12

Work, Not Relief

The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 carried with it a vaguely defined but undeniable shift in public expectations of the federal government. In the grim months following the stock market crash of 1929, President Herbert Hoover had repeatedly refused to acknowledge the extent of the crisis. He feared gloomy public statements from the White House would only further undermine business confidence and, instead, was content to restate his long-standing opposition to large-scale federal intervention. “We cannot,” he told a press conference in 1931, “legislate ourselves out of a world economic depression.”¹

In the absence of any positive economic markers, Hoover’s stubborn passivity brought him little more than ridicule and contempt. By the time of the 1932 presidential campaign, a majority of the electorate had lost patience with political nostrums that continued to sanctify the wisdom of the business community. The doctrine of unfettered capitalism had been discredited. The promise of permanent prosperity, so widely hailed in the “New Era” of the 1920s, seemed like a cruel joke in 1932. In just a few years, the American businessman had been stripped of his statesmanlike aura and singled out as the primary villain of the Depression. Even Herbert Hoover had been known to join in the chorus of catcalls. “The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists,” he once commented. “They’re too damned greedy.”²

The election results signaled the voters’ desire for a new and different role for the government. Despite Roosevelt’s cautious campaign rhetoric, the symbolic contrast with Hoover was clear. A victory for the Democrats in 1932 represented an endorsement of a more activist federal government, particularly in the area of relief and job creation programs. It was a mandate that the new administration took seriously. In the first hundred days of office, FDR and his Brains Trust took steps to intervene in banking, farming, home mortgages, land use, and economic planning. And, most important for the nation’s building trades workers, the New Deal inaugurated an alphabet soup of agencies (PWA, CWA, CCC, and WPA) to revive the moribund construction industry.

The frenetic pace and broadened scope of federal activity unnerved much of the national leadership of the AFL and its affiliated unions. The first thirty years of the twentieth century had cemented a mistrust of government agencies among Federation chieftains. Having been victimized by antitrust legislation, court injunctions, and federal troops, many labor leaders feared the repressive power of the state and, accordingly, adopted a hands-off attitude. Samuel Gompers had argued, at times, that individual liberty and an interventionist state were polar opposites, that one could only be achieved at the expense of the other. As a result, the AFL had generally opposed reform legislation that required state or federal regulation. Testifying against a proposed social insurance bill, Gompers once explained:

Sore and sad as I am by the illness, the killing, the maiming of so many of my fellow workers, I would rather see that go on for years and years, minimized and mitigated by the organized labor movement, than give up one jot of the freedom of the workers to strive and struggle for their own emancipation through their own efforts.³

Gompers’s death produced no shift in the political alignments of organized labor. William Green subscribed to a similar voluntarist ideology. The AFL’s views had meshed neatly with the laissez-faire political climate of the twenties, but Roosevelt’s ascendancy forced the Federation to come to terms with the overwhelming national sentiment for major social change initiatives out of Washington. Perhaps no single AFL affiliate was less ideally situated to accommodate this new public mood than the national UBCJA. Not only was the leadership of the Brotherhood wary of FDR’s reform proposals, they were one of the few groups of labor leaders to endorse and work for Herbert Hoover in 1932. General President Hutcheson managed the labor bureau of the Republican party during the campaign.

William Hutcheson was a life-long Republican. At various times, his name had been floated as a possible candidate for secretary of labor and even vice-president in a GOP administration. Hutcheson had indelibly impressed his personal stamp on the UBCJA ever since he took the helm in 1915. He brooked no dissent at the national level. Brotherhood officers and staff carefully toed the political line he advocated. As a result, the national union was a solid bastion of Republicanism in a predominantly Democratic, if conservative, AFL. When the Federation departed from its customary distaste for independent political activity and endorsed the presidential candidacy of Robert La Follette of the Farmer–Labor party in 1924, the Brotherhood was the only major AFL affiliate that refused to participate.

Roosevelt’s job creation programs put the union in an awkward position. Hutcheson’s extreme version of AFL voluntarism could not tolerate the notion of the federal government as an employer of last resort. He was happiest when the government operated at a long arm’s length from the labor movement. He preferred to deal with management directly without the mediating influences of state and federal agencies. In part this was a tactical judgment. Compared to the limited power of decentralized building employers, the authority of the federal government could easily abridge the significant influence of the building trades unions. That was why Hutcheson had adopted such an uncharacteristic posture of militance during World War I. While other labor leaders viewed wartime federal guidelines as an opportunity to expand the ranks of organized labor, Hutcheson primarily saw the dangers, both immediate and potential, of a voracious federal appetite eating away at collectively bargained agreements. Hutcheson never dropped his passionate distrust of state intervention, consistently preferring the known quantity of direct labor–management negotiations. In 1937, he unsuccessfully opposed AFL endorsement of minimum wage legislation. A full decade after the onset of the Great Depression, Hutcheson remained one of the few public figures who still opposed New Deal legislation and the accompanying expanded role of the state. Labor “has known that what government gives, government can take away,” Hutcheson said in a 1940 speech. “Where government has failed, labor and industry can succeed . . . in spite of every handicap that government may place in the way.”⁴

Early in his term of office, Hutcheson eradicated whatever vestiges of labor radicalism persisted from the McGuire era at the Brotherhood’s national level. The general president crushed any and all opposition. But though he was never forced to yield on his machine rule or his political conservatism, the human wreckage of the Depression compelled Hutcheson to grudgingly reconsider his repudiation of all federal jobs policies. The rank-and-file carpenter did not have the security of a union office and salary to cushion his suffering. He yearned for relief of any kind and cared little about the source. Many carpenters shared Hutcheson’s misgivings about an expanded federal presence in construction but few had the option to turn aside publicly funded employment in order to maintain ideological purity. With their reluctance to advocate unemployment relief and public works programs, Hutcheson and other comfortable AFL leaders showed themselves to be out of touch with the needs and perceptions of the average union member.

Like most working-class Americans, the majority of building tradesmen had lost faith in the ability of the private sector to generate sufficient jobs and welcomed New Deal efforts to provide supplemental employment. Massachusetts carpenters embraced the Roosevelt administration. “When FDR took over the reins, things began to improve,” John MacKinnon says. “People got back to work. It was a lot better. I give FDR all the credit in the world.” Enock Peterson praises Roosevelt in similar glowing terms. He worked for the WPA, building schools, grandstands, and athletic fields. The New Deal saved him, Peterson claims. “If it hadn’t been for Roosevelt. . . .”

Local union officers lived with the Depression more intimately and, as a result, understood the distress of the membership more acutely. They did not necessarily share the voluntarist principles that hamstrung national AFL leaders. On the contrary, many local building trades officials in Massachusetts led the charge for political reform agendas and prolabor candidates. The Boston Building Trades Council, for example, called for an independent Labor party in 1932, a position considered heretical by top AFL officials. The Council actively pressured municipal, state, and federal agencies to seek out either private or public loans to subsidize construction projects. Over a thousand carpenters and other craftsmen rallied at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common for a June 1933 BTC-sponsored “work demand” meeting. Massachusetts AFL President James Moriarty told the assembled construction workers: “The key to our whole difficulty is to put people to work. Work instead of relief means that millions can buy bread and retain their self-respect . . . we shall not be content with continued pauperism and doles.”⁵

The distinction between work and relief was a constant theme for Depression-era carpenters. They wanted work. Relief may have been unavoidable after extended bouts of unemployment but it never became desirable. In the exclusively male world of construction, the equation of relief and dependence was particularly powerful. The rigidly defined sex roles of the era reinforced carpenter heads-of-households’ discomfort with even token assistance. The very thought of charity was humiliating for men who prided themselves on their fierce independence. They had learned how to cope with a chronically insecure occupation without resorting to private aid or public dole. They had overcome the lack of stability with a combination of individual mastery of their craft and collective control of the job site through their unions. They had used the tools of the trade to raise and support families. Now all those years of effort were unraveling uncontrollably. The deft touch of the master carpenter was useless without a job, and the carefully constructed work rules went by the board when union members were forced to accept substandard wages and working conditions.

The unemployed often blamed themselves for their plight. The common wisdom of the 1920s linked workers’ modest prosperity to their own hard work. The cultural pundits of the New Era dismissed larger social and economic forces and attributed the twists and turns of personal histories to individual choices. When conditions changed, it was almost inevitable, as historian Robert McElvaine points out, that “Americans who had claimed responsibility for personal gains found it difficult not to feel guilty when confronted with failure.”⁶ Carpenters who accepted the notion that the triumph of an adequately furnished home and a slim nest egg of savings rested solely on their shoulders were at a loss when the Depression hit. They were willing to work and push themselves just as hard, but somehow, that was no longer enough. In the early years of the crisis, before its full impact was completely understood, many of the unemployed assumed they were at fault for their own situation.

The idea of unemployed relief assistance, therefore, ran counter to most of the assumptions and aspirations of American carpenters in the early 1930s—including those who were out of work. The national UBCJA rejected the concept as an illegitimate federal policy, and rank-and-file carpenters viewed relief as a stigma, a stinging brand of personal failure. To accept relief with equanimity, a jobless worker must feel “entitled” to it. The feeling of entitlement depends on a recognition that one’s personal misfortune is, in large part, due to forces out of one’s control. Attitudes toward relief shifted dramatically in the mid and late 1930s. By that time, most American workers had come to the conclusion that their suffering was caused, not by their own decisions, but by national and international economic developments. Still, the initial horrors of the dole never completely disappeared. Thus, whatever other differences existed, the absolute political priority of jobs creation programs over a more comprehensive relief system united every Brotherhood member, from Hutcheson to the unemployed carpenter on the street.

Union carpenters welcomed Roosevelt’s stabs at construction works programs but, like Hutcheson, they ultimately preferred private building. The memories of World War I federal meddling with the closed shop were only fifteen years old. But the mistrust ran deeper. The industry had evolved its own set of idiosyncrasies that building trades workers liked to think made them unique and incomprehensible to outsiders. Even with a legacy of bitter employer-employee conflicts, tradesmen were far more likely to consider contractors, especially those who came up from the ranks, as part of the “club” than any state or federal bureaucrat. Unlike a factory owner, the head of a construction firm was usually visible to the workers, occasionally exchanging pleasantries on a first-name basis. The builder knew the industry, the tools, the terminology, and the feel of a construction site. He was a member, if an unequal one, of the construction family and, most important, he had a tradition of collective bargaining. Managers of public works agencies shared none of those bonds. They were government appointees whose loyalties to the political party in power transcended any affinities for the industry.

Initial public policies did nothing to overcome the misgivings and allay fears of a replay of the World War I experience. Government officials were seeking methods to put people back to work. Carpenters acknowledged that work had to be found for all the unemployed, but they did not want their industry to become the repository for every jobless American. Having spent their working lives in the construction field, carpenters expected that construction jobs programs should give priority to experienced craftsmen. In addition, they believed those jobs should be carried out under customary, i.e., union, working conditions. They found, to their dismay, that municipal, state, and federal officials did not necessarily agree. On the contrary, some politicians used the opportunity to vent their antilabor animus. In the winter of 1931-32, for example, the Worcester Mayor’s Unemployment Committee referred unemployed tradesmen to the notoriously antiunion E. J. Cross at 50 cents an hour.⁷

The first federal and state projects also ignored labor agreements. Ovila Marceau worked on a Federal Emergency Relief Administration project in western Massachusetts for 50 cents an hour. In 1933, when the National Recovery Administration funded several highway construction contracts in Massachusetts, the state Commission on Public Works set the pay scale for all skilled workers at 55 cents. The following year, the City of Springfield paid carpenters from 56 to 64 cents for concrete work on the city sewer system. The UBC resented the sabotage of the union rate with taxpayers’ money. The Massachusetts State Council of Carpenters initiated a statewide letter campaign to Governor Joseph Ely to protest the 55-cent highway rate, charging that it was “a sweat shop rate and in direct violation of the spirit and intent of the N.R.A.”⁸

Despite the low wages, publicly funded projects offered the only alternative to unemployment. In 1933, the Springfield District Council granted carpenters on welfare permission to do carpentry work at the city farm as long as the welfare board gave them $1 credit for every hour they put in. Carpenters were careful to distinguish between criticism of the programs and of their abuses. A January 10, 1934, resolution from the State Council wholeheartedly supported the NRA, Public Works Administration (PWA), and Civil Works Administration (CWA) but also noted that “some of the officials in the several cities and towns who are handling the C.W.A. programs are not paying the stipulated wages and some of the contractors on P.W.A. are violating the intent and meaning of the act as it relates to hours and wages.” As a solution, the Council suggested uniform statewide standards for all the programs, including a $1.20-an-hour wage.⁹

For the next few years, building trades unions and New Deal administrators haggled over wages and hiring policies. The union position was straightforward—preferential hiring for union craftsmen, union pay scales, and publicly funded private contracts rather than direct government employment whenever possible. Roosevelt’s position was less clear. Administration officials constantly developed and redeveloped regulations as Congress allocated more funds and created new agencies. Through 1935 and 1936, guidelines on PWA and Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects shifted from month to month depending on the individual state administrator, the political influence of the unions, and the latest directive from Washington.

In July of 1935, the Massachusetts Building Trades Council met to consider a proposed six-state strike against a suggested PWA and WPA hourly scale of 65 cents for 130 hours of work a month for all skilled mechanics. Throughout the summer and fall, BTC leaders negotiated with Arthur Rotch, WPA administrator in Massachusetts. By the beginning of winter, Rotch received an order from Washington allowing him to set wages at the prevailing rate. However, as soon as the unions had won the battle on wages, Harry Hopkins issued a series of contradictory hiring directives from Washington that reignited union anger. Hopkins, FDR’s right-hand man, had agreed with many of the unions’ arguments when he accepted the top post at the WPA. Though his primary responsibility was to provide as many jobs as possible within budgetary constraints, Hopkins announced that he would not accomplish his mission at the expense of the private sector and its system of collective bargaining in the construction industry.¹⁰

In August 1935, Hopkins issued Administrative Order No. 15 requiring WPA projects using private employers to give union workers preference. This directive simply maintained traditional employment practices in the industry. Four months later, Hopkins amended the order. He still allowed union preference but only after priority had been given to residents of the “political subdivision” in which the work was being carried out. This effectively knocked out any union tradesman who lived outside the local project area. Once again, the Massachusetts BTC threatened to strike. In early January 1936, the WPA head countermanded both of his previous orders and ruled that 90 percent of all WPA project employees must be drawn from the relief rolls of the U.S. Employment Service. The BTC immediately moved from threats to action. Six hundred craftsmen in Boston and Newton and two hundred more in Waltham, Concord, Framingham, and Natick walked off WPA jobs in protest.¹¹

Hopkins’s ruling angered union workers. The loss of the protection of union status was bad enough. It appeared, in that sense, to be a rerun of the Gompers–Baker pact. In addition, they believed that the quality of construction would inevitably suffer as untrained workers attempted to carry out skilled tasks. But the underlying assumptions behind preferential treatment for those on relief irritated union tradesmen the most. As they saw it, the WPA would reward those who chose the dependent life of the dole and penalize those who had been too proud to accept charity. For the next two months, a comedy of bureaucratic bungling characterized the dispute. The WPA rescinded the ruling on January 18, only to restore it on February 25. Finally, on March 16, Massachusetts WPA director Paul Edwards agreed to a 50–50 split between the relief rolls and the union hiring halls. Our World, a Boston labor paper, reported satisfaction among building trades leaders with the settlement. “This means that those men whom the depression had hit as hard as any others but yet had preferred suffering rather than stoop to beg relief, will no longer be denied jobs as union men who know their job, irrespective whether their names are on the relief rolls.”¹²

In Massachusetts, at least, organized building trades workers had resolved their basic differences with the WPA. Periodic flare-ups continued to occur, but the unions generally refocused on private contractors, such as John Bowen, who persisted in paying below the rate or hiring nonunion tradesmen. The employment situation improved slightly in the second half of the decade though it never dropped into single digits. Raises in 1936 and 1937 brought the union carpenter’s wages back to the pre-Depression high of $1.37-1/2. The economy had by no means reached a state of normalcy, but mild gains combined with the dramatic upsurge of organizing among industrial workers encouraged construction workers to return to some of their more militant habits. In September 1937, for example, 330 carpenters and other tradesmen walked off the $3.7 million seventeen-story Suffolk County Courthouse to protest the presence of nonunion granite cutters.¹³ A sympathetic action (or a construction project, for that matter) of that scale would have been unthinkable five years earlier.

Despite the mild rebound in the private sector, the dominant themes for union carpenters in the 1930s were wrapped up with their ambivalent feelings toward the New Deal and the federal role in the construction industry. There was no question that the average union carpenter identified with and embraced New Deal initiatives to relieve unemployment. It was equally clear that union leaders and members never abandoned their qualms about the government as employer. History had taught them a healthy respect for the ability of the state to undermine labor relations. The early practices of the FERA, NRA, CWA, PWA, and WPA had only confirmed these fears.

But it was the question of relief and public works that encapsulated all the complex political strains. Union officers attempted to resolve their conflicting attitudes by viewing the federal government as just another employer. By and large, they were unwilling to enter discussions about the proper role of the state in social and economic policy. They preferred a concrete hands-on approach. That is, if the government planned to act as a major consumer of construction services, the unions insisted that it play by the same rules as any other employer. Most construction union leaders had little use for Keynesian pump-priming theories. They rejected any notion of substandard wages as a method of sharing the pain or kicking off economic recovery. If the government wants to build, union leaders proclaimed, it must operate under guidelines established by collective bargaining. Any other approach or consideration could only undercut decades of union struggle. It was as simple as that.

Union solutions were equally simple. Most union officials welcomed federal funding, but all hoped to minimize direct government administration. They wanted to avoid any direct political control over construction, preferring the familiar adversarial relationship with contractors and employer associations. In a lengthy resolution passed unanimously at the 1936 UBCJA national convention, the delegates expressed their satisfaction at the prounion reforms instituted by the WPA but, on balance, maintained a highly critical position. They advocated taking construction management decisions out of the hands of federal and state administrators and turning “this work over to our [my emphasis] general contractors for supervision, contractors who are equipped to do this work more efficiently.” Should that plan fail, continued the delegates, “we ask that [WPA administrators] place on all future work, union skilled mechanics as foremen and supervisors to whom it rightfully belongs.” Interestingly, the hostility to government administration was so strong that conventional private construction management was deemed superior to weak and inefficient federal administrators dependent on the craft knowledge of union workers. The perspective embodied in this resolution cannot just be chalked up to Hutcheson’s fanatical voluntarism. At the 1938 Massachusetts AFL convention, all forty-two building trades delegates introduced a similar resolution. They charged that the WPA was competing with the “normal” construction industry and, as a result, “seriously retarding recovery in that industry.” They proposed that any project over $10,000 be put out for bids by private contractors rather than be administered by government agencies.¹⁴

Rank-and-file carpenters rarely voiced a purely ideological opposition to public intervention. They shared their leaders’ distrust of governmental intentions regarding wages and working conditions. But they also wanted to work and they knew, as Springfield Business Agent Harry Hogan told a “somewhat startled” Central Labor Union meeting in 1939, that “carpenters can do better on the WPA than in private employment.” They supported the New Deal’s political programs. For the rank-and-file carpenter, the controversial issues of relief and public works were more personal. The 90 percent rule had provoked intense hostility. The administration order had tapped into something very deep inside those workers. Why else walk off a job when hardly any jobs are available?

Carpenters had constructed working lives based on an ethical system revolving around the twin issues of independence and cooperation. The independence, or self-reliance, served a crucial function. It helped fashion an unshakable work identity that transcended any particular contractor or any particular project. The carpenter’s identity was based on his tools, his knowledge, and his own efforts. He stood alone, making a living by his wits, employed by others, but not defined by any single employer. Yet that independence was tempered by an equally strong sense of cooperation. The decades of labor wars in construction had demonstrated the necessity of collective action to even the most individualistic of carpenters. Their very livelihoods, their pursuit of independence in their careers, ultimately depended on their ability to cooperate successfully in the form of trade unionism. Thus, Harry Hopkins’s 90 percent rule was, in their minds, a slap in the face. They felt entitled to work, not to relief. Preferential treatment of those on relief told these carpenters that their values and choices would bring no rewards at the most stressful point in their working lives. It was a message from their government—their democratically elected representatives—that dependence and defeatism paid off.

They were, as one tradesman put it, “self-sustaining” workers, and their sense of self-respect depended heavily on that self-image. The Depression had wrought serious damage to that image. It was more than just a question of where the next meal would come from. Preoccupation with economic survival invariably triggered corollary concerns—family crises, alcoholism, depression. Carpenters had sustained themselves through previous difficult periods with the help of their own culture of cooperation and independence—a culture peculiar to the building industry and nourished by its unions. The battles over relief and public works were clearly matters of bread and butter. But they were also symbolic struggles over the acceptance or rejection of the value of the carpenters’ culture and his sense of self-worth. The reinstatement of the prevailing wage and the defeat of the WPA 90 percent rule brought union carpenters more and better-paid employment. Those rulings also validated a lifetime of personal choices. As a Boston labor reporter wrote, building trades workers “stressed that labor’s dignity demands jobs be given in labor’s own name without a thought of charity.”¹⁵