by Adam Cohen
The CCC’s critics also testified, urging Congress to reject or modify the bill. Green continued to argue that the pay scale would hurt private-sector workers. This Congress “will go down in history,” he declared, as one “that has established a dollar a day wage for the payment of labor on the public domain.” Green also insisted that putting so many civilians under the army’s control “smacked of fascism, of Hitlerism, of a form of Sovietism.” Herbert Benjamin of the National Unemployment Council warned that the CCC’s model of sending men out to the forests for extended periods would result in “the violation and destruction of the families of American workers.” The administration dispatched witnesses to rebut these concerns. Douglas MacArthur, who was then the army chief of staff, promised that while the armed forces would select, train, and transport workers enrolled in the CCC, it was a “purely non-military function” and would have “no connection with the army’s job” of “national defense.”48
Roosevelt’s reference to larger-scale public works in his congressional message had alarmed conservatives. While the CCC worked its way through Congress, powerful financial interests mobilized to try to block a broader program. On March 24, the same day MacArthur testified, James Warburg, the prominent young banker, met with Moley to convey Wall Street’s strong opposition to large-scale public works. Spending billions of dollars on such programs would only put a small percentage of the unemployed back to work, Warburg said, but it would do irreparable damage to the government’s credit. Moley listened sympathetically to the argument, which he had already heard from Douglas. He knew, however, that Roosevelt was moving in the direction of adopting the sort of program Warburg and Douglas feared.49
In the meantime, Roosevelt was holding his sixth press conference. It was not clear how he intended to establish major relief and public works programs while also implementing the Economy Act. He suggested to reporters that he might do it by creating two budgets, one for regular and one for emergency expenditures. Roosevelt still intended to cut spending on regular expenses, but he had not decided whether it was fair to include “expenditures that relate to keeping human beings from starving in this emergency” in the regular budget. “I should say probably not,” he told the press corps. The idea of dual federal budgets was not new—Moley had floated it in his May 1932 Brain Trust memo. Still, conservatives were shocked when Roosevelt went public with the idea. The New York Times was troubled that some of the president’s advisers seemed to think he could increase spending while balancing the budget through “a sort of painless arithmetic.” Douglas was the most disturbed of all. Roosevelt had not consulted with Douglas in advance, no doubt because he knew how bitterly he would have objected. The talk of a dual budget was Douglas’s first indication that Roosevelt’s commitment to government economy was weakening. Douglas was deeply pained by Roosevelt’s change of heart. By the end of the year, he would write an angry memo pointing to Roosevelt’s decision to treat emergency expenditures as a separate category as perhaps the worst of any during the Hundred Days. “Why should we steel ourselves to the heart-breaking task of saving a billion dollars of ordinary expenditures, when with a prodigal hand, we scatter over seven billions upon extraordinary expenditures?” he asked. To Douglas, as long as expenditures were greater than receipts, the government’s credit would be in peril. Separating some expenses off into a separate budget, he insisted, “fools no one.”50
On March 28, the Senate passed the CCC bill on a voice vote, undeterred by the warning of L. J. Dickinson, Republican of Iowa, that “we will rue the day when we put so much power into one man’s hands.” The opposition was stronger in the House, led by organized labor’s allies. Connery tried to amend the bill to raise the CCC wage scale to $50 a month for single enrollees and $80 for married ones. The Connery amendment failed. The House did, however, approve another amendment sponsored by Oscar DePriest of Illinois, the House’s only black member, prohibiting the CCC from discriminating on the basis of race. The House passed its bill, and after it and the Senate’s bill were reconciled, with DePriest’s amendment remaining, Roosevelt signed the CCC into law on March 31. 51
Before the bill passed, planning for the CCC was already under way. Perkins offered the job of running the Labor Department’s part of the program, the selection of enrollees, to W. Frank Persons, the former superintendent of the Charity Organization Society in New York. Persons had run the Red Cross home service during the war, and Perkins had been impressed, she said, with his “knowledge of how to sort out the sheep from the goats.” The army drew up regulations dividing the country into nine regions, and it began calculating how much it would cost to train, shelter, feed, and clothe 250,000 formerly unemployed men in camps in the forest. Roosevelt convened a meeting at the White House on April 3 to work out how the departments of Labor, War, Agriculture, and Interior would coordinate their efforts. On the same day, the call went out for the first 25,000 enrollees. 52
Two days later, Roosevelt named Robert Fechner director of the CCC. Just as he had chosen Peek to run the AAA to placate the leading critics of the program, agricultural processors, the selection of Fechner, an executive in the International Association of Machinists and vice president of the AFL, was Roosevelt’s attempt to assuage the unions, which remained uneasy about the CCC. Fechner, who had been born into poverty in Chattanooga, had dropped out of school at sixteen to peddle newspapers on trains in Georgia. He became a machinist and worked his way up the ranks of the union, but he never lost his rough edges. Fechner once said that among the New Dealers, many of whom arrived in Washington with lofty educational pedigrees, he felt like “a potato bug amongst dragonflies.” Most of his clerks, he freely admitted, were better educated than he was. Roosevelt asked Fechner how long it would take him to set up the first CCC camp. When he replied “a month,” Roosevelt said it was too long. “Two weeks?” Fechner asked. “Good,” Roosevelt said. The CCC met its deadline. The first camp was established in George Washington National Forest outside Luray, Virginia, and it was called Camp Roosevelt.53
On March 31, the same day Roosevelt signed the CCC bill into law, Perkins presided over the labor conference Sidney Hillman had asked for. Several unions offered their buildings so the conference would not have to be held in the Department of Labor’s ramshackle offices. Perkins thought the symbolism of hosting the conference at the department was important. She wanted to make clear that the administration was reaching out to labor. The largest space in the poorly laid-out building was Perkins’s office, so she had all of the furniture removed and the sliding doors to an adjacent office opened up. When the seventy-five union leaders arrived, it was not only crowded but hot, because, as Perkins recalled later, “spring came very early that year.”54
In her opening statement, Perkins emphasized Roosevelt’s commitment to doing something about unemployment. The administration intended to fight it, she said, with both relief and programs to create jobs. She also talked about unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, child labor laws, and maximum hours laws. All of these were valuable, she said, not only as workers’ rights measures, but as ways to take people out of the job market, leaving more work for those who needed it. There were tensions among the labor leaders. John L. Lewis was “less than happily welcomed,” Perkins noticed, and the AFL leaders cast “a big pickle eye on Hillman.” When they focused on substance, there was more agreement. George Berry, the Tennessean who headed up the International Printing Pressmen and Assistants’ Union, spoke for the whole conference when he talked about how badly off his members were and urged the adoption of a federal relief program as quickly as possible. Other leaders offered more specific suggestions, including that the unemployed be allowed to sleep in public buildings. The suggestion struck Perkins as “inane coming from a group of labor leaders,” and more what one would expect coming from a “warm-hearted, not very scientific charity organization.” In the late morning, Daniel J. Tobin, the Teamsters union president, complained loudly about the accommodations, and ins
isted that the conference should move to larger, cooler meeting rooms at the AFL headquarters. Perkins thought that the facilities were “horrid,” but vetoed the move. What seemed to be rankling Tobin was not the accommodations, but being passed over for labor secretary. 55
After a nighttime meeting without Perkins, the labor leaders returned the next day and hammered out a ten-point program of action. It called for at least $1 billion in appropriations for relief and $3 billion for public works, the adoption of a ban on child labor, and labor representation on CCC advisory boards. The labor leaders were particularly intent on getting large-scale public works, which they saw as the best chance of getting their members jobs until the economy improved. A $3 billion public works program would directly employ one million workers, they said, and it would employ nearly one million more in manufacturing and transporting the materials needed for the projects. When the conference ended, Perkins took a contingent of labor leaders to the White House to report to Roosevelt. With William Green’s consent, she let Tobin lead the group. Their recommendations were not unexpected, but the meeting served a dual purpose for Perkins. It allowed her to show union leaders that the president cared about what they thought, and it helped her to show Roosevelt how strongly organized labor felt about public works and the other programs she was urging on him. 56
By mid-March, Roosevelt had already sent Congress the ambitious Agricultural Adjustment Act, but the administration did not have a comparable plan for reviving industry. The lack of industrial relief legislation left a vacuum that Congress was prepared to fill itself. The previous December, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama had introduced a “30 hour” bill, his attempt to boost nonfarm employment. The Black Bill called for banning from interstate commerce products made by workers who were employed more than five days a week or six hours a day. The idea was that if workweeks were capped at thirty hours, employers would have to spread the available work out among more employees. It was wrong, Black insisted in a radio address, for some workers to work as much as seventy hours a week “while others are driven into poverty and misery from unemployment.” If his bill passed, Black argued, it would force employers to hire 25 percent more workers to make up for the lost hours, generating six million new jobs. The Black Bill had strong support from organized labor and it benefited from the absence of any other serious proposals for reenergizing the labor market. On April 6, the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 53-30.57
Perkins had first heard of Black’s “30 hour” bill back in New York, and it had struck her as nonsensical. She talked to Roosevelt and found that he agreed. As they saw it, the bill had two basic problems. It was too inflexible, applying a single cap on hours to every job in the nation. Roosevelt believed it would put a particular burden on businesses, like canneries, that were located in rural areas, where labor was in relatively short supply. The thirty-hour limit might mean that these employers would not be able to keep up production at peak times of the season. The rigidity was particularly unsuited for specialized industries, like dairy farming, which could not simply send a new shift of workers onto the factory floor. “There have to be hours adapted to the rhythm of the cow,” Roosevelt said. The bill’s other major flaw was that if employees’ workweeks were reduced to thirty hours, they would earn less money at a time when low wages were already making it difficult for working people to support their families. Roosevelt dispatched Perkins to try to stop Congress from passing the bill.58
Perkins met with Black and found him difficult to dissuade. “Ah think the President’s in favor of this,” he told her. Perkins was not impressed when she listened to Black explain his bill. He took out a pencil and paper and did complex calculations involving the number of people employed before the Depression, the number currently unemployed, and the total value of the nation’s manufactured goods. He concluded, in a way Perkins found thoroughly unpersuasive, that the available work came to thirty hours per worker, employed and unemployed. After this presentation, Perkins never “felt quite easy” about Black. The mechanics of fighting unemployment were, she decided, “a matter he knew nothing about.” She asked him what would happen to workers who were currently working forty-eight or fifty-four hours a week, who would see their income plunge if they were cut back to just thirty hours. Black said their wages would naturally adjust, which she considered “absurd.” Perkins argued that the bill had to contain a minimum wage provision, to ensure that workers were not driven into poverty by the hour limits. Black, however, insisted that such a provision was unnecessary.59
If Black’s bill was going to be stopped now, it would have to be in the House. That would not be easy, since the bill had momentum coming out of the Senate, and it had the support of progressives who were unhappy that the administration, which had been slashing salaries and benefits under the Economy Act, had still done nothing for workers. The AFL strongly backed the “30 hour” bill. Faced with unprecedented unemployment rates, it had abandoned its historic opposition to helping workers by passing laws. William Green hailed the Black Bill as “the first real practical step on the part of the government to constructively deal with the problem of unemployment.” He predicted a universal strike if it did not become law. Green would not go along with Perkins’s suggestion of a minimum wage provision. “Pass your bill,” Green said, “and let us handle the question of wages.” The AFL insisted that it was worried that a minimum wage would effectively become a maximum wage as well. It looked to Perkins, however, like another example of what she had seen in her Albany days: labor leaders opposing rights for workers that were provided by law, rather than through a union contract.60
On April 12, Perkins returned to Congress to testify before the House Committee on Labor. The administration would be willing to support the Black Bill, she said, if it was properly modified. Roosevelt wanted an “elasticity” clause that would allow industries, with the permission of a joint government-employer-employee commission, to put workers to work for forty hours a week for a limited number of weeks. Perkins also insisted that, despite labor’s opposition, the bill had to have a minimum wage provision, to ensure that workers whose hours were reduced were not driven into poverty.61
While she tried to modify or derail the “30 hour” bill, Perkins kept fighting for public works. Along with her behind-the-scenes lobbying, she used her bully pulpit to build popular support. At an appearance before the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor the evening of April 12, she called for a federal public works program and a federal minimum wage. Perkins continued to argue that public works would not only help the unemployed, but restore the whole economy by priming the pump. “Industry cannot go forward unless it has in back of it the tremendous purchasing power of the wage earners,” she said. Two days later, Perkins told the Associated Press that she supported $2 to $3 billion in public works projects over the next four or five months—not “monumental” projects, but practical ones, such as roads, sewage systems, and low-cost housing that could be started right away. 62
On April 18, Perkins sent the House Labor Committee a revised version of the Black Bill that met the administration’s concerns. The bill provided for industry-by-industry boards that would have the power to allow businesses to extend their workweeks up to forty hours. It authorized the labor secretary to establish a board to set a minimum wage for an industry if she found that the workers were not getting subsistence wages. It also expressly exempted milk and cream from the limits, a concession to Roosevelt’s concerns about the “rhythm of the cow.” There was strong opposition to the modified Black Bill. Organized labor attacked the minimum wage provision. Manufacturers opposed the maximum hours in Perkins’s bill, and in Black’s original one. Critics branded the bill “Sovietism” and accused Perkins of trying to become a “Czar of Industry.”63
Perkins was not prepared for the ferocity of the opposition to what she called her “modest plan to make the Black bill workable.” On April 25, she returned to the House Labor Committee. The hearing attracted an unusual amo
unt of attention because Eleanor Roosevelt brought British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter, Ishbel, who was visiting the White House. In a hearing room packed with spectators, cameras, and klieg lights, Perkins calmly made the case for her bill. When a committee member objected that it would require thousands of new Labor Department staff, Perkins replied, “I should resign at once if it did.” The following day, labor and business testified against the modified bill. William Green attacked the minimum wage provision as a “dangerous experiment” that would “peg wages.” Gerard Swope, the president of General Electric, endorsed the goal of spreading work among more people, but he argued that the bill was “too rigid for practical application.” On May 10, the committee reported out a version of the Black Bill, but it no longer mattered. Roosevelt did not want to back a bill that faced such entrenched opposition. The administration was by now at work on its own industrial recovery bill, one that it expected both business and labor to support.64
In early April, nineteen-year-old Fiore Rizzo walked into an army building in downtown Manhattan and declared that he wanted to work in the woods. Rizzo was the first person to sign up for the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of an initial group of 25,000 enrollees. Henry Wallace talked up the CCC in a national radio address. “This is primarily a relief program,” he declared, but “the men who enroll are not seeking charity; they want an opportunity to make their way.” The CCC was an instant success. Young men loaded onto buses and trucks and took up work assignments in forests and parks across the country. By mid-July, 275,000 workers would be employed at more than 1,300 camps, a deployment larger than the number of Americans who enlisted in the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt took a personal interest in the details of the CCC, and reviewed the camp locations himself. There were some early glitches. Too many work sites were approved in the West and not enough in the East, where most of the unemployed were. There was a mini-scandal when Louis Howe approved the purchase of 200,000 toilet kits without competitive bidding, and congressional hearings revealed that they could have been purchased for far less. But for the most part the CCC worked just as Roosevelt had hoped. Young men enthusiastically built roads, trails, camps, and picnic grounds. They worked on erosion and flood control projects and planted trees. Most of the participants earned $30 a month, and sent $25 a month home, supporting an estimated one million family members.65