emphasis on deficit spending, highlighted the promotion of “free competitive enterprise,” excised the language of government “responsibility,” and conceded that the “right to employment” did not constitute a legal entitlement. Instead, the federal government would maintain business conditions favorable

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to maximum employment. These were, in large part, concessions wrung from congressional conservatives and business lobbyists concerned that full employment would produce inflation which could only be managed through the “regimentation” of wage and price controls. At the same time, it expressed the planners’ own reluctance to push forward the kind of direction job creation programs that had generated so much resistance from opponents of the New Deal. If this was a function of the inherent limitations of liberalism, as Anais Miodek argues, or the conservative propensities of social Keynesianism, as Steven Attewell contends, it also suggests the strength of the opposition that had been building since the first critics launched their assaults on the Civil Works Administration. This opposition had only grown during the war. Arguably, the concessions that Murray, Wagner, and their liberal allies made had less to do with a secret affinity for conservatism than the growing power of the real conservative movement. At the same, however, it illustrated the failure of liberal policymakers to understand the vital importance of popular mobilization along class lines. If the legislative concessions did reveal a “hidden conservative angle even to social Keynesianism,” they also highlighted the limited capacity of liberal policymakers to see the congressional fight as the extension of a larger class struggle.32 Yet White and his allies continued to face mounting opposition from those less concerned about what the bill contained and more concerned about what the bill suggested: the strengthening of the alliance between the New Deal state and a mobilized multiracial working class. When the theater of debate shifted from the Senate to the House, it gave the conservative and segregationist-led Executive Expenditures Committee control over the bill. There, the opposition intensified. It exposed right-wing fears of economic planning but also the power of southern legislators to neutralize measures that threatened the expansion of federal authority in the region. For example, two of three representatives on the House subcommittee responsible for drafting what would become H.R. 2202 were southern Democrats volubly opposed to the idea of a job guarantee. They were also loyal to Senator Walter George, chair of the Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning and a vigorous opponent of both policy and planning.33 Even so, in a legislative process in which so few African American voices were heard at all, White made the case that the full employment bill carried a significance far beyond its technical provisions. Recalling his travels to north Africa, Italy, the Pacific, and the Middle East, the NAACP secretary observed that black and white troops alike worried about “what kind of postwar America

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we shall have.” Passage of the measure would demonstrate a firm commitment to “freedom and democracy for all men” and provide an antidote to the cynicism of black troops about the prospects for change at home. White was not the only one concerned about the international implications of the full employment measure. Others also pointed out the opportunities to establish the framework for what Henry Wallace described as “the era of the common man.” Yet White racialized this discussion. In a Senate notorious for obstructing anti-racist legislation, White advocated for the criminalization of lynching and the repeal of the racially motivated poll tax. At the same time, he linked racial discrimination to the mechanics of capitalism. The Full Employment Bill was essential, White argued, “to cut the ground from under those who work deliberately to create friction by assuring citizens of every race, creed, color, and national origin the right to a job if he is able and willing to work.”34 Achieving full employment would challenge racial exclusion and build class solidarity by depriving capital of the tools of racial and ethnic division, a time-honored tactic of labor control. No wonder southern segregationists found the idea so threatening.35 The congressional hearings also afforded women the opportunity to express their conception of full employment in the postwar era. Even though the women who testified were uniformly white and middle class, they brought to the hearings perspectives that did not simply reflect their class position or relatively privileged status. In fact, the majority expressed the sensibilities of the labor-left alignment that had developed in the tumult of the 1930s. Although this was by the design of the liberal senators who managed the committee hearings, those who testified brought to this public forum their own sense of women’s aspirations for equality, their own indignation at the persistence of sexist assumptions about women and work. Perhaps no statement was more eloquent on these points than J.B. Caulkins, president of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). The YWCA had been an ally of organized labor and a proponent of racial equality since the 1920s. It was a key member of the broad progressive alliance that continued to champion social democracy during the war.36 By 1944, the YWCA’s Industrial Council had become a champion of working-class issues. In her testimony, Caulkins detailed the diversity of working-class representation in its ranks. It included a crane operator at a steel mill, a cashier, a mechanic working for a radio tube factory, two domestic workers—almost certainly African American—a sewer for a cap company, a textile worker, a garment machine operator, a maid at a housing project, a pharmacist’s assistant, a female janitor for a packing company, and an aircraft mechanic working at a naval station. Each endorsed the principle

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that any government reconversion program should provide “jobs for all who want to work.” By 1945, the Industrial Council had enlisted enthusiastically in the struggle for full employment. It was motivated by the drastic production cutbacks and by the keen sense on the part of female war workers that their interests had been sacrificed to the needs of veterans.37 It was these concerns that Caulkins foregrounded in her testimony. But Caulkins also underlined the divisive consequences of failing to provide for continuing employment. “We think one of the results of a congressional failure to promote full employment would be to engender bitter rivalries for whatever jobs are available—men against women, veterans against nonveterans, whites against Negroes.” The zero-sum game of private enterprise job creation that fostered such bitter enmities was forcing women out of wartime work.38 Caulkins drove the point home that women needed to work for wages. Even so, she made no direct attempt to question the exemption for housewives built into the bill by its principal architects. She even submitted that “most young women hope to marry” and have husbands that would support them. Yet, Caulkins wryly undercut this concession to gender prejudice by citing a Washington Times article that concluded in no uncertain terms that “80 percent of the women employed early in 1945 desire postwar jobs.” Like countless activists before and after her, Caulkins used the mythology of domesticity to ease the acceptance of women in the paid labor force.39 Moreover, Caulkins highlighted the class issues that underlay women’s labor, a point obscured by widespread cultural assumptions about women’s “place” in society. In short, working-class women entered the labor market because they had to. Acquiescing to the notion that women preferred domesticity, she cited financial need to rationalize a full employment policy that incorporated women on a full and equal basis. Quoting Women’s Bureau and YWCA studies on women’s wartime work, she repudiated the sexist notion that women worked for frivolous reasons. “These studies are valuable because they explode the argument that women work for pin money,” Caulkins declared. “Most women work because they must support themselves and support others.” The YWCA president reported that in a poll conducted by the organization on the problem of postwar reconversion, 72 percent of the 2,000 women surveyed claimed that it was “necessary” for them to continue in waged work. Of these, the majority were single and under the age of thirty. “These girls have to work to eat,” Caulkins informed the senators. “What will happen to them if failure to plan results in depression?” Studies by the CIO, the state of New York, and even the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce corroborated Caulkins’ claims.40

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This was an argument based not only on principle but on political economy. The very women most concerned about private sector reconversion belonged to that group of workers typically considered “marginal” to production. “If they are allowed to form a pool of unemployed, they will be a threat to the employed workers. Past experience has shown us that services of marginal workers can be secured at substandard wages and under poor working conditions, that they tend to depress wages in general and to lower the purchasing power of the Nation.” Echoing the CIO, the NAACP, and the left feminists in the New Deal administration, Caulkins argued for the elimination of a stratified labor market that depressed wages and commodified workers.41 Failing to ensure adequate employment after the war would guarantee that women, African Americans, and other minorities would continue to function as “marginal” workers. “All of these people are equally entitled to a job,” Caulkins announced fearlessly, “and none of them should be barred because of sex, marital status, race, color, or creed.” Not only did Caulkins take a swipe at the bill’s prohibition on job assurance for housewives but she also leveled a critique that linked racial and gender inequality to the profit imperative of capitalism.42 Caulkins’ testimony is important for two additional reasons. First, she reminded the senators that the idea of full employment had indeed captured the imagination of working and many middle-class Americans. The legitimacy of the idea itself exceeded the authority, expertise, and status of the men who presumed to determine its political fate. It was also a point that the political allies of the YWCA, including the opponents of the poll tax and advocates of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, had been making throughout the war.43 Organizations like the YWCA figured most prominently in the campaign, but “the demand, however inarticulate, for full employment is far wider and far stronger than any organization can indicate,” Caulkins stated. “It is the one thing that American workers, be they white collar or industrial, have most on their minds. They may not know very much about legislative proposals,” she added, “but they know they want jobs for all.” Second, even while she accepted the family wage idea, Caulkins asserted the central conviction that galvanized the movement: achieving meaningful employment should not require a zero-sum game in which some lost while others won. She did this by quoting Elsa Graves, a steelworker who also served as the chair of the YWCA’s National Industrial Council: I hope I haven’t given the impression that women will fight to hold their jobs no matter what. I think practically every woman in the United States would

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quit her job rather than have a veteran without a job, but—and this is the most important point—I don’t see any reason why women should have to choose between a job for themselves and a job for someone else. Most working women of America are conscious that their future as workers is dependent on planning for full employment.44

Like Caulkins’ own testimony, Graves conceded the sanctity of the domestic ideal but then subverted it, even more directly than the president of the YWCA. What Graves—and Caulkins by association—did was to assert the universality of the right to employment, the radical notion that male veterans and women should have equal guarantees of employment if they needed it. Any other position seemed irrational or unconvincing. This was no mere rhetorical flourish. It represented a powerful challenge to the suggestion that a male-dominated economics profession, political class, business elite, and journalistic caste should rule out of order and out of reach an idea that had gained as much widespread legitimacy as full employment. Subtly but powerfully, Caulkins’ testimony and Graves’ speech challenged male authority. The initial exclusion of housewives from S. 380 demonstrated that supposedly enlightened legislators such as Robert Wagner and James Murray continued to operate in the grip of the dominant gender ideology. Most importantly, Caulkins’ invocation of Graves’ bold statement questioned the power of those policymakers who sought to maintain the status quo by delineating the boundaries of reasonable discussion. Echoing the arguments of full employment advocates since the 1930s, Graves implicitly criticized the irrationality of mass unemployment. She asserted a new, intrinsically feminist logic that insisted on the fundamental equality of men and women. She did this in the face of building cultural pressure to restore gender norms upended by wartime mobilization. Perhaps this is what is most striking about the testimony given during the Senate hearings: the dissident strains of full employment thought and the willingness of progressive groups to expand its meaning beyond what liberal legislators had intended. Groups such as the YWCA, the National Farmers Union, the National Council of Jewish Women, the NAACP, and the League of Women Shoppers consistently opposed the reduction of the full employment question to instrumentalist logic. Instead, they sifted the debate through the ethical and ideological filters produced by the working-class movement and the war against fascism. The full employment debate illustrated more than any other comparable issue how, as Nelson Lichtenstein describes it, “the social-patriotic

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ethos generated by antifascist propaganda and war-era mobilization politicized new aspects of working-class life.” This was a “patriotic subversion of the old order,” a “mobilization from below, legitimated by government policy above.” It was a dynamic that played out in the struggles over a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and the Office of Price Administration as well.45 This subversion of the old order, the expansion of the boundaries of legitimate thought, and the transformation of the meaning of full employment were no more evident than in the statements of the Communist Party and Norman Thomas, America’s leading socialist. That their statements were included at all in the official documentation of the Senate’s hearings is a commentary on the fluid political reality that characterized America in 1945. It is inconceivable that, two years later, any CPUSA statement would be included in a government publication other than as testimony at a HUAC hearing or in anti-communist tirades in the Congressional Record. In the throes of the transition from the wartime popular front to the class-conscious policies of the postwar period, the statement was full of the stridency of the early 1930s.46 Yet the CPUSA statement did not simply offer pro-Soviet rhetoric. Instead, it articulated the radical edge of full employment thought. This had accompanied the development of the idea since the 1930s and had been implicit in the writings of some of even the most restrained commentators. What the party presented was a considered reminder of the lessons of the Great Depression. “Long years of joblessness, insecurity, and low living standards, together with painful experiences with inadequate relief schemes and makeshift job projects has forcefully taught the lesson of the failure and incompetency of private enterprise,” the statement proclaimed. Inflammatory, yes—but what the Communist Party was explicitly saying nonetheless echoed Murray, Patton, and other progressives. Each started from the assumption that the system was incapable of delivering on its promises of prosperity and security.47 More than this, the Communist Party statement reminded the Washington powerbrokers that the Great Depression had exploded the myth of a self-regulating capitalist system. “The American people learned that mass unemployment is not an act of God like typhoons and cyclones, inevitably arising and being patiently endured for years at a time.”48 The communists were not alone in this sentiment. If anything, they simply encapsulated the widespread conviction that economic inequality was not a product of natural forces. As Dorothy Kahn put it to the Social Work Action Committee of New York, “One thing we have learned: Mass joblessness is not inevitable. We have come to understand that employment rises and fall not in accord with some supernatural law but in response to human

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decisions, purposes, and activities.”49 For the communists, the answer was clear: the private ownership of the means of production permitted the exclusive control of resources and the uninhibited development of monopolies. Neither could be ameliorated without government planning. Unfortunately, for the CPUSA, according to an Elmo Roper poll conducted in August 1945, only 10.4 percent of the population would have agreed that the socialization of industry was an acceptable route to full employment. Yet fully 55 percent of Americans agreed that achieving full employment required economic planning and government intervention. In other words, more than 65 percent of Americans agreed that the kind of government planning and regulation outlined by the party and implicit in the Murray bill was necessary.50 Arguing that the opponents of full employment wanted to restore an economy of scarcity, retain a floating pool of unemployed workers, and eliminate government regulations, the CPUSA only put the most militant gloss on a belief held by most working-class Americans. It was a position which liberal members of Congress were steadily abandoning as opposition to the measure intensified. If the Communist Party had yet to swerve from its popular front affinity for the Democratic Party, the Socialist Party had yet to embrace it. It was conspicuously a position that was evident in Norman Thomas’ spirited statement to the subcommittee. “The Murray bill has two good features,” the curmudgeonly radical conceded. “It recognizes that the provision of full employment is a social necessity for a healthy democracy and that it is a legitimate concern of Government.” Thomas also praised the national budgeting plan that was a key element of the measure. Beyond this, however, “the bill breaks down in an extravagant and unrealistic devotion to a miscalled system of free enterprise, better described as private capitalism.” While right-wing critics assailed the measure for its alleged plans to redistribute wealth and impinge on corporate autonomy, Thomas excoriated it for rescuing capital from the business cycle while raising taxes to support the unemployed. His critique had an oddly conservative ring to it, as he inveighed against the government becoming “a dispenser of the ancient dole of bread and circuses to the unemployed,” setting up a “Santa Claus” charade that threatened “intelligent democracy” and made “citizens dependent upon government.” Thomas’ position ran into confusion when he suggested that somehow the Murray bill misunderstood what was required to achieve full employment: the increase of consumer purchasing power to fuel the production of goods. If this wasn’t the essence of the compensatory argument, then what was? What disturbed Thomas the most—as it did many conservative critics of the measure—was the prospect that maintaining full employment required

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the continuation of the “arbitrary regimentation and excessive bureaucracy of wartime.”51 Yet if private enterprise really had failed to produce the abundance it promised, how exactly would a nation as large and complex as the United States in the 1940s achieve anything approximating maximum production? Here was the key: Thomas dissented from the assumption that full employment was a matter best administered by experts. He introduced the idea that local, community-level, democratic participation should be central to any full employment agenda worth considering. This emphasis on fostering nonprofit companies, promoting cooperatives, and raising the “direct consuming power” of farmers and workers set Thomas apart from liberals and progressives.52 But it also distinguished him from the communists, who were more than happy to exalt in big state planning ala the Soviet Union and its five-year plans. It also set him apart from conservatives, who railed against “centralization” but offered little more than the freeing of private enterprise as a solution to stagnation. The testimony in Congress on behalf of progressive and left-wing organizations drew on the strength of mobilization at the grassroots level. A broad cross-section of the popular front officially endorsed the measure, including the American Association of Social Workers, the American Jewish Congress, the League of Women Shoppers, the Council for Social Action of the Congregational Christian Churches, the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the National Consumers’ League, the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the National Conference of Jewish Women, to name just a few. These organizations alone represented hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom were white-collar workers as invested in the idea of ensuring adequate employment as any member of the CIO.53 The most illustrious group was the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP). Formed in 1944 to mobilize star power for Roosevelt’s re-election bid, the organization claimed a membership of 10,000 that included cultural and artistic luminaries such as sculptor Jo Davidson; writers Van Wyck Brooks, William Rose Benet, and playwright Marc Connelly; actors Frederick March, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart; radio personality Norman Corwin; FDR’s son James Roosevelt; as well as a host of professional and cultural types who added glamor and skill to the group’s energetic activism. In support of the bill, the organization held a conference on full employment in June 1945 at which Senator Murray gave an address on the connection between economic stability and artistic vitality.54 When Murray invited ICCASP to testify at the Senate hearings, Harvard astronomer

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and ICCASP activist Harlow Shapley obliged. He offered insight into the vulnerability of artists and intellectuals to unemployment, providing a glimpse into the affinity between white-collar workers and working-class Americans. “This bill is the Magna Carta of full employment.” It was inextricably connected to the wider campaign for social democratic justice, which included the effort to pass the Murray-Wagner-Dingell bill for the extension of social security, to maintain the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and to push through Congress the Kilgore-Forand unemployment compensation bill providing relief for the tens of thousands idled by shrinking wartime production. More than this, Shapley put ICCASP on record for its opposition to the bill’s failure to support housewives who wanted to enter the labor market. “It is our position that creative ability and a willingness to work do not automatically cease should a woman assume housekeeping responsibilities or bear children. Full employment is not full employment,” the Harvard astronomer added pointedly, “when limited to one sex.” Like Walter White and J.B. Caulkins, Shapley brought the egalitarian principles of the popular front into the public debate.55 Leading cultural and intellectual figures like actress Olivia de Havilland and Albert Einstein also supported full employment. But what was most important was that a sizable representation of the cultural left had fashioned an organization that spoke to the interests of professionals and white-collar workers. They could legitimately claim to represent at least a segment of that social strata. Middle-class progressives lent tremendous support to the full employment measure and to the larger thrust for economic planning. By early September, 1945, the Union for Democratic Action was mobilizing at the grassroots and reaching out to organized labor to develop a united front in support of the Murray bill. The Illinois Committee for Full Employment brought representatives from the National Public Housing Conference, the Industrial Union Council of the CIO, the YWCA, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Veterans Committee together to plan action. And yet a report from the Independent Voters of Illinois and the Citizens Research Bureau illustrated the disparity between widespread support for the idea of economic planning and knowledge of the Murray bill. As the report pointed out, 69 percent had not even heard of the legislation, while another 19 percent had heard of it but did not know what it was. In response, the organization outlined a strategy that promised to inform the working-class citizenry and win their support. What’s important to understand is that working and progressive middle-class Americans overwhelmingly supported the idea of full employment. The problem was that the architects of the bill had failed to

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defend a sufficiently visionary measure that would match their expectations. Simultaneously, organized labor failed to generate sufficient support for the bill over the summer. By September 1945, as the prospect of renewed hearings loomed and as the unemployed numbers escalated, the CIO changed its tune. In Chicago, members of the Independent Voters of Illinois who met on September 6th in the office of the Union for Democratic Action (UDA) at 123 Madison Street found that their survey of voters’ opinions confirmed that a workingclass majority supported full employment. When asked if they would support a measure in which “government would give contracts to private business to build public works to make up the balance of jobs needed” should the president’s yearly budget project a shortfall, a resounding 83 percent of respondents answered “yes.” More than this, the survey revealed a yearning to understand and discuss full employment through community meetings.56 Based on these findings, the Independent Voters of Illinois decided on an aggressive grassroots campaign in support of the legislation. It would focus on local meetings, pressure Illinois congressional representatives, and build synergies between labor, liberal, religious, and local business groups. The group entertained the idea of hiring a full-time coordinator for the campaign. Chair Howard Y. Williams agreed to sponsor meetings in southern Illinois. Most important, the Committee planned to use CIO and UDA literature in a doorbellringing campaign that would bring the issue into the homes of Chicago’s workers. How much if any of this ambitious plan became reality remains is difficult to determine. According to the committee’s September 1945 report, frontline organizing was moving apace. In the following weeks, as the minutes recorded, Walter Reuther planned to make an appearance at an event sponsored by the Labor Council for Community Action; the Independent Voters of Illinois scheduled a meeting in the Rogers Park area of the city; Richard Frankensteen, former UAW vice president who was then running for the mayor’s office in Detroit, was set to address the city’s Civil Liberties Committee on “Full and Fair Employment” at the Orchestra Hall; and the Southwest Committee on Full Employment had arranged a public event at the Lindbloom High School for October 12th. This offers a glimpse of the community organizing that took place under the auspices of the UDA and progressive organizations in at least some of the major urban centers in 1945.57 While ICCASP and UDA aimed at generating middle-class support, the CIO mobilized masses of workers in defense of postwar planning. In July, it rallied tens of thousands of its members to a full employment demonstration in Cadillac Square, Detroit. They demanded to know why the US Congress guaranteed

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corporate profits during the war but resisted guaranteeing full employment after it.58 As the rolls of those left unemployed by the cancellation of wartime contracts increased, rising to approximately 2 million in early October, and as real income declined by 15 percent in the three months following victory over Japan, the CIO intensified its activism.59 It launched mass rallies in New York City, Camden, New Jersey, and Chicago to demand increased unemployment compensation, government ownership of plants that private enterprise refused to operate, and “jobs for all.” In Chicago, thousands of workers crowded into the Loop District on a torchlight parade demanding that President Truman redirect war production appropriations to provide severance pay for unemployed workers. Even here, however, workers bore signs reading “Bendix Local 330 UAW-CIO Demands Jobs and Security for All” and “We Won Victory Over Fascism, Now Let’s Win Victory Over Unemployment.” The ideas of economic security and guaranteed employment now blended together in a rising tide of working-class enthusiasm. In Labor Day demonstrations in Minneapolis, Detroit, Baltimore, Winston-Salem, Buffalo, Schenectady, and elsewhere, veterans joined wartime workers to protest the business campaign against social security, unemployment compensation, and full employment legislation.60 A week later, the CIO held a mass rally in Philadelphia that brought some 7,000 workers and their supporters to the city’s Convention Hall. “We in labor are not going to stand idly by while profiteering lunatics destroy America,” the CIO’s James Carey told the assembled. The following week, more than 1,000 CIO supporters—African Americans, whites, men, women—descended on Washington to demand that Congress adopt the union’s legislative agenda. The militancy that had defined industrial labor in the 1930s and would soon rock the nation in a series of general strikes was now enlisted in support of guaranteed employment.61 In October, delegations of CIO members and community organizations began appearing in the offices of senators and congressmen known for their opposition to progressive reconversion legislation. Most remarkably, some one hundred CIO members from the South—“men and women, Negroes and whites from shipyard, textile, tobacco, steel and other industries”— converged on Capitol Hill to demand a solution to the unemployment crisis.62 As the evidence of production layoffs mounted and as congressional and corporate opposition to social democratic legislation intensified, the CIO increased its presence in the public forum, demonstrating the kind of working-class leadership not seen since 1937. Yet little of this militant bravado made much of a difference since the CIO never took decisive action where its power really lay: at the point of production.

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Lobbying Congress certainly strengthened the resolution of those already in favor of full employment legislation. Public demonstrations heightened awareness of the legislation before Congress and galvanized working-class support for the idea. But the failure to unify sporadic walkouts through a coordinated withdrawal of labor that would penalize the political alliance then thwarting progressive legislation left the CIO with few options other than congressional lobbying.63 Despite its limitations, the left-wing media amplified the campaign dramatically. Its efforts tracked the growing momentum on the ground, exposing the contradictions and unsavory motives of those who defended “free” enterprise against full employment. While Keynesian government advisers back-peddled in the face of reactionary opposition, progressive journalists and economists painted the full spectrum of change that still seemed possible. Progressive economist Seymour Harris argued in the pages of the New Republic that the problem of unemployment could not be reduced to increasing aggregate demand. It inevitably meant “ensuring the distribution of capital and labor in such a way that, given the total demand, employment may be maximized.” That meant intervening in labor markets, investment decisions, and planning for maximum production. It also meant government funding of public improvements.64 Ezekiel and the other contributors to The New Republic’s special section foregrounded the class antagonism which the full employment debate had sparked. The contributors submitted that “the full employment bill and related legislative proposals cut far deeper and more directly into the basic economic divisions of the country” than any question of international relations.65 Equally important, it highlighted the willingness of progressive intellectuals to contest the presumptions of capitalist authority. It also heightened the expectation that the postwar order might bring an end to forced scarcity and destructive competition.66 In the pages of The Nation, journalist I.F. Stone argued that the social and economic order that full employment challenged was one in which a “margin of poverty and joblessness” was considered indispensable to “the profitable functioning of an unplanned, irresponsible, and anarchistic economic system” of capitalism. Stone was unequivocal: full employment and monopoly capitalism were completely incompatible. Even he was willing to concede, however, that a drastic change in the structures of accumulation might reconcile the two. The war had produced the conditions for a bold reconfiguration of economic power. It had generated sufficient demand and established the planning agencies that could effectively direct production. Should these conditions

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continue, private capitalism could be saved—but Stone was skeptical at best.67 Yet Stone’s skepticism illustrated how the full employment idea exposed the limitations of modern capitalism as an agent of social improvement. Urging its readers to support the Murray Bill, the editors of The Nation encapsulated exactly how full employment challenged private enterprise: The opposition to the bill, led by Taft of Ohio, falls backs on as astounding an argument as was ever advanced by conservative opinion in a changing world. It is that full employment is impossible under capitalism, an extraordinarily subversive and defeatist “line” for conservatives to take. They may be correct— Karl Marx agreed with them—but the experiment is worth trying, and they are completely deluded in the conclusion to which they think their argument leads. To tell the masses that full employment is impossible under capitalism is to invite them to give up capitalism, not full employment. Taft forgets that he is addressing ordinary folk, not a bankers’ convention [emphasis added].68

Rather than an innocuous liberal palliative, full employment raised fundamental questions about the compatibility between capitalism and democracy. Above all, it promised workers additional leverage. If Hansen noted the shift in power, The New Republic spelled it out. “Our experience with periods of labor shortage indicates that its first effect is greatly to increase the bargaining power of labor, both individually and collectively.” That would mean improved working conditions and increased wages. But it would also mean that business would have to make employment appealing, since “the workers are no longer motivated by the fear of losing their jobs.” Southern senators gasped at what the New Republic editors were only too happy to underline: full employment would make it difficult to secure domestic servants unless working conditions and wage rates improved. “The status of labor will improve, since employers can no longer rely upon the discipline of discharge to enforce authority,” the editors bluntly observed. “The tendency will be for labor to have more participation in industrial and economic policy.” This was exactly what business feared and what most excited the advocates of full employment.69 It would also liberate employees from the uncertainty that operated as the ultimate check on working-class activism. No longer afraid of technological change as the harbinger of unemployment, no longer terrified by the consequences of arbitrary dismissal, they would invest themselves in the production process and take a greater sense of ownership in it. “The tendency will be for labor to have more participation in industrial and economic policy.” More than elaborate grievance

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procedures and seniority entitlements, full employment would promote worker control over the production process itself. In 1945, this was exactly the last thing that management wanted to encourage. *** To varying degrees, the advocates of full employment sought to resolve the contradictions of Keynesianism. They strove to harmonize full employment and private enterprise and assure their critics that economic planning and compensatory spending would only mitigate the worst of the business cycle. Above all, they sought to assure private enterprise that its prerogatives over investment and the labor market remained intact. They did so in part because full employment seemed attainable under capitalism. Yet the attainment of full employment, as Michal Kalecki postulated, would also irrevocably alter the structures of accumulation that business sought so vigorously to restore after the Great Depression. The conservative, business-friendly opposition had no such qualms about exposing the tensions inherent in full employment. In September, Sumner Gerard of the Committee for Constitutional Government—one of a myriad of rightwing organizations that sprang up in opposition to economic planning—penned a letter to the Montana attorney general titled “Grave Danger! ‘Full Employment’ Bill.” While Gerard criticized the “barrage of socialistic legislation” then before Congress, he considered the Full Employment Bill the “most dangerous,” since it supposedly advanced a “philosophy that Government must support the citizen, and not the citizen his government.” Calling for the expansion of a mass media campaign that had already put anti-full employment articles before some 5 million newspaper readers, Sumner outlined what was at stake: “This is the hour of decision. Collectivism is sweeping across Europe and knocking at our gates. Are you and your associates willing to surrender here, let your country be taken over by left-wing collectivists?”70 The Citizens National Committee (CNC), a business-led political action committee, underlined precisely what was at stake in the full employment issue. It was not simply compensatory spending, per se, or budget deficits, or government boondoggles, or even a bloated federal bureaucracy. Each of these criticisms had been leveled at New Deal social policy since the 1930s. Instead, according to the committee’s 1945 Full Employment and the National Budget, it was the conviction that the economy should be “guided primarily by business enterprise.” The state, by contrast, should merely provide “an atmosphere in which business can develop to its fullest extent, unhampered by extended government control or restriction.” The rhetoric could not have more perfectly

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anticipated the neoliberal ideology of the late twentieth century than had it been written by Business Week itself. In the committee’s estimation, which clearly echoed Friedrich Hayek’s diatribe against state intervention in private enterprise, the regulations that would accompany full employment would “lead inevitably to a government-planned economy and economic dictatorship.” Adopting the hysterical tone that increasingly defined right-wing diatribes against the New Deal, the committee conflated economic planning with the totalitarian theory of state dominance and individual subordination.71 Business pundits railed against New Deal policy infringements on entrepreneurial freedom, personal liberty, and traditions of decentralized government, but the Citizens National Committee (CNC) focused on more prosaic concerns: business taxation. If sustained at present levels (1945), they claimed, it would steadily erode the incentive for investment and expansion. The committee said nothing about the spectacular profits that corporations earned because of federal cost-plus contracts.72 But it was certainly on to something. Not only did this fear reflect on Kalecki’s belief that taxation was a critical road to full employment, but it paralleled Henry Wallace’s belief that corporate taxation would compel businesses to shift cash reserves into productive capital investments that would create jobs.73 From the CNC’s perspective, this would simply force industry after industry into unprofitability. Inflation and deficit spending would only exacerbate this gloomy forecast. What distressed the committee the most, though, was the prospect that managing full employed would require government intervention in capital’s presumed prerogative to determine prices and wages.74 The Citizens National Committee did not simply object to price controls and deficit spending. It opposed the whole notion of eradicating unemployment itself. Even while it might be a “desirable objective” to eliminate mass unemployment, it insisted that “the flexibility required by a free economy [was] inconsistent with the complete elimination of unemployment.” Acknowledging the “widespread popular demand for job security,” the committee insisted on the primacy of “economic freedom,” a sentiment echoed in Chamber of Commerce pamphlets attacking postwar planning. Stripped of the Jeffersonian rhetoric, what the committee and its business allies wanted to protect was the discipline of unemployment. The economic freedom of business now stood in direct opposition to widespread, popular support for “freedom from want”, a sentiment that the committee frankly acknowledged.75 Full employment also raised the possibility that government might compete directly against private enterprise. Could enough bridges, hospitals, airports,

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and roads be constructed to employ those now entitled to employment? “When public works fail to provide ‘full employment,’” the committee worried, “it would seem inevitable that there would be further and further extension of government activities until the government goes directly into the field of commercial goods and services.” Business apologists did not fear an abstract leviathan, but an effective competitor that could reduce profit margins, influence investment patterns, and govern labor markets to the detriment of capitalist control. “The flow of new capital, which is the life blood of a free economic system, will diminish.” The Chamber of Commerce articulated similar fears. Government investment could “dampen” private investment by using the power of taxation to manage costs which businesses could never absorb. What the committee and the Chamber could not bring themselves to acknowledge was the likelihood that reducing the overaccumulation of capital would translate into a wider distribution of income, socially beneficial investments, and the greater likelihood of maximum employment.76 The Citizens National Committee was one of the more voluble in an expansive business coalition that mobilized against full employment. Even so, it echoed the opinion of organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, which spearheaded the antifull employment drive. This campaign was never a simple exercise in opposition, however. At least in the early stages, the Chamber of Commerce was reluctant to dismiss the argument that mass unemployment posed a real threat to postwar society. The Chamber’s own extensive research on the problem revealed precisely what Senators Murray and Wagner had been saying since 1944: the United States faced a disparity between projected job creation and anticipated job demand. Disturbed by the prospect of a return to mass unemployment, the Chamber of Commerce was prepared to accept some form of government assistance to provide enterprise, but not one that reinforced the stagnationist argument or justified redistributionist policies.77 According to Emerson Schmidt, director of Economic Research for the Chamber and author of Can Government Guarantee Full Employment?, full employment threatened state centralization, the erosion of individual liberty, a profligate increase in the federal deficit, and the creation of agencies and bureaus that would exercise inordinate authority over private interests. This was the standard conservative critique,78 but at this moment at least, Schmidt and the Chamber were willing to entertain the benefit of unemployment compensation “and other devices” to mitigate economic downturns. Even though Schmidt posited that wage and price rigidities, inflexible credit policies, and “war-created distortions and maladjustments” (i.e., government regulations) were really at

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the root of mass unemployment, he acknowledged that it was a problem that required expert attention and national will.79 Resisting the temptation to condemn the measure outright and set itself against public opinion, the Chamber of Commerce acceded to the need for deficit spending in business downturns. It even endorsed tax reforms and public works during recessions. Accommodating liberal opinion, the Chamber increased its influence even as it criticized what it thought would be the dangerous consequences of economic planning.80 For its part, the Union for Democratic Action saw little evidence of liberal conciliation. UDA Director Paul Sifton drafted a four-page memo that dissected Schmidt’s pamphlet paragraph by paragraph. Countering Schmidt’s assertion that the effort to resolve the problem of unemployment in the 1930s had only met with “limited” success, Sifton argued that the Chamber of Commerce and its allies had done everything possible to obstruct the administration’s program for recovery. “Year after year policies and appropriations were attacked, whittled down, compromised and emasculated so that at no time was the government able to move decisively to wipe out mass unemployment.” Despite the opposition, the Roosevelt administration had been able to reduce the unemployment rate from 25 to 14 percent. “The United States Chamber of Commerce, which with its allies succeeded in preventing a solution of chronic mass unemployment during the 30s, now cites that failure to wipe out mass unemployment as [sic] argument against a goal of full employment.” Sifton was being too kind to an administration that had resisted the magnitude of deficit spending necessary to bring down a stubbornly high unemployment rate in the early 1940s. Even so, his analysis underlined the continuity of the Chamber’s hostility toward any government solutions for the failures of the private enterprise system.81 Progressive journalists demonstrated considerably more nerve than their policymaking counterparts in defending the implications of full employment.82 They joined Sifton in a more radical and searching discussion of the idea of full employment. As conservatives dragooned economist Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom into the defense of business pre-eminence, orchestrating a nationwide right-wing assault on what was now the Wagner Full Employment Act,83 progressives challenged their effort to monopolize the rhetoric of freedom.84 They disputed the claim that conservatives sought to protect the lofty principles of decentralized republicanism against the tentacles of New Deal “regimentation.” Historian Alan Brinkley argues that, “in responding to Burnham and Hayek” and to the pervasive discussion about totalitarianism,

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“liberals were in fact responding to a powerful strain of Jeffersonian anti-statism in American political culture that a decade of the New Deal had done relatively little to eliminate.” Brinkley is not alone in this assessment.85 It is, however, an argument that exaggerates the principled content of the business front’s opposition to full employment. Consider economist Ben B. Seligman’s analysis of the National Association of Manufacturers’ National Industrial Conference Board. Despite the harangues against the Harvard theorists who had “foisted upon the Western world a new gospel of totalitarianism,” Seligman wrote, the real dispute was over control rather than planning itself. If the economic order is run by private enterprise, special interests are bound to dominate. If responsibility for economic operations rests with democratically chosen government agencies, public welfare will prevail. The Conference Board boys are no fools; they understand this very well, and they are quite anxious to have their own bureaucracy in the driver’s seat [emphasis added]. 86

Bureaucracy, like state intervention in the market economy, was ultimately a question of what was being regulated and in whose interests. Progressives on the margins of political power proved the most willing to challenge the conservative equation between unregulated private enterprise and freedom. Instead of a leviathan threatening liberty, economist Heinz Eulau argued, the modern democratic state had become the only effective defender of the people’s liberties “against the encroachment of the huge economic combines which hide behind the shibboleth of ‘free enterprise.’” The barrage of rhetoric about protecting liberty failed to obscure the evidence that business and its intellectual allies were “more interested in restricting the sphere of government action than in enlarging the sphere of freedom.” Writing in 1945 to Bertram Gross, an adviser to Senator James Murray and key supporter of the Full Employment Bill, Louis Bean of the Bureau of the Budget skewered the motives of its opponents, including former brain truster Raymond Moley. The defeat of full employment “means private instead of public planning with concentrations of economic power continuing to take over more and more of our economy.” It also meant the “steady increase of control over the machinery of government to advance the interests of such aggregations of power.” If there was an insidious force threatening American freedoms, Bean argued, it was not creeping socialism, but unbridled capitalism operating under the ideological mantle of free enterprise.87

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Testifying before Wagner’s Subcommittee on Banking and Currency, Phillip Murray stripped away the lofty principles from the material self-interest propelling opposition to full employment. I take this occasion to put the question directly to every member of the committee and to all of the Members of the Senate: Do you want to see unemployment of Americans? I am not satisfied to listen in reply to legalistic double talk. I am not interested in a sterile discussion about isolated phrases and how the “right” to a job is an introduction to ‘tyranny’ or any other nonsense.

Murray understood how those Americans who had come to embrace the idea of full employment would respond to its repudiation in Congress. “The American people are going to be very skeptical and suspicious of anyone who believes in unemployment,” he warned, “or who conducts himself in any manner to hinder and prevent the accomplishment” of a full employment system.88 The more radical cross-currents of full employment continued to percolate to the surface in these hearings and throughout this long, hot summer of class struggle. Despite his overtures to boosting consumption, Murray echoed the likes of Senator Murray, Alvin Hansen, John G. Pierson, and so many proponents of guaranteed employment. He did so by offering a defense of the idea that tended to subvert his banal plaudits to the benefits of mass consumption. “Selfgovernment—democracy—also extends into the employment relationship,” Murray claimed, recapitulating the idea of working-class self-determination. Opponents of economic planning wanted to maintain maximum labor flexibility to contain costs. Paraphrasing infamous rogue financier Samuel Insull on the benefits of a long line at the unemployment office, Murray argued that “employers want to keep workers in constant fear that they will make no demands for their share of the wealth they create and so that they will continue in subjection to the will of the mill master.” This attitude was the equivalent of fascism, Murray implied. But most critically, the former miner and steelworkers’ leader brought to the Senate chambers the widespread belief that democratic economic planning presented a legitimate alternative to the caprices of capitalist production. The American labor movement had supported “private competitive enterprise,” Murray cooed, but the rank-and-file now expected business leaders to lease and operate the plants that the federal government had generously provided them. What were the implications of failing to do so? If the plants are not soon started up to make jobs and turn out goods, the average citizen is going to ask: Well, why doesn’t the government hire engineers

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and managers to operate these factories the way it was done during the war? Resolutions are being passed in local unions; individuals are inquiring: Why not? It’s going to be impossible to answer that one with talk of “confidence” and similar chatter… And if private enterprise fails to give workers jobs at good wages, turning out things we all need, the people will recognize the failure of private capitalism and vigorously call for Government operation.

Like so many engaged in the class struggle of that era, Murray seemed willing to contemplate something more radical than social democratic reform. It was evident in the fact that he was not simply agitating for his industrial council scheme again. “I am telling you this,” he added portentously, “because of the pressure that is already generating from the people.”89 That pressure would eventually produce the general strike wave of 1945 and 1946, but it did little to change the fate of Murray Full Employment Bill. That fate was determined by a business press and corporate lobby hostile to the measure. It was sealed by a coalition of anti-New Deal Republicans and southerners determined to stop the advance of a progressive labor movement. By the time that the Senate passed the measure and sent it to the House, opponents had been able to eviscerate the right to a job. In place of “the right to useful, remunerative, regular and full-time employment,” the bill now stated that Americans were “entitled to an opportunity” for useful and remunerative work.90 The notion of a guarantee comparable to the right to freedom of speech or assembly had finally been defeated. Once in the House, this concession would look positively minor. Under the concerted lobbying pressure of the Chamber of Commerce, the conservative House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments rejected the Murray-Patman bill, the mirror-image bill sponsored by Wright Patman of Texas, and an even more progressive alternative championed by Charles La Follette of Indiana. Striking a subcommittee to draft an alternative, the House placed the fate of the bill in the hands of Will Whittington, Mississippi Democrat and the deciding vote. Whittington became the key architect of a new measure. A member of the Chamber of Commerce, a writer for the organization’s Nation’s Business, and a defender of the South’s comparative advantage on labor costs, Whittington turned to the organization for assistance in shaping a measure that would channel his animosity toward the idea of a job guarantee into legislation.91 Benefiting from the advice of the Chamber’s Department of Governmental Affairs, Whittington produced a bill that decisively undermined Murray’s

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proposal. Instead of focusing exclusively on the problem of unemployment, the new measure now addressed the issue of production and consumer spending. This shifted the focus from the social question of idled workers to the technical problem of calibrating production for profit. If liberals or weak-kneed progressives began the process of undercutting the radical vigor of the Full Employment Bill, as Steven Attewell has argued, conservatives steadily united against any expansion of the New Deal. They undercut fiscal initiatives designed to expand social investments by insisting on loans and only fiscally sound public works projects. They also removed the National Production and Employment Budget, the very centerpiece of Murray’s economic planning. In its place, they substituted the considerably less stringent President’s Economic Report, which the Council of Economic Advisers, now vetted of labor and consumer influence, would produce.92 As historian Alan Brinkley noted, “Nothing in the law required either the President or the Congress to respond to the council’s recommendations in any particular way.”93 The bill that the House finally approved deflected any federal responsibility for creating “useful, remunerative employment,” let alone for achieving full employment. In the compromise Employment Act of 1946, Congress endorsed a measure that eradicated the full employment idiom and removed any requirement to adopt compensatory spending.94 Ultimately, the bill established a vague commitment to “maximum employment.” Cumulatively, the conservative alliance between big business, the Republican Party, and southern segregationists, reinforced by the liberal boundaries that persuaded most Democrats to defer to the prerogatives of capital, had discredited the idea that economic stagnation lay at the center of the great collapse. It thus undermined the argument that economic planning was the only answer. In the process, it also dealt a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of the notion that government authority should be exercised to achieve economic and racial justice.95 Yet the idea of “jobs for all” persisted. It did so not because of the legislative battles waged by Murray, Patman, and Wagner, but because of the economic calamities playing out in the wider society as corporations shredded their workforces, cut back on hours and overtime, and imposed a massive wage cut on workers. The intransigence of a conservative Congress determined to obstruct a battery of progressive legislation only exacerbated the mood of class disaffection. CIO agitation for higher wages, for adequate unemployment insurance, for an end to racial discrimination in hiring, and for the principle of a job guarantee galvanized the working-class discontent that had been festering despite the CIO’s no-strike pledge. While Congress

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wrangled over the Murray bill, working-class Americans began taking to the streets in walkouts that demonstrated the determination to achieve what full employment had always promised: decent pay, job security, and dignity in the workplace. The uprisings of 1945–46 were nothing less than strikes for the right to a job.

Notes Quoted in Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment, 110; Katznelson, Fear Itself, 380–1. 2 Williams et al., “Cutting the Deck, 150–3; Blyth, Great Transformations, 83. 3 Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore’s judgment can stand for the majority opinion on what the demise of the Full Employment Act signified in 1945. Citing Brinkley’s The End of Reform, they argue that “After 1937, the liberals’ job was to manage the system toward the Keynesian dream of full employment and broad-based consumption… The gutted Employment Act of 1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 were early evidence of the trimmed prospects of the New Deal for the postwar era.” See “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008): 8, 21; Kim Phillips-Fein, The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 32; Lizabeth Cohen posits that liberals promoted mass consumption through full employment as a means of “reconciling capitalist growth and democratic commitments without endorsing too planned an economy or too powerful a welfare state” in contrast to “labor and others on the left.” A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 116. 4 Brian Waddell, The War Against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 137–8. 5 Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 207–8; “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining,” 15–27. 6 This argument runs counter to that presented by Kathleen G. Donahue, who argues that the demise of the National Recovery Administration signaled the discrediting of economic planning. See Freedom from Want, 242–3. 7 Labor’s War at Home, 200–1; “Program of the CIO Political Action Committee,” 3–5, box 16, folder titled “PAC Platforms 1944,” Beanie Baldwin papers, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Library, hereafter cited as Baldwin papers. 8 CIO Political Action Committee, “Jobs for All After the War,” 1944, 17, box 16, folder titled “CIO-PAC Leaflets etc.,” Beanie Baldwin papers; Julie Meyer, “Trade 1

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Union Plans for Post-War Reconstruction in the United States,” Social Research 11 (1944): 495–501, quotation on 494. 9 Ibid., 328–30; for the AFL’s support for full employment legislation, see Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 210–11. 10 “Program of the CIO Political Action Committee,” 5. 11 CIO-PAC, “Program for Victory,” 3, box 16, folder titled “CIO-PAC Platforms 1944,” Baldwin papers. 12 Philip Murray, “Reconversion and Postwar Needs,” Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment, CIO Political Action Committee, January 15, 1944 (New York: CIO-PAC, 1944), 60. 13 CIO pamphlet “Steel Fights for the Nation,” 1944, 1–3, box 18, folder titled “Undated 1944,” Elmer Benson papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. 14 Ibid. 15 Leon Henderson, “Reconversion and Postwar Needs,” Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment, CIO Political Action Committee, 16. 16 “C.I.O—Political Action Committee,” The Dairy Farmers’ Digest (January 1944): 42, in box 5, folder titled “Farmers Union 1944–1945,” Baldwin papers. 17 Sidney Hillman, “Opening Remarks,” in Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment, CIO Political Action Committee, 3. 18 Walter Reuther, “Reconversion and Postwar Needs,” ibid., 15; Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25–6; Philip Dray, There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 511–12. 19 James G. Patton, “Agriculture,” Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment, CIO Political Action Committee, 78. 20 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 335–7. 21 Willard S. Townsend, “Negro Workers,” ibid., 120. 22 William J. Collins, “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets,” American Economic Review 91 (March 2001): 278–81, quotation on 272. 23 Townsend, “Negro Workers,” 120. 24 Ibid. 25 Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 125–7, 133–5, challenges the far more skeptical view of the CIO found in Bruce Nelson, “Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile During World War II,” Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 952–88, which focuses exclusively on the Pinto Island Yard in Birmingham, Alabama.

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26 Ferdinand Smith, “Negro Workers,” Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment, CIO Political Action Committee, 125–6. Note: each of the speakers at the CIO-PAC conference gave untitled speeches under general headings such as “Industrial Planning,” “Reconversion and Postwar Needs,” and “Negro Workers.” 27 Townsend, “Negro Workers,” 119; Townsend gave the same address to the Institute of Race Relations at Fisk University in July 1945. See “Full Employment and the Negro Worker,” Journal of Negro Education 14 (Winter 1945): 6–10. 28 As discussed previously, the NRPB’s advocacy of national economic planning and its critique of free enterprise earned it the enmity of a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans. In 1943, they conspired to cut off the agency’s funding. See Donald T. Critchlow, “Deficit Spending as a Political Belief, 1932–1952,” Public Historian 3 (Spring 1981): 19. 29 “Statement of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, President, Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, and Bishop of the Methodist Church, New York, N.Y.,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session on S. 380 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 353–4; Statement of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference to the House Committee on Expenditures, November 1, 1945, box 10, folder 38, “Special Topics Files: Legislation, Full Employment,” Social Action Department papers, CUA. 30 “Statement of Walter White, Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Washington, D.C.,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 616. 31 As historian Karen Tucker Anderson explains, “Whatever the hierarchy of preference… black women could always be found at the bottom. The dramatic expansion of jobs for women did not necessarily mean the opening up of new categories of employment for minority group women.” For example, “a survey conducted by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in April 1943 found that only 74 out of 280 establishments that employed women in production work were willing to hire black women.” See “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers During World War II,” Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 83–4, 95–7, quotation on 84; as Ruth Milkman explains, the auto industry’s ingenuity at perpetuating sex segregation and gendered job classifications during the war fell especially hard on black women, but it affected nearly all women who found employment in wartime industry. Job segregation during the war spanned the wider labor market. See On Gender, Labor, and Inequality, chapter 2, and in particular, 56–72.

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32 Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 200–1; Attewell, quotation on 159. 33 Karl F. Johnson and Michael P. Barrett, “Cutting the Deck: New Deal, Fair Deal, and the Employment Act of 1946,” 138. 34 “Statement of Walter White,” 619. 35 Although Ira Katznelson does not address the Murray Full Employment Bill directly, he elucidates the rising opposition of southern members of Congress to New Deal labor protections in the 1940s. See Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013) chapters five and six. As Williams, Johnson, and Barrett corroborate, the “key linkage between the formulation of the act and segregation was that consistent opposition to its original employment and planning provisions within the majority party came from the South,” a theme which continued even when the innocuous Employment Act of 1946 came up for a vote. See Williams, Johnson, and Barrett, “Cutting the Deck: New Deal, Fair Deal, and the Employment Act of 1946,” 6; for union gains and the impact on black political consciousness in the South, see Timothy Minchin, Fighting Against the Odds: A History of Southern Labor Since World War II (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 24–9, and Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 202–23. 36 Brooks Spivey Creedy, Women Behind the Lines: YWCA Program with War Production Workers, 1940–1947 (New York: The Woman’s Press, 1949), 125–7, 183, 186–9, 199–202. 37 Ibid., 142–3. 38 Statement of Mrs. J.B. Caulkins, President, Young Women’s Christian Association,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 747. 39 Ibid., 747–8, quotation on 748. This reading is a little more forgiving of Caulkin than that of Emily Stoltzfus, who points out that the YWCA president raised no objections to the bill’s exemption for housewives from the right to work provision. Considering the conservative tone in Congress, the uphill climb that confronted the bill, and the delicate problem of asserting women’s claims while not appearing to dismiss the needs of veterans, Caulkin’s reticence is explicable. See Citizen, Worker, Mother: Debating Responsibility for Child Care After World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 26–7. The offending prohibition was also eventually excluded from the bill that appeared before the House. 40 “Full Employment,” Social Service Review 19 (December 1945): 554–5. The CIO poll found that 85 percent of female UAW members working for wartime contractors wanted to continue after the war. Nearly 75 percent of these had not

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worked in factories prior to the war. Similarly, the Women’s Bureau study which Caulkins cited found that nearly 80 percent of 402,000 women employed by Detroit manufacturers wanted to keep their jobs after the war (p. 556). Social work journals published dozens of pieces on the rising expectation that women should find a place in the postwar labor market. William Haber’s “Economic and Social Readjustments in the Reconversion Period” can stand as a representative example. “Many women will have strong economic incentives to hold on to their jobs, or to seek new jobs if they are laid off. Most of the women added to the wartime labor force are working to replace the income of husbands, brothers, and sons who have gone to war plants and into the armed forces. In addition,” Haber commented, “A large number of women will prefer working in industry to housekeeping.” If the social democratic movement of the 1940s did anything for American women, it created the belief that Americans were in the process of building a society in which women’s equality finally mattered. See Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work: Selected Papers, Seventy-Second Annual Meeting, 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 34. 41 Examining women such as Elizabeth Wickenden, Catherine Bauer, and Mary Dublin Keyserling, each of whom worked in or in close proximity to the Roosevelt administration, historian Landon Storrs writes that they were “especially sensitive to how the family wage ideal—which prescribed male breadwinning and female dependence—had structured the labor market and social welfare policies in ways that disadvantaged women and also excluded most racial minorities… Broadly trained in history and economics, left-leaning New Dealers believed that race and gender inequality served employers by creating lower-status groups of workers who supposedly needed or deserved less, thereby applying downward pressure on all labor standards, including those of white men.” This effectively captures the political perspective of J.B. Caulkins, as well as most progressive women who agitated for full employment in 1945. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 260. 42 “Statement of Mrs. J.B. Caulkins, President, Young Women’s Christian Association,” 749–50. 43 As historian Patricia Sullivan notes, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax united progressive groups that orbited around the New Deal program, including the NAACP, the CIO, and the YWCA. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era, 114–15. The achievements of the FEPC were certainly limited by southern racial intransigence, but it still represented a major challenge to the existing order. The creation of the FEPC “incarnated what had heretofore been only an allegation, that discrimination in employment was wrong,” writes historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. “Despite the committee’s vicissitudes, the fierce opposition it drew, and its own ineffectiveness, the very idea that the government

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had decided that employment practices should be fair to African Americans represented an enormous departure from Jim Crow practice.” Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1915–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 363. 44 Elsa Graves quoted in ibid., 750. 45 Nelson Lichtenstein, “Class Politics and the State During World War II,” International Labor and Working-Class History 58 (Fall 2000): 268–9. 46 Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 208–29. 47 “Statement of the Communist Party on Full Employment Bill S. 380,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 886–7. 48 Ibid., 888–9. 49 Subsequently published as “A Social Work Program for Full Employment,” The Compass 27 (November 1945): 11. 50 Wasem, 62–3. 51 “Statement on the Murray Bill for Full Employment by Norman Thomas Testifying for the Socialist Party U.S.A,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 958. 52 “Statement on the Murray Bill by Norman Thomas,” 959. 53 “Statement of Hon. James F. Murray, United States Senator (D. Mont.) on Full Employment Act of 1946 as Reported by the Conference Committee,” February 8, 1946, box 855, folder 2, Murray Papers, UM. 54 “Address by Hon. James E. Murray, United States Senator from Montana to Conference of Arts, Sciences, and Professions,” June 22, 1945, box 949, folder 31, Murray Papers, UM. 55 “Statement of Dr. Harlow Shapley, Vice President, Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, Director, Harvard Observatory, Harvard University,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 785–8, quotation on 788; Roscoe T. Steffen, chair of the Connecticut State Division of ICCASP, also wrote expressing the committee’s support for Murray’s commitment to postwar reconversion and full employment. Steffen to Murray, August 17, 1945, box 855, folder 1, Murray Papers, UM. 56 “Minutes, Illinois Committee on Full Employment,” September 6, 1945, 1, Reel 7, Series 1, Americans for Democratic Action Papers, microfilm. 57 Ibid., 2. 58 “How About a Job for Every Worker?” CIO News, July 30, 1945, 1. 59 Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 221; even allowing for CIO histrionics, the situation was becoming dire for those employed in war production. By the

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Winter of 1945, 24 percent of workers had lost their jobs. The highest percentage being women. By the Winter of 1946, 37 percent of women employed in wartime production were out of work and seeking employment. A little-noted feature of this massive downsizing was its impact on older workers. As the Monthly Labor Review observed, “a third of the ex-war workers aged 45 and over were unemployed, compared with only a fifth of those under 45.” The only really positive development was that African Americans were not suffering disproportionately higher rates of unemployment—yet. “Workers’ Experience During First Phase of Reconversion,” Monthly Labor Review 62 (May 1946): 707–10, quotation on 710. 60 “CIO Fights Cutbacks,” 1; “Four Million Lose Jobs: CIO Rallies Demand Work, Jobless Pay,” CIO News, September 3, 1945, 5; “Laid Off—But Not Licked!” CIO News, September 10, 1945, 1, 3–4; using American Federation of Labor sources, Kersten pegs the total number of furloughed war workers at 3 million by September 1945, which was probably closer to the truth than the CIO’s numbers. Many were being absorbed back into domestic manufacturing as early as late 1944 as the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion steadily permitted the switch to consumer production in the final year of the war. See Labor’s Home Front, 217–18. 61 Fred D’Avila, “How About It Mr. Truman?” CIO News, September 24, 1945, 2–3. 62 “They’re Still Telling It Congress!” 7, CIO News, October 15, 1945; Hollace Ransdell, “South Gives Congress and Earful, Too,” ibid., 2, October 22, 1945. 63 Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment, 109. 64 Seymour Harris, “The Way to Full Employment,” The New Republic, June 24, 1945, 784. 65 “Congress and Full Employment,” The New Republic 113 (September 24, 1945): 411. 66 Homage to private enterprise aside, the CIO-PAC insisted that “the full employment program must, however, be guaranteed by government with a prepared program of jobs at useful work, with standard wages and working conditions, if and to the extent that private industry falls short of the goal.” This was not simply countercyclical Keynesian spending. “Whenever workers and capital are unemployed,” the PAC writers asserted in a draft statement of the organization’s postwar reconstruction plan, “the national government has the responsibility for their productive employment” (emphasis added.) CIO-PAC, “Program for Victory,” 3, box 16, folder titled “CIO-PAC Platforms 1944,” Baldwin papers. See “Program of the CIO Political Action Committee,” 3–5, box 16, folder titled “PAC Platforms 1944,” and remarks of Philip Murray, “Full Employment: Proceedings of the Conference on Full Employment CIO Political Action Committee,” January 15, 1944, 58, box 16, folder titled “Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Broadsides,” Baldwin papers, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Library. 67 I.F. Stone, “Capitalism and Full Employment,” The Nation 161 (September 1, 1945): 198–9.

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68 “Speed the Murray Bill!” The Nation (August 25, 1945): 161. 69 “The Meaning of Jobs for All,” 113 (September 24, 1945): 395. 70 Sumner Gerard to H.M. Gullickson, September 1945, box 855, folder 1, Murray Papers, UM. 71 Citizens National Committee, Full Employment and the National Budget, Report # 2–417 (Washington: Citizens National Committee, 1945), 5. 72 In 1940, after tax corporate profits stood at $5.8 billion; by 1944, these had climbed to $10.7 billion. Rosenberg, American Economic Development Since 1945, 33. 73 Kingdon, An Uncommon Man, 85. 74 Full Employment and the National Budget, 13. 75 Citizens National Committee, Full Employment and the National Budget, Report # 2–417, 15; Chamber of Commerce, Economic Policy Means and Ends: Report of Committee on Economic Policy, Postwar Readjustments Bulletin No. 12 (Washington: Chamber of Commerce, 1944), 6–8, 20, Chamber of Commerce Papers, ACC 1960, box 66. 76 Full Employment and the National Budget, 17–19; Chamber of Commerce, Economic Policy Means and Ends, 13–14. 77 Collins, 101–2. 78 Don Yalung-Matthews, “Business Perspectives on the Full Employment Bill of 1945 and Passage of the Employment Act of 1946,” Essays in Economic and Business History: Selected Papers from the Economic and Business History Society 8 (1989– 1990): 336. 79 Chamber of Commerce, Can Government Guarantee Full Employment? 3, 5, 9–10, 14–15, 24–6. 80 Collins, 110. 81 Paul Sifton, “Some Observations on the United States Chamber of Commerce PostWar Readjustments Bulletin No. 13,” box 25, folder titled “1945, full employment bill,” Sifton papers, Library of Congress. 82 Bailey focuses on the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chambers of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, and the Committee for Constitutional Government, but acknowledges that these only indicate “the scope and power of the opposition pressures” mobilized against the Full Employment Bill. See Congress Makes a Law, chapter six, quotation on 148. 83 As an example of this highly coordinated campaign, the Committee for Constitutional Government, a leading right-wing, anti-New Deal organization, planned to raise $100,000 to spend on sending anti-Murray bill literature to 15,000 newspapers. It would also send 5,000 “leadership individuals, editors, lawyers, clergymen, leaders of labor, women’s business and farm organizations etc., who if aroused, can reach hundreds of thousands.” The stakes were clearly very high. See Sumner Gerard to H.H. Gullickson, September 1945, box 855, folder 1, Murray Papers, UM.

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84 McIntyre and Hillard, “Capitalist Class Agency and the New Deal Order: 135–6; Hansen, “The New Crusade Against Planning,” New Republic 112 (January 1, 1945): 9–12; Keith Hutchinson, “Hayek: Digested and Redigested,” The Nation 160 (April 28, 1945): 489–90, Alvin Hansen, “The New Crusade Against Planning,” New Republic 112 (January 1, 1945): 9–12. 85 The End of Reform, 160; see also David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 168–70). While Ciepley considers full employment fairly innocuous, he argues that “the idea” of totalitarianism gripped the imagination of a considerable swath of intellectual opinion in the United States. See p. 176. 86 Ben Seligman, “Propaganda by the NAM: Economic Philosophy of the Big Boys,” New Republic 113 (September 10, 1945): 310. 87 Heinz Eulau et al., “Toward a Free Society,” The New Republic 113 (September 24, 1945): 414; “Congress and Full Employment,” ibid., 413; Louis Bean to Bertram Gross, June 9, 1945, box 12, folder titled “Correspondence,” Louis Bean collection, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. 88 “Statement of Philip Murray, President, Congress of Industrial Organizations, Washington D.C.,” Full Employment Act of 1945: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 231–2. 89 Ibid., 227–8. 90 Wasem, 92–3. 91 Richard M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 103–5. 92 Ibid., 105–6. 93 Brinkley, The End of Reform, 263. 94 Wasem, 142. 95 Collins, 110–12; Blyth, 74; Weir, “Full Employment as a Political Issue in the United States,” 389–90.

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Out of Rebellion and into the Morass: Full Employment in the Postwar Years

The idea that the strike wave of 1945–46 represented something more than a massive demand for a raise diverges from the prevailing interpretation. According to the dominant view, some 5 million workers engaged in as many as 5,000 walkouts to restore wages lost to cutbacks in overtime and hours. The strike wave only gained momentum as the federal government removed price controls, allowing inflation to eat away at precious wartime wage gains.1 Even on these terms, however, the strike wave can best be understood as a full employment uprising. Almost as soon as hostilities ceased, workers began to walk in numbers. Even before the famous strikes in auto and steel, 43,000 petroleum workers in twenty states left the job. In the same month, September 1945, 200,000 went on strike, while 44,000 lumber workers in the northwest, 70,000 truck drivers in the Midwest, and 40,000 machinists in California soon joined them. The point is, those who struck earliest did so in the effort to maintain what had been achieved: full employment at decent wages. Even in the case of auto, steel, rubber, and electrical, workers sought to maintain at forty hours a week the wage gains that had only been achieved through overtime and excess hours. There is little doubt that wages figured prominently in the massive uprisings of 1945–46. Yet anxieties about a renewed Depression, frustration over strike pledges that blunted labor militancy, and anger at the precipitous decline in wages and working conditions fueled the determination to take to the streets and ensure that full employment continued into the postwar period. Workers had enjoyed an unprecedented degree of security during the war; they had gained at least some of the leverage, class cohesion, and occupational mobility that full employment promised. They were prepared to fight to maintain it.2 This is what made the postwar strikes a struggle over economic and political power as much as a dispute over income shares. As even the most moderate of advocates had predicted, full employment did concede greater power to workers

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on the shop floor. Some expressed this sense of empowerment by going on racist wildcat strikes. These were spontaneous walkouts in which primarily displaced southerners insisted they would not abide the presence of African Americans in the factory. Yet even after the most notorious of these racist walkouts in the Detroit auto industry, most white workers began to accept African Americans as legitimate coworkers. At the same time, countless others walked out in protest against managerial control, excessive overtime, and deteriorating real wages. More than this, African Americans also exerted their growing power through work stoppages that forced concessions in the auto sector and built a black presence in the United Auto Workers (UAW). Workers engaged in these “quickie” strikes knowing that they had gained considerable leverage in the manufacturing process. Most industrial leaders sought to curb this rising militancy in the postwar period. As historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains, “they sought the restoration of managerial prerogatives that wartime conditions had eroded in the areas of product pricing, market allocation, and shop-floor work environment.” The effort to maintain wage gains, curb the attack on foremen sympathetic to unionism, and repeal the repressive powers granted to management under the “no strike pledge” ultimately flowed from the achievement of full employment.3 In many respects, then, the key struggles of the immediate postwar period hinged on the future of democratic economic planning. Labor veteran Irving Richter’s observation that “labor set no political demands” and was “not concerned about income distribution or redistribution” may have expressed the perspective of a hardboiled Communist Party activist in the UAW leadership trying to downplay any revolutionary overtones the strike may have carried.4 Yet it minimized the extent to which this renewed labor insurgency aimed at extending the de facto job guarantee into the postwar period and to contest managerial discipline from a position of power. This was the central emancipatory promise of full employment. Similarly, the campaign by progressives and organized labor to maintain wartime price controls aimed at defending full employment. Industrial workers wanted a noninflationary wage-price balance. They also wanted to limit corporate profits and protect the economic democratization that the New Deal-labor coalition had achieved. This was precisely why business lobbied so vigorously against the Office of Price Administration (OPA). It wasn’t that wage and price controls didn’t work; it was that they worked too well, challenging the privileged authority of private enterprise through a popular alliance of workers, consumers, and the state. In fact, as business leaders understood, it was price controls,

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supported by the OPA’s mass mobilization of volunteers, which made it possible to contain inflation at full employment. In addition, the OPA enjoyed the almost uniform support of middle-class progressives and organized labor. Through the New Republic and the Nation, progressive journalists and commentators railed against the deliberate campaign by a united business front to sabotage the OPA. They advocated for average citizens to join the price control panels that had proved so critical to the containment of inflation. Throughout the final year of the war and well into the postwar period, women’s organizations such as the League of Women Shoppers joined consumer groups and labor unions in a spirited defense of OPA. As historian Meg Jacobs writes, the advocates of continued price controls considered the OPA “the culmination of the drive for the government’s guarantee of economic citizenship,” the expression of a “political culture based on popular participation and economic rights.” This desperate and ultimately unsuccessful campaign was nothing short of a crusade to extend full employment planning into the postwar period. More than just a campaign against inflation, it represented the drive to expand democratic control over the economy. In fact, without the existence of full employment, controlling inflation would have been meaningless.5 The General Motors (GM) strike exemplified the community and labor alliance that the union movement had produced over the past ten years. It also represented the effort to control profit margins and price levels in the interest of the working class. Walter Reuther and the UAW leadership demanded a 30 percent increase and a check on company pricing policy. The UAW was not the only union to demand that wage increases not be passed along to consumers. It was, however, the union most determined to compel the Truman administration to maintain wartime regulatory mechanisms and ensure that wage increases be drawn from vastly increased corporate profits.6 This was “politicized bargaining,” as Lichtenstein describes it, the kind that “demanded of the trade unions an organic amalgamation of strike action, organizing activity, and political mobilization.”7 Attentive to the advice of OPA economists and sensitive to the social consequences of union wage increases that might translate into higher prices for consumers, the UAW advocated for high wages and low prices. Yet this was not simply an exercise in the politics of purchasing power.8 It was a campaign to carry forward an agenda of working-class participation in the determination of social policy. It aimed to influence the distribution of capitalist surplus and to exercise power at the point of production. “These demands,” wrote Francis Carlton in the Antioch Review in 1946, “and the arguments advanced to support them, were revolutionary in their over-all economic implications, as well

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as in their impact upon a public concerned deeply with the need to reconvert the American economy to a pattern of full employment and full production.” As Carlton explained, It was the deliberate effort to bind the interests of the union to the movement to control prices and redistribute profits that gave the strike its “social revolutionary and far-reaching character.”9 While the national leadership called for a wage increase, the rank-and-file agitated for an end to incentive and piecework practices, for increased union control over the speed of production, for limits on the authority of supervisors to make arbitrary job assignment and transfer decisions, and for greater union committee influence in the factory.10 The union was now bargaining from the perspective and experience of full employment. The connection between the GM strike and the movement for full employment emerges clearly from a report produced by the National Citizens Committee on the walkout. The committee represented a “who’s who” of the New Deal left, including journalist Stuart Chase, economic planner Beardsley Ruml, Bishop Bernard Sheil, former OPA administrator Leon Henderson, economist Alvin Hansen, and National Farmers Union President James G. Patton, to name a few. The committee’s sympathies were never in doubt, but it strove to underline the implications of the GM strike for the wider society. “There is much more than a mere economic disagreement of labor and capital involved in this controversy,” the committee asserted. “The issues underlying this case are rooted deeply in the very fabric of our social, political and cultural institutions.” At the center of the struggle was the democratic determination to utilize the “rich industrial resources for the public good,” the very centerpiece of progressive full employment policy. Assessing the merits of the UAW case, the committee explicitly connected the union’s 30 percent pay increase demand to the larger question of economic planning. The increase would compensate for the erosion of take-home pay that resulted from the slashing of hours and the demotion of workers to lower-skilled positions. At the same time, it would “advance the general purchasing power necessary to support full employment.” By tying wage increases to price and profit considerations, the UAW convinced the committee of its moral probity.11 More than this, the committee argued that, in the face of an inflationary crisis, the business campaign to end price controls threatened the entire society. The question of pricing policy had become “a matter of legitimate public concern” and not the exclusive jurisdiction of the company. As GM failed to demonstrate that it could not finance the 30 percent wage increase out of existing revenues, the UAW “lifted the whole matter of collective bargaining to a new high level

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by insisting that the advancement of Labor’s interests shall not be made at the expense of the public.”12 Beyond the ranks of the progressive intelligentsia, the strike generated tremendous support. It became the symbol of resentment for wartime controls but also the focal point for the enthusiasm of returning soldiers and wartime workers determined to advance social democracy.13 The UAW strike at General Motors catalyzed a wave of job actions from auto to steel to electrical that produced the largest working-class uprising in American history. The final settlement at GM and the other major companies produced considerably less than the union leadership had demanded. Instead of a 30 percent increase, they won a meager 18 and ½, much of which would be inflated away through price increases permitted by an increasingly business-friendly Truman administration. Despite the limited financial gains, the spirit of rebellion continued to churn. As historian George Lipsitz writes, these outbursts were not simply the results of wartime dislocations. “They displayed a revolt against work, against exploitation, and against hierarchies rooted in the experience of labor itself.”14 In the following months, general strikes would break out in Oakland, Stamford, Connecticut, Rochester, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, uniting workers and their communities in defiant, exuberant demonstrations of working-class solidarity. Even after the CIO’s actions came to an end in March 1946, the strike wave continued, roiling through a myriad of industries and communities, including rail and coal, many involving craft unions under the aegis of the American Federation of Labor. More than any discrete issue, the strikes expressed what had become the governing expectation of the period: continuous employment under decent conditions for adequate compensation. This was not only rebellion against a corporate campaign to restore the prewar status quo but a massive protest in support of the conviction that Americans had the right to determine the terms and conditions under which they would work. As even the laconic Monthly Labor Review noted, “Other working conditions (including job security, shop conditions and policies, work load, etc.) continued to be the issues responsible for about a third of the stoppages, 29 percent of the number of workers involved, and a fifth of the idleness in 1945.”15 At an even more fundamental level, however, American workers translated their commitment to democratic economic planning into action. They demonstrated their determination to abolish enforced scarcity and the threat of unemployment as tactics for maintaining profitability. Full employment had become the condition for imagining a radical decommodification of labor. The connection between the strike wave of 1945 and of the drive for planned full employment was never more evident than in the United Electrical Workers’

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(UE’s) vision of the postwar order. In its 1945 “Program for Higher Wages and Job Security,” the UE outlined a program that aimed as much at augmenting working-class power as it did at increasing wages. In addition to an increase in the national minimum wage, it called for a guaranteed annual wage and standardized, industry-wide rates indiscriminate of gender, race, or geography. In addition to generous benefits for unemployed workers (which Congress continued to obstruct), the program called for progressive tax reform that would “shift the burden of war expenditures from low-income groups to the big corporations and wealthy individuals.” The expansion of Social Security and aggressive investment in public infrastructure and housing figured prominently as well. The UE anchored each of these objectives in the maintenance of adequate employment under union protection. The program endorsed a job guarantee, but it also advocated for the use of government-owned plants to maintain full employment should the private sector prove unequal to the task. On the radical edge of the labor movement, the UE was mapping out the horizon of economic democracy, or what might plausibly be described as democratic socialism.16 The UE program aimed at synthesizing the union’s needs and the most advanced interests of the wider community. It was consciously designed to counter the business and congressional alliance against the New Deal. “Big business is attempting to advance its program” and “to divide the community by splitting labor, isolating labor from its friends and causing antagonism, particularly between veterans and civilian workers.” In the effort to build a common front between unionized workers, the unorganized, and the larger community, the UE launched an aggressive campaign of canvassing, radio programs, outreach to local organizations, and overtures to local merchants. Community-wide conferences, meetings, rallies, and discussion groups would create the social space and civic institutions to extend economic democracy. More than public relations ploys, this was evidence of social movement unionism in support of democratic economic planning.17 In fact, the UE was issuing a full employment manifesto for the postwar period. Addressing the nation by radio on October 30 on the question of wages and prices during reconversion, President Truman expressed empathy for wartime workers facing the loss of overtime pay. Nevertheless, he insisted that “we must understand that we cannot hope, with a reduced work week, to maintain now the same take-home pay for labor generally that it has had during the war. There will have to be a drop.” Even if Truman hoped the drop would not be too “drastic,” he considered an adjustment to prewar wage standards inevitable.18 It was precisely this kind of sentiment the UE rejected. “We must

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prevent widespread unemployment and wage cutting,” the union researchers insisted, “which industry and government officials accept as an inevitable result of the cancellation of war contracts.” Where Truman saw “inevitability,” the UE suspected a deliberate campaign to exploit reconversion as an opportunity to undermine unions, suppress wages, and increase prices. At the same time, the UE challenged the normalization of women’s economic resubjugation following the war. “We cannot accept the cavalier attitude of certain industry and government spokesmen that reconversion and postwar employment problems will be solved by the voluntary ‘retirement’ from industry of thousands of women workers.” Similarly, they rejected the corporate campaign to reduce wages by reclassifying certain positions as women’s jobs and shifting production to low-wage areas.19 Defending the rights of women and African American workers, the union simultaneously attacked the inequitable distribution of wealth that persisted despite the increase in real wages. As economist Robert Brenner points out, the rate of profit between 1940 and 1945 increased by approximately 50 percent over its 1929 level and between 60 and 70 percent above the average for 1900 to 1929.20 Wages, by contrast, lagged behind. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted, the “increase in gross average hourly earnings in factories from 1939 to 1944 was 61 percent,” while “the increase in basic wage rates was hardly more than 35 percent.”21 Considering the period from 1940 to 1945, historian David Kennedy finds that wages for manufacturing workers, when adjusted for inflation, realized a 27 percent gain, while corporate profits almost doubled. Regardless of how much the fortunes of American industrial laborers had improved during the war, the major corporations were doing astronomically better.22 It was a power imbalance and a basic injustice that ran counter to the egalitarian undercurrents of the full employment movement. What distressed the UE and the CIO was not only the prospect of mass unemployment but the possibility that companies could exploit government tax benefits to drive down wages across the board. Written into the tax code of 1942 to add yet another layer of incentives to military production, companies could write off part of their reconversion losses by applying them against their tax bill during the war. This permitted companies to get a tax refund that could amount to millions of dollars. The tax provisions ensured profitability during reconversion. They also gave companies a powerful weapon in the class struggle. As the UE explained, “This means that most of these companies can, if it suits their interests, curtail operations altogether and still be guaranteed earnings almost equal to their prewar profits.” When added to higher prices on products manufactured for peacetime consumption, this spelled a direct threat to the wage-price-planning

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nexus at the center of full employment thought. General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA, and others seemed to be enjoying the assistance of the federal government in “attempting to use cutbacks to create pools of unemployment as a means of cutting wages.” The corporate campaign to restore primacy added urgency to the drive for democratic economic planning. In the UE’s estimation, “the inability of industrial leaders in the electrical, radio, and machine industries to use the fully developed wartime plant capacity and equipment when confronted by the tremendous peace-time demands of consumers compels reliance upon the government to plan for such full employment.”23 The strike wave galvanized the labor movement’s investment in economic planning.24 The massive labor uprising of 1945–46 demonstrated perhaps more forcefully than any CIO rally or Labor Day speech how inextricable the idea of economic planning had become from the working-class image of postwar America. This relationship was at the very center of the capitalist counterattack in the postwar years. Driven by an alliance of business, anti-New Deal media outlets, and conservative Republicans, the reactionary backlash benefited from the cooperation of President Truman, who increasingly considered organized labor a petulant child to be tamed. As early as August 18, 1945, four days after the war had come to an end, the president issued Executive Order 9599, which instructed government agencies to stabilize the economy while also moving steadily toward the elimination of price, production, and capital controls.25 Writing for the New Republic in June 1946, journalist Helen Fuller considered the decision a turning point: “Contract termination and surplus-property disposal for management were quickly provided,” Fuller argued, while “unemployment compensation, wage adjustments, and price control were left neglected.” The administration had “failed to divert profits to wages rather than to soaring dividends, and the pattern for strikes to meet the higher cost of living was set.”26 Even if Fuller ignored how much of this pattern had been set by the Roosevelt administration during the war, the point remained: Truman had made a decisive concession to corporate lobbyists long before the official removal of price controls. He then galvanized the business assault on organized labor by appointing a commission to mediate the steel strike. The commission unambiguously ruled in favor of corporate interests. It ratified managerial authority, authorized price increases pegged to wage increases, and set the standard of the wage-price spiral that undermined the program for economic planning. It also steadily eroded union credibility.27 More was to come, however. When coal miners and railroad workers joined the strike wave in 1946, disrupting production in the automotive and steel

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sectors, Truman seized the mines, a draconian measure that nevertheless paved the way for a settlement. When two railroad unions went on strike, paralyzing the national transportation system, the president escalated the response, going before Congress to ask for emergency legislation permitting him to draft rail workers into the Army. If the strike on such essential goods and services alienated elements from across the class spectrum, the ranks of organized labor turned against an administration that had used state power to break strikes and failed to control inflation. Despite the plaintiff cry of the CIO-PAC, millions of industrial laborers simply stayed away from the polls in 1946. It gave the Republicans the chance to win Congress and to solidify the anti-New Deal insurgency that had been building since 1942.28 Truman’s handling of the strike wave and his support for legislation that would undermine the protections of the Wagner Act opened doors of opposition to the labor movement that have yet to be closed. The most pernicious of these portals was the Taft-Hartley Act. Drafted in large part by business lawyers working for the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, the measure aimed to deprive workers of the mechanisms of solidarity essential for pursuing a full employment agenda. In addition to strengthening the hand of management during representation elections, prohibiting secondary boycotts, preventing industry-wide bargaining, and requiring union leaders to sign anti-communist affidavits (thereby depriving labor of its most militant and effective organizers), the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 also permitted states to pass “right to work” laws that proscribed the closed shop. This meant that union membership could no longer be made a condition of employment. This latter provision aimed at undermining a union’s financial resources. Since employees in a shop represented by an NLRB-certified union could opt out of membership, they could enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining while depriving the local union of dues needed to fight its legal battles and organize beyond the factory. In addition to these punitive measures, the bill magnified the president’s authority to impose injunctions on strikes that allegedly threatened the national interest. He could also impose notification requirements for job actions reinforced by the threat of federal lawsuits. It was a clause aimed directly at terminating wildcat strikes once and for all.29 Beyond the internal damage to union democracy and strength, the measure undermined the full employment drive by sabotaging the linchpin of the movement. Simply put, the Taft-Hartley Act repudiated the notion that the government’s default position was support for the working class. It may not have destroyed the labor movement, but it inflicted a bureaucratic regime on labor unionism that fostered an obsessive focus on the contract, undermined

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inter-union solidarity, and impeded the movement toward class conscious action.30 Augmented by the Cold War, the anti-labor legislation exacerbated the climate of intolerance for mass democratic movements. In addition, it made any meaningful critique of American capitalism highly suspect. Unwilling to adopt a strategy of mass working-class action to drive through the Full Employment Act, CIO President Philip Murray proved just as unwilling to call a general strike in defiance of the Taft-Hartley Act. This only reinforced the drift toward organized labor’s political subordination to the Democratic party. The escalation of anti-communism would finally dismantle the network of progressive groups and social organizations that had been pivotal in the dissemination of full employment thought. Len De Caux, longtime editor of the CIO News and a dedicated leftist, captured the changing tone of the CIO and its implications for the postwar period: From the first CIO had cooperated with many united-front organizations—for black people, for youth and the unemployed, for libertarian purposes. It thus reached beyond union limits and drew into cooperation with itself many other groups, inspiring and being inspired by many fighters against oppression and reaction outside its ranks. In making the Cold War switch, CIO now began to abandon these old associations on the pretext of avoiding communist contamination… This forcibly imposed policy switch set the stage for the official insensitivity to issues like black liberation, the youth revolt, and the Vietnam War which so disgusted new lefts in the Sixties.31

None of this is to suggest that workers simply acquiesced to managerial control. If anything, the approximation of full employment created the conditions for workers to take action on grievances that could not be reduced to compensation. As the Korean War increased the demand for labor, unemployment declined from 5.6 percent in 1949 to approximately 3 percent in the years 1951–53, strengthening the position of workers and emboldening their determination to negotiate on the shop floor rather than at the bargaining table.32 In defiance of their increasingly conservative leadership, industrial workers used the wildcat strike to protest the intensification of production and the imposition of managerial discipline. Peaking in 1955, the wildcat wave saw more than 40,000 auto workers engage in unauthorized job actions.33 The discontent on the job exposed the illusion of a management-labor accord, but also the persistent determination to transform the workplace along more democratic lines. For those on the most progressive edge of full employment movement, this had been one of the key expectations of the postwar period. Moving into the postwar era, it remained a shining but increasingly distant hope.

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But why? We’ve seen that it stemmed in large part from the successful business counterattack on the social democratic movement of the 1930s. What was unique about the 1940s was the access of business to the highest levels of power. Gaining a foothold, it launched a drive to restore the ideological dominance of “free” enterprise capitalism.34 That meant repudiating the idea that capitalism tends toward stagnation.35 It meant restoring the normalcy of the business cycle, which had always had a dual function: to liquidate existing capital stock, thus clearing the way for new investments, and to drive down the cost of labor to increase profitability. Restoring the primacy of private enterprise meant delegitimizing the movement to raise and equalize wages. Working through an alliance of southern Democrats and northern Republicans, competitive business interests successfully exploited anti-communism, powerful media interests, and the conservative tendencies of the leadership of organized labor itself to remove the struggle over wages and working from the public sphere. The postwar counterattack thus sought not only to delegitimize the idea that the redistribution of wealth was necessary, but to repudiate the notion that working-class people should have a voice in shaping the political and economic order at all. This was at the center of full employment thought. Business interests wanted to rein in labor unions, but they needed to discredit the supposedly ludicrous notion that involuntary unemployment was the relic of a barbarous and inhumane past. If the Taft-Hartley Act represented the zenith of the campaign against economic planning, the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” signaled labor’s acquiescence. Management and labor would now base company-wage increases on projections of national productivity improvement and protect against inflation through a cost of living index. As economists Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch argue, this translated into a mutual understanding that “collective bargaining would not disturb the existing distribution of income.” By concentrating power in the union executive, terminating any further debate over managerial authority on the shop floor, and limiting negotiations to wages, benefits, and health-care plans, the treaty incorporated the UAW into a relationship of dependency that passed rising costs onto consumers. It effectively terminated the idea that the union could function as an instrument of economic planning in the postwar period.36 *** In the years following the strike wave, the business cycle returned as a constant feature of American life. Its persistence as well as the return of

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periodic unemployment put the lie to the notion that a rising GDP translated into universally shared prosperity. This was something painfully evident to working-class African Americans. They steadily challenged the combined forces of economic inequality and racial injustice in the allegedly quiescent 1950s. In Montgomery in 1955, for example, working African Americans, led in large part by black women, mobilized against the nexus of race and class oppression that stood as the cornerstone of southern society.37 But the relentless churning of the business cycle was also evident to workingand middle-class whites. In the period from April 1945 to February 1947 alone, workers in the steel, automotive, electrical, and machine tool sectors saw their real weekly wages decline by 20 percent. Low interest rates, union-negotiated wage rates, the social wage improvements provided by New Deal programs, and the pent-up demand from wartime savings fueled an expansion that saw average wage rates increase by 25 percent between 1946 and 1950. Still, in this period of explosive consumer demand, Americans endured another recession in 1948–49 that produced an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent. Spurred by the Korean War, military spending quickly resolved this crisis. By 1955, however, the spectacular GDP growth that dated back to 1938 had begun to decline. From an average of 5.8 percent in those dynamic years, the rate slowed to 2.5 percent between 1955 and 1961. It declined even more sharply in the manufacturing sector, from 5.1 percent between 1950 and 1955 to 1.4 percent between 1955 and 1961. Equally disconcerting, the decade of famed affluence and suburban proliferation also witnessed a steadily increasing unemployment rate, rising from 4.0 percent between 1950 and 1955 to 5.5 percent between 1950 and 1961, hitting a period high of 5.7 percent in 1963.38 The point is not to contest the evidence of an almost unprecedented period of economic expansion, nor the general improvement of the American standard of living. It is to suggest that military Keynesianism, technocratic fiscal management, and the incorporation of labor into a state capitalist arrangement had not banished the specter of unemployment. Nor had it dissolved the combination of racial oppression and class exploitation that defined the black experience. Similarly, the dislocating consequences of the business cycle still governed the lives of most Americans despite explosive economic growth. Although the United States approximated the Keynesian version of full employment through military spending, an international financial order that initially ensured a favorable balance of payments, and mass consumption, this looked nothing like the economic democracy once envisioned by the progressive planners of the 1930s and 1940s.

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Nor, for that matter, did it fulfill the expectations of American workers that full employment would provide the foundation for advancing social democracy. Those who had hoped that worker empowerment would produce racial equality, women’s emancipation, and greater independence at the workplace found themselves bitterly disappointed. When the United States slipped into recession at the end of the Korean War, the gains that women had been making against discrimination in labor unions evaporated. Companies shed employees and women activists scrambled just to hold on to jobs. Media attacks on women for allegedly compounding the unemployment problem and contributing to the rise of juvenile delinquency only exacerbated the problems that working-class women faced. Not the least of these was the absence of affordable daycare.39 For those who did find work in American manufacturing in the 1950s, it often proved a dehumanizing and demoralizing experience. As the Trotskyist writer Harvey Swados explained after his return to the auto assembly line, “The plain truth is that factory work is degrading.” The dream of “freedom” that had motivated the immigrant worker and the socialist-inspired labor activist had been replaced by the dream of “commodities,” a dream haunted by the persistent threat of joblessness. “Almost without exception,” Swados recalled in his 1957 essay “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” his fellow employees “felt like trapped animals. Depending on their age and personal circumstances, they were either resigned to their fate, furiously angry at themselves for what they were doing, or desperately hunting for other work that would pay as well and in addition offer some variety, some prospect of change and betterment.”40 For even the most progressive champions of full employment, the “prospect of change and betterment” had been reduced to material improvement at best. Now, in an environment of Keynseian maximum employment, the possibilities for reinventing work, increasing personal autonomy on the job, or jettisoning it altogether in favor of more “meaningful and remunerative” labor (as the Murray bill phrased it) seem remote indeed. Despite the failure to win real and existing full employment, African Americans saw some promise in the postwar period. Manufacturing, the retail trades, and the public sector offered horizons of opportunity to literally millions of semi-skilled and professional workers. By 1960, nearly 900,000 African Americans had found employment at all levels of state and local government. Yet the concentration of blacks in war-related industries that atrophied in the very same years meant that many sought work in urban areas suffering from increasing stagnation and corporate disinvestment. As historian Robert Zieger notes, the evidence was in the numbers, as the disparity between black and white

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wages grew. Although black earnings measured against those of whites climbed substantially between 1940 and 1951, they steadily lost ground in the 1950s, declining to less than 60 percent for the years from 1954 to 1962. More than this, black unemployment increased drastically from 4.4 percent in 1953 to 11 percent in 1962. Unemployment hit young African American males and women the hardest. By 1964, approximately 20 percent of black males between 14 and 24 were unemployed. Women in the same age bracket endured an astonishing 25 percent rate of unemployment.41 Writing in 1943, Caroline Ware, a long-time member of the League for Women Shoppers, a left feminist, and the driving force on the OPA Consumer Division, argued that no question was more urgent in the lives in African Americans than the question of jobs after the war. “The Negro’s stake in full employment and security is not only the same as that of all workers, businessmen, and professionals in corresponding occupations,” she contented, “it is greater. In fact, the extent to which Negroes in the postwar period have access to jobs, security, and opportunity will be a real measure of the success with which the central economic problem of our time is met.”42 Measured by Ware’s standards, full employment had been rendered meaningless by the end of the 1950s. A business-led program of economic management filled the void. Even so, business leaders were in no hurry for another catastrophic liquidation like the Great Depression. Considering the preeminent position that American business enjoyed on the global stage in the postwar period, this made perfect sense. European markets beckoned as did the opportunities of national defense contracting. Fueled by the GI Bill, pent-up demand, state-sponsored technological innovations, and New Deal social protections, the American domestic market was also exploding. So business and its commercial Keynesian allies in government sought to minimize the frequency and intensity of capitalism’s crises. The saga of the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and its influence in postwar policymaking has been documented extensively elsewhere. It is enough to note here that in the postwar years, the CED, which was founded in 1942 and staffed by corporate executives friendly to commercial Keynesianism, emerged as the preeminent voice for the policies of economic growth over redistribution. It championed noninterventionist fiscal policy to maintain price stability, budgetary restraint, and maximum employment that did not threaten profitability. Utilizing the automatic stabilizers available through the powers of interest rates and taxation, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury would run budget deficits during downturns and surpluses during boom years.

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It also set the ideal rate for unemployment at 4 percent, a target well above the 1.5–2  percent, which the war had achieved and which progressive economic planners had set as their benchmark. While avoiding the descent into mass unemployment, this strategy of fiscal management would also inhibit the return to any illusions about redistributing wealth and achieving genuine full employment.43 “The CED was not interested in full employment,” writes historian Samuel Rosenberg, “though it was concerned with the employment problem. Full employment might be accompanied by serious inflation and to achieve it would require too much government intervention in the free market.” Disparaging an activist fiscal policy, the CED promoted the discretionary monetarism of the Federal Reserve Board. In the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord arrived at in March 1951, the Federal Reserve finally broke free of the Treasury Department and the politics of redistribution. It abrogated its commitment to purchasing government bonds to perpetuate low interest rates and expand investment. It could now sell securities to constrict the money supply, reduce credit, and drive up interest rates. It could put a break on any economic expansion that threatened inflation and the interests of the rentier class.44 Above all, the Accord represented a major watershed in the return of private banking interests and market forces in the determination of economic policy. In the postwar period, the Treasury Department, staffed by New Deal supporters and planning enthusiasts, pressured the Federal Reserve Board to maintain low interest rates in order to stimulate job creation and limit the cost of financing the federal debt. While the Federal Reserve Board clamored for greater independence in setting rates, Council of Economic Advisers’ chair Leon Keyserling—former acting director of the Housing Authority and leading proponent of full employment—dissented. Instead, he agitated for a policy that privileged economic expansion over the protection of assets and private banks. Keyserling defended President Truman’s and Roosevelt’s conviction that monetary policy should be determined by prevailing social values, not by the interests of the ownership class. Yet an internecine struggle ultimately wrenched monetary policy out of the hands of fiscal Keynesians interested in a more activist program of job creation and entrenched it in the increasingly remote and autonomous Federal Reserve. This was not simply a turf war. It was a contest between advocates such as Keyserling, a tribune for what remained of the full employment dream, and financial elites like Alan Sproul, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and vice chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, the

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latter of which sets Federal Reserve policy on the purchase and exchange of government securities. As historian Herbert Stein notes, the push from within the Federal Reserve for higher interest rates was not just Sproul’s and Fed chair Thomas McCabe’s. It also came from powerful banking interests in New York. Banking and insurance companies automatically favored higher interest rates, but the considerations operating in support of an “independent” Federal Reserve were a little more complicated. There was also a “strong aversion to inflation, a dislike of direct controls, whether over prices or over lending, and a skepticism of the government’s determination to follow anti-inflationary fiscal policies.”45 Even though the Federal Reserve continued to maintain low interest rates into the 1960s, the 1951 Accord set the precedent for monetary “independence.” As the economic malaise of the 1970s set in, the Fed would utilize its latent powers to target inflation while steadily displacing the objective of full employment.46 What emerged in the postwar period was a depoliticized system of Keynesian demand management that delivered only a pale reflection of democratic full employment. Americans in the 1950s enjoyed relatively low unemployment. As we’ve noted, however, even this decade was punctuated by recession and jobless rates above 4 percent, 1950 and 1958 being the most conspicuous examples, at 5.3 and 6.8 percent, respectively. These averages also fail to account for the pockets of underemployment, idleness, and sheer poverty that afflicted African Americans, poor whites, and many Latinos.47 As economist Nixon Apple explained more than thirty years ago, the “demobilization of labor was a precondition for the development of an unplanned version of full employment capitalism.” It was also the central factor in explaining why conditions that came close to the 2–3 percent “frictional” unemployment dreamed of by the planners of the 1940s proved so fleeting.48 As Bertram Gross, leading architect of the 1945 Full Employment Act, laconically put it, “The achievements of American capitalism since World War II never produced genuine full employment similar to the 1943 to 1945 period, but instead resulted in the expansion of the labor supply.”49 By 1971, those “hidden and ignored portions of the nation’s labor reserves”— housewives willing to work but trapped by domestic responsibilities; males aged between twenty-four and fifty-four, particularly African Americans bearing the legacy of discriminatory hiring and inadequate training; those stuck in manpower training exercises for jobs that didn’t exist, as well as students, high school and older, was estimated at 13.8 million. When added to the discouraged workers, the underemployed, and those who might be pulled into the labor market through proactive incentives but were not, the total “potential labor reserves” for 1971 stood at 20.9 million

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people. According to Gross, these were people “who, under a different political economy, could be job holders.”50 *** Despite the spectacular economic growth and real income gains of the period, uncertainty continued to afflict American workers, particularly those who were African American or female. Detroit serves as only the most extreme example of what was becoming the pattern in postwar America. Through the combined forces of automation, corporate relocation, and the steady expansion of overtime, the major manufacturers in Detroit fundamentally restructured the political economy of the city. As historian Thomas Sugrue observed, these forces accounted for the loss of almost 130,000 jobs between 1948 and 1967. It also precipitated the dissolution of several independent auto manufacturers, including Packard, Hudson Motors, and Briggs Auto Body. The deliberate policies of automation and urban out-migration affected all workers, but they fell particularly hard on African Americans. Quite simply, blacks seeking jobs in manufacturing in the 1950s were considerably worse off than those seeking employment in the 1940s. The decline of manufacturing and the rise of automation fell with particular cruelty on African American migrants and youth. The increase in the city’s African America population from rural outmigration only compounded the problem.51 While even the most mainstream proponents of full employment in the 1940s had believed that an unemployment rate between 2 and 4 percent should be the acceptable standard, policymakers steadily accommodated themselves to increasingly parsimonious definitions. By the 1950s, as the political climate chilled the prospect for progressive reform, business opinion began pressing for higher unemployment targets that would supposedly preserve price stability. In 1962, Arthur Burns and the Committee of Economic Advisers (CEA) proclaimed a 4 percent unemployment rate the ideal target for preserving price stability. As spending on the Vietnam War accelerated an economy preheated by Kennedy’s tax cut and existing military investments, business and financial interests preoccupied by the specter of inflation blamed American workers. Yet the American working class had just endured a five-year stretch (1958–63) in which the unemployment rate averaged 6 percent and failed to fall below 5.5. As corporate profitability declined in response to rising international competition and the failure to invest sufficiently in research and innovation, defenders of capital mobilized. They put increasing pressure on policymakers to attack inflation and normalize a higher rate of unemployment. Through the

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interventions of free-market intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and E.S. Phelps, the idea of a “natural rate” of unemployment entered public discourse. In the economic calamity of the 1970s, this natural rate became untethered from any New Deal-style concerns about the right to work or the dangers of mass unemployment. Instead, it would be adjusted to meet the needs of price stability and sustained profitability. In other words, the free market would determine the natural rate. This left the vision of even a 2.5 percent unemployment a quaint reminder of an era when policymakers dreamed of social democratic transformation through economic planning.52 More to the point, these golden years failed to deliver unemployment rates anywhere near the levels achieved during the Second World War. Between 1946 and 1973, the unemployment rate dropped below 3 percent precisely once— in 1953, when Korean War spending saw it decline to 2.9 percent.53 Leaving aside economic growth and focusing instead on the only economic indicator that really matters to working people—the level of unemployment—the postwar period failed to deliver the “freedom from fear” once considered the sine qua non of a just society.54 And while military Keynesianism bolstered the temporary economic preeminence of the United States in the Bretton Woods era, competing nations that spent considerably less on their military budgets enjoyed lower rates of unemployment.55 Even so, military spending underwrote American economic expansion most decisively in the years between 1947 and 1970. Even while the employment performance of the postwar economy failed to deliver security to many in the working class, the national commitment to massive military investment won the support of organized labor. As military contractors helped set the benchmark for unionized workers, their prospects improved. Having been “present at the creation” of the 1946 Employment Act, Leon Keyserling could only look with a jaundiced eye in 1975 on what had passed for full employment in the intervening years. “We have never had anything approximating full employment in a full economy since 1953,” he acerbically observed, “and even conditions at that time did not fully meet the appropriate criteria” laid out by Harry Truman in the Economic Report of 1953, let alone Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. “Thus, for more than two decades, we have been in a long-term retreat from full employment in a full economy.”56 The famed prosperity of the period that accrued primarily to a white middle-class and to the ranks of unionized workers blunted any criticism of an economic order predicated largely on military spending. Through a state-directed program that produced higher wages for industrial laborers and used military

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spending as a source of countercyclical stabilization, the United States fended off rising foreign competition and the overcapitalization of private industrial enterprise.57 Even so, a pattern of repeated recessions followed by rising rates of unemployment produced an increasing sense of uncertainty. It persuaded progressive intellectuals, civil rights activists, and defenders of the New Deal tradition to renew the pressure for job creation. Keynesian demand management had not resolved the contradictions of capitalism that had been painfully evident to the economic planners of the 1940s. Only the expansion of the civil rights movement and the regeneration of the left would produce a revival of full employment thought comparable to that of the 1940s. African American labor and civil rights activists had championed economic planning to increase employment opportunities since the 1930s. As we have seen, black labor unionists and radicals joined the NAACP, the CIO, and the Urban League in advocating for a comprehensive vision of full employment that foregrounded the elimination of structural inequalities in the labor market. As increased automation transformed industries in which blacks had only recently gained a foothold, black labor and civil rights activists responded.58 It seemed as if the 1960s might just produce a revitalized movement for economic democracy.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

Jack Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, ed. Aaron Brenner et al., 2009 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 216–18; Irving Richter, Labor’s Struggles, 1945–1950: A Participant’s View (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48–9; “Work Stoppages Caused by LaborManagement Disputes in 1945,” Monthly Labor Review 62 (May 1946): 718. Jeremy Brecker, Strike! (Cambridge: South End Press, 1997), 244–5; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 99–100. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 117–19, 125–6, 219–20, quotation on 220; “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” in A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 117–19. Richter, 50. Meg Jacobs, “‘How About Some Meat?’ The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941–1946,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 912–13; Martin Hart-Landsberg, “Popular Mobilization and Progressive Policy Making: Lessons from World War II

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Price Control Struggles in the United States,” Science and Society 67 (Winter 2003–2004): 400–1, 426–7; Landon Storss, The Second New Deal and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77–8; CIO-PAC, Four Men Speak About Jobs (1944), box 18, folder titled “CIO Political Action Committee,” Benson Papers; Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press), quotations on 218 and 220. 6 Hart-Landsberg, 426–7; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 225. 7 Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 103. 8 Acknowledging the redistributive character of the postwar movement for price controls and union wages, Meg Jacobs describes the social democratic agenda as a “purchasing power program,” p. 225. This term captures the regulatory impulse that was critical to the progressive postwar reconversion campaign but underestimates how inextricably tied it was to an agenda of maintaining full employment, which necessarily included workers’ power in industry, the expansion of social democratic protections, and the idea of public investment as a check against mass unemployment. Pocketbook Politics, 225. 9 Francis Carlton, “The GM Strike: A New Stage in Collective Bargaining,” The Antioch Review 6 (Autumn 1946): 430. 10 Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 109. 11 Report of National Citizens Committee on GM-UAW-CIO Dispute,” Detroit, Michigan, December 1945, foreword, 1–2; Lipsitz, 112–15. 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 233–4. It is also clear that Reuther used the strike to solidify his own powerbase in the union. Triggering a strike against GM, he sought to control the worker discontent that had already generated ninety unauthorized strikes in the summer of 1945. Reuther proved more than willing to bargain away managerial control and transfer union power from the shop stewards to the executive. See Nelson Lichtenstein, “Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937–1955,” Journal of American History 67 (September 1980): 351–2. 14 Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 151. 15 “Work Stoppages Caused by Labor-Management Disputes in 1945,” 731. 16 UE Program for Higher Wages and Job Security (New York: CIO/UE publication, 1945), 1–2, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. 17 If the leadership of the UAW focused narrowly on the wage issue, as Meg Jacobs and others argue, the left-led UE believed that postwar reconstruction meant community and union allegiance in support of a broader vision of economic

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democracy. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 223–4; UE Program for Higher Wages and Job Security, 3–4; Journal of American History 67 (September 1980): 350–1. 18 Harry S. Truman, “Radio Address to the American People on Wages and Prices in the Reconversion Period,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry Truman, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, April 12 to December 31, 1945, October 30, 1945 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1961), 439. 19 UE Program for Higher Wages and Job Security, 6, 8. 20 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (New York: Verso Press, 2006), 52. 21 United States Department of Labor, War and Postwar Wages, Prices, and Hours, 1914–1923 and 1939–1944, Bulletin 852 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 1, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/ bls_0852_1946.pdf. 22 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 641. 23 UE Program for Higher Wages and Job Security, 10, 24. 24 Mike Davis, “The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party,” New Left Review 124 (November–December 1980): 67; Lichtenstein, “Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life,” 351–2. 25 Rosenberg, American Economic Development Since 1945, citation on Truman and price controls. 26 Helen Fuller, “Has Truman Lost Labor?” The New Republic 114 (June 10, 1946): 827. 27 Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 194. 28 Davis, 73. 29 Dray, There Is Power in a Union, 496–7. 30 Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” 134. 31 Len De Caux, Labor Radical: From the Wobblies to CIO, a Personal History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 476. 32 Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, 57. 33 Ibid.; Stein, 97. 34 McIntyre and Hillard, “Capitalist Class Agency and the New Deal Order, 134–5. 35 Blyth, Great Transformations, 87–90. 36 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (New York: Verso, 2012), 83. 37 See, for example, Max Krochmal, “An Unmistakably Working-Class Vision: Birmingham’s Foot Soldiers and Their Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Southern

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History 76 (November 2010): 923–60, Annelise Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 65–8. 38 Rosenberg, American Economic Development Since 1945, 70; Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 83; Nixon Apple, “The Rise and Fall of Full Employment Capitalism,” Studies in Political Economy 4 (Autumn 1980): 9; Brenner, 52–3. 39 David P. Stein, “Fearing Inflation and Inflating Fears: The End of Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2014, 94–5. 40 Harvey Swados, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” in Harvey Swados, On the Line, 1957 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 243–4. 41 Robert Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 141–2. 42 Caroline F. Ware, “Implications for Negro Americans of the Post-War Planning Activities of the U.S. Government,” Journal of Negro Education 12 (Summer 1943): 543; Storss, The Second New Deal and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left, 76–7. 43 Blyth, 91–2. 44 Rosenberg, 56–7. 45 Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America, 245–6. 46 David Stein, “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears,” 79–85. 47 Gene Smiley, “The U.S. Economy in the 1920s,” EH.Net, https://eh.net/ encyclopedia/the-u-s-economy-in-the-1920s; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Unemployment Rate, 1947– 2016,” https://data.bls.gov/timeseries. 48 Apple, 34. 49 Bertram Gross and Jeffrey D. Straussman, “‘Full’ Employment Growthmanship and Labor Supply,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 418 (March 1975): 10. 50 Ibid., 10–11, quotation on 11. 51 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 1996 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 130–44. 52 Richard Duboff, “Full Employment: The History of a Receding Target,” Politics and Society 7 (1977): 6–20. 53 “Employment Status of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population, 1946 to Date,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.bls.gov/cps/ cpsaat01.htm. 54 Ibid., 1–3. Here, Duboff places particular emphasis on the disproportionate increase between 1947–1949 and 1960–1962 in the number of the “long duration” unemployed, those without work for a period of fifteen weeks or more. 55 Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy, 22.

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56 Leon Keyserling, “Full Employment Without Inflation: Prepared for the Task Force Committee on Full Employment,” 7–9, quotations on 9, Conference on Economic Progress, 1975. 57 James M. Cypher, “The Origins and Evolution of Military Keynesianism in the United States,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 38 (2015): 459–64, quotation on 463; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 141–3. 58 Michael Honey, “Martin Luther King Jr. and the Memphis Sanitation Strike,” in Southern Labor in Transition, 1940–1995, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 149; Peter Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 75–6; Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 144–6.

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“The Day of Structural Economic Reform Is Not Over:” The Full Employment Revival, 1960–1973

Despite the economic blight that steadily spread over the black communities of the urban North, prospects seemed promising at the beginning of the new decade. A young and charismatic president, ostensibly committed to liberal democratic reform, encouraged labor unionists and civil rights activists to believe that a new era of social reform had arrived. Although President Kennedy did little to warrant this support during the first two years of his administration, the Commission of Civil Rights, established by Congress 1957, raised expectations of federal government support for racial justice. Documenting extensive residential and workplace discrimination throughout both the North and the South, the commission illustrated already the link between class and race oppression that was common knowledge among African Americans. The commission demonstrated that structural economic injustice underlay the distress that blanketed the urban black communities of the North. Widespread racial injustice in the North, the burgeoning of the civil rights movement in the South, and the frustrating duplicity of a Cold War-obsessed Kennedy administration propelled the national black freedom movement forward.1 Influenced by the commission’s revelations and by the renewed awareness of the connection between racial inequality and economic injustice in the civil rights movement, the drive for black freedom entered a new and dynamic phase. At the forefront of this regenerated movement was long-time civil rights and labor activist A. Philip Randolph. Motivated by the evidence of persistent racial discrimination in AFL-CIO locals, black labor unionists like Randolph took action. In 1962, they formed the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), which decided to organize a march on Washington to demonstrate against racial discrimination in the labor movement. The plan was that the march would

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culminate at the federation’s headquarters. The NALC then decided to shift the focus and the objective of the march. It would now concentrate on a legislative breakthrough that would address the dual agenda of jobs and freedom, a strategy tying the interracial, democratic unionism of the NALC to the political and social equality championed by civil rights groups in the South. After all, most African Americans expressed a much higher degree of concern about racialized unemployment than access to consumer retail outlets. In planning the march, black trade unionists revitalized the labor and civil rights network fractured by anti-communism in the 1940s. At the same time, NALC leadership reached out to like-minded activists who had the organizational acumen for such an undertaking. It was Randolph who enlisted fellow civil rights activist and socialist Bayard Rustin to take the lead. As the campaign gained momentum in 1963, the ideological horizon expanded as well, producing a renewed interest in the equation between genuine full employment and racial equality.2 Since its inception, young socialists offered vital organizational skill to the march, helping to highlight the economic injustice built into racial segregation. While mainstream intellectuals focused on the culture of consumption or the blessings of a liberal consensus, many of these radicals explored the problems of unemployment, economic inequality, and the impact of automation in journals such as Dissent and New America. Socialist intellectuals and activists such as Tom Kahn, Rachelle Horowitz, and Michael Harrington proved critical to the renewed movement. Harrington’s The Other America became groundbreaking. Published in 1962, it presented a searing expose of the persistence of poverty in an affluent America. Despite its ambivalence about unemployment as a cause and consequence of an alleged “culture of poverty,” it contributed an economic analysis that would decisively shape the civil rights movement in the coming years.3 In 1963, socialist activists proved critical to making the march on washington a demonstration for black economic justice.4 Designed to pressure the Kennedy administration into action, the 1963 March on Washington highlighted the impact of automation and economic discrimination on the black community. It simultaneously stressed the need for a cross-racial alliance rooted in the labor movement. Organizers underlined the indispensable importance of the federal government in resolving the combined problems of racism and structural unemployment. As historians now routinely observe, the August 28th, 1963, protest posited the connection between economic democracy and racial equality, between black liberation and steady employment. The class and racial diversity of the 250,000 in attendance signaled the possibility for a renewed united front

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in support of racial and economic justice. Labor union support from the United Auto Workers, the United Packinghouse Workers, the Fur and Leather Workers, and the Retail Workers proved critical. It also suggested that Randolph’s and Martin Luther King’s hopes to regenerate the 1930s coalition between organized labor and the black freedom movement were not misconceived. The support from organized labor was in part a function of Randolph’s aggressive organizing, but it was also an expression of the fact that organized labor continued to provide the most racially integrated public spaces in American society.5 In the immediate aftermath of the march, Socialist Party activists and march organizers Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz met to plan a more ambitious agenda. Instead of simply augmenting the welfare state, they wanted to map out a vision of racial and economic liberation. They planned a conference that included Rustin, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist Bob Moses, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, among others. The conference fostered expectations of social and political change that went well beyond the integrationist agenda of the civil rights movement.6 Propelled by the kinetic energy of the black freedom movement, riveted by the black urban protests that would escalate throughout the decade, and encouraged by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Randolph and his socialist allies outlined an ambitious political agenda predicated on full employment. For Bayard Rustin, the absence of a commitment to economic democracy represented the central weakness of the civil rights movement. The favorable political environment afforded by the inauguration of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty only intensified Rustin’s belief that the black freedom movement needed a comprehensive vision of economic emancipation. Without it, the movement’s legal victories would fail to alleviate the distress of those confined to an urban archipelago devastated by corporate relocation and white flight. Distilled into his signature article “From Protest to Politics,” which appeared in Commentary in 1965, Rustin made the argument for a cross-racial alliance anchored in the labor movement and unified by a commitment to economic planning.7 Rustin was motivated by pragmatism as much as idealism. He worried that civil rights victories that broke down barriers to employment but failed to address the problem of automation would only exacerbate racial enmity. In a memo probably written in 1966 to community organizers about “The Freedom Budget,” Rustin warned about the ephemeral improvement in the employment picture. Workers “in this technological, automated economy still dread the possibility of losing their jobs,” he submitted. As long as this “psychology of scarcity and depression” prevailed, organized workers would look suspiciously

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on the unorganized, while white workers would “feel threatened by and hostile to the black unemployed.” The “politics of fear” evident among whites was reflected in the black community’s “politics of frustration.”8 In a memo for the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, he elaborated this position more precisely. The civil rights bill had not gone far enough toward the amelioration of black economic distress. Only by pursuing “full employment for all Americans through accelerated public works, shorter work-weeks, anti-regressive taxation, and other policies aimed at the elimination of poverty and the satisfaction of social needs” could black liberation be achieved. Moreover, it could not be achieved through a program of black independent action. If blacks hoped to benefit from the redistribution of national resources, they would need “the support of a broad coalition of Americans of good will, including the labor movement, liberals, religious groups, progressive businessmen, intellectuals, and students.” What Randolph failed to mention was the central place of political radicals in articulating a vision of social transformation that would speak to this nascent coalition. The idea that “progressive businessmen” would sign on for “accelerated public works” and “anti-regressive taxation” was an example of the liberal optimism which Rustin would steadily abandon in the following decade.9 In the early 1960s, however, Rustin focused on crystallizing the momentum from the March on Washington into a coherent plan for economic action. Rustin and Randolph thus joined Leon Keyserling in developing a comprehensive economic plan to ameliorate black poverty and powerlessness. The 1964 Watts Riot and subsequent urban uprisings only made the plan seem more urgent. It resulted in a November 1965 conference on racial unrest that saw more than 200 activists from a plethora of civil rights organizations converge on the White House. There, A. Philip Randolph highlighted the critical junction between unemployment, poverty, and black discontent. Working through the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department, Randolph also benefited from the expertise of socialist activists like Tom Kahn and Michael Harrington. A range of left-leaning academics, including urban poverty scholar Herbert Gans and Gerhard Colm, the letter of whom had worked for the Bureau of the Budget and advised on the Full Employment Act of 1945, also lent their assistance. Joining Leon Keyserling and A. Philip Randolph, Rustin produced a job guarantee manifesto known as the “Freedom Budget” of 1966.10 Released by the A. Philip Randolph Institute in October 1966, “The Freedom Budget” represented the most decisive commitment to full employment by a social organization since the 1940s. Its closest antecedent was the CIO-PAC’s 1944 pamphlet “The Answer Is Full Employment.” The central pillar of this landmark manifesto harkened back to the Full Employment Act of 1945, which

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guaranteed meaningful employment to any and all those able and willing to work. Equally important, the budget committed the United States to providing “decent and adequate wages,” a “decent standard of living,” and “decent medical care and adequate educational opportunities” for all Americans. Distancing itself from the clinical, detached idiom of 1960s’ policy analysts, “The Freedom Budget” resonated with the moral tones of the civil rights movement even while it paid perfunctory homage to Kennedy-era pragmatism.11 Reflecting Keyserling’s influence, the budget placed the emphasis on economic growth rather than the redistribution of wealth. Stimulating productivity and aggregate demand was critical. So too was avoiding tax increases, make-work jobs, or any backsliding on America’s “international commitments.” Still, the budget was not another exercise in what Bertram Gross described as “growthmanship.” It endorsed job creation through federal investment in urban renewal. It advocated for economic planning that would include private management of school and hospital construction, water and electricity grid upgrades, and housing construction. But it also insisted on decent wages for workers, a guaranteed annual income for those unable to find work, and a job guarantee for those seeking employment. In essence, it recapitulated the moral and economic case made for full employment by progressives in the 1940s. In short, the United States had the obligation to eliminate poverty and insecurity through the provision of full-time employment. “Indeed,” wrote A. Philip Randolph in the introduction, the very process of abolishing poverty will add enormously to our resources, raising the standard of living of Americans at all income levels. By serving our unmet social needs… we can achieve and sustain a full employment economy (itself the single greatest force against poverty) and a higher rate of economic growth, while simultaneously tearing down the environment of poverty.12

Proposing direct job creation through “public service employment,” the budget went beyond policies aimed at stimulating the private sector. Instead, it proposed to make the federal government the employer of last resort.13 Priced at $185 billion over ten years, Keyserling presented a quantitative picture that came much closer to matching the magnitude of the problem facing the poor and marginally employed. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty assigned a meager $900 million to new and existing anti-poverty programs.14 “The Freedom Budget” communicated the message that attacking the problem of black economic inequality could never be resolved by discrete adjustments to the fiscal abacus of Keynesian demand management. It required a commitment by the federal government to direct job creation.15

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At the same time, it challenged the anti-inflationary preoccupation of the Federal Reserve Board and those economists who justified persistent unemployment as the inevitable cost of maintaining price stability. Countering a swelling chorus of conservative opinion that reached its apogee in the famous “Phillips Curve”—which by the 1970s would become dogmatic in mainstream economics—Keyserling argued that there was no solid evidence for an inevitable trade-off between full employment and an inflationary spike.16 It wasn’t just the evidence that inflation was at its greatest during periods of war and reconversion (an observation that did little to dent Keyserling’s unconditional support for the Vietnam War). It was that inflation could not be reduced to a technical issue. Economists could not hide behind an allegedly inflexible law positing that higher employment inevitably produced rising inflation in order to deflect the “moral or social question” of joblessness. “A moderate long-range upward movement of prices itself is not beneficial,” he was willing to concede. “But it may well be argued from U.S. experience that the economic questions and public programs during such periods have yielded more equity and more improvements in income distribution than those periods where stable prices have been accompanied by neglect of the needs of the nation and the people.” The policy of high interest rates had only exacerbated the maldistribution of income. It transferred wealth to those who needed it least and burdened working-class families trying to finance a new car, a child going to college, the costs of a protracted illness, or the small businessperson or farmer dependent on credit. Keyserling, the lead author of the budget, wanted to demystify the mechanics of a monetary policy that seemed indifferent to the specter of unemployment. In short, Americans could choose techniques other than involuntary unemployment, including progressive taxation as well as price and wage controls, to control inflation.17 “The Freedom Budget” harkened back to the New Deal, but it also questioned the merits of the War on Poverty. Invoking Roosevelt’s declaration of a “freedom from want,” Keyserling argued that it was the responsibility of the federal government to stimulate aggregate demand through national economic planning. “The Freedom Budget” challenged the central premise of the War on Poverty, which held that individual attitudes and a cumulative culture of poverty had to be corrected through training and education. Writing from the perspective of a country rocked by a summer of urban rebellions against racialized poverty and despair, Bayard Rustin used “The Freedom Budget” to evaluate Johnson’s War on Poverty. It would seem only reasonable that the first task of an assault on poverty would be to create jobs for all those who are able to work. This apparently self-evident

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proposition was not, however, one of the assumptions behind the Johnson war on poverty. That war was implicitly based on the notion that poor people are poor because there is something wrong with them, and it has accordingly proceeded to set up a bedlam of community-action programs under the delusion that the poor can be helped to organize themselves out of poverty.18

Social structures, not individual temperament or cultural conditioning, explained the poverty that afflicted an affluent America. Both Rustin and Keyserling conceded the value of community action programs, but not as mechanisms for putting the unemployed back to work. Job-training programs, the darling of liberals even today, flummoxed both Keyserling and Rustin. They looked in vain for the jobs that would absorb newly trained but increasingly frustrated young workers. The War on Poverty offered no solution for alleviating the poverty of those who were already employed—the working poor, those treading water against the pull of outright destitution.19 The budget did more than look back to the New Deal and critique the limits of the Great Society. Instead, it offered a thoroughgoing revival of the full employment thought of the 1940s. Rustin and the others started by advancing a more fundamental critique of industrial capitalism itself. As Rustin wrote in 1967, “Private enterprise—and let’s stop fooling ourselves—is neither going to train nor to [sic] put to work the hard-core poor.” For the same reasons, he excoriated the notion that the private sector could solve the problem of unaffordable housing.20 Even under a system of state-directed liberal capitalism, the social wage had not increased nearly enough to eradicate poverty, let alone unemployment. Only by increasing wages, encouraging the redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, expanding social services, and investing in public infrastructure could policymakers hope to compensate for the deficiencies of private enterprise as a guarantor of social security. This was a program designed to deflect racial resentment and accusations of racial privileging. Cautiously avoiding the implication that the budget was targeted exclusively at African Americans, Keyserling fashioned a politically astute program implicitly built on the foundation of a class analysis. This analysis included attention to the chronic problem of single women raising children in poverty because of unaffordable daycare, lack of job opportunities, and insufficient income support. It also examined the problem of underemployment. Keyserling’s budget addressed discouraged workers who had dropped out of the labor market altogether, those who remained invisible to the statisticians, excluded from the official count and from the glowing reports of economic vitality. Above all, it made the point that poverty and unemployment were

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inseparable. “Even allowing for the fact that not all of the unemployed and their families are poor,” he argued, “it appears that about 40 percent of all of the poverty is directly attributable to full-time unemployment or part-time unemployment, and that another 20 percent are poor because of substandard wages paid to their breadwinners when employed (which in itself is an aspect of an unsatisfactory employment environment). This accounts for about 60 percent of all the U.S. poor.”21 Before conservatives solidified the invidious image of the black welfare mother luxuriating in benefits provided by a bloated federal bureaucracy run by limousine liberals, the authors of “The Freedom Budget” excoriated the private enterprise system for failing to provide the path to self-reliance. While Keyserling typically elided the question of the Vietnam War, he and his colleagues built a bold-enough plan that promised to unite labor, civil rights organizations, and liberal intellectuals in an alliance reminiscent of the New Deal coalition.22 The line-up of supporting groups was impressive. The NAACP, the Urban League, CORE, and SNCC all signed on. So too did the Steelworkers, the Communications Workers of America, and the United Auto Workers, among other labor unions. Leading intellectuals and scholars also joined the ranks of supporters, including sociologist Daniel Bell, scholar and UN appointee Ralph Bunche, sociologist St. Clair Drake, Monsignor George Higgins, a labor priest of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and Morris B. Abram of the American Jewish Committee. Mainline Catholic and Protestant denominations as well as liberal Jewish synagogues joined social organizations such as the YWCA, labor unions, left-wing intellectuals, and local anti-poverty activists in advancing the case for a coordinated attack on racial inequality and working-class insecurity. In contrast to the War on Poverty, “The Freedom Budget” tied institutionalized racism to the class inequities that had persisted into the postwar era. The 1940s full employment coalition seemed revived again. *** No one was more important in moving this structural critique of capitalism to the mainstream than Martin Luther King Jr. Shaped by his upbringing during the Great Depression and influenced by the Christian socialism of Walter Rauschenbusch, King brought to his leadership in the civil rights movement an acute sensitivity to economic injustice. By 1965, he was examining racial inequality through the lens of class oppression. By 1967, he was routinely speaking the language of democratic socialism, presenting a structural critique of capitalism that looked toward a massive redistribution of wealth toward the disadvantaged.23

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Like Rustin, he also advocated for an alliance between the civil rights movement and organized labor. It was an alliance that King believed would be mutually beneficial. As he told an Illinois assembly of the AFL-CIO in 1965, “with all its power and experience, labor has been on the defensive for years, beating back efforts to outlaw the closed shop, interference in its internal affairs, and restrictions on organizing activities. It has made wage gains,” King conceded, “but its prestige is lower and its influence in government is meager if compared to labor movements of Europe.” King believed that the moral energy of the civil rights movement could reinvigorate the labor movement. Like Rustin and Randolph, he also understood that the accelerating rate of automation affected black and white workers alike, undermining the possibilities for black economic advancement and stoking the fires of racial animosity. “The advance of automation is a destructive hurricane whose winds are sweeping away jobs and work standards.” Striking at the auto, packing, and electrical sectors, automation was the adversary of all workers. It was particularly menacing to African Americans, however, who still struggled to achieve baseline economic security. Keenly attentive to the impact of technology on the composition of the working class, King speculated correctly that blacks, dislocated by mechanization, would steadily shift into the service sector. There, union organization would become all the more imperative to both defend industrial wage rates and maintain union density in American society.24 Just as threatening was the South, a haven for industries seeking lower wages, taxes, and relief from unions. “The widespread, deeply rooted Negro poverty in the South weakens the wage scale there for the white as well as the Negro. Beyond that,” King argued to a labor audience, “a low wage structure in the South becomes a heavy pressure on higher wages in the North.” In King’s analysis, capitalism pitted black against white workers, cast workers off in the interest of automated efficiency, awarded investment to some regions and impoverished others, and fought tooth and nail against union inroads on its power in the workplace. He reiterated this critique in speeches, addresses, and articles, highlighting again and again the central American paradox of poverty amid plenty. “These conditions exist at a time when national wealth and resources are enormous.” Echoing the full employment dreamers of the 1940s, King could only conclude that “the day of structural economic reform is not over but must again begin a new birth toward historic heights.”25 This was not only a call for interracial unionism and solidarity but a repudiation of the commercial Keynesianism that permitted poverty and insecurity to flourish alongside consumer abundance.

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In words that echoed the full employment ruminations of Granville Hicks, George Soule, and the socialist critics of the 1930s, King interrogated the economic status quo. “Are we not past the days when layoffs are no longer sufferable?” What kind of a security was it, he asked rhetorically, “when jobs can disappear for periods and families must abruptly sink to lower living standards? Why should other workers be put in competition with younger workers; why should Negro workers and white workers compete for jobs?” King also questioned the unexamined assumptions of postwar capitalism itself. “To put it mildly,” economist Michael Greene argued, “King is skeptical of any claim that the logic of the market can eliminate unemployment, underemployment, and poverty, and thereby ensure that all can enjoy basic economic security.”26 What King presented was a program that sought to augment the social wage but also tear down the ideological veil that separated Americans from an understanding of the sources of unemployment. He called for a guaranteed annual wage, a minimum wage that would meet the standard of a living wage, and a job guarantee for those willing and able to work. King reminded this state convention of primarily white AFL-CIO delegates that the pressure of organized labor had been the motive force behind the social democratic achievements of the 1930s. Only through the same determination could labor advance the kind of economic planning necessary to ameliorate the conditions facing both black and white workers. “Today labor can resume its pioneering role for its own security and at the same time it will dissolve America’s most acute and distressing problem— Negro equality and freedom. In creating full employment,” King explained, “the poverty of Negroes will be eliminated; their migrations, which swell ghettos, causing turmoil and suffering, will diminish; their family life will have an economic base on which to find stability and structure.” King was challenging the increasingly conservative union movement to rediscover the principles that united labor and civil rights. He enjoined his audience to remember the 1930s, when “the young labor movement made government create tens of millions of jobs in a great hurry, and benefitted all of society in the process.”27 King challenged the mainstream labor movement, but he also criticized the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty officials for endorsing the conclusions from the 1964 Moynihan Report, which posited that a pathological aversion to family stability rather than chronic joblessness lay at the root of black poverty. As historian Thomas Jackson puts it, black and white progressives “suspected that the conditions for full freedom and genuine equality—programs in jobs, housing, equal education, and the democratization of urban institutions, had been abandoned by an administration too timid to face the real causes

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of inequality and willing to use the rhetoric of family values to obscure the abandonment.” Rejecting the cycles and cultures of poverty discourse, King now spoke in terms of class exploitation. He critiqued the wage and power inequalities built into capitalism, not the alleged deficiencies of poor people in skills or training or character. Promoting full employment through democratic economic planning, King rejected the standard liberal framing for the nation’s economic disparities.28 At a time when mainstream organized labor had become quiescent, when the political winds were shifting decisively against largescale government social engineering projects, “The Freedom Budget” seemed a quixotic exercise at best. Only weeks following its dissemination, the 1966 midterm elections saw the Democrats lose several liberal senators critical to the support of any progressive legislation. Conservatives steadily replaced the liberal Republicans who had reached across the aisle on civil rights and other progressive measures. It was in 1966, for instance, that Ronald Reagan was elected to the governorship of California.29 Yet it wasn’t the rise of conservatism nearly as much as the unwillingness of the budget’s proponents themselves to understand the moving spirit of the era that explains the failure to translate it into something more than a position paper. While Martin Luther King turned against a war that he considered imperialistic and hypocritical, Randolph, Rustin, Harrington, and Keyserling raised nary an objection. Calculated not to offend the Johnson administration and win the support of the AFL-CIO leadership, this position only alienated those Americans who believed that ending the Vietnam War was the moral imperative of the era. This was an opinion not limited to the young and disaffected. An activist in the 1930s production-for-use Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and a two-term state senator in Washington, Mary Farquharson had been a lifelong peace advocate who continued to maintain a high profile on the left. In 1967, she wrote to Tom Kahn, executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy, to express her disappointment about the budget’s equivocation on the war. The unwillingness to take a position on the war was bad enough, but the readiness to rely on the “judgment of informed experts” and believe that an improvement in the “international situation” might lead to a reduction in military spending and an increase in social spending was patently naïve. “Can you imagine military ‘experts’ ever proposing a decrease in military spending?” Presciently, Farquharson observed that as long as military spending took precedence in American life, “the goals of the ‘Freedom Budget’ will recede in the distance.”30 Making the case that the United States could afford both the war in Vietnam

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and the War on Poverty sent the message that military aggression and social democracy were completely compatible. More than this, Randolph, Rustin, and the others missed the point that the war in Vietnam was also a war against America’s most disadvantaged. It not only withdrew resources from programs designed to fight poverty but it recruited and killed working class, disproportionately black and disadvantaged Americans. As Michael Yates and Paul Le Blanc argue, had Rustin and the others made this kind of argument, it would have “brought new strength to those who vigorously opposed the war, and it could have helped to form a coalition of civil rights and anti-war activists that might have begun to transform U.S. politics.”31 While calling for a fundamental restructuring of American society that would eradicate poverty in ten years, Randolph elided the Vietnam question. He argued that “The Freedom Budget” was “not predicated on cutbacks in national defense nor on one or another position regarding the Vietnam conflict, which is basically a thorny question to be viewed on its own terms.”32 Critics on the left, such as Irving Howe and Norman Thomas, execrated Rustin and Keyserling for promoting an economic program in complicity with the Vietnam War. Senate supporters, including Robert Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff, gave it only a perfunctory endorsement. Most importantly, by failing to support the anti-war movement, the proponents of the budget missed the opportunity to align with the zeitgeist of the 1960s. While it attracted the nominal support of the progressive religious organizations that had been critical to the civil rights movement,33 their message failed to resonate with most progressive academics and activists in the labor movement. It failed to move the radicals in the civil rights movement, the youthful protestors, the anti-war veterans, and the ranks of middle-class Americans increasingly disenchanted by American policy in southeast Asia. Writing to Rustin in 1967, graduate student and future environmental studies scholar Robert C. Paehlke captured the contradictions in their position. Paehlke was sympathetic to Rustin’s need to distance himself from the peace movement and to appeal “to a broader segment of society than that ‘movement’ represents.” Rustin might have supported the notion of a broad alliance for economic justice, but include the elements of the peace movement drawn from the radicalized campuses across the United States.34 For Rustin, the most promising and legitimate youth organization was the United States Youth Council (USYC), an outfit funded and covertly directed by the CIA. Rustin certainly shared the council’s antagonism toward the New Left. Writing to him about plans for a youth conference on “The Freedom Budget,” USYC project

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director Charlotte Roe confided that “The New Left… has not yet made up its mind about the Freedom Budget, yet certain elements within this community are bound to oppose it eventually.” Rustin almost certainly agreed. Instead of engaging the anticipated dissent, Roe argued that “it is essential that we take the offensive in the youth field—explain the Freedom Budget, build support for it among key student leaders—before SDS and other New Left groups have a chance to develop a hard position or to create pockets of resistance to the idea on the campuses.” The director of the CIA himself could not have put it better. So much for participatory democracy in the state-sanctioned youth movement.35 By contrast to Roe and the USYC, Paehike challenged the civil rights leader to adopt a position of moral and political consistency. Despite his misgivings about the anti-war movement, he argued that “you cannot avoid the fact that the things we all work and hope for and the present foreign policy of this country are directly opposed and may well be mutually exclusive.” Echoing Mary Farquharson, Paehlke emphasized the internal tendencies at work in the expansion of military spending. Considering “our present posture as overseers of the world status quo,” he wrote astutely, “the military-industrial complex can easily absorb all that the economy is capable of producing.” If his economics were slightly off, his policy analysis was dead on. The architects of the budget had to take “some foreign policy stand,” since a “meaningful Freedom Budget would be impossible without some change in our present foreign policy stance and because freedom in the shadow of war is hardly freedom.” Keyserling and Rustin had little patience for the New Left critique of the “military-industrial complex.” For a proposal pervaded by the idiom of freedom and equality, “The Freedom Budget” sounded far too friendly to the establishment. Besides, the anti-war movement had all the signs of the multiracial, cross-class coalition that the architects of the budget were so determined to build. To add insult to injury, the AFL-CIO and its massive membership never did mobilize in support of “The Freedom Budget.”36 More fundamentally, Randolph and the others never could translate the abstractions of this detailed budget into something meaningful, tangible, and worth fighting for by rank-and-file workers. The sense of crisis and possibility that fueled the movement in 1945 simply did not exist in the late 1960s, at least not beyond those immediately affected by racial inequality, deindustrialization, automation, and unemployment. Most Americans focused their attention on the Vietnam War. What emotional energy they spent beyond the war and managing their own lives was directed at rising inflation. By the Autumn of 1967, 75 percent of Americans believed the rising cost of living, fueled by an increase

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in employment courtesy of massive defense spending, justified substantial cuts to government spending on domestic programs.37 The skepticism about federal government spending on social programs was only exacerbated by the urban rebellions of the same year. Conservative commentators uniformly blamed these alleged excesses of the Great Society. “By the fall of 1967,” writes historian Randall Woods, “restoring law and order meant putting down urban riots. Polls showed that the racial crisis was now the nation’s chief domestic concern.”38 By 1967, most Americans believed that the Great Society and the War on Poverty programs had been designed exclusively for African Americans. By 1968, a mere 17 percent of whites believed that the War on Poverty had been effective.39 Propelled by growing disillusionment at establishment politics, from the debacle in Vietnam to the alleged failure of the War on Poverty, a considerable percentage of Americans became skeptical about government action at the very moment that Rustin and his allies were calling for massive government intervention.40 Racial resentment and the fragmentation of the civil rights movement militated against “The Freedom Budget,” but so too did the relative prosperity of the 1960s. This countered the urgent tone of the budget as well as Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Over the course of the decade, the average unemployment rate stood at 4.6 percent, the number of Americans in poverty shrank from 40 to 24 percent between 1960 and 1969 (in no small part because of Great Society programs), and the average GDP growth rate ran at 4.1 percent (by contrast, the 2000s saw GDP growth slow once again to the 1970s and 1980s norms of 2.8 percent and 2.6, respectively).41 Ironically, while Keyersling drafted the most spirited defense of full employment since 1945, Americans were actually achieving it, at least in standard macroeconomic terms, courtesy in large part of the Vietnam War. Military spending on the conflict in Southeast Asia rose from just over 50 billion in 1965 to 82.5 billion in 1969, moving the unemployment rate from 5.2 percent in 1964 to an average of 3.8 percent between 1965 and 1969.42 Major pockets of African American joblessness persisted, chronic poverty throughout Appalachia and the rural South stubbornly endured, but the United States did enjoy a broadening of prosperity. But as employment opportunities and union membership increased for African Americans, women, and Latinos, it placed additional pressure on businesses anxious about a profit squeeze and inflation. As economist Dean Baker and his coauthors argue, however, “the real problem occurring in the second half of the 1960s was not inflation per se, but rather that the distribution of national income had shifted in favor of working people and the less wealthy and the

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profitability of U.S. businesses was declining.”43 In fact, the rate of profit declined by 29.3 percent between 1965 and 1973. This was not primarily a function of rising wages, however. As historian Robert Brenner has demonstrated, the root cause of the profitability crisis can be attributed to foreign competition from low-cost manufacturers.44 Yet attacking labor proved easier and more popular among business interests than challenging cheap imports at the level of national policy. The corporate assault on organized labor became the central strategy for restoring profitability across the capitalist West. Despite the underwhelming support for “The Freedom Budget,” Rustin and the others succeeded in returning the idea of full employment to public discussion. King’s dedication to interracial trade unionism and to a multiracial movement of the dispossessed focused critical attention on the connection between poverty, unemployment, and race. The problem of chronic structural unemployment among African Americans gained additional legitimacy when the Kerner Commission, struck to investigate the urban uprisings of 1967, advocated for monumental investments in job creation and national economic planning. While President Johnson and the political establishment ignored the recommendations for massive federal intervention, African American activists continued to advocate for substantial change. As the prospects for “The Freedom Budget” faded and as Great Society job-training programs fell short of alleviating chronic black unemployment, members of the congressional black caucus took up the cause of structural economic reform once again. The rise of a rank-andfile labor insurgency that included young black militants seemed to suggest that the movement for economic democracy could be regenerated in the 1970s. *** The times seemed oddly propitious for just such a change. Contrary to mythologies reinforced by scholarly treatments of the period, the election of Richard Nixon did not provide the capstone for a conservative insurgency. If anything, as historian Judith Stein reminds us, the period between 1968 and 1972 saw a turn toward the left that could not have been anticipated in 1966. It was only in 1969 that the anti-war movement reached its summit, generating middle-class support and producing the Moratorium on the War in October of that year. Middle-class, white Americans may have turned against the Johnson administration’s program for expanding the welfare state, but most Americans had apparently not repudiated the idea of government responsibility for the disadvantaged. According to a 1973 University of Michigan Center for Political Studies analysis, 72 percent of Americans believed the federal government had

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a responsibility to eliminate poverty. Almost 70 percent supported the idea of national health insurance. Importantly, 91 percent endorsed the suggestion that the tax system should be revised to lighten the burden on the working class and increase it for the ownership and business class. Even the re-election of Richard Nixon did not represent a drastic ideological departure from the politics of managed prosperity. Instead, Stein argues convincingly, it signified the rejection of George McGovern, a candidate who inspired little confidence at a time when the administration’s wage and price controls seemed to be reducing inflation and employment seemed to be rebounding.45 If Americans, liberal and conservative, were growing skeptical of technocratic management that produced what seemed like out-of-control social spending and unwinnable wars, a majority still believed that a progressive redistribution of wealth, the establishment of a genuinely universal system of social insurance, and the dismantling of secretive and centralized systems of political control were necessary. The early 1970s can be defined as neither the point of departure for the inexorable rise of conservatism nor the moment for the inevitable implosion of the New Left. Instead, the United States was entering a fluid, disorienting, but potentially promising period of democratic revitalization. The horizons for women, African Americans, young workers, unionized public employees, and those exasperated by the duplicities of established authority seemed to broaden. It was this “excess of democracy,” this “democratic distemper,” as the corporateled Trilateral Commission put it in 1975, that alarmed business interests and moved them toward more effective organization in the 1970s.46 That these sentiments of democratic revitalization confronted the cross-currents of racist attitudes about undeserving blacks and urban disorders, about the supposed excesses of Great Society social engineering, about the supposed violence of black nationalism, and about the alleged racial privileging of the War on Poverty only underlines the contradictory impulses of this period. What most Americans apparently wanted could only be achieved by the instruments about which they had reasons to be suspicious. In short, most white, working, and middle-class Americans supported the idea of ending the war in Vietnam, reducing poverty and unemployment, and containing the black freedom movement. This would not have been surprising to Martin Luther King. In fact, it was the central problem he tried to untangle in the last years of his life. It permeated his reflections on interracial unionism, the problem of automation, the persistence of poverty in an affluent society, the limits of racial integration and legal equality, the hypocrisy of a violent and imperialistic America, and the urgent need for an multiracial movement of the poor. Only through economic

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democracy—including an expansive conception of full employment—could Americans begin to challenge racism in a meaningful way. At the same time, King understood that the democratization of economic power would allow average Americans to challenge the social authority of capital and the powerful mythologies of individual self-reliance that prevented them from understanding their predicament. After all, in 1970, 30 percent of working-class American families still languished in poverty, earning incomes less than $7,000 annually, the official marker. Another 30 percent of the population existed above the poverty line but earned below what government statistics considered the intermediate level of income. This meant that after a decade that included a massive tax break, Keynesian fiscal management, Great Society spending, accelerating military investment, and claims of a full employment profit squeeze, 60 percent of Americans still lived lives under or only modestly above the poverty line. That’s not to mention the 23 percent of American laborers who experienced at least some episode of unemployment in 1970 or the more than one-third of these who endured a period of unemployment that lasted almost four months.47 The labor insurgency that broke out in the United States and across much of industrialized West provided a catalyst for a renewed challenge to the status quo. Galvanized by tightening labor markets, laborers pushed for greater workplace democracy. They protested the alienating conditions of industrial production. Wildcat strikes, rank-and-file movements to democratize mainstream unions, African American campaigns for trade union independence, as well as feminist efforts to contest inequitable hiring practices and challenge sexist union leadership seemed to suggest that a revitalized labor movement could spearhead a movement for economic democracy. Countervailing economic winds propelled the New Left toward a more serious analysis of political economy. The spike in unemployment in 1970, the recession of 1973, and the complicating problem of inflation forced questions of political economy to the foreground of left political consciousness. Questions of class antagonism and the economic structures of inequality gained a salience on the left that they did not have in the previous decade. In grassroots organizations such as the National Welfare Rights Organization and in New Left-inspired groups such as the Union for Radical Political Economics and Studies on the Left, the discussion of socialism enjoyed a newfound legitimacy. Far from being dispersed by the batons wielded at the Chicago Democratic Convention or the bullets fired at Kent State, the American left seemed to be entering a period of transformation and renewal.48

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In the aftermath of the 1972 electoral debacle, those in the labor-oriented left wing of the Democratic Party sought to rebuild it on foundations that would include the wider working class. Hubert Humphrey and many liberals believed the party had erred in 1972 by emphasizing race and gender diversity to the exclusion of economic amelioration.49 They were determined to rectify the alleged overcorrection by fashioning a program that addressed the common interests of workers from across the racial spectrum. In a period of economic contraction, when deindustrialization, offshoring, and automation seemed to be cutting a wide swath through the entire working class, it seemed imperative to advance a program of social democracy that would speak to the interests of a diverse working class. As historian Jefferson Cowie puts it, “Many could see that placing affirmative action onto a world of declining opportunity was little more than a zero-sum game—and most likely a fast track to further racial resentment.” Bayard Rustin, Hubert Humphrey, and African American congressional representative Augustus Hawkins emerged as leading advocates for a renewed commitment to full employment. Rustin joined the likes of New York Times journalist Andrew Levison and black trade unionist Cleveland Robinson in advocating for a national commitment to full employment. Returning to the rationale of the 1940s movement, they argued that creating a jobs surplus would advance the cause of racial equality and deflect a wave of white racial animosity toward blacks.50 The idea of full employment also began to gain traction among African American intellectuals and scholars. Once again, the radical democratic possibilities of full employment began to emerge, moving many advocates far beyond what Keyserling or Rustin ever imagined or dared to admit. In the pages of the Review of Black Political Economy, a group of black economists that included Marcus Alexis, Bernard Anderson, and Robert S. Browne outlined an “Economic Bill of Rights” that championed full employment and reparations for slavery. Advocating for a job guarantee, the Caucus of Black Economists, as they came to be known, emphasized the economic and psychological imperatives behind it. Work was not simply a material requirement but an essential human need. “The individual’s search for meaning in his life and his search for selffulfillment are deeply rooted in his work activity.” Full employment could not be defined by a formula that would maintain price stability but as “the availability of dignified and economically rewarding jobs for all who want work.” While this echoed some of the more humanistic language in “The Freedom Budget,” Marcus and his associates wanted to detail the unique experience of exploitation and exclusion that defined the experience of blacks in the American labor market.

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“Throughout American history,” the economists wrote, “black workers have languished in the backwash of the economic forces determining the progress and mobility of white labor.” Anderson and the others vigorously advanced the case that blacks had consistently occupied an inferior position in the American class structure. “Blacks have continuously been subject to the syndrome of low wages, job instability, menial work, low skills, poor job information, discrimination, and inadequate access to jobs.” Revisiting the depressing statistics of black economic disadvantage in the postwar years, they highlighted one set in particular: the fact that while white unemployment ricocheted from 6.1 percent in 1958 to 3.1 percent in 1969, the black unemployment rate did not fall below 6.4 percent in any single year. In thirteen out of eighteen years, during the postwar economic miracle, the unemployment rate among African Americans consistently hovered above 8 percent. While Rustin and Keyserling sought to build interracial bridges, Alexis and his colleagues drove home the point that Keynesian macroeconomic management had not achieved anything close to “full” employment for blacks.51 Like most social commentators on the black predicament of the period, the authors of the special study for the Review of Black Political Economy pointed to the glaring problem of youth unemployment. What set them apart was their emphasis on the discriminatory treatment that confronted blacks who were employed. This connected them to the more comprehensive vision of full employment which the left in the 1940s had championed. Still occupying a “peripheral” status, blacks in 1971 found themselves “twice as likely as white to be employed in service jobs, seven times as likely to be employed as domestics, and almost three times as likely to be employed as industrial laborers.” Noting the limited progress that blacks had made in semi-skilled and entry-level white-collar positions, the authors underlined their susceptibility to structural unemployment through automation and technological innovations. Conspicuously underrepresented in managerial positions, they failed to gain influence in the corporate and government circles that determined the policies affecting black communities. Suffering from such a profound lag in access to decent employment, African Americans found themselves victimized by a widening income gap that only compounded their economic subordination.52 The starting point was to acknowledge the invaluable link between tight labor markets and black economic advancement.53 Only by absorbing the slack in the labor market could African Americans hope to gain economic leverage. As the authors candidly put it, “When labor markets are tight, the cost of discrimination rises and blacks find jobs easier to obtain.” In effect, as the situation for white workers improves, the jobs they evacuate are occupied by

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upwardly mobile blacks. Equally important was the insight that had governed progressive black thought since the anti-slavery movement: the federal government was indispensable to genuine racial justice. As economist Robert S. Browne explained in 1977, “black economic progress is heavily dependent upon government policies against discrimination” as well as “public policies on education, job training, and income maintenance.” Government intervention had not only expanded economic growth but proven essential to protecting the rights of African Americans and other minorities.54 As the Black Caucus Study Group argued, those African Americans who had gained managerial positions had generally done so in the public sector.55 Although government support for black economic advancement had expanded opportunities for black job seekers, Alexis and his colleagues argued for something much more ambitious: a “direct attack on black unemployment and underemployment.” Only a commitment to full employment could achieve this. Policymakers would have to choose job creation over price stability, an argument that led invariably to a consideration of the alleged “trade-off.” What distinguished the special report from most other treatments of the topic was its class analysis. “Inflation has a variable effect on the rich and the poor,” they argued, pointing out that periods of full employment produced opportunities for low-income workers that made them quite indifferent to marginal increases in the rate of inflation. Why? Because they were working. “The expanding job opportunities benefit the poor and the disadvantaged while inflation harms the economic position of the rich and the well-to-do.” On the question of price stability and maximum employment, this “differential impact” established a wide gulf between workers and owners, between wage earners and rent seekers.56 The heterodox tone informed the author’s entire analysis of full employment, most notably on the question of race. The price stability-maximum employment trade-off was not the only illusion standing in the way of eliminating joblessness. The other was the belief that macroeconomic policy alone would resolve the problem of chronic black unemployment. Only an assault on black structural unemployment could begin to shift the balance of class forces in favor of the nation’s historically most dispossessed group. Discrimination was not a matter of individual bigotry but of “seemingly objective institutions and systems of decision-making” that made a mockery of the idea of equal opportunity. From discriminatory tests to racially biased recruitment and promotion policies, blacks paid the price of institutional practices that maintained racial subordination.

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Like the architects of “The Freedom Budget,” the authors of the special report emphasized a comprehensive vision of full employment, one that included equitable housing, transportation, and educational opportunities. Once again, a group of intellectual activists advanced the case that the road to social democracy ran through the achievement of a robust version of full employment. At the same time, however, they parted company with Rustin and Keyserling by rejecting the bias in favor of the private sector as the preferred mechanism for job creation. “The government must act as co-equal with the private sector as an ‘employer of first resort.’ To an unemployed man seeking gainful employment, there is nothing inherently more desirable in private employment than in government.” The authors’ gendered language might suggest a sexist indifference to the realities of a new working class, but their call for a national network of childcare facilities demonstrated just how democratic and egalitarian a vision of full employment it was that they espoused. “Full enforcement of existing legislation designed to end once and for all, discrimination against women in employment is an absolute essential to any full-employment economy.” The authors left little doubt that full employment was the economic precondition for women’s emancipation.57 Equally striking was the synthesis of black nationalism and left economic populism. If the authors devoted little attention to the mutually empowering possibilities of an interracial trade union alliance, they advocated for universal reforms that would attack the inequalities of wealth that lay beneath the chimera of the affluent society. Full employment provided the path beyond tempering capitalism and toward something that looked like democratic socialism. From universal health care to targeted direct investment to a radically overhauled system of taxation that would mitigate corporate privilege, the authors presented an expansive vision of economic democracy that addressed the grievances of a working-class majority. At the same time, they frankly confronted the unique experience of African American oppression. As the authors eloquently explained, The programs outlined in this volume are meant to humanize American society, to correct inequities in the allocation of America’s resources and to obtain maximum benefits for the poor… But even as we unite to transform America into a humanist, non-racist society, we must not lose sight of the current reality… that the black community in America is the specific object of a virulent racism which will keep blacks, as a group, in an inferior position until such time as special measures are taken to correct the situation. And even were racism to vanish overnight, the legacy of slavery and post-emancipation discrimination

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would insure that the black community’s economic status would remain inferior to that of whites for many decades to come [emphasis added].

The origins of this persistent inequality were not to be found in the realm of popular culture or law or ideology but in the material sphere of wealth distribution. Only an understanding of the legacy of slavery, the failed promises of Reconstruction, and the determined postwar campaign both North and South to subjugate African Americans could adequately account for the massive disparities in wealth between blacks and whites. Only this kind of historical consciousness could explain the exclusion of blacks from “the inner circles where large scale thievery and connivance” have been practiced, which subsequently “made honest capital accumulation an Herculean undertaking for most black folk.”58 African Americans did not participate in the “primitive accumulation” that gave white settlers, cattle ranchers, plantation owners, merchant manufacturers, and industrial entrepreneurs their massive head start.59 Considering the conspicuous inequalities in capital resources that separated whites and blacks in the early 1970s, the Special Study Group of the Caucus of Black Economists argued for a “disproportionately large slice of the national pie to enable it to overcome its massive deficiencies.” Notably, the authors rejected the individualistic model of affirmative action that would come to define liberal policy in the post-Great Society years. Instead, they called for bloc allocations to “black communities” to fund infrastructure as well as institutions that promoted black independence and full economic participation. Clever economists, however, they also made the case from the logic of necessity, a concession to the sensitivities of those who found the equity argument “disturbing.” What is most striking is that the authors presented a case for equity and equality. They advocated for affirmative action and broad-based economic remedies for average Americans of both genders and all races who had felt the sting of unemployment, if not the trauma of poverty. Espousing American egalitarianism, Alexis, Browne, and the others still spoke in the idiom of black power. “For too long the black community has been ruled by those who not only live outside of it, but are often hostile to its interests.” Only by “greater community control over public services and public revenues,” through greater political representation, and through a “multibillion dollar reparation payment” could African Americans overcome the legacy of slavery. It was a bold, pathbreaking statement that challenged liberal axioms and expanded the horizons of full employment thought in the 1970s. Throughout, it resonated with the theme of economic democracy that seemed ascendant on the left.60 Although the Special Study Group emphasized the indispensable importance of black self-determination in the achievement of genuine full employment,

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it joined Rustin, Cleveland, Robinson, and King in harkening back to the class-oriented analysis of the 1940s movement for full employment. As we’ve discovered, it was a movement that took for granted the establishment of a floor of economic security in the search for social justice. Neither Robinson nor Rustin romanticized full employment: achieving it would not automatically wipe out bigotry and discrimination. Yet both believed that it provided the only stable foundation for racial equality. Without a job guarantee, whites would compete with minorities and women from across the racial spectrum for what was clearly a shrinking economic pie. Writing in 1975 in support of the legislative incarnation of these ideas, economist Bernard E. Anderson encapsulated these sentiments: “In the absence of full employment, resistance to the pursuit of fair employment is certain to rise, and minorities will be forced into the position of competing with other workers in a system where limited job opportunities must be rationed.” A supporter of equal opportunity lawsuits that saw AT&T pay huge settlements for discriminatory hiring practices, Anderson echoed the Caucus of Black Economists in postulating that “even with the stronger government commitment to equal employment enforcement observed in recent years, minorities are unlikely to win many victories in that game.”61 Like the proponents of “The Freedom Budget,” Anderson and the Caucus challenged the logic of a system that normalized unemployment. More directly and unequivocally than “The Freedom Budget,” though, the authors pushed to the surface the discomfiting questions that the discussion of full employment invariably raised. They did so not only in the pages of mainstream academic journals but through speeches, addresses, and articles in popular publications. Perhaps no one was more prolific on this front than Robert S. Browne. In a forum on the question of whether the United States could achieve full employment without inflation, Browne, the principal founder of the Black Economic Research Center in Harlem and a key member of the Caucus of Black Economists, answered unequivocally, “Not under our existing economic arrangements.” A proponent of full employment, he was nevertheless prepared to discuss the seemingly unmentionable question of how achieving it would impinge on conventional notions of freedom. Typically the purview of rightwing critics, freedom was nothing less than the third leg of the stool, as Browne described it, without which the discussion of full employment and price stability lacked “realism.” Yet Browne was not providing a brief for defending private enterprise against the threat of economic planning. Echoing economist Edward Everett Hale and the uncompromising I.F. Stone, he explored the implications of any genuine plan to eradicate involuntary idleness. He was convinced that

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the evidence demonstrated that full employment over any significant period generated inflation. How much he did not say. Browne’s point was this: Americans needed a “new set of tools” to manage full employment. These would invariably “require extensive transformation of the manner in which our economy operates, including a rather substantial dose of central economic planning and plan enforcement.” Similarly, the decline in the reserve supply of unemployed would produce a measure of wage inflation that could only be contained by direct wage and price controls. In short, he repudiated the notion that full employment could be achieved through decentralized management and limited federal government intervention.62 Rejecting the bogeymen of totalitarian control, Browne entertained the possibility that certain freedoms had only really redounded to the benefit of an elite few should indeed be curtailed to secure freedom for the majority. This could only be achieved by economic planning. For example, considering that the majority of the unemployed at any given time were semi-skilled, the program would fail if it did not pay them decent wages, since invariably they would perform tasks generally considered undesirable. This would mean setting wages in a fashion that would “no longer be determined by profit-maximization criteria—a major change in our system, and one that implies state rather than private entrepreneurship.” Against the persistent overtures to the primacy of private enterprise in standard appeals for job creation, Browne argued that the state would have to intervene decisively in the labor market. Any other option would either leave large swaths of Americans in the ranks of the unemployed or give tacit assent to the hiring of desperate workers at poverty wages under the false aegis of “full employment.” Rejecting liberal appeasement of business, Browne followed the full employment argument to its logical conclusions. The government would have to become the employer of last resort or be prepared to “play a major coercive role with respect to private employment practices.” Here was the return of the socialist argument of the 1940s that any authentic program of full employment would invariably impinge on the prerogatives of capital. A genuine commitment to full employment in 1976, Browne argued, would mean something like an additional 7 million new jobs, a 50 percent increase over existing public sector employees. After this dramatic expansion of the public sector, Browne insouciantly put it, “one might discover that the economic system had been substantially altered from its present form.” This was something about which the labor-left proponents of full employment in the 1940s had been considerably more candid. In Browne’s estimate, monetary and fiscal incentives could “move us toward full employment but they have not succeeded in getting

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us there and keeping us there.” Achieving that would require the full and frank discussion of matters that would politicize the issue and likely generate vigorous business class opposition.63 By exposing the limits of Keynesian liberalism and foregrounding the class conflict inherent in any honest discussion of a job guarantee, Browne had revived the radical sensibilities of the 1940s labor-left. Like these predecessors, he pointed to the inadequacy of any full employment program that depended primarily on the private sector. If private enterprise failed to respond to lavish incentives, or if the price was simply too high, the “logical solution would be for the government to go into business itself, competing with the private sector in the production of shoes, clothing, appliances, etc.” This was the specter of state ownership that the National Resources Planning Board had envisioned, that the Citizens National Committee had decried, and that economist Edward Everett Hale had predicted would naturally develop out of any authentic program for full employment. Browne, however, remained resolute. As he told the readers of The Black Collegian in 1978, “Such a policy would raise anguished cries of ‘socialism’ from certain sectors of our population, but few Blacks are likely to be frightened by that word, and in any case the alternative is clearly much more to be feared.”64 *** The movement for full employment legislation in the 1970s has been portrayed as the work of a renewed liberal coalition, but it is better understood as an expression of working-class upheaval of the early 1970s. This in turn drew strength from the social movements of the era. It should be remembered that it was the approximation of full employment throughout the Western, industrialized world that produced the wildcat strikes in the years between 1968 and 1972. From France to West Germany, from Italy to the United States, workers challenged faceless bureaucracies, dehumanizing work routines, and exploitative managers, but they did so from a position of strength, of tightened labor markets and a shift in the distribution of the national wage toward labor. Workers challenged not only the power of management but the complicity of union officials in maintaining workplace structures that discriminated according to race and gender. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Black Panthers each participated in the revival and reinterpretation of the full employment ideal. They did so by advocating for the elimination of job classification and pay systems that maintained historic inequities and denied the achievement of meaningful and dignified work. Meaningful, dignified, consistent employment: this had been the

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dream of the progressive economic planners of the 1930s and 1940s. It was this wider egalitarian impulse, this willingness to question established institutions and received practices, that lay at the foundation of the full employment revival of the 1970s.

Notes Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 256–62, 269–72. 2 William P. Jones, “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 7 (Fall 2010): 35–44. 3 Attewell, People Must Live by Work, 189–90. 4 Le Blanc and Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, 34, 62–72. 5 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 306–7. 6 Stein, “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears,” 153–4. 7 Daniel Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 172–4. 8 Bayard Rustin to “Community Leaders,” n.d., microfilm reel #13, Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 9 A. Philip Randolph Institute, “Prospectus,” n.d., box 7, folder titled “A. Philip Randolph Institute, Miscellany, 1965–1976,” Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 10 Matthew Forstater, “From Civil Rights to Economic Security: Bayard Rustin and the African American Struggle for Full Employment, 1945–1978,” International Journal of Political Economy 36 (Fall 2007): 67–8, including quotation; Herbert Gans to Bayard Rustin, March 21, 1966, box 19, folder titled “Freedom Budget, Correspondence, General, 1965–66,” Bayard Rustin Papers, Library of Congress; Stein, “Fearing Inflation and Inflating Fears,” 181–2. 11 A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, A Freedom Budget for All: A Summary (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1967), 9–10. 12 A. Philip Randolph Institute, A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans: Budgeting Our Resources 1966–1975 to Achieve “Freedom from Want” (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1966), “Introduction.” 13 Matthew Forstater, “The Freedom Budget at 45: Functional Finance and Full Employment,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection, May 2011, http://www.levyinstitute.org. 14 Julian Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 138. 1

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15 Randolph and Rustin, A Freedom Budget for All, 11–15; Forstater, “From Civil Rights to Economic Security,” 69; Mathew Forstater, “Jobs and Freedom Now! Functional Finance, Full Employment, and the Freedom Budget,” Review of Black Political Economy 39 (2012): 63–5. 16 As Helen Ginsburg points out, what economists drew from Phillips was the conclusion that inflation invariably resulted from employment gains and that wages were the principal determinant of prices. “It also assumed,” she writes, “that wage changes lead to price changes, not the other way around.” Full Employment and Public Policy: The United States and Sweden, 23. 17 A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans, 71–5. 18 Bayard Rustin, “The Lessons of the Long Hot Summer,” Commentary, October 1967, in Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, ed. Bayard Rustin and C. Vann Woodward (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 189. 19 Ibid., 190. 20 A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans, 29–30, 38–9; Donald K. Pickens, Leon H. Keyserling: A Progressive Economist (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 174–5; Bayard Rustin, “Spit, String, and Scotchtape,” n.d., Bayard Rustin Papers, microfilm collection, reel 18, Library of Congress. 21 A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans, 27. 22 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 377. 23 J. Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 4, 256–60, 272–5; Adam Fairlcough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (New York: Viking Press, 2001), 237. 24 Martin Luther King Jr., “Speech to Illinois State AFL-CIO, Springfield, Illinois, October 7, 1965,” in All Labor Has Dignity, ed. Michael Honey (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 113–16, quotations on 115; King, Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 141. 25 Ibid., 116. 26 Michael Greene, A Way Out of No Way: The Economic Prerequisites of the Beloved Community (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014), 29. 27 Ibid., 117. 28 Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, 246, 250. 29 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 377. 30 Mary Farquharson to Tom Kahn, May 5, 1967, box 19, folder titled “Freedom Budget, Correspondence, General, 1966–67,” Bayard Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 31 Le Blanc and Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, 142. 32 A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans, “Introduction.”

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33 For example, see Charles E. Cobb, executive co-ordinator, Committee for Racial Justice Now, United Church of Christ to Bayard Rustin, November 18, 1966; Reverend George Koski, chairman, Christian Social Relations Committee, Protestant Council of the City of New York to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, March 1, 1967; Huber F. Klemme, associate executive director, United Church of Christ, Council for Social Action to Bayard Rustin, March 17, 1967, box 19, folder titled “Freedom Budget, Correspondence, General, 1966–67,” Bayard Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 34 Robert C. Paehlke to “Dear Sirs,” February 27, 1967, microfilm reel 13, Bayard Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 35 Charlotte Roe to Bayard Rustin, October 28, 1966, microfilm reel #13, Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 36 Ibid.; Le Blanc and Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, 159; Charlotte Roe to Bayard Rustin, October 28, 1966, microfilm reel #13, Rustin Papers, Library of Congress. 37 Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 272. 38 Randall B. Woods, Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 315. 39 Cited in Weir, Politics and Jobs, 88–9. 40 Brian Balogh, “Making Pluralism ‘Great’: Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 160–2. 41 Dean Baker, Robert Pollin, Elizabeth Zahrt, “The Vietnam War and the Political Economy of Full Employment,” Challenge (May–June 1996): 38; “Real Gross Domestic Product, Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate,” U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, St. Louis Federal Reserve, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1#0. 42 Cited in Edward M. McNertney, “Economy, U.S., and the Vietnam War,” in The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 326; Baker et al., “The Vietnam War and the Political Economy of Full Employment,” 39; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, 1946–2016,” https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat01.htm. 43 Baker et al., 41. 44 Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, 102–3, quotation on 108. 45 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 71–3. 46 Quoted in Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010): 242. 47 Stein, 14–15. 48 Brick and Phelps, Radicals in America, 178–90.

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49 Humphrey had also played a direct role in derailing McGovern’s campaign. Running against McGovern for the nomination, he and his aides conspired to paint the senator from South Dakota as an unhinged radical whose plan for a guaranteed annual income would drastically raise taxes on middle-class American families. The claim was patently false, but it stuck. Combined with Nixon’s popularity and the strength of the American economy at the time, it effectively sealed McGovern’s fate. See Joshua Mound, “What Democrats Still Don’t Get About George McGovern.” 50 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2010), 267–9. 51 Marcus Alexis et al., “An Economic Bill of Rights: Report of a Special Study Group on Problems of Poverty and Racism,” Review of Black Political Economy 3 (Fall 1972): 6–8. 52 Ibid., 9–10. 53 Robert S. Browne expanded on this point in a paper presented at a conference in Detroit in 1977. Black advancement was inextricable from the economic improvement of the nation itself. “At no time in the nation’s history have blacks made significant gains when all others did not. This means full employment is absolutely essential for continued economic progress for the black community. Slow growth, stand-pat policies will do nothing but retard further economic and social progress.” See “U.S Economic Policy and the Problem of Black Unemployment,” 4, box 23, folder 18, Robert S. Browne Papers, New York Public Library, Archives and Manuscripts, hereafter abbreviated as NYPL. 54 Ibid. 55 See also Browne, “U.S. Economic Policy and the Problem of Black Unemployment,” 9. 56 “An Economic Bill of Rights: Report of a Special Study Group on Problems of Poverty and Racism,” 11–12. 57 Ibid., 12. 58 Ibid., 37–9. 59 Steve Fraser quotation here 60 “An Economic Bill of Rights,” 38–9. 61 Bernard E. Anderson, “Full Employment and Economic Equality,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 418 (March 1975): 137. 62 Robert S. Browne, “Can We Have Full Employment Without Inflation?” Challenge 19 (March–April 1976): 61. 63 Ibid., 61–2. 64 Robert S. Browne, “Black Unemployment and Public Policy—The Need for Full Employment,” 81, The Black Collegian, March–April 1978, box 23, folder 1, Browne Papers, NYPL.

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The Vitality of the Improbable: The Campaign for a Job Guarantee and the Radical Possibilities of Full Employment in the 1970s

“The Freedom Budget” and Martin Luther King’s activism had returned the idea of full employment to the public forum. In the 1970s, it steadily drew support from a broad alliance of labor activists, progressive economists, antipoverty advocates, civil rights proponents, and socialist intellectuals. As early as February 1972, Augustus Hawkins, congressional representative of the Watts District in Los Angeles and chair of the Equal Opportunities Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor, convened a meeting of progressive economists and intellectuals to consider the possibilities of legislating full employment. Joined by Robert S. Browne of the Black Economic Research Center, perennial planner Leon Keyserling, social policy scholar Sumner Rosen, as well as economist Bernard Anderson and sociologist Russell Nixon, Hawkins began the long process that would lead to one of the signature legislative struggles of the 1970s, the drive for a federal job guarantee. The evidence of egregiously high unemployment rates among African Americans and signs of a broader economic crisis moved Hawkins’ group to action. Some believed that this was a new opportunity to advance a more fundamental democratization of American political economy. Through their activism, writing, and organizing, they pointed toward a new horizon of economic democracy. The leadership of the movement proved considerably less able or willing to articulate a sustained critique of corporate capitalism. Nor did they fashion political alternatives that moved beyond the mechanism of a federal job guarantee. Even so, they and their supporters believed they would succeed where “The Freedom Budget” had failed.1 In early 1973, Hawkins recruited the veteran planner Bertram Gross to draft a measure that would address the steady increase in unemployment since 1970. A key architect of the 1945 Full Employment Act and a professor of management

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at Hunter College, Gross had maintained the progressive vision he had brought to the struggles of the 1940s. He became an astute critic of the kind of banal liberal confidence in economic “growth” that Keyserling and other commercial Keynesians had espoused in the postwar period. By the 1960s, Gross observed in a 1975 article for The Annals of the American Academy, policymakers paid lip service to an increasingly amorphous notion of full employment. They celebrated the wonders of growth, but never asked whether it had alleviated social suffering. “Rather, what was salient was the appropriate growth rate,” Gross observed. “Meanwhile, the early postwar issue of a guaranteed job for all receded into the background.”2 Instead of guaranteeing citizens a right to a job, businesses had been guaranteed the opportunity for expanded markets, a healthy return on capital investments, a cornucopia of raw materials courtesy of economic imperialism, and an expanded labor market in which employers decisively held the power. Counting the increasing percentage of women in the workforce, those trained and educated but unable to find employment, and the “4.7 million” people or 5.7 percent of the labor force searching for work but unable to find it, Gross had little reason to believe that postwar policymakers had delivered meaningful full employment.3 For Gross, the invitation to draft a new full employment measure provided an opportunity to revisit the most ambitious expectations of the 1940s movement. Here was a chance to correct the concessions that had marked the 1945 bill. Once completed, Hawkins sponsored conferences at Berkeley and at Columbia to consider Gross’ draft. Mildly revised, the Gross bill would be submitted to Congress in 1974 by Hawkins and Senator Hubert Humphrey as the “Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act of 1976.” Even though the bill generated little support at that time, it represented a bold exercise in expanding the horizon of political possibilities. Here was a measure that explicitly guaranteed employment opportunities regardless of age, youth, gender, race, ethnicity, or physical ability. In its comprehensive conception of full employment, it went lightyears beyond the cautious and coded language of the Wagner-Murray bill. The 1945 measure paid lip service to universalism but initially made no provisions for housewives. It also operated on the assumption that racial animosities would disappear as the economy reached full employment. Like the 1945 bill, the measure called for a joint planning committee in which both houses of Congress would evaluate long- and short-term plans submitted by the president. Unlike the 1945 incarnation, however, the 1974 bill made specific provisions for local and regional input, thus correcting the centralizing tendencies inherent in 1940s economic planning.

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Democratic sensibilities pervaded the bill. In the establishment of local Job Guarantee Offices, in the rejection of a numeric target on the assumption that anyone—including those not currently in the workforce—had a right to a job, and in the insistence that those denied this right could sue the federal government, the Gross draft resonated with the idea of economic democracy. The right to sue provision generated tremendous resistance. It also reinforced the litigious individualism that ran counter to the collectivist sensibilities of the left in the 1970s. On balance, however, the measure proved to be more visionary than the Full Employment Act. This was because it clearly outlined the government’s obligation to provide employment through federally funded public sector jobs when the private sector failed to respond to macroeconomic engineering. Here was a decisive break from the notion that capitalism, however regulated, and tweaked, would produce full employment. In its original incarnation, the Humphrey-Hawkins bill contested the assumption that Keynesian fiscal management alone could dissolve the structural barriers that had bolstered racial and gender inequality. Here too was a return to the idea that countercyclical measures would not be enough to absorb those affected by mechanization, by deep pockets of persistent poverty, and by the capricious demands of the marketplace.4 Bold for the 1970s, this kind of advanced planning harkened back to the National Resources Planning Board’s ambitious studies. Like its 1943 Security, Work, and Relief Policies, the Humphrey-Hawkins bill aimed to create the framework of a genuine social democracy, the kind originally envisioned by the wartime labor-left. It promoted “a reordering of our national priorities,” as Augustus Hawkins wrote in 1978. “This strategy encompasses not only fiscal and monetary policies, but also policies in the priority fields of education, health, housing, energy, environmental improvement, social security, agriculture mass transportation, income supports, welfare, and other related areas.” Instead of a wish list of social spending, Hawkins was reviving the idea that the achievement of meaningful and remunerative work would foster a more humane, democratic, and egalitarian society. None of this could be achieved by putting people to work without an adequate social wage. Echoing the New Left’s critique of capitalism as well as the racial egalitarianism of the civil rights movement, Hawkins and Bertram Gross drafted a measure that questioned the essential prerogatives of capitalist production. It would “prohibit further efforts to try to combat inflation by deliberately contriving vast idleness of manpower and plant.” Skewering the Federal Reserve Board for its anti-inflationary fiscal vaccinations, they challenged the idea that unemployment was inevitable. Instead, they advocated

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for a redistribution of power that would confront the dominance of corporate interests in American society.5 Although the legislation originated from liberal policymakers, the drafting and advocacy of the measure produced a shift in thinking among its leading proponents. Hawkins moved toward a stronger commitment to social democracy than anything conceived of by the Johnson or Kennedy administrations. In this period of economic crisis, ideological lines became more fluid, allowing even the idea of democratic socialism to gain broader appeal.6 This impulse had deeper roots than the economic dislocations of the period. It followed from the democratic insurgencies of the 1960s. It flowed from Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign; from the interracial unionism that King, Rustin, and Randolph championed; but most directly from the efforts of Coretta Scott King, whose sympathy for democratic socialism stretched back to the Progressive party campaign of 1948. A vigorous advocate of international peace and racial justice in her youth, Coretta Scott found in Martin King a like-minded partner and political ally. Together, they moved toward a vision of a cooperative social order based on democratic participation. When King died, Scott King continued to champion the twin goals of economic and racial justice. A direct line can be drawn, then, from Scott King’s participation in the Poor People’s campaign through to her support for the progressive hospital workers union Local 1199 and on to her advocacy of guaranteed employment at the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. Through these experiences, Scott King cultivated the political connections, community relationships, and labor perspective that would inform her leadership in the full employment movement of the 1970s.7 By May of 1974, she had joined UAW President Leonard Woodcock in the effort to promote a federal job guarantee. While George Meany and the AFLCIO proved averse to anything that might inhibit their members’ freedom to bargain for higher wages, regardless of the inflationary impact, the UAW under Woodcock enlisted in the campaign. More than a call for direct job creation, the full employment movement advocated for the return of economic planning to the political sphere. Organizing a conference on the rising unemployment crisis in 1974, Scott King and Woodcock brought together the liberal and labor left in a promising demonstration of cross-gender, multiracial cohesion. In addition to Michael Harrington, the leading socialist thinker of the period, the conference included labor activist Cesar Chavez, feminist Gloria Steinem, as well as liberal congressional leaders Ted Kennedy, Jacob Javitz, Walter Mondale, and Augustus Hawkins. When Murray Finley of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of

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America replaced Woodcock, Scott King and he moved to establish the National Committee for Full Employment and the Full Employment Action Council.8 Rising unemployment fueled the movement for a job guarantee. By January 1975, it had hit 8.1 percent. Despite the bold assertion of the right to work, the bill failed to gain support from the Black Caucus, organized labor, or the media. Focused on campaigns for desegregation and against workplace discrimination, few civil rights activists considered full employment a comprehensible or even worthwhile objective. Pushed by former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, however, Hawkins returned to the project. He enlisted Bertram Gross once again to craft a second version of the bill, one which carried forward the expansive commitment to full employment. It expressly repudiated what had become the conventional wisdom of the era: that inflation was a greater threat to society than unemployment. Aiming to make the full employment bill a centerpiece of the Democratic strategy for 1976, Humphrey’s Joint Economic Committee launched hearings on the problem of unemployment early that year, generating interest and support for government action on what had now become a social crisis.9 At the same time, Scott King and Finley worked to rebuild the kind of broadbased progressive coalition that had coalesced around the 1945 legislative initiative. To an extent that challenges the dominant views of a politically quiescent “me decade,” they succeeded. “The breadth of the movement is reminiscent of the coalition that supported FDR and the New Deal,” observed Sylvia Aron of the Long Island Coalition for Full Employment.10 While women’s liberation grabbed the headlines, liberal and labor feminists gave their support to a battery of measures aimed at economic improvements for women, including the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. The National Women’s Political Caucus, the National Organization for Women, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the National Council of Negro Women, and the National Women’s Political Caucus enlisted in support of the measure. So too did the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSCME). Progressive labor unions threw their support behind the measure. So too did the Americans for Democratic Action, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Urban Coalition. Paralleling the religious activism that figured prominently in the 1940s full employment movement, mainstream denominations came out in strong support of the measure. The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the National Council of Churches, and the American Jewish Committee, to name only the most salient, vigorously supported the National Committee for Full Employment. Throughout the course of its campaign, in its publicity and through

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public hearings, supporters of the Full Employment Action Council emphasized the multiracial, cross-class benefits of the bill.11 The central idea was to deflect the argument that the bill would exclusively benefit African Americans. More than an anti-recessionary measure, it promised to become the spearhead of a larger program to advance the structural reform that King, Rustin and others had championed. The idea of democratic economic planning proved particularly appealing to the white-collar, middle-class elements that had once provided the leadership for the Wagner-Murray bill. Liberal politicians who lent their support to full employment saw it as a mechanism for building a new, interracial, working-class majority. Unfortunately, they privileged the interests of white and black male breadwinners, not the women and minorities who organized for a job guarantee at the ground level. Even so, women in the movement did not simply acquiesce to the male bias among some who championed the Humphrey-Hawkins Act.12 Take, for example, Irma Diamond. At the time of the full employment revival in the 1970s, she was the first president of the Bronx chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She was also a member of the Association of Feminist Consultants, a member of the National Conference on Public Service Employment, and the associate director of the Co-Op City Campus at the College of New Rochelle. In effect, Diamond was a prototypical labor feminist of the 1970s. In the pages of The Annals of the American Academy, she penned a women’s full emancipation manifesto that echoed the impassioned congressional testimony of J.B. Caulkins some thirty years earlier. Instead of the liberal reformism for which NOW has been pilloried, Diamond spoke in favor of the “liberation” of women through economic planning. Despite the steadily increasing percentage of women in the workforce—by 1975, women constituted 40 percent of the workforce—they remained “invisible” to the policymakers who presided over the labor market. The negligence of “life affecting programs,” particularly child care, underlined the continuing second-class status of women workers. They found themselves consigned to something analogous to a “caste system” in which gender determined social status. Diamond was not simply advocating for equal opportunity, the central ideological pillar of liberal individualism, but for a solution to the “problem of invisibility.” She championed a direct challenge to the gender-stratified labor market that defined women as the original “marginal worker.” Working part-time, frequently the last to be hired, and treated as cheap labor, women provided the rank-and-file of the reserve army for capitalism. They offered a key source of labor market “flexibility” long before management consultants adopted the term.

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Years of civil rights legislation and employment access litigation had not erased the image of the woman worker in the popular mind, Diamond argued. It was as potent a source of cultural domination as any discriminatory job advertisement or sexist clothing requirement. “Women are viewed by many employers as people who indiscriminately drift in and out of the work force and as intruders who really belong at home with their children.” That meant that most women were “barely tolerated in the house of work.” As historian Alice KesslerHarris explains, despite the efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, gender stereotypes in job categorizations had become the fabric of laws, policies, and informal practices. They were calcified in “custom and tradition,” including two-track seniority systems that distinguished between men and women. “Originally developed to legitimize and rationalize traditional sex differences and to shore up the boundaries between home and wage work, they now seemed to encapsulate belief systems about gender.”13 Joining the full employment campaign, feminists extended the analysis of how a program of direct job creation could overcome the patterns of gender stratification ingrained in modern capitalism. The critique of gender segregation and racial exclusion throughout the American economy resonated loudly in congressional hearings on the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. Although “full employment for women and minorities would solve many of the immediate economic problems associated with life sustenance,” the National Organization for Women submitted, it would not “automatically solve problems caused by discrimination. There must be a specific commitment to developing new supplementary programs in training and counselling aimed at relieving discrimination and the channeling of workers into stereotyped jobs.” More than this, the organization also repudiated the eligibility criteria in the measure that discriminated against married women. It advocated in favor of a 3 percent employment target for each disadvantaged group, not simply for aggregate labor market.14 The egalitarian language of the original bill, the momentum of the women’s movement, and the logic of the feminist critique propelled a more penetrating consideration of what full employment could mean in the 1970s. Diamond and her white-collar allies advanced a vision of women’s emancipation that was already developing through the “other women’s movement,” as historian Dorothy Sue Cobble describes it. Labor feminists worked through trade unions to achieve more effective civil rights laws, win higher pay, and improve working conditions. They organized to eliminate pay disparities, win grievance procedures that addressed sexual harassment in the

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workplace, achieve pay equity and child care, as well as explore other issues affecting women on the job. Paralleling female flight attendants struggling for dignity on the job, they contested the sexist policies and gender stereotyping that pervaded the world of waged labor. Operating through public sector unions such as AFSCME but also in the private sector through progressive unions like the United Farm Workers, they organized men and women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. They frequently moved beyond equal access to reforms that pushed forward a bolder vision of social democracy.15 If the full employment movement did anything, it foregrounded the economic sources of women’s oppression. Diamond inveighed against the low status and low pay of “secretaries, clerical workers, household workers, household workers, telephone operators, stenographers, practical nurses, typists, sewers and stitchers,” ninety percent of whom were women. An economy allegedly operating at full employment in the late 1960s and a women’s movement committed to workplace inclusion had not eradicated these structural inequalities. On the one hand, Diamond cheered the growing participation of women in the workforce. As a proponent of an emancipatory vision of full employment, however, she articulated a more trenchant critique. Echoing Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg, she castigated a society that made both domestic and paid labor spheres of exploitation. If women were “intruders” who “indiscriminately drift in and out of the work force,” it was because they had been funneled into unsatisfying work. Women found themselves simultaneously pressured by circumstances to take poorly paying jobs and by public opinion to return to the home lest they be accused of being “bad mothers, unfeminine, selfish or deviant.”16 Perhaps unconsciously, Diamond recapitulated a Marxian analysis of the modern woman’s predicament. Subjected to the sexual division of labor for the reproduction of labor power, they toiled under conditions that reduced wages, undermined working-class unity, hampered social investment, and impeded women’s freedom. “Although the employer may not be aware of it,” Diamond wrote, “he receives not only the services of the male head of household, but also the services of the employee’s wife and children, gratis, enabling both the employer and the employee to operate in the public sector.” If Diamond didn’t expressly address profit, she understood how this arrangement worked to the economic advantage of business. “This labor of virtuousness is convenient and cheap for a society that does not recognize the housewife’s labor and considers her unemployed when in the home.” Diamond’s entire conception of full employment stemmed from an analysis of the gender inequities inherent in the

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sexual division of labor. Only through guaranteed work opportunities could women sever the connection between the valorization of male paid labor and the denigration of housework performed by “virtuous” women. The right to employment would permit women to “escape from their invisibleness.” It would afford them the chance to dissolve the mutually reinforcing subordination of women in both spheres. “In such an economy, women would not be pitted against each other, for a scant few positions.” Quite simply, it would give women the choice to join the paid workforce on an equitable basis.17 Diamond was not naïve about the social changes that would be necessary to achieve women’s genuine liberation. But this is precisely what made her vision of full employment a case for democratic socialism. “Support services such as daycare, professionalization of housework, new types of architecture, flexible work schedules, regional development of industry, good public transportation and educational opportunities are some of the needs of women as public citizens.” If the liberal exponents of the job guarantee stressed the rehabilitation of the male breadwinner over the interests of women workers, women such as Irma Diamond championed the emancipatory potential of genuine full employment. Although her appeal for the “professionalization” of housework might have sounded like the middle-class condescension of Betty Friedan, a closer examination suggests the contrary. “If housework were professionalized along the lines of civil service jobs and accorded the trappings of a profession (equitable wages, status and title), it would create jobs for some women and men and allow others the time and freedom to choose other occupations (emphasis added).” Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she outlined the path toward ending a workforce bifurcated by gender. She aimed at terminating the association between gender and domestic submission, between women and the indignity of unpaid housework. Diamond certainly belonged to that group of what historian Marisa Chappell has described as “welfare mothers and labor union feminists [and] middle-class women’s organizations” that “demanded a restructuring of the country’s labor market and social support system that would enable women’s economic independence.”18 But she looked beyond a more equitable labor market to a society organized according to the principles of democratic cooperation. Invoking the example of Swedish collective apartments and their cooperative daycare centers against the isolating individualism of American domesticity, she envisioned a more fundamental reorganization of society. Advocating for “flexible work scheduling” that included a four-day work weeks to accommodate the demands of child raising, for a regional plan for industrial development that addressed the limited mobility of many women, and for massive investments in a public transportation system that she believed was an

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economic and “ecological” necessity, Diamond traveled well beyond the idea that achieving a 3 percent unemployment rate meant real progress.19 Instead of some generic bromide to equal opportunity, Diamond specifically applauded and critiqued key provisions of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. Local planning councils would promote participatory democracy, but she believed it was vital that “working mothers and feminists are fairly represented on the councils” in order to counter the conservative opinion that often preserved the status quo. The Job Guarantee Office was not an exercise in utopian dreaming but a mechanism for providing special assistance to those groups—racial minorities, women, the disabled—confronting historic impediments to full and fair employment. As Diamond argued, “This section constitutes a major breakthrough for women workers by backing up the promise of employment with an actual agency designed to fulfil that promise.” Similarly, she endorsed the Standby Job Corps, which would provide adequate compensation for a pool of eligible workers who had yet to be placed in a job. Still, she worried that housewives might suffer from the stipulation that remuneration would be based on prior qualifications and training. And while Diamond celebrated the idea of a National Institute for Full Employment, she advocated for a “women’s policy bureau” that would address the historic subordination of women in American society. She hoped that such a bureau would remedy the unique problems that women confronted in acquiring and maintaining employment. Although Diamond expressed little sensitivity to the unique burdens facing African American and other racialized women, she demonstrated how citizens could interpret, modify, and transform policy proposals advanced by liberal elites. Mirroring the full employment struggle of the 1940s, Diamond and other proponents of women’s liberation began to interpret the bill on their own terms, investing it with expansive possibilities never imagined by its architects.20 While women’s organizations, civil rights groups, and progressive elements of the labor movement actively shaped the meaning of full employment according to their own visions of liberation, mainstream organized labor opposed it from the beginning. Despite the vigorous support of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Electrical Workers, and the Postal Workers, the AFL-CIO leadership remained lukewarm at best. This was despite the fact that it effectively funded the Full Employment Action Council. While progressive elements of the coalition as well as religious organizations agitated for lawmakers to maintain the  job guarantee provision of the measure, President George Meany considered the measure pie-in-the-sky dreaming. In Meany’s estimation, it was an impractical

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but also potentially dangerous exercise in centralized planning, one that might undermine the ability of organized labor to get the best deal it could through collective bargaining. Efforts at setting guideposts and imposing wage and price controls had usually come at the expense of workers, organized labor believed. Even though Lyndon Johnson had apparently achieved numeric full employment at relative price stability through the utilization of wage and price guidelines, the federal government had generally proven much more interested in imposing wage controls than price controls. As Gardner Ackley, Johnson’s own chair of the Committee of Economic Advisers, acknowledged in 1966, “Labor feels that the guideposts have done a better job of protecting corporate profits than real wages. Business leaders must ponder this fact of life.” This left George Meany convinced that mechanisms for controlling inflation would mean stagnating wages for workers.21 Meany certainly had a point, but what he would not acknowledge was that the full employment drive was central to the political campaign to shift from managerial liberalism to democratic movement building. That placed a premium on the interests of a multiracial working class that had yet to enjoy the benefits of union protection. But this too was a stumbling block, since Meany and the AFL-CIO brass had little sympathy for the idea of a regenerated social movement that might threaten the interests of hierarchical, male-dominated, racially regressive labor unions. Disdainful of Augustus Hawkins and William Higgs, a one-time member of SNCC then serving as Hawkins’ legislative assistant, Meany and other union top brass also objected to the democratizing provisions of the measure. They had little patience for the promise to extend the definition of the unemployed to include housewives, teenagers, the disabled, and discouraged workers. Such an expansion of the labor market might threaten the job protection interests of mainline union members. It was this anti-democratic sensibility that informed the federation’s opposition to the local planning councils that had been included in the first two drafts of the bill. What organized labor wanted was a return to the corporatist, tripartite bargaining arrangements that had at least in principle made unions the equal partners of business and the state. It was only when the sponsors of the bill dropped the provisions for wage and price controls and sacrificed the job guarantee at the center of the legislation that the AFL-CIO offer its endorsement.22 By relinquishing any program for price stability, the bill played into the hands of conservative opponents who accused it of threatening to fuel the inflationary inferno of the 1970s.23 Yet key proponents of the bill understood very clearly the need for addressing the inflation question seriously. For Hubert Humphrey,

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there was nothing quaint or hairbrained about price and wage controls. Having observed the Office of Price Administration in action, he understood their imperative function in any regime of democratic economic planning. In 1975, long before the concessions to organized labor and the sacrifice of the job guarantee, Humphrey argued for “tough anti-inflation and price stability legislation which will serve as permanent protection against any and all inflationary outbursts such as we are now experiencing.” Humphrey was adding anti-inflationary measures that extended beyond wages, the favorite target of Business First advocates. The senator also wanted to include “profiteering and speculation, price fixing by oligopolistic corporations or credit policies that finance speculation,” as well as “oligopoly and anticompetitive measures.” Without realizing it, Humphrey was speaking the same language as socialist Michael Harrington, critiquing the anti-democratic, monopolistic sources of inflation for which allegedly greedy union members were usually held responsible.24 And Humphrey wasn’t the only one. Again, from the margins of the Full Employment Action Council and liberal opinion, economist Robert Lekachman addressed the “prerequisites of full employment.” Writing in The Annals of the American Academy, a key outlet for full employment thought, he reminded readers that inflation was a function of demand outstripping supply. Leaving aside the exogenous factors such as rising energy costs and the pressure of a global population explosion on limited food supply networks, he argued that growth itself would contain inflation. “So long as real growth is substantial, the process is only moderately inflationary and, on the evidence of the post-World War II experience, politically tolerable in democratic societies.” The left-wing economist from CUNY did more than offer reassurances about equilibrium. Instead, he advocated for “equity of sacrifice and equity of reward.” What this meant was a genuine commitment to redistributive taxation that would advance equity and maintain price stability. Far from distortions of a perfect market that felicitously maintained equilibrium, wage and prices controls would address the impact of monopoly pricing on inflation. Contrary to the “fantasy” that consumers rationally choose products that maximized their pleasure and minimized their expense, Lekachman highlighted a world in which concentrated financial power dominated. Monopoly power allowed major manufacturers to “opt for the inflationary strategy of high pricing and heavy advertising.” Wage and price controls would not bring Arab oil producers to heal. Nor would they alleviate the food and fertilizer bottlenecks that drove prices up worldwide. What they would do is check the increasingly unfettered power of capital. Contrary to the ascendant perfect competition dogma, Lekachman argued, wage

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and price controls “do appropriately react to that element of inflation which derives from the exercise of concentrated market power [italics in original].” The alternative was not between planning and competition but between a form of planning exercised in the public interest and one driven by the priorities of profit maximization. Echoing Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Populist Party, Lekachman argued that competition itself was steadily becoming a fiction. Through concentrated economic power, areas such as the environment, wages, land use, and occupational safety suffered the deleterious consequences of further commodification. Wage and price controls provided necessary democratic regulations while creating the conditions for a job guarantee. “Rational controls and regulations afford the community a chance to correct the distortions imposed upon resource use and allocation by the operations of concentrated and irresponsible private economic power,” Lekachman argued. Any debate that failed to address the influence of monopoly in price setting or the need to insulate key aspects of public life from the influence of the market was a debate divorced from economic reality and ethical value.25 Echoing Lekachman and left economists such as Paul Barran and Paul Sweezy, Leon Keyserling dismissed the accusation that reckless wage pressure lay at the root of escalating inflation. He too pointed to “the monopolistic exercise in power” in an underperforming economy that failed to augment the social wage, resolve persistent social inequalities, or provide sufficient demand for private enterprise. “It has been the rate of price increases,” Keyserling argued, “compared with the rates of increase in other sectors, including wages, [which] have resulted in allocations of resources and incomes which have been highly inimical to full employment in a full economy, to priority programs, and to social justice.” An economy that produced at full capacity, resolved the maldistribution of wealth, and reined in the power of corporate monopolies was one prepared to generate price stability and maximum employment.26 Keyserling was eager to meet the accusation that he was “soft” on price inflation. Turning to the evidence of steadily low and manageable inflation during periods of significant economic growth, he made the case that the most effective measure for achieving price stability was an economy operating at its maximum. He turned to the evidence. During the Kennedy-Johnson years, the average rate of economic growth came in at 4.8 percent, with unemployment declining from 6.7 in 1961 to 3.5 percent in 1969, and inflation averaging 2.6 percent (a mere 1.5 percent between 1961 and 1965). All of this stood in contrast to the Eisenhower administration, when price inflation was nearly two and a half times higher in 1961 than in 1953. Unemployment also increased from 2.9 percent in 1953

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to 6.7 percent in 1961. The performance of the Nixon and Ford years showed a similarly dismal pattern, but Keyserling was eager to disprove the trade-off by using evidence that could not be complicated by the oil shocks and energy crisis of the 1970s. Turning to the period between 1958 and 1966, he discovered that the real average economic growth rate was 4.9 percent, that unemployment dropped from 6.8 to 3.8 percent, and that the average annual price increase was only 1.5 percent. More recently, economist Robert Brenner has turned to the evidence of wage suppression to account for some of these healthy numbers, but Keyserling’s general point proved compelling: rising unemployment did not cause spiraling inflation, at least not in the presence of real, substantial economic growth. This was a point with which Mordecai Ezekiel and Alvin Hansen would have had no reason to disagree. The spiraling inflation of the early Truman years was a product of the premature removal of price controls and the consequent expenditure of pent-up savings. Instead of promoting an economy at maximum production, Federal Reserve and government policy had maintained tight credit between 1955 and 1974. This further stunted expansion and bolstered Keyserling’s startling argument that high interest rates and tight money policies aggravated inflation. Most egregiously, corporate monopolies ranging from steel and automobiles to chemical and petroleum had taken to raising prices during volume slumps to achieve predetermined profit targets. Economists and policymakers had produced a false choice between price stability and economic expansion. What they had abandoned was a policy that championed both.27 The point is that progressive policymakers, commentators, and expert advocates of full employment did address the question of inflation. What they rejected was the idea that inflation targeting should supersede job creation. As Augustus Hawkins noted, inflation was no phantom, but the law that he supported would “prohibit further efforts to combat inflation by deliberately contriving vast idleness of manpower and plant.” Increasing production and promoting comprehensive economic planning would replace the decisions of experts indifferent to the interests of a working-class majority.28 The familiar tale of an ambitious piece of progressive legislation shredded by a unified business lobby played out once again.29 The business assault gained strength from the misgivings of business-friendly politicians and by the organizational limitations of the left-wing alliance that supported it.30 Opposed by President Ford, lacking support from President Carter and most of his advisers, most notably Charles Schulze, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the bill floundered. Most economists similarly fixated on the allegedly inflexible laws of employment and inflation also derided it as naive utopianism.

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The measure also suffered from inherent weaknesses, not least of which was the failure to outline the specific measures that would in fact achieve full employment. Democratic framers made concessions to states’ rights prejudices that gave the states and local governments significant leverage over the US Full Employment Service and Job Guarantee Office. And despite Irma Diamond’s enthusiasm for the job reservoir, the National Urban League worried that the least skilled and most needy would be consigned to distasteful jobs that offered little hope of advancement and would instead mask the involuntary nature of their unemployment.31 Between 1976 and 1978, the bill fell to amendment after amendment. Legislators stripped it of its local planning councils, its commitment to public sector job creation, and the right to employment backed by the federal courts. They imposed ever-more stringent conditions for eligibility, thus undermining the radical egalitarianism of the original measure. They eliminated the job guarantee, diminished the function of the federal government as the employer of last resort, and generally diluted the central purpose of the bill. It left the measure little more than a wistful promise to reduce unemployment in as timely a fashion as possible, provided it did not produce a jot of inflation.32 Equally damaging, adversaries of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill extirpated the clause that insisted on the creation of employment at “prevailing wages.” This deprived planners of a key mechanism for redistributing wealth to the working poor, creating instead a scenario for full employment at penurious wages.33 Political scientist Margaret Weir perhaps best encapsulates the internal weaknesses of the full employment revival: “The swift demise of planning for full employment highlights the limits of Congress as the sole arena for promoting planning.”34 Most importantly, the deterioration of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill into something which Carter could innocuously sign in 1978 and then ignore represented the repudiation of the idea of direct government job creation as the answer to capitalism’s intrinsic inability to provide work for all of those seeking it.35 The administration did little to support the measure, but congressional Democrats, fearful that advocating for the measure would alienate the business community, also participated in its demise. Chastened by the 1972 shellacking of George McGovern, a New Deal-style progressive who genuinely supported the idea of full employment, party leaders endorsed economic growth over the redistribution of wealth. In effect, they rejected structural economic reform in favor of business-led expansion and the politics of austerity. As Marjorie Gellermann, a leader in the National Women’s Political Caucus, observed, “Efforts to diminish the public sector have long been the special province of the

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right. But it is disturbing to see this attitude increasingly adopted by those who call themselves liberal, such as Governors Brown of California and Dukakis of Massachusetts.” Gellermann considered the rising respectability of the argument that government intervention was categorically misguided deeply disconcerting. For feminists, not to mention racial minorities, it was in the public sector that “these groups have made some progress in attaining the jobs, services, and power denied them elsewhere.”36 In Congress, liberal converts to the Business First agenda also engineered the removal of Wright Patman as chairman of the US House Committee on Banking and Currency. This conservative victory displaced a New Dealer who routinely tried to wield his influence against bank mergers that threatened excessive consolidation. Just as “neoliberal” Democrats rebuffed the gay and lesbian movement, the labor insurgency, and the community action movement that reverberated throughout the 1970s,37 they remained indifferent to a full employment movement that sought an even more fundamental realignment of power and privilege in American society. President Jimmy Carter presided over the rightward shift, actively abetted by leading exponent of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff theory. Charles Schultze proved critical. He had already given damaging testimony in Senate hearings on the bill in 1976, fine-tuning the argument that high unemployment could only be purchased at the cost of runaway inflation. Published as an op-ed in the Washington Post, it persuaded many of the neoliberals to insist on a redraft that would further undermine the prospects for national economic planning.38 As party insiders angled to maintain the loyalty of labor and civil rights groups while appeasing conservative economic opinion, Schultze once again moved into the fray. He convinced the administration to jettison the bill’s immediate demands for economic planning. In its place, he substituted a series of vague, noncommittal objectives designed to dilute the meaning of full employment and delay the implementation of whatever remained. It worked. Under Schultze’s deft guidance, the administration added the caveats and qualifications that rendered the bill “a mere economic suggestion put into legislative form,” as Jefferson Cowie astutely put it, “barely recognizable as the ambitious social vision that had inspired its original proponents.”39 Under pressure from Carter and his neoliberal insiders, the Humphrey-Hawkins alliance capitulated on every significant provision. *** It is rather easy to disparage the full employment drive for its shortcomings. Detached from the roots of working-class power, it lacked coordination and

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failed to foster a measure that could speak to people beyond those immediately affected by unemployment. Even considering the unofficially higher rates of joblessness captured by standard metrics and the pockets of extremely high structural unemployment afflicting African Americans, this was not a replay of the mass dislocations of the 1930s. Most American workers had good reason to believe that they would find work again. In the meantime, unemployment benefits and additional transfer payments kept them afloat, dangerously close to but not yet mired in indigence. More than this, a steadily widening sense of hopelessness at the prospect of change through protest infected those left redundant by the crisis.40 A deeper, more devastating crisis may very well have produced the kind of widespread indignation that would have provided the kindling for a working-class rebellion. Yet it is equally easy to exaggerate the level of working-class despondency. Clearly, the crisis did not extinguish working-class activism or left-wing organizing on a wide front. Even had the ranks of the unemployed expanded well beyond the 8.2 percent of 1975, a new working class, buffeted by corporate attacks from without and racial and gender divisions from within, would have struggled lacking as it did a spark to set the kindling aflame. Unlike the 1930s, there was no Communist Party with the organizing élan and social vision to attract dispossessed workers, no Socialist Party with its roots sunk in the soil of working-class struggle, no Trotskyist Teamsters or fellow-traveling Longshoremen who could spearhead daunting strikes like those won in during the Great Depression. Despite the rallies,41 marches, and powerful witness of Coretta Scott King, the movement never could map out a compelling program of collective action, certainly not one that could apply meaningful pressure on Congress and the White House. *** Despite the anti-inflationary hysteria and business mobilization, a renewed commitment to the democratization of American society did flourish. The movements for gender equality, racial justice, sexual liberation, and workingclass self-determination surged in the 1970s. These emancipatory impulses accompanied what historians Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps describe as a “reinvigoration of labor-based socialist visions, community organizing, and campaigns for economic justice,” many of which intersected in mutually reinforcing patterns throughout the period.42 It originated in the revolutionary imagination of the 1960s, but it extended into the ranks of white-collar workers through the full employment meetings, discussions, debates, and articles

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that multiplied in the years surrounding the bicentennial. It was evident in the thinking of David Livingston, president of District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America and a member of National Conference for Public Service Employment. Writing for the forum on full employment published in The Annals of the American Academy in 1975, Livingston argued for a return to the social movement unionism of the 1930s. To establish a full employment economy, the unemployed themselves must play a significant role in the struggle. Currently the unemployed do not seem to have a voice. During the 1930s some organizations were able to involve some of the unemployed. Such organizations do not seem to be rising today. Therefore, it is essential that the labor movement help create institutions through which unemployed unionists can raise their voice.43

For the most part, they did not. Even so, the democratic impulse was abundantly evident in the decade’s dramatic upswing in unionization campaigns, the bulk of which were driven by women. It permeated the campaigns that women from across the racial and ethnic spectrum launched to democratize their unions. The rank-and-file insurgencies that challenged the conservative leadership of the mineworkers, the auto workers, the teamsters, and the steelworkers similarly illustrated the vibrancy of this impulse in the 1970s. By agitating for institutions, rules, and practices that promoted the interests of women; by advocating for unions that would challenge the pretensions of business and the coziness between union leadership and corporate executives; by going on strike in support of more humane workspaces and against the encroachment of work on leisure time, labor activists advanced the radical ethos at the center of full employment.44 They pushed to expand the sphere of social democracy, all the while probing, sometimes inadvertently, the possibilities of democratic socialism. Rather than a period defined by the decline of organized labor and the left, the 1970s witnessed the coalescence of a movement propelled by elements of a new working class. Men and women; white, black, Asian, and Latino; blue collar and white collar, as well as those historically subject to the caprices of the market economy organized for a renewed challenge to corporate dominance.45 This was what workers did at the GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. Responding to escalating global competition, the problem of industrial overcapacity,46 and a rising tide of workplace activism, General Motors created the GM Assembly Division (GMAD). The purpose of the Assembly Division was simple, but brutal: intensify production, discipline its employees, and increase company

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profitability. Instead of technological innovation, however, the GMAD sought to restore control. Through the time-honored tradition of the industrial speedup, the purging of costly positions, and the clawing back of wages along the production line, the company sought to assert its authority in the workplace. Beginning in 1968, the company began overhauls on ten of its major plants, producing work rebellions that sparked the walkout at Lordstown in Ohio. Although it became the representative working-class rebellion of the 1970s, it was only one of at least eight strikes aimed at bringing down GMAD and pushing back against the wider capitalist offensive that sought to contain the democratic outbreak of the 1960s.47 This was a strike over control and autonomy, not wages. As Malcolm Denise, Ford Motor Company’s VP of Labour Relations, observed in 1969, the festering discontent that led to the Lordstown strike of 1972 had little basis in material grievances. “Large numbers of those we hire find factory life so distasteful they quit after only brief exposure to it. The general increase in real wage levels in our economy has afforded more alternatives for satisfying economic needs.”48 The animating impulse of this uprising was the democratization of work itself. “Young workers enter the plant having experienced rebellion in their school lives and in the military service,” sociologist Stanley Aronowitz wrote in 1973. “Their sense of economic imperatives is not sufficient to force subordination to the demand of management for unilateral control of the workplace.”49 Propelled by the democratic alchemy of the 1960s and by the tightening of the labor market in the early 1970s, the desire to expand leisure time at the expense of capitalist efficiency animated the Lordstown protest. The approximation of macroeconomic full employment fueled the growing determination to challenge workplace authority. It produced a working-class rebellion that harkened back to the full employment idealism of the 1940s. However much the official campaign for full employment in the 1970s operated within the boundaries of postwar liberalism, it challenged the resurgent notion that government intervention was antagonistic to social improvement. Take, for example, the “Women in a Full Employment Economy” conference. Sponsored by New York’s Lieutenant Governor Mary Anne Krupsak and Social Policy, it was held at the Harlem State Office Building in June 1976. On the surface, it was a typically liberal affair which brought together female academics, community activists, union representatives, political figures, social workers, and policy experts. At a deeper level, it raised some of the most fundamental questions facing women workers from across the racial spectrum. The panels suggest that the organizers understood the importance of reconciling

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the tensions between race and class, between redistributive policies and those aimed at ameliorating the legacy of historical injustice. In the first workshop planned for the conference, participants addressed affirmative action for women and minorities. The panel raised these questions: “Are minorities and women pitted against each other? Can affirmative action work in a finite economy? How can a full employment economy address problems of affirmative action? Is full employment enough?” The assumption that “minorities” are somehow separable from “women” is particularly jarring to the contemporary reader. In the mind of the conference organizers, it was clearly a matter of reconciling the interests of white women and minorities.50 Evens so, the conference explored the tensions between whites and racial minorities. The organizers placed the challenges of pursuing affirmative action in a contracting economy front and center. They also considered the strong probability that macroeconomic approximations of full employment alone would not resolve the gender and racial inequalities afflicting most American women. Sessions on “Alternative Work Arrangements,” on poverty and its impact on both employed and jobless women, on economic planning, on public sector employment, on the challenges facing older women, on affirmative action, and on “Full Employment and Ecology” spoke not only to the objective circumstances of the period but also to the willingness of the conference organizers to expand the scope of what full employment meant. They wanted to make the job guarantee a vehicle for the emancipation of women and the achievement of racial equality. Activists and intellectuals drawn from the tradition of left feminism brought a structural analysis to the problem of achieving genuine women’s equality. For Mary Keyserling, a socialist feminist who cut her political teeth in the New Deal period, the problem of administered prices was at the center of resolving the wage and job inequalities afflicting most female workers. According to economist and full employment activist Helen Ginsburg, fundamental problems plagued American capitalism. Despite the claims of its apologists, it had “produced substantial and persistent” unemployment, the very “Achilles’ heel” of the capitalist economy. For Jan Peterson, the founder of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a community-organizing group that aimed at building interracial coalitions of the poor, full employment was a natural extension of the drive by women on the margins to “play the game.” Peterson believed that it afforded women the chance to “manipulate the power structure” and “Get their own voice in there.”51 Indeed, the conference illustrated how the idea of full employment had broadened the perspectives of women engaged in challenging sexism, racial inequality, and political authorities indifferent to the needs of the

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poor. “From welfare mothers and labor union feminists to middle-class women’s organizations,” writes historian Marisa Chappell, “these activists demanded a restructuring of the country’s labor market and social support system that would enable women’s economic independence.”52 Multiracial coalitions led by women could advance a program of economic transformation that went miles beyond mere inclusion. If one theme emerged from the full employment movement of the 1970s, it was the notion that a multiracial, cross-class alliance could challenge an economic system predicated on divisions “If we are ever to transform and humanize an economic system largely dependent on the unpaid or underpaid labor of two basic groups—women of all race and Black, Spanish-speaking and other thirdworld men,” wrote Gloria Steinem in a 1974 editorial for Social Policy, “then we must band together in coalition.” So much for the myth of the atomizing 1970s. Steinem sounded more like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn than the caricature of privileged white feminism to which many scholars have reduced her. “We will continue to be a cheap or surplus labor force used for the economic benefit of the few until we learn to exert the force of the majority that we truly are.” Steinem examined how a racially divided, gender-stratified laboring class benefited a political and economic system dominated by white males. The evidence of a broad-based coalition of the oppressed was confirmed by “establishment efforts, whether in government or the private sector, to divide and conquer; to make us expend energies struggling over 5 percent of the economic pie rather than uniting to redistribute the 95 percent controlled by the few.”53 Addressing the National Urban League’s 1975 convention on full employment, Augustus Hawkins echoed the interracial, cross-class theme. “The question really is: can we revive, and how, the cohesiveness and the vibrant spirit that we enjoyed during the early New Deal years and in the quintessence of the Kennedy-Johnson era?” In Hawkins’ estimation, the promise of full employment was an expansive canopy that could unite a fractured nation. It was “comprehensive and broad enough to attract support not only from the ghettos and barrios, factories and mines, but importantly, from Middle America as well; from small farmer and business men, professionals and hard hats, from citizens weary of crime, rising prices, insecurity, and social instability.”54 Both Steinem and Hawkins seemed to speak the same language of economic democracy through coalitions, yet the latter’s overweening liberal faith in the possibility of reconciling the interests of “business men” and the “barrios” was at odds with the former’s implicit belief that a working-class movement was necessary to challenge the structures of oppression.

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Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the flurry of coalitional activity among groups ranging from the Women’s Political Caucus to the Environmentalists for Full Employment has left some historians underwhelmed. Concluding that the drive for full employment represented a promethean saga in a period of stagflation, racial discord, and political disillusionment, historian Jefferson Cowie presents some dismal observations about the popular movement for the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. According to Cowie, the Full Employment Action Council “brought together grass-roots organizations and local and national rallies, gatherings, conferences of all sorts, editorials and articles in the national press, and a barrage of pamphlets, posters, and literature in support of the bill, all of which added up to substantially less than the sum of its parts.”55 Cowie’s observations capture the disparity between the sound and fury of the organizational blitz and the legislative campaign in Congress. In a series of consciousness-raising events organized during a 1977 “Full Employment Week,” more than 1.5 million people demonstrated for a federal job creation program. In Buffalo, New York, more than 60,000 people attended a rally, while as many as 40,000 marched in support of the campaign in Erie, Pennsylvania. In total, 300 cities sponsored demonstrations in support of full employment.56 Yet in the absence of a better organized, direct action program, the attachment of even most working-class Americans to the idea of full employment remained superficial. During the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans did indeed express support for a program that would provide the jobs that the private sector was frankly unable or unwilling to produce. What they could not do was transform it into an urgent possibility, a matter of social and ethical injustice that demanded a radical solution. As journalist Frank Riessman pointed out in 1976, What is particularly surprising in the current period is the fact that the various public-sector constituencies—the unions, the professional associations, as well as a large portion of the public whose services are reduced—seem to be relatively quiescent. They do not like the situation, but they seem to feel that there is not much that can be done. It is as though they believe we are still in the midst of a recession/depression. Their thinking clearly lags behind the times.57

As journalist Andrew Levinson, a chronicler of the 1970s working class and a full employment partisan, explained in an interview with historian David Stein, “it never really became a bottom-up, grassroots movement… It was basically a lobbying effort by default.”58 Echoing District 65 President David Livingston’s

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lament about the indifference of the unemployed, an editorialist for Social Policy observed in 1976 that the widening network of organizations that supported the Humphrey-Hawkins measure could not compensate for the inaction of the jobless themselves. “While the National Organization for Women lists full employment as a major demand in its platform for 1976, there have been no large-scale demonstrations of unemployed women at a grass-roots level for this kind of program. The same point can be made with regard to Blacks and other minorities.” This was a case, the editor noted, of “liberal leadership calling for a program in the interest of people who themselves do not express similar strong demands.”59 Why was this the case? Leaving aside the conservative opposition, the growing influence of an individualistic, libertarian ethic within the economics profession and in the wider political climate, what explains the lack of a fight? The reluctance of mainstream organized labor to endorse the radically egalitarian expression of the full employment movement must stand out as a conspicuous failure of the campaign. The support of progressive unions could not compensate for the self-interested concessions demanded by Meany and the AFL-CIO. Simply put, the federation had little interest in a comprehensive measure that promised meaningful economic emancipation for those historically excluded from the great American barbecue. Union leadership was hardly alone, however. This was indeed a problem of race but not one generated by those excited by the full employment principles at the center of the Memphis Sanitation Strike and the Poor People’s Campaign. As historian Nancy MacLean argues, the connection between racial equality and economic security was clear enough to the architects of “The Freedom Budget” and King’s multiracial movement for the poor. It continued to animate the proponents of the full employment movement in the 1970s. “Yet white America at large proved more sympathetic to appeals to tear down unfair barriers to competition than calls to construct greater equality of rewards. Activists were unable to amass powerful enough backing to overcome fierce business and conservative hostility to the kind of radical transformation needed to achieve equity for the excluded without backlash from less well-off whites.”60 Despite the enthusiasm of its proponents, the movement lacked a solid social foundation, a mass base that could translate ideas into action. It lacked a cadre of radical activists who could connect the insights of the full employment intellectuals to the wider experiences of insecurity, workplace oppression, and want. Full employment activists spoke eloquently of the social costs of joblessness, of the individual humiliation and hopelessness of losing one’s livelihood, but they generally avoided an indictment of a system that predicated job creation on the

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prospect of profit. This consciousness of opposing forces, of mutually exclusive interests, of injustices perpetrated by a system that degraded and exploited people, was largely absent from the full employment literature and leadership. By contrast, even groups such as the Americans for Democratic Action, which historians have generally described as a “liberal” outfit, consistently pilloried capitalism during the 1940s full employment fight, castigating industrial profiteers for taking advantage of the war to undermine social democratic progress. In the 1970s, however, the AFL-CIO criticized a nebulous “they,” whose “obsession with keeping down budget deficits at the expense of American workers” represented “negative thinking.” Putting “deficits before people” didn’t represent a violation of equality but a lack of “faith in America.” This was the language of fiscal management, not the indignant cry of those determined to expose hypocrisy and dethrone self-interest masquerading as virtue. For the most part, Full Employment Action Committee leadership wanted to alleviate unemployment, not challenge the system on which it depended.61 At the same time, many of those who became the rank-and-file of the movement anticipated a more elemental reordering of social priorities. The housewives, progressive union fundamental members, social workers, students, and civil servants who embraced the idea struggled for a language that would name the problem and for a leadership that would speak its name. Why did American students spontaneously walk out on their colleges and high schools after the US intervention in Cambodia? Why did literally hundreds of thousands, with considerably less agitation, join in the moratorium against the war in 1969? Why, for that matter, did tens of thousands of women join in a strike for equality in 1970 that saw them march and demonstrate but also leave work? In large part, it was because it was so clear who their adversaries were. The sense of injustice, of political alienation, of personal indignity drove people onto the streets. A sense that lines had been drawn and myths exposed propelled women into action aimed at shutting the system down. In the full employment movement, by contrast, the enemy was joblessness. By the 1970s, the social tragedy of unemployment had been reduced to a technocratic problem best managed by policy experts. Full employment activists understood this and sought desperately to humanize those tossed aside by the caprices of capital investment. At the same time, they struggled to find an alternative vision that didn’t simply reinforce the primacy of business in the framing of social policy. Discussing the connection between fears of inflation and “callousness about unemployment,” economist and full employment activist Helen Ginsburg noted how “even the concept of full employment has changed

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over the years. No longer does the term focus on human beings. No longer does it mean that all jobseekers will find jobs. Instead, it focuses on price changes. Full employment has been redefined to mean the unemployment rate consistent with the degree of price stability desired by policymakers [original italics].”62 Ginsburg and others accurately detailed the privileging of inflation over job creation. At the same time, they saw deficit fixation as a peculiarly Washington phenomenon, not the product of a political and ideological alliance that bound business and policymakers together. Critical of the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department, they remained silent about the anti-union assault that was only intensifying at the time. They did not confront the business resentment of working-class militancy in the early 1970s and the determination of powerbrokers to oppose the “excess of democracy” that the period of protest had produced. Facing the reassertion of business prerogatives throughout American society, espousing a Keynesian perspective allegedly discredited by the economic crisis of the 1970s,63 the liberal-labor coalition struggled to speak to workingclass discontent. They could not, as Chris Maisano argues in a discussion of the ideological power of the capitalist consensus, explain “the ways in which structural economic constraints provide the social underpinnings of capital’s political power.”64 Unemployment lacked a decisive crisis. There was no evident breaking point that could disrupt the dominant assumptions about individual responsibility and self-reliance. At the same time, the movement lacked a powerful set of alternative values that could force a rupture from the ideology of liberal individualism. The problem was not one of technique but of imagination. Even this showed signs of changing, however, as the movement for full employment pushed into the late 1970s. *** No one explored the horizon of possibilities more thoroughly than Michael Harrington. “Full employment is the key to social justice in the United States today. No other progressive goal can be fully achieved without it,” Harrington announced in his 1977 The Issue and the Movement, a pamphlet published by the Democratic Socialists of America. It was this intuitive insight that explained the broad coalition, Harrington argued. It had a subversive edge, however, that most other participants denied or overlooked. “We regard full employment as a radical reform,” he argued, “an incremental gain which requires qualitative changes in the society.” Achieving those changes meant acknowledging that the afflictions of joblessness and poverty were built into the system. They were

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inherent in the very mechanisms through which corporate capitalism exercised its power and which had proven tenaciously resistant to progressive reform. The problem was not simply jaded economists and inflation-obsessed bureaucrats but a system in which private interests monopolized the most vital decisions of public life. At the very center of Harrington’s critique was a challenge to the capitalist monopoly over investment, the wellspring of job creation and social surplus.65 As much as Harrington was determined to interrogate the structures of capitalist domination, he wanted to detail the social consequences of unemployment. “The competition for scarce jobs sets blacks against whites, women against men, young against old. It embitters the struggle for decent education and housing. The various efforts to deal with racial and sexual discrimination are subverted. The blind racism and sexism of the acquisitive economy take over.” This was not simply a matter of political expediency, let alone the expression of a longing for a return to class over race. Instead, it was a lucid recognition that only full employment could challenge corporate dominance. By insisting on economic security over profit, Americans could advance the interests of “minorities, women, the aging and students.” It would also promote environmental protection, since the logic of democratic economic planning would challenge the notion that economic growth must come at the expense of the earth, the water, and the air.66 Ultimately, Harrington returned to the insights of the 1930s left-wing planners and radicals. Capitalism operated on exploitation, but it also seemed to produce utterly irrational, wasteful, and destructive consequences. More than this, the standard liberal notions about the link between inflation and unemployment simply didn’t hold for the crisis of the 1970s. This created an intellectual gap, which conservative free market proponents eagerly tried to fill. He wanted to present an oppositional analysis and an alternative set of possibilities. Full employment was not the smoking gun for rising inflation, particularly considering that in the eleven-year period between 1960 and 1976, real wages consistently fell behind labor productivity. Harrington assailed the allegedly airtight logic of the Phillips Curve by demonstrating that inflation was lower when the unemployment rate was 3.6 percent than it was in 1971, when it stood at 5.9 percent.67 What was most insidious about the jobs-inflation trade-off theory was that it aimed to discredit the entire idea that the federal government could intervene against unemployment.68 According to this increasingly mainstream position, stimulating job growth would only send inflation skyrocketing

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and bring investment to a standstill. Yet Harrington exposed the fallacy that federal government spending was responsible for inflation. This was evident enough considering the inflationary stability over the previous twenty years of federal government largesse and the increase in the deficit during the period of chronic unemployment in the Nixon and Ford years. Harrington failed to mention spending on the Vietnam War. He also dismissed increases to Social Security and Medicare as “enormously popular and worthwhile.” Even so, the most alarming inflationary spike did not arrive until the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis, which provided ample evidence for the argument that high employment levels and government spending had not triggered rapid inflation.69 What distinguished Harrington’s analysis from mainstream handwringing about “stagflation” was his insistence on the structural sources of the economic crisis. Separating the inflationary spiral from the recession, he recapitulated the socialist argument for capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. He also underlined the regenerative function of recession in the capitalist system: Recessions are a way—a violent, destructive, reactionary way—of restoring the conditions of profitability. The “painful but unavoidable” downturn brings higher unemployment, and “moderation” is again imposed on workers who find themselves on the defensive. Keynesian governments can be counted on to loosen up the money market; the least efficient producers are driven into bankruptcy; the bottlenecks disappear—and lo, and behold, profits go up.70

Harrington wasn’t alone in applying a Marxist perspective to the economic tremors of the era. Even so, he was one of the few to demonstrate the incompatibility between genuine full employment and the system of private enterprise. Recessions were not only inevitable but necessary for the restoration of labor discipline, lowered costs, and higher profits. Turning to the evidence, Harrington highlighted the malaise afflicting the steel industry. As historian Robert Brenner would later demonstrate, the problem was not only a failure to match the technological innovations of the Japanese and other global competitors but the overproduction of steel in the expectation that demand would continue uninhibited. Harrington did not account for the impact of European subsidies, loans, import quotas, and antidumping measures on American steel competitiveness.71 Nor would his prediction of a “long, cyclical downswing” prove accurate. The Reagan administration’s enthusiastic endorsement of military Keynesianism, the return of inexpensive oil supplies, the suppression of wages following the 1974 recession, and the technological boom of the late twentieth century would temporarily restore business profitability.

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Yet Harrington did not put much stock in such predictions. What concerned him most was the tendency of capitalism toward crisis even in a period when the Keynesian consensus still prevailed. Welfare state capitalism produced recessions as predictably as it engineered recoveries, and the two were inextricably linked. “If, then, one accepts this system as the on-going basis of a full employment policy, frustration and failure are as inevitable as the periodic bust which will be their cause.” Beyond the oil shocks, the structural changes in capitalism itself troubled him. It was the renewed movement toward corporate concentration, not out-of-control labor costs, that exacerbated the price increase of the 1970s. Amid the deterioration of real wages, rising unemployment, and the stagnation of federal spending, the Big Three auto manufacturers increased their prices by $1,000. GM could simultaneously raise prices, layoff workers, and increase its profits, a maneuver replicated by steel and other companies that dominated the market. Even while their dominance was deteriorating—only to be replaced by new consolidated interests that would eclipse the titanic combinations of the Gilded Age—it put the lie to the notion that a free market economy had simply fallen victim to exogenous shocks or unscrupulous trade unions.72 Beyond a critique of monopoly capitalism and the rational expectations theory then on the rise among conservative economists, Harrington presented an unequivocal case for a socialist vision of full employment.73 Suitable to a democratic socialist who never capitulated to Stalinist orthodoxies, he advocated for the “democratization of investment” and a twentieth-century cooperative commonwealth. Organizing at the grassroots level, this full employmentoriented activism would generate a reorientation in political consciousness and raise the prospect of genuine economic democracy. In this spirit, he applauded the UAW for advocating a four-day work week in its 1976 negotiations. “In the middle distance,” he calmly explained, full employment “poses the question of the very nature of work.” Appropriate to the skepticism of the 1970s left toward sloganeering, hopeful about the democratization of work, Harrington harkened back to the socialist notion that new and egalitarian social structures would emerge from within the old.74 The socialist idea was not simply to ensure that everyone found work. After all, as Keynes understood, the maximization of bad employment opportunities was not the same as full employment. Instead, it was to “create an economy of meaningful, useful work.” The democratic control of investment—the central idea of full employment visionaries—promised to rescue political power from the grip of a corporate elite. The liberal version of maximum employment left the lever of investment power in the hands of private interests. “And as long as

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private corporations control the investment process in this country,” Harrington argued, “the future of full employment inevitably will be decided in their boardrooms, not in the Congress.” The campaign for progressive legislation would continue to confront the same fate as the 1946 Employment Act. In short, “if the unelected representatives of capital refuse to cooperate, the law is effectively vetoed.” The problem was not vacillating liberals, he argued, but the reality of corporate control, which compelled even the most generous legislators to bargain away workers’ interests to secure the cooperation of private enterprise. Achieving democratic control over investments would also create the conditions for eradicating the inequality endemic to capitalism. Harrington underlined the changing political tone of the era, as conservatives rejected the policies designed to stimulate aggregate demand in favor of those that brazenly privileged private enterprise. Magazines such as Business Week and Fortune joined mainstream economists and the Council of Economic Advisors in disseminating the message that deficits “crowded out” private investment. It was an argument that flew in the face of the conservative doctrine that capital shortages simply could not exist in a free market that automatically set interest rates to meet its savings needs. According to the proponents of the “crowding out” thesis, the savings shortfall had to be met by the public sector through a massive shift in the tax burden that would reward finance capital and punish the working class. Yet instead of an attack on political conservatives, Harington leveled his criticism at the system itself. “Since capitalism leaves it to private individuals and corporations to make the social decision of how the national surplus shall be invested,” he argued, “those individuals and corporations must have an enormous and disproportionate share of society’s wealth.” Blunted by the New Deal, modified by Keynesianism, or softened by the Great Society, the system demanded that economic stimuli derive primarily from the privileging of private investment. As Harrington expounded, “This is not a policy of capitalist society; it is the policy.”75 Achieving full employment under the existing arrangements was all that more elusive since it meant redistributing wealth to create sufficient demand in an economic system automatically geared to inequality. While Harrington had nothing to say about the burst of corporate regulation that seemed to preoccupy business in the 1970s,76 his analysis of an increasingly regressive tax system and the litany of public subsidies to private corporations corroborated his argument that, under capitalism, government policy could not help but privilege private enterprise. If democratizing control over the machinery of investment was essential to achieving full employment, so too was challenging the production priorities set

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by private interests. Echoing James Murray as much as I.F. Stone and the New Republic, Harrington argued that the free market system had demonstrably failed to provide the social framework necessary to maintain a universal baseline of human dignity. From the perspective of an era confronted by deindustrialization and inner-city despair, he wrote forcefully of the failure of the corporate interests to “arrest the rot in cities, to erect decent homes, to improve public transportation, to provide adequate health maintenance—in short, to substitute public needs for private ends.” Equally galling was the evidence that the private sector gladly accepted investment tax credits while automating and downsizing their workers out of a job. Instead of tax cuts that fueled an economy that produced “consumer trash,” Harrington joined King and Bayard Rustin in calling for an economy governed by democratic national planning.77 Furthest from his mind was the idea of centralized planning in a command economy. Instead, he advocated for a system that provided citizens’ groups access to the resources necessary to formulate planning alternatives. The idea that Congress would allocate funding to ad hoc groups of citizens entertaining proposals for a three-day work week was as fanciful as Murray’s proposal for a joint congressional planning committee. At least, however, it moved the discussion away from technocratic control toward a more participatory model of policy formulation. More substantial was his argument that a socialist version of full employment would require the achievement of workplace democracy. Harkening back to the Knights of Labor and paralleling the social democratic reforms of Western Europe, Harrington called for “worker representation at every level where decisions are made, from the shop floor to the board of directors.” Producer cooperatives, democratized workplaces, neighborhood organizations, representative systems of corporate governance, and publicly owned industries led by decentralized workers’ councils would provide the seedbeds for an organic, grassroots, full employment movement. In turn, these local initiatives would connect to national networks of economic planning. The overarching objective was anything but modest. Harrington was unequivocal: expanding employee control and the nonprofit sector was not simply about taming capitalism but about eradicating the business cycle itself.78 *** Above all, Harrington was eager to illustrate the radical implications of the full employment idea. As a leading figure in the movement to win congressional approval for the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, Harrington was eminently aware that most of what he advocated—from environmentally sustainable investment

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in solar power to a coordinated national rail system to a publicly funded, community-governed health-care system—was politically improbable in 1977. What the leadership of the full employment movement wanted was immediate, concrete, emergency job creation. Yet like George Soule, I.F. Stone, Granville Hicks, Stuart Chase, and Michal Kalecki before him, Harrington understood how the logic of full employment pointed beyond a system of private control over investment. While the full employment coalition championed the right to a job, the evidence of the system’s inability to provide it generated a sense of frustration that invariably moved its advocates toward a defense of public sector job creation. The quandary produced by the conviction of a moral right to work and by the realization that private enterprise refused to oblige was only compounded by the testimony of Carter administration economists who insisted that elasticity in the labor market was, in fact, one of the system’s central requirements. Like James Murray, Robert Wagner, and Rexford Tugwell in the New Deal years, champions of full employment in the 1970s paid homage to private employment but invested their real hope for relief in the public sector. Writing in 1973, economist and full employment activist Helen Ginsburg argued that the federal government “must provide meaningful public service jobs at wages that will enable workers to attain at least the BLS lower living standard if it is impossible to absorb them into the private sector of the economy.”79 Or, as UAW President Doug Fraser explained, “Many of the needs of our society—additional auto mechanics, weatherization and other improvements of our housing stock, the development of adequate child care services, to name just a few, could be creatively matched with the need to provide jobs for many people.” Other industrialized economies, Fraser pointedly added, “are not afraid of channeling a much larger slice of their output through the government.”80 Naomi Levine, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, best captured how the economic crisis and the idea of full employment combined to legitimize the expansion of the public sector. “It borders on the absurd,” she wrote in a critique of the pro-business revisions to the Humphrey-Hawkins bill in March 1978, “at this late date and after so many years of high level unemployment, to enact a bill which requires that still more time be spent in the illusory quest for full employment primarily through the private sector.”81 Yet, as Harrington understood, the challenge was to legitimize any public sector employment, let alone those jobs created for the express purpose of alleviating immediate economic distress. “The public sector is thought of as second rate,” he wrote, “inferior, its jobs a stopgap designed to give way to

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private employment as soon as possible.” It was this “irrational dogma,” this socially sanctioned contempt for the public sector, which hobbled even the most modest proposals for maximum employment. The related corporate antipathy for any major spending proposals would necessarily accompany any job creation program that aimed at more than private sector hiring incentives. This meant that full employment plans would invariably sink beneath the political surface. Rather than despair, however, Harrington saw hope. If the liberal innocence of the Humphrey-Hawkins’ supporters had exposed the ruthless zero-sum logic that governed business attitudes toward the social wage, the full employment campaign had demonstrated once again how campaigns for limited objective can evolve into struggles for fundamental change. What cheered Harrington the most was that the full employment coalition had begun to embrace the idea of “democratic social control over investment.” The calls for an end to discriminatory lending practices, for banks to provide credit to communities in decline and to support public housing initiatives, the UAW’s campaign to prevent corporations from relocating to low-wage regions in search of higher profits, as well as the efforts to achieve employee and community representation on corporate boards of directors seemed to illustrate the widening horizons of the full employment movement. As Andrew Levison documented in his 1980 The Full Employment Alternative, public opinion steadily showed support for expanding the social wage. In contrast to the image of a monolithically conservative electorate eager to reduce social programs and government regulation, a 1976 survey by the Potomac Associates concluded that 97 percent of those surveyed supported the maintenance or increase of spending on assistance to the elderly. Similarly, 90 percent expressed support for maintaining or increasing spending on air pollution control, 88 percent for making college more affordable, 87 percent for affordable health care, 81 percent for sustaining or augmenting assistance to the unemployed, 77 percent for improved mass transportation, and 75 percent for urban renewal. Perhaps most significant, 72 percent supported “improving the situation of black Americans.” The most telling illustration of widespread support for government-sponsored job creation came from a 1975 Harris poll, which tested the following proposition: during an economic crisis when work was almost impossible to find, the only “human thing to do” is provide “productive jobs” to the unemployed so that “their families can eat.” Flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that working-class Americans had rejected “big government,” a breathtaking 93 percent answered in the affirmative. What the polls suggested was not disaffection with the idea of government action but with the kind that failed to produce concrete results for the working-class majority.

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What most Americans of middling means seemed to want was an end to policies that only addressed the supply side of the labor equation—training, education, attacks on an alleged “culture of poverty”—but failed to resolve the demand-side problem: adequate employment at decent wages. “The majority did not accept that more unfocussed spending by government was the appropriate solution for unemployment. Nor did they endorse the idea that a guaranteed income, regardless of work, was the best solution for poverty.” Levison concluded that opinion polls conducted by Harris, Gallup, CBS News, and others like the Potomac Associates demonstrated a rejection of Great Society liberalism as well as Goldwater-style conservatism. What working-class Americans sought was an alternative to austerity politics and tax-and-spend liberalism. What they sought, Levison theorized, was the full employment alternative.82 For Harrington, the coalition’s rehabilitation of the public sector and the evidence of widespread support for an expanded social wage underlined the movement’s capacity to challenge corporate America. The growing demand for democratic control over investment was not simply a challenge to property, per se, but to the rights and privileges that accompanied ownership in a capitalist society. Sylvia Aron of the Long Island Coalition for Full Employment summarized the growing commitment to democratic planning among full employment supporters. “A commitment to full employment brings in its wake an acceptance of economic planning,” she firmly stated. It would necessarily require “the various interventive mechanisms—monetary (budget, expenditures, taxes), fiscal (interest rates, bank reserves, open market operations), loans, stimuli to investment and productivity, public employment control of inflation, public ownership,” all of which would have to be “harmonized and directed toward specific economic goals.”83 As Kalecki had anticipated, the full employment movement was calling into question capitalist authority over pricing, employment policies, plant location, and production decisions. In short, it was challenging the “bundle of rights” that allowed business to govern workers and determine the terms of investment. As Harrington and earlier radicals understood, “they do not challenge corporate property as such, but they encroach upon its prerogatives. On practical, non-socialist grounds, the coalition finds itself pointed in the direction of socialist structural reforms without defining them in these terms.”84 This impulse toward economic democracy was evident also in the musings of Professor Bernard E. Anderson, one of the key contributors to the Special Study Group Report for the Review of Black Political Economy. An economist at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, Anderson became a leading

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exponent of Rustin and King’s conviction that democratic economic planning and racial equality were inextricably linked. Writing for the Annals of the American Academy forum, Anderson recapitulated the case that full employment was the baseline starting point for any enduring improvement in the lives of racial minorities. Anderson did not simply criticize the technocratic version of full employment that privileged price stability over the elimination of joblessness. He challenged the Phillips curve directly. To contend that escalating inflation would necessarily accompany rising employment was to assume “a commitment to the institutional arrangements, power positions of economic vested interest groups, levels of investment in human capital, and relative distribution of income among productive factors existing in the past.” Anderson questioned the corporate monopoly over investment and pricing decisions, over the allocation of surplus wealth and the distribution of national income. But he also contested the privileged place of mainstream labor unions in this arrangement. He advocated for wage and price controls and for interventionist planning decisions. Meany and the AFL-CIO considered this intolerable. “It is clear that if the nation’s primary commitment were to human dignity and economic equality, then traditional relationships among the major participants in the economy might be modified in ways that would improve the troublesome trade-off.” As the Study Group had argued in 1972, the commitment to “human dignity and economic opportunity” meant a transformation of “existing institutions, power positions, human investment, and income distribution” that would render the trade-off obsolete.85Running like a red thread from the March on Washington through to “The Freedom Budget,” the Poor People’s Campaign, and now the mobilization for the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, the prospect of overcoming the blight of unemployment invariably led activists and intellectuals toward a confrontation with the privileges of capital. But it also led some to question the comfortable complicity of mainstream labor.86 In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the fragmentation of the New Left, and the corporate campaign against organized labor, it is a wonder that a coalition as diverse and dynamic as the full employment movement assembled at all. It certainly proved a formidable challenge to the Business First alliance. Led by the US Chamber of Commerce and supported by the Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, and the Associated General Contractors, the alliance defeated national health insurance, tax reform, labor law, and welfare improvement initiatives. But it was compelled to make compromises on the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. The idea of a job guarantee

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had gained widespread traction, but the coalition that championed it failed to generate a powerful grassroots campaign that could make it a legislative reality.87 But what if it had? Is it plausible to suggest that liberal or conservative politicians then in power would have endorsed a program of reform predicated on the politics of working-class emancipation, the powerful regulation of business, and the promotion of economic democracy? Unlikely. Better than most contemporary observers, journalist Andrew Levison understood this point. Most working-class Americans saw little reason to believe that existing fiscal and monetary policies would do much to significantly increase employment opportunities. The evidence suggested that a new working-class majority sought “economic security,” a return to the politics of class that seemed to include the amelioration of the condition facing African Americans. What they rejected was the argument that increased taxation or austerity-driven policies that threatened to materially diminish their prospects made sense. Not unlike Michael Harrington, Levison looked past the strident right-wing rhetoric to the evidence of popular support for a regenerated progressive vision.88 Despite the qualifications he threw up to dampen the blow, Levison was in fact prescribing nothing less than democratic economic planning. Difficult as it is to imagine from an historiographical perspective that tends to treat the rise of the conservative right as a political inevitability in the 1970s, Levison detected the possibilities for “some form of social contract between labor, business, and government.” He found the evidence in the Carter administration’s establishment of a “pay advisory committee” that would give organized labor a voice at the table of economic planning. If Levison wildly underestimated the determination of business to restore its primacy against the labor insurgencies of the early 1970s, he understood that Business Week and the Heritage Foundation did not speak for most average Americans.89 Like Harrington, Levison discerned support for the expansion of the public sector and the democratization of investment. According to Levison, an alternative political perspective which the mainstream media ignored supported the provision of decent employment but also adequate housing, public health care, education, and other services essential to a decent standard of living. Instead of eradicating poverty, this perspective emphasized the elimination of the conditions that led to poverty and unemployment. In other words, Levison had detected widespread support for the idea that full employment was a prerequisite for achieving social democracy. Through national economic planning and the inclusion of organized labor in the development of economic policy, American society could move in a direction that a majority of Americans

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already supported.90 As unemployment eased and inflation spiked in 1978, polls reflected a growing concern about the latter and a diminishing fear of the former, further undermining the prospects for the passage of the HumphreyHawkins Act.91 It would be erroneous to conclude, however, that this shift, which the polls seemed to signal, represented a repudiation of the perspective that Levison had described. What they could not capture was the broader political sensibilities of the working-class majority. For example, no poll asked the question, “Would you agree that government-engineered unemployment is a legitimate method for reducing inflation?” Or, “If throwing people out of work was the only method for reducing inflation, would you approve of it?” What we do know is that African American leaders challenged anti-inflation measures that were both inhumane and discriminatory. As Dona Cooper and Charles V. Hamilton explain, the National Urban League vigilantly opposed the practice of reducing inflation at the expense of minorities and the indigent, the very people most dependent on social assistance.92 Even as the white electorate became more willing to absorb the racialized arguments against the Great Society advanced by neo-conservatives, buying the accusations of waste and mismanagement leveled at the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, they did not simply capitulate to the conservative attack on government action itself. As Margaret Weir explains, “public opinion polls in the late 1970s continued to show majority backing for government action on employment issues.”93 By 1978, Murray Finley of the National Full Employment Action Committee had also moved toward a more thorough critique of capitalism. Testifying before Congress on the Humphrey-Hawkins bill in 1978, he challenged the notion that average Americans would accept penury as the price for controlling inflation. He also shredded the assertion that unemployment was the inevitable cost of price stability. The fact that high inflation accompanied rising unemployment seemed enough to discredit the assertion of an automatic trade-off between the two. More than this, Finley made the point that everyone (except the professional economists, it seemed) knew where the sources of inflation lay: skyrocketing energy costs, spiraling housing and medical prices, and declining production, resulting in the “lack of real competition.” Yet Finley was most eloquent on this point: the moral and political implications of a system that seemed to require human misery. “They seem to assume that high inflation is the inevitable partner of low joblessness,” he argued, “that our economics system cannot operate with price stability unless we have high unemployment. If so, then millions of our citizens must be asking just what kind of system it is that depends on their

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idleness for its ‘success.’”94 Like Harrington and I.F. Stone in 1945, Finley had hit upon the central contradiction itself. The movement had clearly pushed some liberals toward a more transformative vision of full employment. This was the development that Harrington detected. It was evident among some of the most unlikely people. One of these was none other than Hubert Humphrey. Contributing to a special edition on full employment in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Humphrey addressed the inevitable question of inflation. Rejecting the idea of a mono-causal wage-push explanation, he called out the distortions inflicted by “profiteering and speculation, price fixing by oligopolistic corporations, [and] credit policies that finance speculation, oligopoly, and anticompetitive mergers.” But Humphrey went beyond reviving the anti-trust tradition, which New Deal liberals had rejected in favor of expanding consumption.95 He also appealed for full employment champions to abjure “abstract theorizing and general argumentation” in favor of a blueprint for coordinated production and employment. In short, he called for a return to the kind of vigorous economic planning that had animated the studies of the National Resources Planning Board and framed the Murray-Wagner bill of 1945. “This would mean nothing less than a specific model of a full employment economy, with due attention to the structure not only of employment but also production, investment, foreign trade, and the distribution of income, wealth, and corporate power.” Achieving full employment would require government intervention in determining investment priorities. For Humphrey, like Murray and the NRPB, full employment would provide the foundation for achieving authentic social democracy. As Humphrey wrote in 1975, the job guarantee would create the impetus for adequate housing, public transportation, daycare facilities, a national health insurance program, decent education, as well as scientific research and a flourishing arts community. While Humphrey echoed Keyserling’s notion of the “abundance economy,” neither he nor Keyserling believed that the expansion of consumption per se was tantamount to the achievement of “genuine full employment.” Like the version that gained traction on the left in the 1940s, this vision of “genuine” full employment aimed at more than stimulating buying power. Instead, it pointed toward a critical examination of production and investment; the distribution of “income, wealth”; and, perhaps most importantly, the exercise of “corporate power.”96 Above all, it required the recognition that employment was a fundamentally political question that could not be left to efficiency experts. “Just what would be the implications of this measure, when enacted, on the structure of political

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power in this country?” Humphrey asked rhetorically. “Would it lead to the undue concentration of power in Washington? I think not. But the question should be faced openly.” Humphrey wasn’t raising a red flag but was pointing out the necessary consequence of any program for “genuine” full employment. Even these questions, however, could not be separated from the “most important questions of all—the questions of ethics, morality, and religion.” In a period which many historians portray religiosity as an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, Humphrey argued that the achievement of a progressive vision of full employment was a moral and religious issue—much as King had argued before him. It is an important reminder that, like in the 1940s, the mainstream Christian churches and Jewish synagogues were instrumental in building the coalitions that advocated for meaningful full employment.97 Instead of “rhetoric and glowing generalities,” Humphrey wanted to speak of “right and wrong.”98 Moreover, the dying senator was not alone. Augustus Hawkins explicitly rejected the commercial Keynesianism of the postwar era. Writing in The Annals of the American Academy in 1975, he argued that his bill did not advocate a version of full employment that could be reduced to “some limited, managed and manipulated notion of the labor supply as reflected in official labor force and unemployment data.” Instead, it had to be understood as “a guarantee of human rights,” the right to employment for all who sought it. Like Humphrey, Hawkins wanted to confront the implications of a social commitment to the job guarantee: This bill would involve profound change in the American way of life, and it would commit the entire society to rethinking the operations and purposes of our economic system, to setting new goals and priorities for societal production, and to responding directly to the needs of millions of Americans who have heretofore been excluded from consideration and attention.99

Hawkins reiterated Humphrey’s themes: fundamental change in American society, the elimination of a capricious, inhumane labor market, the intervention in investment decisions to meet the priorities of social democracy, a genuine commitment to alleviating the misery of those afflicted by unemployment, and the egalitarian commitment to improve the condition of the millions left behind by involuntary idleness.100 The full employment movement had restored to national debate the “social aspects” of the question, as Hubert Humphrey put it.101 In the years that followed, the right-wing movement that coalesced in the 1970s sought to dismantle labor unions and privatize public services but also to depoliticize the unemployment issue, which had become dangerously

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contentious in the 1970s. Instead of Keynesian demand management, the conservative cadre would hide the human costs of joblessness behind the veil of supply-side economics. For all of its internal tensions, it was a movement that understood the indispensable necessity of political coalitions. It spoke the language of economic democracy and democratic planning. It produced activists and intellectuals who called into question the capacity of the existing system to generate adequate employment. It emboldened at least some to entertain the radical proposition that the expansion of the public sector might not only be necessary but the only sensible alternative to the ravages of the business cycle. Full employment activists professed the idea that racial and gender equalities were essential to any meaningful program for full employment. Above all, they posited that building a social democratic society required a job guarantee. For many, achieving full employment opened wider possibilities of democratizing production, social services, and the very institutions that governed people’s lives. Those stand as the landmarks of a movement that, considering the historical zeitgeist, was both intellectually daring and politically improbable.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

6

Bernard E. Anderson, “Robert Browne and Full Employment,” Review of Black Political Economy 35 (2008): 93–4. Bertram M. Gross and Jeffrey Straussman, “Full Employment Growthmanship and the Expansion of Labor Supply,” The Annals of the American Academy 418 (March 1975): 6. Ibid., 10–11. Leonard Berkey, “Organized Labor and the Capitalist State: The Case of Full Employment Policy,” PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1983, 145–6; Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy, 64–5; “Historical Amnesia: The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, Full Employment and Employment as a Right,” Review of Black Political Economy 39 (2012): 130. Augustus Hawkins, “Full Employment: To Plan or Improvise—That Is the Question,” Cross Reference: A Journal of Public Policy and Multicultural Education 1.1 (1978): 8–9. Timothy Stanley, “Going Beyond the New Deal: Socialists and the Democratic Party in the 1970s,” in Making Sense of American Liberalism, ed. Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 68–70.

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David Stein, “This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy”: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls 18 (January–March 2016): 82–5. 8 Stein, “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears,” 208–12; Dean Baker et al., “The Full Employment Mandate of the Federal Reserve: Its Origins and Purpose,” 9–10, Center for Economic Policy and Research, https://populardemocracy.org/sites/ default/files/Full-Employment_web-output.pdf. 9 Berkey, “Organized Labor and the Capitalist State,” 147–8; Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 274. 10 Sylvia Aron, “Toward a Full Employment Policy: An Overview,” Journal of Sociology and Welfare 7 (January 1980): 92. 11 Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy, 65–6; Donna Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 200; Ginsburg, “Historical Amnesia,” 129–30. 12 This is the argument advanced by Marissa Chappell in The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 124–9. 13 Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, 255–6. 14 “Statement of the National Organization for Women on the Balanced Growth and Full Employment Act of 1976,” in Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Economic Growth and Stabilization of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session, September 16, 1977 (Washington: U.S Government Printing Office, 1978): 35–54, quotation on 40. 15 Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 206–21; Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 136–54, 287–8. 16 Irma Diamond, “The Liberation of Women in a Full Employment Society,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 418 (March 1975): 138–41. 17 Ibid., 139–40, 142. 18 Marissa Chappell, “Demanding a New Family Wage: Feminist Consensus in the 1970s Full Employment Campaign,” in Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, ed. Stephanie Gilmore (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 272. 19 Diamond, “The Liberation of Women in a Full Employment Society,” 142–3. 20 Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble underlines the point that both were bound together in the forging of a new working-class movement. Cobble emphasizes how women organized through nontraditional, unconventional means, usually outside the lines of the labor union or the political precinct. The women who joined the full

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employment movement fit Cobble’s description of the clerical, public sector, and manufacturing-based workers who became the vanguard of this new movement. As Cobble writes, “Many of the new working women’s organizations relied on ‘below the radar’ pressure tactics such as informal work actions, lawsuits, public shaming, and community-based protest.” See “A Tiger by the Toenail: Origins of the New Working-Class Majority,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2 (Fall 2005): 108–9, quotation on p. 108. 21 Berkey, “Organized Labor and the Capitalist State,” 151–2; Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 274, Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy, 67; David Shreve, “Lyndon Johnson and the Keynesian Revolution: The Struggle for Full Employment and Price Stability,” in Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light, ed. Mitchell B. Lerner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 192–6, 209–10. 22 Robert Lekachman, “The Specter of Full Employment,” Harper’s Magazine 254 (February 1977): 39–40; Berkey, “Organized Labor and the Capitalist State,” 152–9; Weir, Politics and Jobs, 139, quotation on 196. 23 Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 272–5. 24 David Kotz provides additional evidence for the monopolistic underpinning of the 1970s inflationary spike. He argues that it originates in periods of economic stagnation and “low capacity utilization.” During a crisis, “the pricing mechanism redistributes surplus value from the competitive sector toward the monopoly sector,” while workers lose their capacity to defend wage gains. See David M. Kotz, “Monopoly, Inflation, and Economic Crisis,” Review of Radical Political Economics 14 (December 1982): 2, 8–9. 25 Robert Lekachman, “Managing Inflation in a Full Employment Society,” Annals of the American Academy 418 (March 1975): 86, 90–1. 26 Leon Keyserling, “Full Employment Without Inflation: Prepared for the Task Force Committee on Full Employment,” 13, 21, Conference on Economic Progress, 1975. 27 Ibid. 28 Hawkins, “Full Employment: To Plan or Improvise—That Is the Question,” 8–9. 29 Stein, Pivotal Decade, 191. 30 Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; Weir, Politics and Jobs, 132–40; Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy, 63–80; Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment, 110–17. 31 Donna Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 206. 32 Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 131–2. 33 Berkey, “Organized Labor and the Capitalist State,” 170. 34 Weir, Politics and Jobs, 138. 35 Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment, 111.

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36 Marjorie Gellermann, “The Public Sector Against Sexism,” Social Policy (March/ April 1976): 3, in box 1, folder 27, ILR School Extension Division Metropolitan District Office, Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. 37 Joshua Mound, “What Democrats Still Don’t Get About George McGovern,” New Republic, February 29, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/130737/democratsstill-dont-get-george-mcgovern. 38 Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy, 71. 39 Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 283. 40 “Can the Unemployed Be Organized in 1976?,” 2. 41 David P. Stein, “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls 18 (January–March 2016): 90–6. 42 Brick and Phelps, Radicals in America, 180–1. 43 David Livingston, “Labor Unions and Full Employment,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 418 (March 1975): 125. 44 Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 35–47. 45 Cobble, “Tiger by the Toenail,” 103, 106–9. 46 Robert Brenner, “The Political Economy of the Rank-and-File Rebellion,” in Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, ed. Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow (New York: Verso Press, 2010), 69–70. 47 A.C. Jones, “Rank-and-File Opposition in the UAW During the Long 1970s,” in Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, ed. Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow (New York: Verso Press, 2010), 28–8. 48 Ken Weller, “The Lordstown Struggle and the Real Crisis in Production,” Solidarity Pamphlet 45 (London, Solidarity, 1974): 4. 49 Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 35. 50 “Questions for Issues Workshops”; Mary Ann Krupsak to Ann H. Nelson, June 15, 1976, in box 1, folder 27, ILR School Extension Division Metropolitan District Office, Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. 51 Anne H. Nelson, notes from “Women in a Full Employment Economy,” Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center; Tamar Carroll, “Unlikely Allies: Forging a Multiracial, Class-Based Women’s Movement in 1970s Brooklyn,” in Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, ed. Stephanie Gilmore (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 197–202. 52 Chappell, “Demanding a New Family Wage,” 272.

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53 Gloria Steinem, “A Coalition for Full Employment,” Social Policy 5 (September/ October 1974), n.p., in box 1, folder 27, ILR School Extension Division Metropolitan District Office, Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center. 54 Augustus Hawkins remarks, in National Urban League, “Full Employment as a National Goal,” 42, 1975. 55 Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 273. 56 David Stein, “Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee,” Boston Review, May 17, 2017, http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-race/david-stein-whycoretta-scott-king-fought-job-guarantee. 57 Frank Riessman, “Uneven Recovery,” 33–4, in box 1, folder 27, ILR School Extension Division Metropolitan District Office, Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. 58 Ibid. 59 “Can the Unemployed Be Organized in 1976?” Social Policy (March/April 1976): 2, in box 1, folder 27, ILR School Extension Division Metropolitan District Office, Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. 60 MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough, 242–3. 61 National Committee for Full Employment, “AFL-CIO Gives Strong Endorsement to Full Employment,” Focus on Full Employment (January 1976): 1, 4, Jewish Labor Committee Records, box 241, folder titled “Full Employment, 1971–1980,” Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives; see also Harry Fleischman’s “Out of Work: The Impact of Unemployment and What’s Being Done About it,” which details the geographic reach, social consequences, and racial dimensions of unemployment—noting, for example, that most of the unemployed were white—but treats it as a disembodied phenomenon. Characteristic of most mainstream discussions of the topic, Fleishman detailed the “social cost” of unemployment and the pragmatic benefits of investment to stimulate aggregate demand and productivity. Yet, he avoids confronting the sources of cyclical joblessness, let alone the possibility of a more permanent cure. Citing the Committee for Economic Development and the UAW’s Doug Fraser, Fleischman soft-peddled the problem of a system predicated on private decisions about the most essential requirements for modern life. The emphasis on the benefits for business and the imprudence of fiscal decisions that privileged fighting inflation appeased some policymakers (but not enough). It simultaneously undercut any possibility of a genuinely mass movement for change. See American Jewish Committee, Our Stake in the Urban Condition—Pertinent Papers, March, 1978, as well as Jacob Sheinkman, president of the Jewish Labor Committee, “Testimony on the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1977, submitted to the Committee on Education and Labor Sub-Committee on Employment Opportunities,” February 2, 1978, ibid.

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62 Helen Ginsburg, “Needed: A National Commitment to Full Employment,” 8, Sidney Hillman Foundation, n.d., ibid. 63 Richard D. Wolff and Stephen A. Resnick, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012), 336–7. 64 Chris Maisano, “Politics Without Politics,” Jacobin Magazine, November 28, 2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/hegemony-how-to-gramsci-organizing. 65 Michael Harrington, Full Employment: The Issue and the Movement (Institute for Democratic Socialism, 1977), 1–2. 66 Ibid., 8. 67 Harrington cites productivity, wage, and salary statistics from the Commerce and Labor Department. See Full Employment, 9–10. 68 William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 138–9. 69 Ibid., 8–11. 70 Stein, Pivotal Decade, 245–6. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 18–19. 73 The rise of rational expectations economics and its concomitant veneration of the market as the perfect mechanism for regulating social exchange is most thoroughly and expertly detailed in Rodgers’ Age of Fracture, chapter two, particularly pp. 63–9. 74 An idea which David Schweickart recapitulates in his argument for economic democracy as the worthy successor to blueprint, doctrinaire socialism. See “Economic Democracy: A Worthy Socialism That Would Really Work,” Science and Society 56 (Spring 1992): 36. 75 Harrington, 26. 76 Lee Drutman, “How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy,” The Atlantic, April 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/howcorporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/. 77 Harrington, ibid. 78 Harrington, “Full Employment,” 26–8. 79 Helen Ginsburg, “Needed: A National Commitment to Full Employment,” 14, Sidney Hillman Reprint Series, originally published in Current History, August 1973, available in box 241, folder titled “Full Employment, 1971–1980,” Jewish Labor Committee Records, Tamiment Institute. 80 Quoted in Harry Fleischman, “Out of Work: The Impact of Unemployment and What’s Being Done About It,” March 1978, Domestic Affairs Department, American Jewish Committee, box 241, folder “Full Employment, 1971–1980,” Jewish Labor Committee Records, Tamiment Institute. 81 Quoted in Richard Cohen, Director of Public Relations Department press release, “AMERICAN JEWISH CONNGRESS URGES PASSAGE OF HUMPHREY-

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HAWKINS BILL WITH EMPHASIS ON FEDERAL JOBS TO COMBAT UNEMPLOYMENT,” 1–2, March 8, 1978, ibid. 82 Andrew Levison, The Full Employment Alternative (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1980), 196–8. 83 Aron, “Toward a Full Employment Policy,” 90. 84 Harrington, “Full Employment,” 31–2. 85 “An Economic Bill of Rights: Report of a Special Study Group on Problems of Poverty and Racism,” 11. 86 Anderson, “Full Employment and Economic Equality,” 134–6, quotation on 136. 87 Levison, The Full Employment Alternative, 199. 88 Ibid., 200–2. 89 Ibid., 205. 90 Ibid., 204–5. 91 Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 278. 92 Cooper and Hamilton, The Dual Agenda, 202. 93 Weir, Politics and Jobs, 158–9. 94 Statement of Murray Finley, president of Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, co-chairperson of Full Employment Action Council, Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act 1978: Joint Hearings Before the Committee on Human Resources and the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Unites States Senate, 95th Congress, Second Session, February 2, 1978, p. 191. 95 Brinkley, The End of Reform, 135–6. 96 Hubert Humphrey, “Guaranteed Jobs for Human Rights,” The Annals of the American Academy 418 (March 1975): 24. 97 See, for example, Timothy S. Robinson, “Churches Plan to Campaign for Full Employment,” Washington Post, September 2, 1977; National Council of Churches of Christ, “NCC Labor Day Proclamation,” n.d., box 241, folder titled “Full Employment, 1971–1980”; “American Jewish Congress Urges Passage of Humphrey-Hawkins Bill with Emphasis on Federal Jobs to Combat Unemployment”; Nathan S. Dershowitz, American Jewish Congress, to Community Relations Councils, March 13, 1978; “Statement of the American Jewish Congress on S.50 Dealing with Full Employment, Submitted to the Subcommittee on Employment, Poverty, and Migratory Labor of the Committee on Human Resources of the United States Senate,” March 8, 1978; Richard Ravitch and Malcolm Hoenlein, Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, to Sam Hirsch, Full Employment Action Council, August 29, 1977; Annette Daum, New York Federation of Reform Synagogues, to presidents, Rabbis, Social Action Chairpersons, LIPAC, n.d., 1977; Rabbi James Rudin, “Statement on ‘Full Employment’ Before the Equal Opportunities Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor,” box 241, folder titled “Full Employment, 1971–1980,” Jewish Labor Committee Records; Julius Bernstein and Edward Boyle,

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S.J., Statement of the Massachusetts Coalition for Full Employment, October 1977, box 19, folder titled “Massachusetts Coalition for Full Employment,” Julius Bernstein Papers, Tamiment Institute. 98 Humphrey, “Guaranteed Jobs for Human Rights,” 24. 99 Ibid. 100 Hawkins, “Planning for Personal Choice: The Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 418 (March 1975): 14. 101 Ibid.

8

Regeneration and Stasis: An Idea in Search of a Movement

Shredded beyond recognition, the Humphrey-Hawkins Act became a museum piece of the period’s social democratic impulse, a victim of the combined forces of business reaction and political conservatism. Like the 1940s, the idea of full employment had never been limited to the legislation. Through the rivulets of independent publications, organizational newsletters, congressional testimony, and a myriad of small-group meetings, activists and intellectuals transformed it into something more progressive than even the most liberal architects of the measure had intended. As Michael Harrington noted, the full employment movement persuaded American progressives to understand that only by expanding the public sector and extending the reach of government could the United States hope to humanize capitalism, or even transcend it. This is important to consider, since so much employment policymaking in the postwar era operated within the boundaries of a liberal consensus that united both Democrats and Republicans. As Anais Miodek Bowring argues, “this ideological constraint was based on two liberal currents—work-ascitizenship and labor-market anti-statism—that together established paid, private work as an important pathway to social and political inclusion, while insisting on minimal government intervention into the labor market.”1 Women, blacks, and minorities contested these liberal constraints. Rather than agitate for inclusion, they fostered visions of gender and racial liberation. Not unlike the 1940s, the very notion of full employment began to stretch beyond the parameters of macroeconomic policy. It raised philosophical, religious, and ideological questions that rarely make it into the public forum. Yet there is little question: the passage of the neutralized bill represented an almost total defeat for the idea of full employment. In the next two decades, it receded from public policy and public consciousness. In its place, both Democratic and Republican policymakers would privilege creating opportunities for work over creating jobs,

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every time. In the modern era of free market fundamentalism, the privatization of public resources, the dilution of the social wage, the assault on organized labor, and the shift toward finance capital at the expense of manufacturing and its high-paying jobs, governments abandoned full employment in favor of maximum employability.2 The social forces that had gathered around the measure may have disintegrated, but a handful of organizations kept the idea alive into the neoliberal new age. The most important of these was the New Initiatives for Full Employment (NIFE), a group of social workers, academics, policy experts, and activists who had emerged out of the Full Employment Action Council of the 1970s. A study group that sponsored conferences and symposia, the NIFE developed a more stable presence after a conference at New York University that brought together economists, teachers, clergy, labor unionists, and at least some frontline activists. Predominantly middle class and academic at first, the organization began to take the shape of the progressive coalitions that had propelled the full employment movements of the past. Liberal Christian denominations had been key agents in the coalitions of the 1940s and 1970s. Once again, they joined the fold, this time through the Urban Ministries unit of the National Council of Churches. It was the National Council, in fact, which provided NIFE its office, part-time staff, and most of its resources. Publishing reports and sponsoring “Full Employment Weeks,” the National Council sought to convince Americans in the age of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” that persistent unemployment in the millions was neither natural nor inevitable. Soon dubbed the National Jobs for All Coalition (NJFAC), the organization soldiered on through the turbo-capitalist 1990s, publishing, proselytizing, and preparing for a political sea change that might revive the idea of the job guarantee. Two of the most important and largely unheralded proponents of the direct job creation strategy were Helen Lachs Ginsburg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg. An economist and social work scholar who published prolifically on the topic, Schaffner Goldberg utilized an historical perspective that challenged the ideological myopia and brazen callousness of employment policy in the 1990s.3 A small group of progressive economists gravitated toward the NJFAC. Together, these dissonant voices argued for state expansion of the public-service sector at a time when it seemed that the free market had utterly triumphed.4 For most of these academics, the central issue was the hidden or unreported unemployment of discouraged workers and the underemployment of others. In the era of corporate restructuring and global market integration,5 these numbers were on the rise. In the wake of the dot.com bust of 2001, during which job

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losses continued some fifteen months after the official end of the recession, a coterie of post-Keynesian economists intensified their search for answers.6 The Center for Full Employment and Price Stability at the University of Missouri led the way. In the 1990s, it became one of two centers for postKeynesian research. The other was the Levy Institute at Bard College. Together, they spearheaded the development of modern monetary theory, a direct challenge to the neoclassical exponents of supply-side economics. Influenced by the ideas of Abba Lerner, Hyman Minsky, and New Deal planner Beardsley Ruml, heterodox economists at the University of Missouri, Bard College, and Newcastle, Australia began to map out a program of direct job creation that contested the notion that full employment was simply unaffordable. In short, they challenged one of the central premises of the dominant economic paradigm that had prevailed since the late 1970s. Economists such as Matthew Forstater, Stephanie Kelton, Randall Wray, and William Mitchell disputed the dogmatic idea that governments had to tax in order to spend. The reality, they argued, is quite a bit different, considering that the government, which is the originator of all legitimate currency, generates the money it needs, funds the program it chooses, and thus expands the nation’s total money supply quite independent of taxation. When the government taxes, they argued, it does so for the purpose of reducing inflation, contracting the money supply, promoting a more equitable distribution of wealth, and preserving the status of the dollar as the only currency that could be used to pay taxes.7 In other words, government does not have to tax first to spend now. Citing functional finance proponent Abba Lerner, Forstater explained it this way in a 2001 article on the history of capitalist thought about unemployment: “He showed that taxing and borrowing are not funding operations; rather, taxes ensure the demand for state currency and bond sales are a means to manage bank reserves and target an overnight lending rate.” The conclusions were startling. “Deficits can be run without worry to eliminate unemployment,” Forstater argued, while “taxes can be used to guard against demand-pull inflation.”8 In other words, the constraints on government spending to ensure maximum employment were political, not technical. The evidence, ironically, was in the Reagan recovery of the 1980s. Excoriating the neoclassical economists who championed the trickle-down policies of deregulation and tax reduction, Forstater recapitulated Keynes’ insights on recessions. All the tax incentives, lowered interest rates, and capital gains tax cuts in the world would not move business to invest if it did not expect to earn a profit from investments. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it was

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the amassing of monumental debt, not tax cuts and government austerity, that sparked the recovery.9 In fact, the massive military budget the United States steadily expanded even after the Cold War era confirmed the basic insight: when needed, the United States could find the money. It would do so again during the War on Terrorism and in the massive bank bailout of 2008, none of which, incidentally, led to calamitous inflation. In this obscure, unpublished paper, Forstater made the case that the dualparty obsession over deficit reduction had shriveled the social wage and impeded a more equitable redistribution of wealth. It deceived Americans into believing that, because of the allegedly iron law of higher debts equaling higher interest rates and thus higher taxes, relentless fiscal prudence was in their best interests. Repudiating these notions, he and his heterodox allies fashioned a new paradigm that advanced an economic and ethical case for job creation over retraining, not to mention deficit reduction. Only by generating sufficient work could the United States launch an effective attack on poverty and the pervasive insecurity that permeated the ranks of American workers in the 1990s. Business had exploited this widespread fear in order to hold down wages even while productivity increased. What made this paper particularly important in the return of full employment thought was not only the modern monetary theory or the critique of the neoclassical “synthesis” that governed public policy making. For mainstream proponents of market efficiency, these were certainly eyebrowraising enough. Instead, it was the return of structural economic analysis that had defined the thought of Martin Luther King, Bernard Anderson, Robert E. Browne, and Leon Keyserling. Like Harrington and Keynes himself, Forstater argued that unemployment was not an anomalous symptom of capitalism but something intrinsic to the system itself. It had a distinct function in capitalism. “Unemployment is not an irrational by-product,” he argued; rather, “it serves a purpose in the system. Unemployment holds down wages by decreasing the bargaining power of labor, it disciplines workers [and] it provides a pool of unemployed who stand ready to work when the demand for labor rises in response to expansion.” Forstater believed that this theoretical insight had significant implications for public policy.10 It might be possible to achieve full employment under capitalism, he argued, but maintaining it was an entirely different matter. If unemployment and excess capacity provided the elasticity in capitalist production, adjustments between sectors and in overall output could be made to avoid the bottlenecks that had so famously disabled the Soviet system. But the pattern of structural and

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technological change, the famous cycle of destruction and regeneration at which even Marx had marveled, would come to a grinding halt in a full employment regime under capitalism. Those who championed effective demand, Forstater argued, never could resolve these nagging problems. Following economist Abba Lerner, who wrestled with the question of inflation under a capitalist full production regime, Forstater abandoned the sunny optimism of Keyserling and the other Keynesians who believed that maximum aggregate demand would push industrial capitalism into egalitarian abundance. Instead, he joined the camp of Robert S. Browne and Michael Harrington, who raised the possibility that only the rapid expansion of the public sector could facilitate jobs for all. Channeling Hyman Minsky and Adolph Lerner, Forstater made the case that public-sector employment would provide the elasticity without which the capitalist system could not function. Echoing the National Resources Planning Board, Forstater argued that public employment was a necessary good, since “we are in a perpetual condition of shortage when it comes to community services, public goods, infrastructure revitalization, and the like.” Not only would the public sector generate the social investment that capitalism would not, but it would resolve the problem of structural unemployment itself. It would do this by adopting an entirely alternative set of economic and ethical values. Since government did not have to obsessively focus on minimizing production costs, it could base its decisions on larger social and macroeconomic objectives.11 The implications were profound. Government could deliberately “choose to use a more labor-intensive method of production, where a private firm could not due to competitive pressures. Government can choose not to use capital equipment or natural resources that are in short supply [and] choose not to use methods of production that pollute.” Deferring to mainstream economics, he argued that public-service employment would absorb the byproducts of capitalism, providing it the “breathing room” and “functionality” that unemployment had previously delivered. This would not preclude the use of fiscal and monetary tools to manage the system; nor would it address the question of providing dignified jobs in the public sector. As Forstater added, however, this was not simply a question for the public sector. This is precisely how a progressive discussion of full employment had routinely functioned in modern America. It held up a mirror to private enterprise, exposing the contrast between its loftiest claims and its unsightly realities. It expressly articulated what sociologist Ralph Milliband believed was the contradiction between the dominant ideology and the lived experience of working people under capitalism. As Milliband wrote, “The message

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speaks of democracy, equality, opportunity, prosperity, security, community, common interests, justice, fairness, etc. The reality, on the other hand, as lived by the majority, is very different, and includes the experience of exploitation, domination, great inequalities in all spheres of life, material constraints of all kinds, and very often great spiritual want.”12 Public-sector employment would not only provide an auxiliary assist to private enterprise but raise questions about its methods, challenging its unquestioned practices and cherished values. It would shed additional light on the contradictions that Milliband and Forstater had identified. While Forstater foregrounded the compatibility between functional finance and public employment, between a guaranteed income and a guaranteed job, he also subtly made the case that public service employment would challenge the market-defined notion of work itself. Not unlike the Works Progress Administration, government employment would permit “people able to pursue crafts and art and music and education and community gardens and working together in positive social activity,” none of which he considered frivolous. Forstater was not only echoing Harrington on the challenge of changing public perceptions about government jobs. He was also arguing that it could be used to “redefine what constitutes meaningful productive activity.” More than this, the expansion of the public sector “can be used as a vehicle for progressive social policies.” Not least of these would be the setting of the minimum wage for public service workers above the existing minimum wage, thus changing the effective minimum wage in the private sector. The post-Keynesian, modern monetary theorists were not engaging in technocratic policy management. Instead, they began to posit a transformative vision of full employment that reflected the legacy of earlier heterodox, radical, and visionary exponents of full employment. Public sector work would do more than provide a safety valve for the private enterprise system. By extending benefits, health-care, and child-care services to public employees, the job guarantee would pressure the private sector to follow suit. “The Public Service Job can serve as a benchmark for the rest of the economy,” Forstater argued. By asserting that there was “no alternative” but to adopt the job guarantee or a guaranteed income, he overestimated the responsiveness of a capitalist society to the social pathologies of unemployment. Even so, he understood that the only humane alternative to a guaranteed job or income was a change to the system itself, “the transformation from capitalism to socialism or some other economic system,” he boldly claimed.13 More than this, Forstater posited the tantalizing possibility that a job guarantee program and capitalist transformation were not “mutually exclusive.” In fact, he submitted

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rather daringly, “a guaranteed public service job may be the short run policy and the transformation to full economic democracy the long run solution.” Echoing Michael Harrington and Michal Kalecki, Forstater argued that full employment might create the conditions for public rather than state ownership, for collective and participatory management rather than state administration.14 An era of questioning the shibboleths of late-twentieth-century hyper-capitalism had arrived. In broad strokes, Forstater had outlined the heterodox position on full employment that had been gestating since the 1980s. The sea change seemed to come in the financial meltdown of 2008. It demonstrated that crisis in the capitalist system provided the necessary precondition for meaningful and imaginative thought about ending involuntary idleness. Progressive economists such as William Darrity, Helen Lachs Ginsburg, and Randall Wray, each of whom had been toiling for years on the direct job-creation question, joined Forstater, using ever-greater theoretical and methodological sophistication to examine the possibilities of using the state as the employer of the last resort. But they also began to gain new audiences, greater attention, and growing relevance. Initially championed by liberal academics as a responsible and practical alternative to using unemployment to manage inflation, advocacy for the “job guarantee,” as it was now called, took on greater urgency as the crisis deepened.15 Forstater and his counterparts at the Levy Institute proved critical to advancing the heterodox approach, but they were not alone. Operating out of the Center of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle in Australia, economist William Mitchell advanced the employment buffer-stock proposal. Financier and investor Warren Mosler had simultaneously been working on the idea, but he, Mitchell, and the others at the Levy Institute all benefited from the earlier explorations of Hyman Minsky. It was Minsky who first proposed an employer of last resort policy (ELR). This would see the government provide jobs to all who wanted them but also avoid the dual problems of wage-push inflation and the “structural rigidities” that often accompany operating at full production.16 Boldly, Mitchell declared that after the inflationary hysteria of the 1970s, policymakers had deliberately set a fiscal and monetary course designed to use unemployment as a buffer against capitalist collapse. Expanding the ranks of the unemployed would maintain price stability but also discipline labor. Central banks now pursued a monetary policy designed to throttle inflation at almost any cost, up to and including the unemployment of millions of people. Reinforced by government fiscal policy aimed at budgetary balances and

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austerity, this policy expressed the dominance of the free market ideology. In a seminal 1998 article, Mitchell argued that this ideology had “convinced us wrongly that government involvement in the economy imposes costs on us, and we have thus supported governments that have significantly reduced their fiscal involvement in economic activity.”17 Mitchell’s ideas for an employment buffer stock thus stood in diametrical opposition to the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU), the theory that had its origins in the monetarist thought of the 1970s. As he explained in his earlier writings and in the 2008 Full Employment Abandoned, the employment buffer stock would not use unemployment to “discipline the wage-price setting process,” which the NAIRU effectively did. Instead, it would expand during periods of recession and contract (but not disappear) during periods of heightened economic growth. The job guarantee would “hire off the bottom” and provide the training that the private sector would not. Critically, it would deliver socially valuable goods and services. It would provide universal access to any and all who sought work and do so on a flexible, noncoercive basis. The job guarantee, Mitchell insisted, was not workfare. Providing a fixed wage below market prices, the job guarantee would theoretically provide an anti-inflationary flywheel more effective than the Keynesian policy of simply raising aggregate demand through generalized government spending. More than this, Mitchell and others were quick to point out that a one-time increase in price levels was not the same as a wage and price spiral. At the same time, the employment buffer stock would not preclude the use of monetary and fiscal controls to manage any resulting inflation as the economy reached genuine full employment. As Mitchell explained in 2008, “If the public sector is inflating, a tightening of fiscal and/or monetary policy shifts workers into the fixed-wage JG sector to achieve inflation stability without unemployment.”18 Added to this, the job guarantee would be geared to regions and areas hit particularly hard by unemployment. This was a radical departure from using unemployment to control inflation and resolve crises of profitability. Taken together, it seemed that Mitchell, Mosler, Wray, and the others had fused monetary theory and employment policy into an economic paradigm that challenged some of the most unquestioned tenets of American neoliberal thought. Their model simultaneously repudiated the logic of the Phillips curve, the monetarist-inspired NAIRU, and the neoliberal argument that fiscal budgetary constraints would always stand as the upward limit on social spending. In the 1990s, Wray, Mitchell, Philip Harvey, Robert Pollin, and William Vickrey joined a widening group of heterodox thinkers who questioned the primacy of the free market. Accompanying this dogmatic belief was the conviction that

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economic policy was value-neutral, politically agnostic, and technically driven to maximize economic efficiency. Heterodox theory questioned the efficiency of the free market, but it also challenged the neoliberal axiom that government intervention was inherently inimical to the solution of large-scale social problems. Challenging neoclassical orthodoxy, the proponents of the modern monetary version of the job guarantee also positioned themselves as Keynesian originalists, questioning the notion that government intervention could be reduced to “priming the pump.” What the standard approach ignores, argued Pavlina R. Tcherneva, one of the leading scholarly proponents of the job guarantee, was the persistence of unemployment even in periods of relative prosperity. While increasing aggregate demand might provide the blunt instrument necessary to obliterate mass unemployment at the onset of a recession, it is a recipe for inflation throughout the rest of the business cycle. It is ineffective at eradicating stubborn pockets of idleness and poverty. It tends to benefit those who are skilled and already in demand in the private economy, thus driving up wages. What set Tcherneva’s argument apart from the liberal technocrats who championed “growth” was the neo-Keynesian insistence that job creation, not economic expansion, should be the objective of any employment policy. Otherwise, contemporary society would continue to be left with the “neo-classical pumppriming approach,” one which considered job creation the beneficent “byproduct” of fiscal policy. The problem was not only that this strategy did not work; it created “jobless recoveries,” each justified “as the natural outcome of modern globalized and automated economies.” Tcherneva and her associates were determined to expose the faulty logic behind these alleged inevitabilities. But they also wanted to outline theoretically informed, plausible alternatives to them as well.19 What was lost in the technocratic version of Keynesianism that enjoyed a revival in the financial crisis of 2008 was Keynes’ own commitment to direct job creation. The key, according to Tcherneva, was to rediscover the difference between “effective demand” and “aggregate demand,” between the sum total of spending throughout each sector of the economy and the amount of hiring a company engages in based on its projected future profits and expenses. Additional spending to wring out remaining unemployment from a recovery may not prove effective, since it would likely be diverted into paying down debts, bolstering savings, or simply raising prices rather than expanding production in sectors already operating at maximum production. For Tcherneva, underlining Keynes’ overarching commitment to the goal of full employment at all points

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during the business cycle was pivotal.20 This was not simply the most effective countercyclical stabilizer available; it was also the key to ending the irrational and inhumane practice of hiding millions of unemployed Americans behind the veil of GDP growth and low inflation.21 Through the alchemy of the recession, the persistent intellectual activism of the job guarantee group, and the American left’s search for a big idea that might address the neoliberal drift of the Democratic Party, the notion that the government should be the employer of last resort once again entered American political discourse. In 2013, progressive economist Robert Pollin published Back to Full Employment, which advocated for central bank measures to redistribute corporate wealth, a massive public works program that would shift American society toward a green economy, and huge investments in education. Pollin recommended a decidedly more lenient attitude toward inflation, which would be controlled through a combination of wage and price controls, increased productivity, and fiscal policy.22 For Pollin, full employment meant creating decent jobs at reasonable wages and getting unemployment down below 4 percent. Like other job guarantee proponents, he wanted to return the question of employment to the mainstream of the economics profession. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he also believed that it should challenge the prerogatives of capitalism but not threaten the functioning of a private enterprise system. The monographs and articles continued to multiply.23 Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein—both founders of leading progressive policy think-tanks with access to major networks and leading political figures—published Getting Back to Full Employment the same year. Like almost all full employment advocates, Baker and Bernstein castigated the monetarist-inspired inflation targeting strategies of the previous thirty years. Echoing the modern monetary theorists (MMT), they too made the case that the alleged budget constraints of the US government were the product of a noxious combination of misinformation and political ideology. Unlike households compelled to balance the budget, the federal government was under no such obligation. The key, they argued, was to focus on interest rates, not the total debt amount; considering historically low interest rates in the years following the collapse, they argued that “the government is nowhere near the limit of its ability to take on additional debt.”24 That meant that the US government was in the uniquely favorable position to maintain aggregate demand during economic recessions. “The alternative is to allow for the economy to operate below its capacity indefinitely and keep millions of workers needlessly unemployed.”25 The author’s alternative was as bold as many of the MMT proponents, if more conventional: restore a positive

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trade balance by allowing the value of the US dollar to decline, establishing a national jobs program that would focus on rebuilding the nation’s social capital, and promoting the adoption of work-sharing arrangements that would expand opportunities for the under-employed. Written in the deluge of the 2008 recession, Getting Back to Full Employment was a product of the moment, a statistically grounded, policy-driven argument for the eminent sensibility of ending unemployment. Focusing on the immediate crisis of joblessness, it eschewed a long-term vision of economic and social reconstruction. Few in the jobs guarantee camp were as enthusiastic as Matthew Forstater had been about the transformative possibilities of full employment. Unlike Baker and Bernstein and other mainstream commentators like New York Times journalist Paul Krugman, they made the case that the employment buffer stock plan could reasonably become a permanent addition to the economic architecture. And despite their wonkish sensibilities, Baker and Bernstein— like Pollin, James Galbraith, and the Levy Institute group—projected a tone of restrained exasperation at the irrationality of a system that needlessly consigned people to despair. Along with more overtly left-wing critics such as Naomi Klein, Doug Henwood, Thomas Frank, Terry Eagleton, and David Harvey, these progressive economists pierced the mystique of market fundamentalism. They questioned the seemingly most unquestionable assumption of the New Economy era: the inevitability and normalcy of unemployment. Each found expanded audiences following the financial crisis of 2008, but few saw such a meteoric rise as the proponents of modern monetary theory. Attention spiked in 2013, when, in the midst of what had become a ritualistic congressional struggle over raising the debt ceiling, Stephanie Kelton and her MMT colleagues proposed minting a $1 trillion coin that could be deposited in the Federal Reserve Bank and used to finance government expenses going forward. The debate that followed brought the theorists to the attention of the Democratic Left. By 2016, Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist running for the party’s nomination, appointed Kelton as his economic adviser, a decision prompted by the recommendations of none other than Dean Baker and James K. Galbraith. As the exponents of MMT moved closer to the center of public discourse, the tone became more detached, the inclination to sound pragmatic and politically neutral, sharpened. In their 2018 “Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment,” which read something like a technocratic manifesto for the job guarantee, Wray, Tcherneva, Kelton, and two other Levy Institute authors acknowledged that a job guarantee might amplify the existing number of federal government employees (2.8 million) by a factor of five. Yet they “worr[ied] about

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the political feasibility of expanding employment on such a scale” and insisted on “the advantages of decentralizing administration to the community level,” which could be read as both a concession to local democracy and a capitulation to state and local control. Historically, this had been the nemesis of African Americans trying to achieve racial equality. And like the advocates of the 1945 Murray-Wagner Full Employment Bill, the authors were careful to pay homage to the private sector. “We would not use the PSE program to compete with private contractors or subvert prevailing wage laws.” Although the Levy Institute scholars advocated for a standard wage of $15, they sought to conciliate a skeptical business class by assuring them that it would be implemented gradually. This would allow employers to “adjust to higher wages over a period of time.”26 Through a detailed simulation of the impact of the PSE program, the authors concluded that it was an eminently rational and necessary program. At the cost of approximately $189 billion for the first year, it would pay a living wage to all those who wanted and needed public employment. But it would also effectively wipe out poverty, raise the GDP, add millions of jobs to the private sector, achieve price stability, increase inflation only slightly, and improve state and local budgets hit by the financial crisis. At the same time, it would reduce expenditures on existing automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance and the earned income tax credit (EITC). In sum, although it operated on premises at odds with the Keynesian demand management advocates and the champions of neoclassical monetary policy, the PSE program echoed the Murray bill of 1944. In short, a job guarantee would be good for the unemployed and for business. And yet despite the overtures to the private sector, the Levy Institute plan would also raise the cost of doing business, since its base wage would become the effective national minimum wage.27 Paralleling the program promoted by the left-wing Center for American Progress, the Levy Institute plan would promote tighter labor markets, increase wages in the private sector, and delegitimize lowwage exploitative work.28 Toned down for the purposes of the manifesto, it still resonated with the critical undercurrents that had historically accompanied full employment thought. The PSE would invest in the “public good” by detaching “the offer of employment from the profitability of employment,” thus challenging the hegemonic standard by which the value of work was consistently measured. Harkening back to Forstater’s seminal 2001 essay, the program outlined in the 2018 statement challenged exploitative employment arrangements which programs like the EITC only subsidized. “If the public employment option offers a decent job at decent pay, employers who pay poverty wages with difficult

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working conditions would have to match the PSE pay and conditions to retain workers.” Or, as Pavlina Tcherneva put it more combatively in a piece aimed at answering the swelling chorus of conservative and liberal critics, the job guarantee would rouse workers from the sleepwalk of market fetishism. Wrote Tcherneva, according to some, the JG is dangerous for another reason: workers outside the program who realize that the JG offers decent pay, healthcare, and childcare to its employees will stage a “political rebellion.” This is considered to be a much scarier scenario than having millions of workers earning poverty-level wages, without health coverage or affordable childcare.

Her blood up over a torrent of criticism that masked indifference to the trauma of joblessness, Tcherneva continued: Which brings us to the fear of disrupting “business as usual” in the private sector. Yes, we want to disrupt business models that can only be successful if they pay poverty-level wages without the benefits that are common in all of the developed countries. In the IT world, “disruptions” are hailed as progressive and innovative. The JG is the policy innovation that secures a true antipoverty wage floor for all—one that firms must match.29

Despite the pragmatic tone of the job guarantee literature, it exposed the class divisions and corresponding economic power alignments of contemporary America in a fashion that even the famed Occupy Movement did not. Exponents of full employment did not simply castigate the rich, inveigh against Wall Street, or appeal to a vague sense of fair play. Instead, they outlined how unemployment functioned as an auxiliary of capitalism. The idea of full employment expanded the political horizons of those who took it seriously, allowing them to explore what economic democracy might really look like. Tcherneva, to her credit, did not deny the possibility of a “political rebellion.” She recognized that any meaningful plan to guarantee work would alter the political worldview of those inculcated in the notion that they should consider themselves lucky to have a job at all. But Tcherneva pointed out the absurdity of worrying more about militant workers than about providing “decent pay, healthcare, and childcare to its employees.” Despite the pragmatic tone, Tcherneva and other counterparts advocated for a massive intervention in the labor market that would raise the social wage and change the stakes in the capitalist game.

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Yet by arguing that full employment would also be good for business, the job guarantee advocates did echo Murray, Keyserling, and the architects of “The Freedom Budget.” And they were probably right. It certainly was good for business during the Second World War. On its own, the liberal version of full employment, which left swaths of African Americans and “other Americans” unemployed, did not seriously threaten profit shares in the 1960s. Coupled with overcapacity and international competition in the early 1970s, it certainly did. Yet the modest increase in the share of national income going to workers following a ten-year business campaign to restore profitability after the gains that labor had made in the 1950s did not threaten to deprive business of its sizable returns. Achieving a Keynesian version of full employment would increase aggregate demand, increase tax revenues, reduce spending on a range of existing antipoverty programs, and guarantee steady profits. It would not, however, protect the super-profits that had become the norm in the era of wage suppression and corporate-led globalization. Yet it would involve an expansion of the public sector that business traditionally objects to on any grounds. It would politicize the entire question of labor, wages, and the conditions of work, as Tcherneva and her critics understood. It would raise the cost of doing business and the prospect of government expansion into areas of investment coveted by private enterprise, as Kalecki and Hale understood. But it would do more than this. Genuine full employment challenges the cultural authority of business. It contests the very values it has created to sustain it, from efficiency and selfsacrifice to competitiveness, radical individualism, workplace “flexibility,” and the unquestioned authority of management on the shop floor. It is no wonder that job guarantee advocates began, even tentatively, to echo the language of Michael Harrington and Sylvia Aron. Both understood that achieving full employment would mean expanding the public sphere and establishing workplace cooperatives. As the left-wing commentators of the 1930s and 1940s understood, it also contests the assumption that only the market can assign value to work, create useful jobs, and define the meaning of productivity. As journalist Kate Aronoff writes, “what feeds a profit margin and what makes for a good society don’t often overlap. Newsrooms are hemorrhaging staff positions and being gobbled up by hedge funds, if not shuttered altogether, as online outlets compete for clicks. Corporations are churning out cheap, carbonintensive junk and selling it through poorly-paid service sector jobs at places like McDonalds and Wal-Mart,” the biggest employers in twenty-two states. By providing a decent wage accompanied by adequate benefits, Aronson argues,

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the job guarantee could “give workers another option and help redefine what valuable, productive work looks like.”30 At least implicitly predicated on an alternative set of values, most ELR schemes also now emphasized the urgent need to manage climate change. “Global warming, biodiversity losses, and resource depletion require that ELR programs favor collective action over private activities,” argues economist Hendrik van den Bergh. “Restructuring the human economy requires curbing many currently profitable and highly capitalized industries, and the resistance will be fierce.”31 Government-sponsored work programs that advance the project of environmental sustainability and the reduction of carbon emissions could only raise questions about those industries responsible for and still benefiting from environmental negligence. By promoting community control over investment projects as well as programs aimed at environmental protection and rehabilitation, the job guarantee creates work that the private sector considers unprofitable. It also provides employment as a dignifying end in itself rather than simply a coefficient of capitalist productivity. Advocating for full employment from these premises, organizations like the Center for American Progress, the Levy Economics Institute, and Robert Pollin’s Political Economy Research Institute raised discomfiting questions about the prerogatives of private enterprise in a society fractured by economic inequality. At the same time, they seemed to answer the question raised by the election of 2016, in which a right-wing populist campaigning against multilateral trade deals and in favor of public infrastructure jobs bested (at least in the electoral college) the Democratic candidate friendly to finance capital. Could the American left produce a vision of social change that spoke to a disaffected multiracial working class? Exponents of full employment, attentive to the peculiar suffering that racialized minorities endured as the result of unemployment and poverty, also understood the damage that globalization, corporate outsourcing, deindustrialization, and the steady erosion of wages, labor unions, and the social safety net had inflicted on a multiracial working class. If the uprising known as the Occupy Movement had generated more heat than light, the job guarantee discussion seemed to offer both a vision of social transformation and a set of concrete policies designed to achieve it. Harkening back to the class-based, coalition politics of the New Deal era, it looked forward to a future in which the preservation of the ecosystem had replaced the Keynesian penchant for “more.” In short, the return of the full employment idea suggested that, at least on the left, the neoliberal consensus had been broken. ***

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Not surprisingly, criticism of the job guarantee appeared early. It accelerated as its exponents utilized the internet and gained access to powerbrokers in Washington. From the right, the criticism generally echoed the refrain of the 1940s and the 1970s. If not an entirely comprehensive list of particulars, Theodore Kupfer’s National Review piece captured the general themes of conservative opposition. According to Kupfer, a job guarantee program, which had recently won the endorsement of Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, threated calamity. “From a conservative perspective,” Kupfer wrote, “these proposals are ludicrous: They would risk runaway inflation, be colossally costly, involve a massive amount of inefficient central planning, cannibalize the free market, and nationalize a huge chunk of the economy.”32 Predictably, Kupfer and even many liberal commentators emphasized the ruinous cost and runaway inflation that would accompany any job guarantee program. They could point to economists William Darrity, Mark Paul, and Darrick Hamilton, who produced a job guarantee program for the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It estimated that it would cost approximately $543 billion in the first year to employ some 11 million idled workers. That is less than the $598 billion spent on the American military every year.33 In other words, the former is unthinkable; the latter is unquestionable. As for the cannibalizing of the “free” market? Commentators from Michal Kalecki to Joan Robinson to Robert S. Browne have argued that sustained full employment through any means would produce more consistent profits but it would also change the dynamics of capitalism, and probably its very nature. Equally important, however, liberal commentators have criticized the program for reasons that go beyond its alleged fiscal infeasibility. They argue that it would amount to little more than workfare. Since most jobs would have to be low skilled, they could not be highly capitalized infrastructure projects (since the presumed recovery of the private sector from recession would pull workers away from the JG and leave projects unfinished). This would invariably produce a “make-work” venture. It would do little to train participants for the private sector. Equally distressing, argues Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project and constant gadfly of JG advocates, the JG pool acts as a hammer that private employers can use against the wage demands of workers in the private sector. Since the plan commits the government to a fixed wage, employers facing what they consider to be unreasonable wage demands could hire the public service worker at a wage higher than the minimum but lower than what their workers are demanding, knowing that the plan prohibits the government from matching the bid.34 As for the Paul, Darrity, and Hamilton proposal, Josh Bivens of the liberal Economic Policy Institute argued that it fails to address the stigma

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connected to public service jobs. According to Bivens, the wider public would not consider the low-skill work provided by a job-creation program valuable enough to justify the enormous costs. The plan simply did not offer a politically sensible path forward, Bivens argued. The entrenched resistance to increasing taxes was simply too strong. Instead of a potentially stigmatizing and unproductive JG, these critics insist, what the United States needs is a macroeconomic full employment plan supported by wage subsidies such as the EITC as well as a thorough overhaul of the Federal Reserve Board’s destructive policy of inflation targeting.35 Proponents of the job guarantee have tried to meet most of these criticisms. For example, Mitchell, Wray, and Tcherneva have consistently argued that traditional Keynesian approaches to increasing aggregate demand invariably fail to reach all those who really do want to work. At the same time, they threaten inflationary spikes through unfocused stimulus spending.36 Nor, for that matter, is the JG a “make-work” program, since it aims to engage in projects that the private sector or the existing state governments will not support, largely because of the constraints of profit and the aversion to taxation. The job guarantee would draw human resources into projects such as child care, school improvements, and community gardening that carried intrinsic social worth but lacked market exchange value. Yet quite apart from the merits of the given program proposals, what is most striking is how advocates of the job guarantee and critics from both the left and the right accept the inevitability and normalcy of unemployment. Despite responding to the policy drift and ideological miasma of the Democratic Party, none of these plans is quite ambitious enough to contemplate the eradication of the business cycle itself. This, if we recall, is exactly what workers demanded in the postwar period. After all, even the most generous, humane, and capably administered job guarantee program still normalizes the disruptive, chaotic, and profoundly discouraging experience of losing a job in the first place, even when technical full employment is still maintained. The dissolution of workplace communities and the human bonds formed through cooperative effort—even in some of the most unsavory work environments—does not figure prominently in these admittedly sophisticated treatments of the subject. Critics like Bivens and Dean Baker, the latter of whom champions full employment but not the job guarantee, are willing to test but ultimately accept the existing boundaries of an anti-tax political culture. They reject the possibility of negotiated controls on inflation and tolerate the primacy of private enterprise.37 For them, the private sector, for all its deficiencies, must ultimately be cajoled, persuaded, appeased, or enticed to offer sufficient employment.

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The same kind of sullen acquiescence to the privileges of corporate leadership seems to inform the advocates of a universal basic income (UBI). In short, the argument goes, we are moving into a postwork world—or should be. It’s one in which automation will intensify the shredding of the workforce that has already accelerated because of corporate downsizing and outsourcing. If this is the case, then the most sensible option is to subsidize people’s inevitable idleness. Proponents believe that this would liberate those considered surplus to needs from the tyranny of low-wage exploitation and the brutalities of the labor market. Entertained in a variety of forms since the Nixon administration’s proposed Family Assistance Plan, the idea of a UBI came raging back to public discourse during the financial crisis, fueled by the same indignation that revived the idea of the job guarantee. Like the job guarantee, the UBI has been put through the thresher of the contemporary blogosphere. Unlike the JG, it has generated considerably more support from right-wing pundits and corporate CEOs than its work-oriented counterpart. Yet there is little to suggest that this program could resonate with an American society that venerates the value of work. Apart from the evidence that a UBI would be highly inflationary, would tend to subsidize low-wage, exploitative jobs, or simply reduce people dependent on it to a barely livable wage, the proponents of the UBI seem content to sideline people who want and often need to work. UBI proponents put little stock in American society’s deepseated cultural commitment to the value and necessity of work. As historian Eric Loomis pithily puts it, I simply see nothing in American history that suggests a robust welfare state not based around work succeeding. What’s the evidence? The near universality of Social Security and Medicare are based around a lifetime of work paying into it, while means-tested programs simply lack broad-based political support and become easy targets for conservatives. Cultures of work exist and are taught to children from a small age.

Equally important, a UBI program proposes to detach the already marginalized from the very nodes of production that generate the social surplus, the historical space in which working-class Americans have confronted capital and said “no.” Working-class Americans can expect to have little control over the pace of automation and the ultimate use of robots if they do not claim power within the workplace. More than this, as Pavlina Tcherneva notes, the UBI program operates under the illusion that the marketplace will automatically generate the products that UBI recipients want. Despite the desire for affordable health care and childcare, for example, the free market fails to provide it.38

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For all the theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor of the new job guarantee proposals, for all the genuine commitment to human rights, dignity, and decency on the part of its advocates and those who championed the UBI, the place of working-class struggle in the achievement of a fundamentally better society is often muted, if not lost altogether. And despite the commendable overtures to community involvement, workers are often portrayed as the recipients of a social program, not active agents exercising a democratic voice in determining the shape of the job guarantee. In part, this is a function of the intellectual character of the JG/full employment/UBI moment in American history. It was one of the liabilities of the movement in the 1970s, even in the 1940s, when legislators and experts fashioned programs they presumed would be in the best interest of the people. The same often proved tone-deaf to the needs of the very people most in need of full employment. To be sure, the racist and sexist assumptions that marred both full employment legislation and thought have been eradicated. The egalitarian visions of social transformation that became manifest in “The Freedom Budget,” the earliest versions of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, and in the mobilizations around them testified to the progress made since the New Deal era. Consistently we have seen how serious full employment thought has sparked the radical imagination. While few today are prepared to call on the federal government to be the employer of first resort, as did the Caucus of Black Economists, some are more than willing to call into question the “hedonic treadmill” of a capitalist society that degrades our environment, fails to ensure economic security, convinces us to accumulate, and denies us the opportunity for self-actualization. Only by breaking the growth fixation can contemporary society halt the march of devastating climate change.39 Yet whether some privilege climate change in the pursuit of a more sustainable society or the need to address the complex problem of race and economic inequality through targeted job creation, few have any proposals for how these ideas will be translated into action. Nor is there much sense that those people affected by unemployment should have a voice in determining the contours of economic democracy. The horizon of full employment has historically been peopled by those who have felt the sting of joblessness, the grinding insecurity that accompanies it, the wounding humiliation that is its most salient symptom. They have been both its most enthusiastic champions and its most thorough critics. Only through social struggle will the idea, in whatever form, take root and motivate people to action. That means that the abstractions of the employee buffer stock or the new “Marshall Plan” for America or the attack on the NAIRU must meet the

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ground of expectations shared by most working-class Americans. That ground will continue to include the desire for greater autonomy in the workplace, for greater security in their homes, and for greater representation in the economic and political affairs that govern their lives. The disparity between the realm of ideas and the sphere of social action reflects the absence of an organizational network that can facilitate communication between the two. At the moment, no large-scale labor or civil rights movements exist to champion, test, debate, or interpret the academic outpourings on the job guarantee or the basic income proposal. The diminishing strength of organized labor, its distance from the world of academe, its persistently defensive and conservative posture, and the decline of a culture of labor literacy militate against the opening of any channels of dialogue soon. But it’s also a function of the assumptions among the architects of the new progressive policy. For the most part, the proponents of the universal basic income or the multiple versions of the job guarantee as well as the critics who delight in criticizing it operate on the belief that the objective is to get through to the rational decision-makers in the business world, the government, and media. They’ll make the enlightened decisions that narrow-minded, ideologically blinkered, politically motivated rubes have obstructed to date. “The implicit assumption,” write Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk in a critique of the UBI, “is that advocates of a truly generous basic income will eventually be able to find common ground with the business class and its political representatives because, allegedly, the legislative introduction of a livable basic income is in everyone’s long-run interest: to do better for everyone, we could leave the entire capitalist apparatus more or less in place, and simply provide every worker with a regular cash payment,” or a job, I’d add, “that is enough to live on.”40 And that is the problem. However clever, elegant, logical, and sensible an employee of last resort scheme may sound, it invariably challenges the presumption that business has the ultimate authority to determine the economic and social reality we all live. That challenge will not be won by clever argument but by working-class organization that can change the balance of class forces. Without this counterforce, those who dominate the capitalist decision-making apparatus will continue to determine investment priorities, the allocation of economic resources, and the effectiveness of the social security state. Only through social and political struggle did the Unemployed Councils, radical parties, and militant labor unions of the 1930s move the Democratic party to take the concerns of the dispossessed seriously. In a society that lacks a genuine working-class party; tolerates an astonishing level of anti-labor coercion,

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violence, and policy; and operates a political system that consistently proves indifferent to some of the most basic social needs of its majority, it is difficult to imagine even the most centrist version of a job guarantee becoming a reality. Absent independent political organization and a more determined challenge to the logic of neoliberalism at the ground level, the landscape of political possibilities will not change dramatically. This is because the discussion of full employment will continue in isolation from the forces capable of translating it into a movement. Until that time, progressive commentators will more than likely continue to believe that it is a matter of simply answering the question, as Gourevitch and Stanczyk put it, “what policies should ‘we’ put in place?” It’s a question that operates on the assumption that “author and audience already have the social power to carry out whatever are the necessary steps,” missing the point that the fundamental question is one of class power, not policy analysis.41 Yet if this retrospective has demonstrated anything, it is how the egalitarian and emancipatory possibilities inherent in the idea of full employment resurface in moments of profound crisis. We have already noted how even some of the most technocratic products of the ELR school raised questions about the privileges of capital and the subjugation of labor. That is not to mention the more expressly socialist musings of Matthew Foraker and Hendrik Van den Berg. Within the broader full employment milieu, one can also find evidence of an awareness that workplace activism is central to moving the United States toward greater equality. “In a full employment economy,” writes economist Robert Pollin, “unions also gain increased leverage as representatives of workers’ interests.”42 Far from being a source of inefficiency or wage distortion, Pollin considers this essential to counter the fleet of lawyers, accountants, and security guards hired to undermine a union or keep a shop union free. That’s not to mention the disciplining power of the “reserve army” waiting outside the factory gates. As Pollin explains, the combination of full employment and strong unions reinforced by respectable minimum wage laws makes it possible to maintain a decent standard of living. In other words, like so many of his predecessors, Pollin saw full employment and working-class organization as the bridge to a robust social democracy.43 What is particularly interesting, however, is how Pollin, like full employment veteran Helen Lachs Ginsburg and commentator Matt Bruenig, moves from capitalist amelioration to a consideration of democratic socialism, though each scrupulously avoids the terminology. They do so by applauding the Swedish model of full employment. In this system, labor became an equal partner with business in fostering economic expansion and economic democracy. In the postwar years, Sweden developed

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the model of a social democratic society committed to the rights and interests of working people. Even before the war, however, Sweden used public employment projects that paid prevailing wages to wrench its way out of the Depression. Equally important, the Landsorganisationen (LO), a confederation of industrial unionists, forged a real capital-labor accord (as opposed to the dubious American version) with the Swedish employers’ association that called a truce in the class war and created the space for expanding social democratic policies. By 1944, the Social Democratic Party and the LO announced a program that would privilege an expansive vision of full employment over the competing claims of private enterprise and the rentier class. Guided by LO economists Rudolph Meidner and Gosta Rehn, the program blended Keynesian demand management, centralized collective bargaining, and progressive taxation. Critically, it also included an interventionist labor policy designed to control inflation and maximize employment opportunities. Like Hyman Minsky and the proponents of the employee buffer stock model, Meidner and Gosta understood that pushing growth through increased aggregate demand could produce labor shortages and  inflation, but fail to eliminate persistent pockets of unemployment. This active labor policy included subsidies for travel and relocation, job retraining, and direct job creation. It also included a “solidarity in wages” policy, which extended equal pay for equal work across the economy, eradicating gender and regional disparities that had been the hallmark of modern industrial capitalism. This was democratic socialism by increments, a program designed to redistribute corporate income, promote industrial development, and extend economic democracy. As Lennart Erixson writes, “The purpose of labour market policy was not only to maintain full employment and combat inflation by putting downward pressure on profit margins; but also to counter inflationary bottlenecks in the labour market and support structural change in the business sector.”44 Between 1960 and 1989, Sweden maintained an unemployment rate of 2.1 percent, a closer approximation of what Beveridge and Murray had in mind than anything achieved in the United States during the same period.45 Here was an example of equality through full employment in which workers actively participated in the determination of social policy. Through collective bargaining, labor unions politicized the question of wages and employment, creating the path for labor to achieve economic security while avoiding runaway inflation.46 At the same time, the “solidarity in wages” policy meant that low productivity companies did not stay in business by paying poverty-level wages. Workers displaced by the collapse of these firms then found employment in more

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productive companies. They also found work through public investments and interventionist labor policies that aimed at resolving frictional unemployment. The government provided additional employment and social assistance through a developing welfare state designed to capture those displaced in the process. In the postwar years, Sweden did not eliminate unemployment, but it did move toward greater levels of stability and prosperity. Negotiated wage restraint certainly contained inflation, but it also generated huge profits for major corporations at workers’ expense. Lining the pockets of an elite group of families, the evidence of profit through wage control led to studies and a government commission that convinced the LO to establish mechanisms to redistribute this wealth. The upshot was the “Meidner Group,” which in 1973 set out to ensure that the solidarity wage policy did not create conspicuous inequalities of wealth. It also sought to promote greater worker control at the point of production. The results of the final report appeared in 1975, and the congress of the LO adopted the recommendations in 1976. Through a series of “wage earner funds,” governed largely by labor unions, workers would earn steadily increasing shares in Swedish companies until they became majority owners. Since workers themselves would control the funds attached to entire industries, it ensured that employees of the most successful companies did not gain at the expense of those in the less profitable firms. The expectation was that workers would exercise control over these firms within two to three decades. Needless to say, business was not pleased. It mobilized a right-wing alliance that defeated the Social Democrats in 1976. Yet the plan for wage earners funds represented a powerful challenge to the privileges of business. All of this developed out of a left political milieu that supported a vision of full employment predicated on worker participation. As Peter Gowan and Mio Tastas Victorsson conclude, the Meidner Group had asked the most fundamental of questions about who controls the production process. “It was not sufficient to have—as Sweden did—decades of social democratic government, an interventionist state, and powerful labor unions,” they write. “Without changing who owns capital, economic development would continue to favor the rich and powerful [original italics].”47 It was the kind of question that had once been asked by a CIO that wanted public ownership of factories abandoned by business after the war. It was asked again by the UAW in its insistence on the cooperative governance of GM in 1946. In the 1970s, Michael Harrington, Robert S. Browne, and others who reconnoitered the frontiers of full employment would recapitulate the question. Invariably, despite the efforts of liberal technocrats to confine the question of full

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employment to the realm of arid statistics and economic models, it compelled supporters to ask far more fundamental questions about the organization of power in American society.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

Anais Miodek Bowring, “Why Is There No Right to Employment in America? Liberal Limits on American Employment Policy, 1933–2000,” 286, PhD Thesis, University of Santa Cruz, California, 2015. William Mitchell and Joan Muysken, Full Employment Abandoned: Shifting Sands and Policy Failures (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008), 260. See Sheila D. Collins, Helen Lachs Ginsburg, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America (New York: The Apex Press, 1994) and, more recently, Sheila D. Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, When Government Helped Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), the latter of which is firmly grounded in an analysis of what New Deal public works programs actually achieved. Gertrude Schafner Goldberg, “Employment, Poverty, and Social Welfare,” in New Perspectives on Poverty: Policies, Programs, and Practice, ed. Elissa D. Giffords and Karen R. Garber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 116–17; particularly important to the National Jobs for All Coalition was economist Sumner Rosen, a lifelong proponent of the belief that full employment could never be separated from the questions of workplace democracy, community development, and environmental responsibility. Rosen provided a key link between the expansive vision of full employment as an avenue toward social democracy, which flourished in the New Deal era, and the campaign of the 1990s for economic justice, which began to entertain often competing visions of a job guarantee. See Matthew Forstater, “Foreword: Jobs and Income: Sumner Rosen’s Lifetime Commitment to True Full Employment, Workplace Democracy, and Environmental Sustainability,” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2 (2006): 1–4. With the exception of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which started collecting data on contingent workers in 1995, the US General Accounting Office was the first official agency to conduct a systematic study of these marginal employees in the late 1990s. While acknowledging the debate over how to define contingent labor, the General Accounting Office also admitted that many “labor experts” included categories of workers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics excluded to get its 5 percent value for the total percentage of contingent labor in 1999. By including standard part-time workers, the percentage grew considerably. If agency temps,

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7

8

9 10 11 12 13

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direct-hire temps, contract company workers, and independent contractors are added to number of standard part-time workers—which would make complete sense, considering that these forms of employment did not simply represent employee choice but the impact of corporate downsizing and casualization–the total came to 29.9 percent, a percentage which has only grown in the US economy since. Critically, the study also noted that the preponderance of contingent workers was concentrated in the service industry. Most were women and minorities who earned lower wages and fewer benefits than full-time workers. They were less likely to have health insurance, to qualify for unemployment insurance, to be included in company pension plans, and “to be covered by key laws designed to protect workers.” Regardless of the percentage, the Accounting Office had presented a bleak picture of workers suffering exploitation rather than enjoying the alleged freedom of “flex time” offered by hip companies riding the entrepreneurial wave of the New Economy. See “Contingent Workers: Incomes and Benefits Lag Behind Those of Rest of Workforce,” 4–29, statistics on p. 14, June 2000, https://www.gao.gov/assets/240/230443.pdf; for more on the continuity between the old and allegedly new economy, see David Kotz and Martin H. Wolfson, “Deja Vu All Over Again: The ‘New’ Economy in Historical Perspective,” Labor Studies Journal 28 (Winter 2004): 25–44. In it, they argue that “The New Economy thesis provides a new rationale for the same free-market, anti-labor agenda championed in the 1980s under the guise of improving U.S. competitiveness,” p. 26. Natalia A. Kolesnikova and Yang Liu, “Jobless Recoveries: Causes and Consequences,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, April 2011, https://www. stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/april-2011/jobless-recoveriescauses-and-consequences#figure. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, “The Rock Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory: The Sanders Generation and a New Economic Idea,” The Atlantic, May 8, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of-modern-monetarytheory/. Matthew Forstater, “Unemployment in Capitalist Economies: A History of Thought for Thinking About Policy, Working Paper No. 16,” 7–8, Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri—Kansas City (August 2001), http://cas2.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/Forstater/papers/CEFPS/ Working%20Papers/WP16-Forstater.pdf. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16–17. Ralph Milliband, “Counter-Hegemonic Struggles,” Socialist Register 1990 26 (March 1990): 346–65, quotation on 347. Ibid., 18–19.

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14 Milliband makes this important distinction between a cooperative, municipal, and decentralized form of public ownership that operates alongside a limited free market and a regulated state apparatus that controls functions such as health care and social insurance. See pp. 352–3. 15 It is “important to remember that the idea of direct job creation or using the government as an employer of last resort had been revived by a number of scholars and policy-oriented intellectuals at least twenty years before the crisis of 2008. Written in the wilderness years of the late 1980s, when the ideology of market dominance was nearly uncontested, Philip Harvey’s Securing the Right to Employment set the tone for many thinkers on the left about how to challenge the apparent stranglehold of the Phillips curve and monetarist-inspired NAIRU over public employment policy. Calling for a public employment option that harkened back to the New Deal while addressing the real problems of inflation and quality job creation, Securing the Right to Employment established the agenda for those probing solutions that went beyond “employability.” Philip Harvey, Securing the Right to Employment: Social Welfare Policy and the Unemployed in the United States. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 16 Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, “(Full) Employment Policy: Theory and Practice,” in Commitment to Full Employment: The Economics and Social Policy of William S. Vickrey, ed. Aaron W. Warner et al. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 26. 17 William F. Mitchell, “The Buffer Stock Employment Model and the NAIRU: The Path to Full Employment,” Journal of Economic Issues 32 (June 1998): 548. 18 Mitchell and Muysken, Full Employment Abandoned, 22, 229–32, 240–1; William Mitchell and Randall Wray, “Full Employment Through Job Guarantee: A Response to Critics,” Working Paper, no. 39, January 2005, 14–15, http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/ wp-pdf/WP39-MitchellWray.pdf. 19 Pavlina Tcherneva, “Full Employment: The Road Not Taken,” 4–8, Working Paper, no. 789, March 2014, http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_789.pdf. 20 Ibid., 5–6. 21 Ibid., 4–5. 22 Robert Pollin, Back to Full Employment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 32–4. 23 See, for example, Michael J. Murray and Matthew Forstater, The Job Guarantee: Toward True Full Employment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Collins and Goldberg, When Government Helped; Michael J. Murray and Matthew Forstater, Employment Guarantee Schemes: Job Creation and Policy in Developing Countries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); invocations of the New Deal and the parallels between job creation programs in the 1930s and the job guarantee idea also proliferated, most notably in Nick Taylor’s American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).

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24 Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2013), 75. 25 Ibid., 74. 26 L. Randall Wray et al., “Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment,” Levy Economics Institute, April 2018. 27 Ibid., 22. 28 Neera Tanden et al., “Toward a Marshall Plan for America: Rebuilding Our Towns, Cities, and the Middle Class,” Center for American Progress, May 16, 2017, https:// www.google.ca/search?q=toward+a+marshall+plan+for+america&rlz=1C1GC EA_enCA760CA760&oq=%22toward+a+marsha&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0.6745j1j7 &sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8. 29 Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “The Job Guarantee and the Economics of Fear,” Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, One Pager, no. 5, May 29, 2018. 30 Kate Aronson, “Yes, a Jobs Guarantee Could Create ‘Boondoggles.’ It also Might Save the Planet,” Common Dreams, May 2, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/ views/2018/05/02/yes-jobs-guarantee-could-create-boondoggles-it-also-mightsave-planet. 31 Hendrik Van den Berg, “Getting Serious About Limits to Growth: ELR and Economic Restructuring Under Decroissance,” in Full Employment and Social Justice: Solidarity and Sustainability (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 101. 32 Theodore Kupfer, “Democrats’ Job Guarantee: Bernie Sanders in Mainstream Now,” National Review, April 26, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/ democrats-jobs-guarantee-bernie-sanders-is-mainstream-now/. 33 “Military Spending in the United States,” Statistics for 2015, https://www. nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-spending-united-states/; equally sobering, Anthony Cordesman points out that, based on figures assembled for the Overseas Budget for the Contingency Operations, between 2001 and 2018, the US government will have at least spent a total of $1, 909 billion and more likely $2 trillion on the occupation of Iran and Afghanistan as well as other related operations in places such as Syria. See “U.S. Military Spending: The Costs of Wars,” 7, Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 10, 2017, https://csis-prod. s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/170710_Cost_War_AHC.pdf?am9Dzaf qgSHdhfNj2mvflnZUyM5j4L8M. 34 Matt Bruenig, “Just What Is a Job Guarantee?” Jacobin Magazine, May 13, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/full-employment-job-guarantee-berniebruenig. 35 Josh Bivens, “How Do Our Job Creation Recommendations Stack Up Against a Job Guarantee?” April 12, 2018. 36 William Mitchell, “The Conservative Opposition to Full Employment Legislation in the United States,” July 13, 2017, http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=36454; Mitchell and Wray, “Full Employment Through a Job Guarantee: A Response to the

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Critics,” Working Paper, no. 39, January 2005, http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/ WP39-MitchellWray.pdf; Tcherneva, “Full Employment: The Road Not Taken,” 4–5. 37 See Dean Baker, “Dems Jobs Guarantee Isn’t Nearly as Easy as It Sounds,” The Daily Beast, April 27, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/dems-job-guarantee-isntnearly-as-easy-as-it-sounds?ref=scroll. 38 Claire Connelly, “Why a Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Substitute for a Guaranteed Job,” ABC News, January 19, 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/news/201701-19/universal-basic-income-vs-job-guarantee. 39 Van Den Berg, “Getting Serious About the Limits to Growth: ELR and Economic Restructuring Under Decroissance,” 85–92. Van Den Berg borrows the term from Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell’s 1971 “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society.” 40 Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk, “The Basic Income Illusion,” Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 1 (Winter 2018): 164. 41 Ibid., 170–5. 42 Robert Pollin, Back to Full Employment (Boston: The MIT Press, 2012), 154. 43 Ibid. 44 Lennart Erixon, “The Swedish Third Way: An Assessment of the Performance and Validity of the Rehn–Meidner Model,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 32 (2008): 369. 45 Pollin, 31–2; Helen Lachs Ginsburg et al., “Special Issue on: The Challenge of Full Employment in the Global Economy, Editorial Introduction,” 11–13; Peter Gowan and Mio Tastas Viktorsson, “Tackling Wealth Inequality Like a Swede,” 2–3, People’s Policy Project, August 21, 2017, https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/08/21/ tackling-wealth-inequality-like-a-swede/. 46 As Pollin notes, inflation may have averaged 6.7 percent, but this period included the oil shocks of the 1970s. Escalating oil prices rather than a tight labor market explain the inflationary spike. See Back to Full Employment, 32–3, as well as Benjamin Stdudebaker’s excellent piece titled “Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70s,” https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2012/12/30/stagflation-what-reallyhappened-in-the-70s/. 47 Gowan and Tastas Viktorsson, 6, ibid.

Conclusion

None of what we explored in the previous chapter suggests that economic democracy is coming to the United States any time soon. What it does suggest is that progressive economists, thinkers, activists, and intellectuals on the margins of the employment discussion are raising the possibility of greater worker participation as well as control over the production process and the society that it serves. Even those closer to power, in the mainstream of the debate, raise discomfiting questions about the capacity of capitalism to deliver on its promises—to provide anything that approximates the “freedom from want” that Franklin D. Roosevelt so famously championed. For a growing percentage of Americans, it seems clear that the turbo-capitalism that they have inherited cannot prevent unemployment. More than this, as Matthew Forstater and others before him have argued, many are coming to the conclusion that unemployment is intrinsic to the system itself. What will happen to this deepening realization is a matter of speculation. What is clear, however, is that any significant consideration of the idea of a job guarantee raises questions about the organization of power and the distribution of wealth in a capitalist society. This cannot be easily dismissed by technocratic jargon, ideological assertion, or prevailing economic doctrine. The most progressive proponents of genuine full employment never believed that it could be achieved strictly by macroeconomic policy. Nor did they believe that banishing the specter of unemployment was a matter for economists and policymakers alone. Instead, they understood the close relationship between social movements and policy change, between social mobilization and political transformation. Since its inception, the notion of a governmentbacked program that provided employment to all who needed it has generated humanistic, egalitarian, and emancipatory notions that could not be contained by legislative pragmatism. Some of those legislators, including James Murray,

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Augustus Hawkins, and Robert Wagner, became themselves the exponents of a vision of social change that extended well beyond the political labels they wore or the legislation they desperately fought to achieve. The renewed interest in cooperatives, the advent of a socialist insurgency supported by a wave of disenchanted young people, the expansion of environmental consciousness, and the growing recognition that racial and gender inequality cannot be resolved without attention to structural economic injustice suggest that this kind of full employment thought has returned. The experience of a global pandemic that has thrown tens of millions out of work worldwide and has hit the United States with peculiar cruelty has only underlined the urgency of guaranteed incomes, adequate health care, state intervention for the disadvantaged, and guaranteed employment. As Americans once again confront the erosion of economic security, more are persuaded to consider the central dilemma of unemployment in a capitalist society: the existence of incredibly productive forces alongside legions of idled workers. Edward Bellamy captured it in Looking Backward, as did Henry George in Progress and Poverty, but more recently, philosopher Paul Mattick has reflected on this contradiction. It is perhaps the most glaring of all in a society that preaches free enterprise amid the incontrovertible evidence of chronic economic inequality. Reflecting on the mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 2008, Mattick observed that “even if there are not enough jobs—paid employment, there is plenty of work to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy.”1 It is exactly for this reason that the proponents of full employment have met vigilant, organized opposition since the 1940s. It is also precisely for this reason that the idea will continue to speak to those who, pressed by circumstances, begin to question the creed of radical individualism that has served the dominant interests so well. These same Americans may even begin to believe that Roosevelt might just have been right: that only economic democracy can make voting something more than an empty civic ritual.

Note 1

Paul Mattick, Business as Usual: the Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 107.

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Index Aaron, Daniel 34 n.25 Ackley, Gardner 193 activism 2, 9–10, 39, 47, 54, 93, 105, 108, 110, 183, 187, 210, 238 AFL-CIO 153, 156, 161–3, 165, 186, 193, 205–6, 216 aggregate demand 15, 32, 109, 157–8, 211, 233, 236–8, 242, 245, 250 Agricultural Adjustments Act 24 Alexis, Marcus 170–2, 174 American Association of Social Workers 105 American Farm Economic Association 32 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 39, 76, 89, 133 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 187, 190, 192 American Jewish Committee 187 American Jewish Congress 105, 213 Americans for Democratic Action 187, 206 American Veterans Committee 106 Anderson, Bernard E. 170, 175, 183, 215–16, 232 Anderson, Karen Tucker 121 n.31 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 184, 188, 194, 200, 216, 219–20 anti-communism 138–9, 154. See also communism anti-inflation 144, 158, 185, 194, 199, 218, 236. See also inflation anti-monopoly reform 37, 67, 73–4, 81 anti-New Deal 52, 56, 90, 97, 117, 136–7 anti-war movement 164–5, 167 Archer, Robin 10 Aronoff, Kate 242 Aron, Sylvia 187, 215, 242 Attewell, Steven 11, 12 n.2, 71, 87, 98, 118 automation 1, 90, 145, 147, 154–5, 161, 171, 246

Bailey, Stephen 26, 87, 126 n.82 Baker, Dean 166, 239, 245 Getting Back to Full Employment 238–9 Banking and Currency Committee 69, 87, 96, 116 Bean, Louis 67, 115 Bellamy, Edward 9, 21, 258 Bergh, Hendrik van den 243, 249 Bernstein, Jared, Getting Back to Full Employment 238–9 Beveridge Report 51, 67 Big Three auto manufacturers 210 Bivens, Josh 244–5 Black Caucus Study Group 172 Black Panthers 177 Black people 87, 92, 94, 147, 157, 162, 170–2, 177, 205, 208. See also race/ racism black nationalism 168, 173 communities/community 153–4, 156, 171, 174, 181 n.53 freedom movement 153, 155, 168 liberation 154, 156 migrants 95 seeking employment 145, 172 unemployment 4, 142, 156, 162, 167, 171–2 women 97, 121 n.31, 140 working-class 97 Blanc, Louis 8 blue-collar workers 7, 12, 43. See also white-collar workers Blyth, Mark 48, 78 Bottomly, R.V. 80 Bowring, Anais Miodek 7, 11, 71, 98, 229 Brenner, Robert 135, 167, 196, 209 Brick, Howard 84 n.40, 199 Brinkley, Alan 71, 87, 114–15, 118 The End of Reform 119 n.3 Browne, Robert S. 170, 172, 174–7, 181 n.53, 183, 232–3, 244, 251 Bruenig, Matt 244, 249

278 Bruner, Jerome 60 n.29, 65–6 budget deficits. See deficit spending buffer-stock. See employment buffer-stock Bureau of Labor Statistics 135, 252 n.5 Burns, Arthur 145 Burns, Eveline 91 Business First alliance 216 business interests 4, 37, 52, 67–8, 72, 88, 139, 167–8 business opposition 6, 43, 78, 88, 111–12, 115, 177 Byrd, Harry 51 California Farm Bureau Federation 37 capitalism 2–6, 9–12, 16, 18, 21–2, 25–6, 31, 41, 51, 56–7, 68–70, 72, 75, 78, 88, 95, 99, 109, 115, 138–9, 142, 144, 147, 160–1, 163, 173, 185, 188, 208, 210–11, 218, 232–3, 241, 257. See also economic system competitive 18–20, 23, 56 corporate 28, 74, 88, 183, 208 and democracy 24, 29 free market 17, 48 function of 17 industrial 15, 19, 57, 74, 233, 250 liberal 12, 159 modern 15, 29, 48, 68, 74–5, 110, 189 monopoly 74, 77, 109, 210 private 104, 110 capitalist accumulation 16, 21, 48 Carlton, Francis 131–2 Carter, Jimmy 196–8, 213, 217 Catholic corporatism 40, 46, 89 Catholic Social Action Department 48, 96 Caulkins, J. B. 99–102, 106, 123 n.40, 188 central program-making unit system 24 Chappell, Marisa 203 Chase, Stuart 16–18, 23, 33 n.6, 39–40, 45, 53, 61 n.37, 132, 213 Chicago Democratic Convention 169 Ciepley, David 127 n.85 CIO-PAC 53, 56, 57, 63 n.73, 89–92, 94, 100–1, 107, 125 n.66, 135, 137 accusations on 56 People’s Program of 1944 55, 63 n.73 “The Answer Is Full Employment” 156 Citizens National Committee (CNC) 112–13, 177

Index Citizens Research Bureau 106 Civil Rights Act of 1964 155 civil rights movement 147, 153–5, 157, 160–1, 164, 166, 185, 248 Civil Works Administration (CWA) 37–8, 98 class analysis 159, 172 class consciousness 1, 10, 40 class divisions 1, 65, 91, 241 Cleveland, Grover 69, 175 climate change 243, 247 Cobble, Dorothy Sue 189, 222–3 n.20 Cohen, Lizabeth 119 n.3 collective bargaining 18, 28, 110, 132, 137, 139, 193, 250 collectivism 40, 49, 73, 111 Collins, William J. 93 Colm, Gerhard 67, 156 Committee for Constitutional Government 126 n.83 Committee for Economic Development (CED) 71, 88, 142–3 Committee of Economic Advisers (CEA) 145 Committee on Economic Security 11, 34 n.19 commodification 195 commodity/commodities 18, 46, 69, 141 Communications Workers of America 160 communism 16, 32, 56. See also anticommunism Communist Party 9, 21–2, 103–4, 199 community organizations 10, 12, 108 compensatory spending 19–20, 24, 32, 78, 87, 111, 118 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act 218 Congressional Record 45, 103 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 4, 39 conservatism 90, 98, 163, 168, 215, 229 consumer goods 15, 17 consumption 16, 32, 36 n.48, 48, 74, 89, 91, 135, 154, 219 mass 20–1, 61 n.37, 96, 116, 119 n.3, 140 private 26 public 5 underconsumption 20, 43, 78

Index contingent labors/workers 252–3 n.5 convictions 10, 12, 16, 19–20, 22–3, 44, 50, 66, 89, 101, 103, 111, 133, 143, 213, 216, 236 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation 163 Cooper, Dona 218 corporate campaign 133, 135–6, 216 Council for Social Action of the Congregational Christian Churches 105 Council of Economic Advisors 211 Cowie, Jefferson 170, 198, 204 Coxey, Jacob 8 CPUSA 103–4 cultural pluralism 22, 39 culture of poverty 154, 158, 215 Darrity, William 235, 244 Debs, Eugene 18, 25 De Caux, Len 138 deficit spending 6, 21, 52, 68, 76–8, 97, 112, 114, 142, 206 democracy 28–9, 73, 90, 99, 116, 240 democratic cooperation 41, 191 democratic participation 31, 105, 186, 192 democratic revitalization 168 democratic socialism 2–3, 6, 12, 21–3, 32, 44, 63 n.73, 88, 90, 95, 134, 160, 173, 186, 191, 250 (see also socialism) economic (see economic democracy) industrial 26, 44, 46, 79–80, 110–11 social (see social democracy) working class 25, 37, 58, 81 workplace 3, 169, 212, 252 n.4 Democratic Party 2, 56, 66, 104, 138, 170, 238, 245, 248 Democrats 45, 49, 98, 163, 198, 229 demonstrations/protests 9, 107–9, 114, 119, 130, 133, 138, 154–5, 169, 186, 199, 201, 204–7. See also strikes; walkouts Denise, Malcolm 201 Dennison, Henry 20–1 Diamond, Irma 188–92, 197 discrimination economic 154 gender 3, 141, 173, 189, 208 (see also gender)

279

racial 93, 97, 99, 110, 118, 141–2, 153, 171–2, 175, 208 (see also race/ racism) Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement 177 domestic labor 51, 190 Donahue, Kathleen G. 119 n.6 Duboff, Richard 150 n.54 DuBois, W. E. B. 44 Durand, G. W. 80 earned income tax credit (EITC) 240, 245 Economic Bill of Rights, 1944 11, 54–5, 63 n.73, 65, 81, 91, 146, 170 economic crisis 2–3, 19–20, 23, 37, 186, 207, 213–14 financial crisis of 2008 1, 3, 237, 239 economic democracy 10, 24, 29, 44–5, 47, 51, 58, 67, 80, 88, 90, 94, 134, 140, 147, 155, 167, 168–9, 173, 183, 185, 203, 210, 215, 221, 235, 241, 247, 249–50, 257–8 economic expansion 64 n.77, 140, 143, 146, 196, 249 economic freedom 112 economic growth 30, 88, 140, 142, 145–6, 157, 172, 184, 196–7, 208, 236. See also GDP growth economic imperialism 27, 55, 184 economic inequality 2, 103, 140, 154, 157, 243, 247, 258 economic injustice 153–4, 160, 258 economic justice 31, 54, 118, 154, 164, 186, 199 economic planning 1, 10, 15–16, 18–19, 21–2, 26, 28, 32, 37, 41, 44, 47, 49, 53, 56, 66–8, 72–4, 87–8, 91–2, 95, 98, 104, 106, 111, 114, 116, 118, 130, 132–4, 136, 139, 147, 155–8, 162–3, 176, 184, 186, 188, 194, 196, 198, 208, 212, 215–17, 219, 232 economic power 7, 12, 28, 51, 57, 73, 89, 109, 115, 169, 195, 241 economic reform 16, 161, 167, 197 Economic Report 118, 146 economic security 40, 44, 50–1, 53, 68, 79, 108, 161–2, 175, 205, 217, 247, 250, 258 economic system 2, 10, 27, 29, 38, 44, 74, 109, 203, 211, 218, 234. See also capitalism

280 economy of abundance 17, 22, 29, 56, 91 effective demand theory 76 egalitarian/egalitarianism 3, 6, 11–12, 30, 32, 44, 47, 92, 94–5, 106, 173, 185, 189, 197, 210, 249 Eight-Hour Movement 18, 25 emancipation 4, 7, 11, 22, 25, 130, 141, 155, 173, 188–91, 199, 202, 205, 217, 249, 257 employer of last resort (ELR) policy 235, 243, 249 Employment Act of 1946 87, 118, 119 n.3, 146, 211 employment buffer-stock 235–6, 238, 247, 250 empowerment, worker 2, 46, 51, 130, 141 End Poverty in California 23 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 189 Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act of 1976 184 Eulau, Heinz 115 Executive Order 9599 136 Ezekiel, Mordecai 24–6, 28, 31–2, 40, 48, 66, 109, 196 Jobs for All Through Industrial Expansion 24, 40 Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) 49, 81, 92–3, 103, 123 n.43 Fair Labor Standards Act 28 Family Assistance Plan 246 Farquharson, Mary 163, 165 fascism 22, 29, 31, 39, 45, 80, 93–4, 102 Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America 39, 43, 48, 96 Federal Emergency Relief Act 37 federal government 42, 68–9, 75, 87, 89, 93, 97, 129, 136, 154, 157–8, 166–7, 172, 185, 193, 208–9, 238 Federal Reserve and the Treasury 142, 207 Federal Reserve Board policy 14 n.19, 143–4, 158, 185, 245 feminism/feminists 4, 6, 12, 102, 169, 187–9, 191–2, 198, 202–3 Filene, Lincoln 34 n.19 Findings Committee 39–40 Finley, Murray 186–7, 218–19 First World War 20, 41, 97

Index fiscal management 4, 73, 88, 140, 143, 169, 185, 206 fiscal policy 20–1, 29, 39, 70, 78, 142, 185, 217, 233, 235–7 Fleischman, Harry 225 n.61 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley 203 Ford, Gerald 196, 209 foreign policy 165 Foreman, Clark 55 Forstater, Matthew 231–5, 240, 257 Fraser, Doug 213 Fraser, Steve 59 n.9, 63 n.73 Freedom Budget 155–8, 160, 163–7, 170, 173, 175, 183, 205, 216, 247 free enterprise 4, 30, 32, 73, 75, 89, 91, 96, 104, 109, 115, 139, 146. See also market economy free market 3, 17, 48, 75, 146, 210, 212, 230, 236–7, 246 full economy 146, 174, 195, 235 Full Employment Action Council 4, 188, 192, 194, 204, 206, 230 Full Employment and the National Budget, CNC’s 111 Full Employment Bill of 1945 6, 26, 68, 70, 79, 87, 98–9, 111, 115, 118, 119 n.3, 138, 144, 156, 183–5 Fuller, Helen 136 Galbraith, James K. 239 Galloway, George B. 29 Gans, Herbert 156 GDP growth 140, 166, 238, 240. See also economic growth Gellermann, Marjorie 197–8 gender 97, 102, 189–91 discrimination 3, 141, 173, 189, 208 diversity 170 equality 5, 102, 192, 199, 221 inequality 101, 123 n.41, 185, 202, 258 injustice 190 prejudice 47, 100 segregation 189 General Motors (GM) 210 GM Assembly Division (GMAD) 200–1 strike 131–3 genuine full employment 77, 143–4, 154, 174, 191, 209, 219–20, 242, 257

Index George, Walter 98 Gerard, Sumner 111 GI Bill 53, 67, 142 Gilded Age 9, 210 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 190–1 Ginsburg, Helen Lachs 179 n.16, 202, 206–7, 213, 230, 249 Goldberg, Gertrude Schaffner 230 Goldenweiser, E. A. 42, 90 Gourevitch, Alex 248–9 government agencies 34 n.19, 42, 65, 70, 136 government intervention 6–7, 9, 12, 32–3, 43, 47, 52, 67–8, 71, 83 n.31, 89, 93, 104, 143, 172, 176, 219, 229, 237 government spending 6, 70, 166, 209–10, 214–15, 231, 236 government-sponsored work programs 243 grassroots organizations 169, 204 Graves, Elsa 101–2 Great Depression 3, 8–10, 15–20, 22, 29, 38, 44–5, 57, 66, 73–5, 103, 111, 142, 160, 204 Great Society programs 6, 159, 166–9, 211, 218 Green New Deal 2 Gross, Bertram 67, 144–5, 157, 183–5 Haber, William 123 n.40 Hale, Edward Everett 68–9, 175, 177, 242 Hamilton, Charles V. 218 Hamilton, Darrick 244 Hansen, Alvin 29–32, 72, 77, 79, 83 n.31, 83 n.37, 110, 116, 132, 196 After the War—Full Employment 51, 64 n.77 Economic Problems of the Post-War World 30 The Postwar Economy 30 Harrington, Michael 4, 154, 156, 163, 186, 194, 208–12, 214, 217, 219, 226 n.67, 229, 232–5, 242, 251 The Issue and the Movement 207 stagflation 209 Harris, Seymour 109 Harvey, Philip 11, 13 n.6, 236 Securing the Right to Employment 254 n.15

281

Hastie, William 94–5 Hawkins, Augustus 170, 183–6, 193, 196, 203, 220, 258 Hayek, Friedrich 78, 112 The Road to Serfdom 114 health-care system 2, 30, 139, 173, 213, 234 Henderson, Leon 90, 132 heterodox approach 29, 172, 232, 235–7 Hicks, Granville 21–2, 24, 42, 72, 162, 213 The Communist Manifesto 22 The Great Tradition 22 I Like America 22 social suffering of labor 22–3 Higgs, William 193 Hillman, Sidney 53–4, 56–7, 62 n.62, 91 Hinrichs, A. F. 40, 84 n.38 Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions 105 Hoover, Calvin B. 20, 33, 35 n.44 Horowitz, Rachelle 154–5 House Conference on Unemployment 41 Howe, Irving 164 Humphrey–Hawkins bill 185, 187–9, 192, 197–8, 204–5, 212–13, 216, 218, 229 Humphrey, Hubert 170, 184, 193–4, 219–20, 258 Illinois Committee for Full Employment 106 immigrant worker 141 Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP) 105, 107 Independent Voters of Illinois 106–7 individualism 17, 23, 185, 191 liberal 207 rugged 13 n.6, 57 industrial accidents 22 industrial councils 89, 91, 99–100 industrial expansion 24–5, 79 industrial laborers 10, 15, 47, 49, 90, 97, 130, 137–8, 146, 171 Industrial Union Council of the CIO 106 inflation 17, 27, 98, 112, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143–5, 158, 165, 168–9, 172, 176, 179 n.16, 185, 193–8,

282 207–9, 216, 218–19, 231–3, 236–8, 244, 250, 256 n.46. See also antiinflation Interfaith Conference on Unemployment 39–41 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) 106 interracial unionism 56, 92, 94, 161, 167–8, 173, 186 investment(s) 26, 77, 143, 173, 209, 211, 213, 215, 231, 242 capital 24, 31–2, 48, 112, 184 control over 74, 211, 213–15, 243 government 6, 9, 89, 113, 236 military 145–6, 169 private 25, 69–70, 77, 113, 211 public 30, 32, 40, 42, 48, 51, 251 social 118, 190, 233 Jacobs, Meg 131 purchasing power program 148 n.8 job creation 1, 3–8, 68, 98, 112–13, 143, 147, 157, 167, 172, 176, 196, 205, 207–8, 213–14, 216, 229, 232, 237, 247 direct 6, 8, 10–11, 42, 70–1, 157, 186, 189, 197, 230–1, 235, 237, 254 n.15 government-sponsored 214 New Deal’s 37, 41 private enterprise 100 programs 7, 19, 70, 98, 204, 214, 245, 254 n.23 public sector 197, 213 job guarantee 2, 5, 19, 39, 41–4, 53, 67–8, 73, 89, 96, 101, 108, 116, 117–18, 130, 134, 156, 162, 170, 175, 183–4, 186, 188, 191–2, 194–5, 197, 202, 219–20, 230, 234–41, 243–9 Job Guarantee Office 192, 197 joblessness. See unemployment job security 38, 46, 53, 112, 119, 133 job segregation 47, 93, 121 n.31 Johnson, Lyndon 163, 186, 193 War on Poverty 157–60, 162, 166 Joint Committee on the National Budget 76 Kahn, Tom 154–6, 163 Kalecki, Michal 76–7, 84 n.38, 89, 111–12, 213, 215, 235, 242, 244

Index Katznelson, Ira 122 n.35 Keller, L. E. 44, 46–7 Kelton, Stephanie 231, 239 Kennedy, David 135 Kennedy, Robert 164 Kessler-Harris, Alice 70, 189 Keynesianism 6, 68, 109, 111, 140, 209, 211, 233, 236–7 business-oriented 88 commercial 3–4, 142, 161, 184, 220 demand management 68, 144, 157, 221, 240 fiscal management 4, 29, 71, 89, 169, 185 military 140, 146 social 56, 71, 98 Keynes, John Maynard 26, 68–9, 77, 83 n.37, 210, 231–2, 237 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 76 Keyserling, Leon 4, 143, 146, 156–60, 163–6, 170–1, 173, 183–4, 195–6, 202, 219, 232–3, 242 Kilgore, Harvey 67 Kilgore-Murray bill 49, 55, 65 King, Coretta Scott 186–7, 199, 216 King, Martin Luther 155, 163–4, 168, 175, 183, 186, 188, 212, 220, 232 Poor People’s Campaign 166, 186, 205, 216 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 13 n.2, 160–2 Kotz, David 223 n.24 Kupfer, Theodore 244 Labor Council for Community Action 107 labor experts 252 n.5 labor-intensive method 233 labor-left alignment 99, 176–7, 185–6 labor market 7, 20, 46, 52, 93, 101, 106, 111, 147, 170–1, 177, 184, 188–9, 191, 193, 203, 213, 229, 241, 246, 250, 256 n.46 labor movement 2, 5–6, 43, 79–80, 88, 92, 116–17, 136–7, 153, 161–2, 164, 169, 192 labor supply 60 n.24, 144, 220 labor union/unionism 5, 9–10, 25, 37, 56, 91, 94, 130, 137, 141, 154–5, 160, 187, 191, 193, 203, 216, 220 labor uprisings of 1945–46 119, 129, 136

Index laissez-faire system 18, 32, 57, 68, 88 Landsorganisationen (LO) 250–1 League of Revolutionary Black Workers 177 League of Women Shoppers 102, 105, 131 Le Blanc, Paul 8, 11, 164 Leeds, Morris E. 34 n.19 legislation 37, 40, 49, 54, 68, 73, 80, 99, 106–9, 111, 137–8, 163, 173, 177, 186, 189, 193–4, 196, 211, 229, 247, 258 legitimacy 37, 65, 67, 101–3, 118, 167, 169 Lekachman, Robert 194–5 Lerner, Abba 231, 233 Levine, Naomi 213 Levinson, Andrew 204 Levison, Andrew 170, 215, 217–18 The Full Employment Alternative 214 Levy Institute 231, 235, 239–40 liberalism 7, 12, 50, 98, 177, 193 New Deal 50 postwar 201 religious 41, 43 tax-and-spend 215 liberal-labor campaign 40, 88, 207 liberation 5, 11, 22, 154–6, 187–8, 191–2, 199, 229 Lichtenstein, Nelson 102, 124 n.59, 130 politicized bargaining 131 Lipsitz, George 79, 133 Livingston, David 200, 204–5 Local 1199 union 186 Loeb, James 54 Loomis, Eric 246 Lucas, Scott 45 Lundeen, Ernest 10 MacLean, Nancy 205 Maisano, Chris 207 make-work program 244–5 marginal workers 101, 188 market economy 17, 19, 27, 29–30, 48, 115, 200, 210. See also free enterprise Marxism 1 Marx, Karl 1–2, 22–3, 26, 233 Mattick, Paul 258 maximum employment 20–1, 24, 33, 40, 48, 68–9, 92–4, 98, 113, 118, 141–2, 172, 195, 210, 214, 230–1

283

McCabe, Thomas 144 McGovern, George 168, 197 McGowan, R. A. 39, 42 McNeil, George 9, 18, 25, 96 Meany, George 40, 186, 192–3, 205 Meidner Group 251 Meidner, Rudolph 250 Memphis Sanitation Strike 205 Merriam, Charles 20, 50 Meyer, Julie 89 middle class 22–3, 37, 43, 54, 99, 101, 106–7, 131, 140, 146, 164, 167–8, 188–9, 191, 203, 230 migrants/migration 92–3, 95, 141, 145 military spending 140, 146, 163, 165–6 Milkman, Ruth 47, 121 n.31 Milliband, Ralph 233–4, 254 n.14 Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party 10 Minsky, Hyman 231, 235, 250 Mitchell, Wesley Clair 18, 23 Mitchell, William 231, 235–6 Full Employment Abandoned 236 mobilization 10, 24, 55, 105, 199, 216, 257 mass 52, 131 political 54, 131 wartime 28, 57, 102–3 modern monetary theory/theorists (MMT) 231–2, 234, 237–9 monetary policy 27, 70, 143, 158, 185, 217, 233, 235–6, 240 money supply 17, 143, 231 Moon, Henry Lee 56 Mosler, Warren 235–6 Moynihan Report, 1964 162 Mucciaroni, Gary 5 multiracial movement 98, 165, 167–8, 188, 193, 203, 205, 243 Mumford, Lewis 15, 23 self-equilibrating economy 19 Murray Full Employment Bill 46, 71, 76, 88, 96, 104, 106, 110, 117, 141, 240 Murray, James E. 4, 40, 61 n.41, 65–70, 72, 74–6, 80, 84 n.38, 98, 102–3, 105, 110, 113, 115–19, 213, 219, 242, 257 Murray-Patman bill 117 Murray, Philip 41, 46, 53, 66, 79, 89–90, 116, 138 Murray-Wagner-Dingle bill 67, 106 Myers, James 39

284

Index

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 92, 97–8, 101–2, 160, 187 National Association of Manufacturers 91, 113, 137 national budget 21, 32, 44, 104 National Catholic Welfare Conference 39, 105 National Citizens Committee 132 National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC) 53, 55, 63 n.73 National Conference of Jewish Women 105 National Consumers’ League 105 National Council of Churches 187, 230 National Council of Jewish Women 48, 61 n.41, 102 National Farmers Union 54–5, 102 Dairy Farmers’ Digest 91 national health insurance system 51, 67, 168 national income 25, 27, 42, 166, 216, 242 National Industrial Recovery Act 18, 76 National Jobs for All Coalition (NJFAC) 230 National Labor Relations Act 28, 42 National Lawyers’ Guild 105–6 National Maritime Union (NMU) 94–5 National Organization for Women (NOW) 187–9, 205 National Planning Association 21, 71 National Planning Commission 19 National Production and Employment Budget 70 National Public Housing Conference 106 National Recovery Administration 32, 75 National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) 30–1, 44, 50–2, 53–4, 65, 67, 70, 73, 79, 82 n.20, 89–91, 121 n.28, 177, 219, 233 Public Works Committee 60 n.24 Security, Work, and Relief Policies report 51–2, 60 n.29, 64 n.77, 185 National Urban League 147, 160, 187, 197, 203, 218 National Welfare Rights Organization 169 National Women’s Political Caucus 187, 197, 204

Negro American Labor Council (NALC) 153–4 neoliberal/neoliberalism 3, 112, 198, 230, 236–8, 243, 249 New Deal policy 1, 3, 6, 11, 21, 24, 28, 37–8, 40–2, 47, 49, 51, 53–4, 56–7, 65, 71, 80, 87, 89, 93, 98, 101, 112, 118, 134, 140, 146–7, 158–9, 187, 202, 211, 219, 243, 247 New Initiatives for Full Employment (NIFE) 230 New Left 164–5, 168–9, 185 Nixon, Richard 3, 167–8, 183, 196, 209, 246 Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) 236, 247 Norris, George 62 n.62 Occupy Movement 241, 243 Office of Price Administration (OPA) 103, 130–1 O’Mahoney, Joseph 70, 80 Operation Market Garden 43 opinion poll 52, 215, 218 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 209 organized labor 10, 41, 43, 46, 49, 53, 71, 89–90, 99, 106–7, 110, 130–1, 136–7, 139, 155, 161–3, 167, 192–4, 200, 205, 230 Outland, George 76 Oxnam, G. Bromley 96 Paehlke, Robert C. 164–5 paid labor 47, 100, 190–1. See also unpaid labor Patman, Wright 117, 118, 198 Patton, James G. 55, 65, 67, 91–2, 103, 132 Paul, Mark 244 peace movement 164 Pegler, Westbrook 56, 95 Pells, Richard H. 33 n.7 Peterson, Jan 202 Phelps, Christopher 199 Philip Randolph Institute 156 Phillips Curve 158, 208, 216, 236 Pierson, John H. G. 26, 28, 32, 35 n.44, 40, 60 n.24, 79, 110, 116

Index against economic imperialism 27 Full Employment 26 Pius XI, Pope, Quadregesimo Anno 46 planned economy 23, 67, 90, 112 Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow symposium 18–19 Polanyi, Karl 17 The Great Transformation 19 policymakers 3–4, 98, 102, 145–6, 172, 184, 186, 188, 196, 207, 229, 235, 257 Political Action Committee 53 political economy 16, 56, 68, 88, 101, 145, 169, 183 politicized bargaining 131 Pollin, Robert 238–9, 249, 256 n.46 poorly-paid service sector jobs 242 Popular Front 9, 22, 39, 55, 90, 92, 95, 103–6 postcapitalism 84 n.40 postwar period 43, 47, 58, 103, 129–31, 134, 138–9, 141–4, 146, 184, 245 postwar planning 40, 44–5, 48, 55, 65, 80, 88–9, 92, 96, 107, 112 Potomac Associates 214–15 poverty 24, 40, 109, 154, 156–62, 164, 166, 168–9, 174, 185, 202, 207, 215, 217, 232, 237, 240–1, 243. See also unemployment powerbrokers 10, 77, 94, 103, 207, 244 price controls 12 n.2, 28, 66, 98, 112, 129–32, 136, 168, 176, 193–5, 216, 238 price stability 142, 145–6, 158, 170, 172, 175, 193–6, 207, 216, 218, 235, 240 private property 5, 17, 22, 31, 89–90 private sector/enterprise 6–7, 19–20, 25, 31–2, 42, 46, 50–2, 56, 66–70, 73–4, 89, 92, 100–1, 103, 105, 108, 110–13, 115, 117, 125 n.66, 134, 147, 159, 173, 175–7, 185, 190, 203–4, 209, 211, 213, 233–4, 236, 238, 240, 242–5 profit/profitability 5–6, 16–17, 19–20, 23–5, 27–32, 131, 133, 135, 139, 145–6, 167, 209, 231, 236, 240, 242, 251 Progressive Era 9, 15–16, 60 n.24, 73 Progressive party campaign of 1948 186

285

PSE program 240–1 public good 17, 132, 233, 240 public policy 1, 31, 66, 88, 229, 232 public sector 141, 185, 190, 197–8, 211, 213–15, 217, 229–30, 233–4, 236, 242 public service jobs 213, 234–5, 245 race/racism 40–1, 87–8, 92, 94, 97, 154, 159, 184, 189. See also Black people diversity 170 interracial solidarity 94 pogroms 41 racial discrimination 93, 97, 99, 110, 118, 141–2, 153, 171–2, 208 racial equality 4, 7, 22, 56–7, 89, 92, 94, 99, 141, 154, 170, 205, 216, 221 racial inequality 15, 46–7, 93, 101, 123 n.41, 140, 153, 160, 165, 171, 174, 185, 202, 258 racial injustice 140, 153 racial justice 3, 11, 14 n.19, 88, 118, 153, 172, 186, 199 racial privilege 168, 188 racial segregation 88, 154 racist walkouts 130 Randolph, Philip 93, 153, 155–7, 161, 163–5, 186 rank-and-file workers 39, 56, 95, 116, 132, 165, 167, 188, 206 Rauschenbusch, Walter 23, 160 Reagan, Ronald 163, 209, 231 realism 94, 175 recession 19, 114, 140–1, 144, 147, 169, 209–10, 231, 236, 238–9 reconversion policy 55, 67, 100–1, 134–5, 158 regimentation 88, 98, 105, 114 Rehn, Gosta 250 renewed interest in full employment 1–2, 154, 258 Reuther, Walter P. 91, 107, 131, 148 n.13 Ribicoff, Abraham 164 Richter, Irving 130 Riessman, Frank 204 right to employment/work 7, 11, 46, 65–6, 69–70, 87, 90, 97, 102, 119, 137, 185, 191, 197, 220

286

Index

right-wing populism/populist (movement) 1–2, 48–9, 50, 57, 220, 243 Robinson, Cleveland 170, 175 Robinson, Joan 76, 244 Roe, Charlotte 164–5 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 18–19, 41, 54–5, 58, 64 n.77, 65, 96, 105, 143, 257–8 administration 10, 37, 42, 56, 66–7, 114, 136 Four Freedoms 11, 67 re-election of 65 Rosen, Sumner 183, 252 n.4 Ruml, Beardsley 20, 71, 88, 132, 231 Rustin, Bayard 154–6, 158–9, 161, 163–7, 170–1, 173, 175, 186, 188, 212, 216 “From Protest to Politics” 155 and Paehlke 164 Ryan, John 9, 18, 39, 96 Sanders, Bernie 239, 244 scab labor 93 Schmidt, Emerson P. 76, 113–14 Schultze, Charles 198 Schweickart, David 226 n.74 Second World War 3, 8, 11, 27, 45, 97, 146, 242 Seligman, Ben B. 115 Shapley, Harlow 106 Sheil, Bernard J. 44–7, 50, 66, 132 Sifton, Paul 54, 79–80, 114–15 skepticism 58, 110, 144, 166, 210 Smith-Connally Act 49, 56 Smith, Ferdinand 4, 94–5 Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference 39 social change 47, 191, 243, 258 social contract 18, 29, 48, 136–7, 217 cost-plus 52, 79, 112 wartime 108, 135 social democracy 12, 19, 29, 46, 48, 50–1, 55, 67, 73, 75, 87, 93, 99, 106, 139, 141, 164, 170, 173, 185–6, 190, 200, 219, 250 Social Democratic Party 250 socialism 22, 33 n.7, 44, 115, 169, 177, 234, 249. See also democracy, democratic socialism socialistic legislation 111 Socialist Party 10, 104, 155

social justice 22, 31, 39, 43, 175, 195, 207 Social Justice Commission of the Conference of American Rabbis 39 social movement unionism 134, 200 social organizations 42–3, 138, 156 social reforms 1, 15, 19, 94, 153 social revolution 45, 50 social security 11, 20, 30, 32, 37, 50–4, 60 n.29, 67–8, 89, 92, 106, 108, 159, 248 Social Security Act 10, 67, 91 social spending 163, 168, 185, 236 social transformation 2, 156, 243, 247 solidarity 5, 94, 96, 99, 133, 137–8, 161, 250–1 Soule, George 15, 39–40, 42, 162 A Planned Economy 16 Southern Conference for Human Welfare 105 Special Study Group Report 215–16 Sproul, Alan 143–4 Stanczyk, Lucas 248–9 Standby Job Corps 192 Stein, David 204 Steinem, Gloria 186, 203 Stein, Herbert 87, 144 Stein, Judith 167–8 Stone, I.F. 3, 109–10, 175, 212–13, 219 Storrs, Landon 123 n.41 Streator, Olive 40–1 strikes 9–10, 49, 80, 93–4, 129, 133, 136–9. See also demonstrations/protests; walkouts General Motors (GM) strike 131–3 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 160 Sugrue, Thomas 145 Sullivan, Patricia 123 n.43 Swados, Harvey, “The Myth of the Happy Worker” 141 Swedish model of full employment 249–51 Sweezy, Alan 48, 195 Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 119 n.3, 137–9 Taft, Robert 52 take-home pay 132, 134 tax/taxation 20, 30, 38, 41, 52, 77, 112–13, 126 n.72, 168, 173, 194, 217, 231, 240, 242, 245

Index anti-regressive 156 benefits of 84 n.38 poll 56, 99, 101 progressive 28, 31–2, 42, 49, 54, 71, 77, 89, 134, 158–9, 250 sales 24 tax cut 145, 212, 231–2 Tcherneva, Pavlina R. 237, 239, 241–2, 246 technocratic class 2, 90, 168 Thomas, Elbert 69 Thomas, Norman 103–5, 155, 164 totalitarianism 19, 79, 112, 115, 127 n.85, 176 Townsend, Willard S. 92–4 trade-off 158, 172, 196, 208, 216, 218 trade union 95, 131, 154, 167, 169, 173, 189, 210 Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord 143 Trilateral Commission, 1975 168 Truman, Harry S. 3, 45, 67, 108, 131, 133–7, 143, 146, 196 Tugwell, Rexford 15–16, 23, 32, 213 two-track seniority systems 189 underemployment 26, 144, 159, 162, 172, 230 underpaid labor 203 Unemployed Councils 9, 14 n.14, 248 unemployment 2–3, 5, 7–11, 21, 23, 26–8, 38–42, 44–5, 47, 55, 58, 67, 72, 77, 80, 87, 89, 96, 110, 113, 118, 139–41, 154, 158, 160, 162, 169, 171, 218, 230, 232, 239, 241, 243, 247. See also poverty black 4, 142, 156, 167, 171–2 compensation 106, 108, 113, 136 declination of 138, 195 full-time/part-time 160 mass 39, 45, 47, 71, 73, 75, 102–3, 112–14, 135, 143 rates 59 n.10, 114, 140, 142–7, 166, 171, 183, 192, 195–6, 199, 208, 250 rising crisis of 186–7, 196 structural 96, 154, 167, 171–2 Union for Democratic Action (UDA) 54, 79–80, 106–7, 114 Union for Radical Political Economics and Studies on the Left 169

287

United Auto Workers (UAW) 121 n.31, 130–2, 139, 148 n.17, 155, 160, 210, 214, 251 United Electrical Workers’ (UE’s) 57, 133–6 Program for Higher Wages and Job Security 134 United Farm Workers 190 United States Youth Council (USYC) 164–5 United Steelworkers 90, 116, 160 universal basic income (UBI) 246–8 unpaid labor 191, 203. See also paid labor urban uprisings 156, 167 U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops 187 US Chamber of Commerce 37, 113–14, 117, 137, 216 US Full Employment Service 197 US General Accounting Office 252 n.5 Veblen, Thorstein 9, 16 Vickrey, William 236 Waddell, Brian 88 wage(s) 134, 163, 176, 193, 201, 209, 213, 215, 234, 238, 240–1, 244, 249 controls 158, 193–4, 216 cutbacks 67, 100, 129, 136 decent pay 119, 240–1 family 101, 123 n.41 gains 129–30, 161, 223 n.24 increase in 132, 135, 139 racial inequality 141–2 social 44, 48, 51, 57, 78, 89, 140, 159, 162, 185, 195, 214–15, 230, 232, 241 wage earner funds 251 Wagner Full Employment Act 114, 118, 137 Wagner-Murray Bill 184, 188 Wagner, Robert 69–71, 73, 87, 98, 102, 113, 213 walkouts 49, 109, 119, 129–30, 132, 201. See also demonstrations/protests; strikes Wallace, Henry 45, 52, 55, 65, 79–80, 99, 112 Ware, Caroline 142 War Labor Board 81

288 War Mobilization and Reconversion Act 67 wartime contracts/contractors 108, 122 n.40 demand for labor 28–9, 38, 43, 47, 93, 138 labor force 123 n.40 mobilization 28, 102 women in wartime production 100, 125 n.59 workers 108, 133–4 Watts Riot 156 Weir, Margaret 8, 11, 37, 197, 218 white-collar workers 7, 10–11, 22, 43, 53, 90, 105–6, 171, 199. See also bluecollar workers white supremacy 37–8, 67, 76 White, Walter 96–9, 106 white-wing populism 1 white workers 1, 92–5, 130, 156, 161–2, 171 Whittington, Will 117 women 184 campaigns by 200 discrimination against 3, 141, 173, 189 domesticity 100, 144 employment of 100 equality for 99, 202 housewives 100–2, 106, 122 n.39, 144, 184, 192–3 liberation 187, 192 oppression 97, 140, 190 professionalization of housework 191 racial inequalities 202 social support system 203 in wartime production 100, 125 n.59

Index women’s policy bureau 192 workers/workforce 188–90, 192, 201 working-class 100, 141 “Women in a Full Employment Economy” conference 201–2 Women’s Bureau 100, 123 n.40 Woodcock, Leonard 186–7 Woods, Randall 166 Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill 9 working class 1–2, 22–3, 28, 30, 41, 47, 49, 51–5, 57–8, 80, 88–9, 98–9, 104, 106, 108–9, 116, 118, 131, 133, 136–7, 139–40, 146, 158, 161, 164, 169–70, 173, 177, 196, 198–9, 211, 214–15, 217–18, 246–8 democracy 25, 37, 58, 81 industrial 57 insecurity 160 movement 9–10, 65, 102, 203, 222 n.20 multiracial 98, 193, 243 organization 10, 248–9 racial 94, 97 rebellion 199, 201 uprising 133, 136, 201, 243 women 100, 141 Works Progress Administration program 19, 71, 234 Wray, Randall 231, 235–6, 239 Wright, Eric Olin 10 Yalung Matthews, Don 6 Yates, Michael D. 8, 11, 164 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 99–102, 106, 160 zero-sum game 100–1, 170, 214