: What
purchasing power; but we have not. Is The
Today when pump-priming requires an increase |Amorican Way?

in our liabilities, we are misled by the same sort of
bookkeeping absurdity. In the past we cashed in
our assets without recording their dissipation on
our books. Now we create assets without entering
these investments on our books. We are spending
billions of Federal dollars to give jobs and purchas-
ing power to millions of our unemployed. Those
unemployed are rebuilding the whole broad face of
America. All their work is public work. They are
replanting and protecting forests, saving the land
and the wildlife, controlling floods and dust storms.
They are building better schools and hospitals,
better roads and bridges. Jobless teachers have
taught more than a million adult illiterates to read
and write English. That is almost one-fourth of
all the illiterates in the country. The unemployed
are improving the health and the culture and the
scientific knowledge of the entire Nation.

Buying Power Needed

How do we keep books on this? Every dollar we
spend to put the unemployed to work is carefully
entered on the red side of the ledger. But for all
the national wealth they have created in permanent
improvements and public services, not one dollar is
entered on the black side of the ledger as assets or
credit. All this money is listed as expenditures,
none as capital investments.

I do not care how the bookkeeping is done, except
that it should not confuse the average citizen about the
actual fiscal condition and operations of his Govern-
ment. I am quite certain that he is confused today.

I suppose that besides the bookkeeping confusion,
what is disconcerting to many sincere people about
the present form of public spending is that it is
directed at supplying purchasing power to the



What
unanimity, have declared themselves in favor of a Is The
work program and will not go back to the socially American Way?

unproductive and individually demoralizing prin-
ciple of the dole. But it happens that the argument
about comparative costs is false. It has been cal-
culated that a shift to a direct relief program, pro-
viding payments of equal adequacy to the families
of the unemployed, would save only 30 percent in
gross costs. If the indirect employment provided
by the purchase of materials, the rental of equip-
ment, etc., is taken into account, the net saving in
a shift to a direct relief program would be so small
as to be negligible.

Examining the Assets

And of course we have left out of account the vast
social assets created by a work program—the thou-
sands of public buildings—the roads and streets and
bridges, the swimming pools, the parks and the
playgrounds, the works of art, and the cultural
services with which the labors of the unemployed
have endowed the Nation. Also we have left out the
conservation of human resources, of morale and skill,
that are involved in the mere opportunity to work.

Aside from the persistent but unfounded com-
plaint of high cost, we hear such complaints as that
the system of work relief destroys individual initia-
tive, that its recipients impose on public generosity
by leaning on their shovels, that it is “made work”
of doubtful value, that it permits political coercion,
that it competes with private enterprise, and that
its benefits are not evenly distributed geographically.

I think we can dispose of the question of individual
initiative merely by citing the findings of surveys
which show that half of those who have worked for
the WPA have been absorbed by private industry.
This is surely adequate proof that the WPA has
preserved their skills, and that they want to work.



selves from other nations, economically or socially.
But we believe that by concentrating our efforts on
our domestic economic problems we can achieve two
things: We can remove the danger ever present in gov-
ernments of creating disastrous diversions in foreign
policy to cover up failures at home, and we can put
ourselves in a position to confer wisely with other
nations on the elimination of international frictions.

We are learning that if our democracy is less secure
today than it was a century ago it is not because
men and women esteem liberty less but because our
democracy has failed to give them the essential
ingredients of that liberty which they esteem.
Men and women do not value the right to starve or
even the right to a dole. They demand the right to
earn a self-respecting livelihood.

While other nations are building vast armaments,
we are building parks, libraries, hospitals, and
schools on a wartime scale. While other peoples
are learning to use gas masks and bombproof
shelters, we are improving the lot of the under-
privileged, eliminating illiteracy, opening up oppor-
tunities for work and play.

While some other nations are outraging the rights
of minorities, we are determined that our priceless
tradition of personal freedom—of free speech, free
press, and freedom of worship—shall not be qualified
or abridged at any time or under any circumstances.

I believe the heritage of America is its love of
liberty, its hard-won victories in peace and war, the
courage and religious fortitude of our fathers,

That heritage can be no resting place for their
sons and daughters. We too have frontiers to con-
quer. And they are to be found in the determina-
tion to abolish poverty, to assure the security of our
humblest neighbor, to destroy injustice, to protect
our personal liberties, and so to live in a disturbed
and threatened world that this Nation will achieve
its democratic destiny in security and peace.

Us S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 167460

What
Is The
American Way?



Works
Progress
Administration

[ee like to discuss three or
four of the principal subjects on which some people
have been most critical of the Government. I am
going to talk about these controversial policies on
the basis of whether they square with American tra-
ditions—whether they are in line with the much-
discussed and often ill-defined “American Way.”

What are the Federal policies of great importance
upon which people disagree most frequently today?
First, the relationship of Government to business.
Second, the Government’s policy toward labor and
collective bargaining. Third, the relief policy.

I welcome the opportunity to express my point
of view upon these national problems. It is a per-
sonal point of view, but one which from the begin-
ning has been closely identified with that of the
Administration.

“The American Way” is not just a rhetorical
phrase. It has deep and significant implications.
America was the new land of opportunity to which
men came from a tired Old World... an Old
World of little land and feudal overlordship and
labor surpluses, an Old World of poverty and
human resignation.

Ours was the new land of freedom, of open fron-
tiers, of work for all. Here were religious liberty,
freedom of thought, and economic opportunity.
Above all, here was respect for the dignity of the
individual. Here the rights a man might enjoy,
the heights he might scale, were not limited by his
family tree but rather by his own individual ability.

The American way is more than a set of consti-
tutional enactments for judicial interpretation. It
is the indwelling spirit of our economic and social
order. Like all great things, it may be summed
up in a few guiding principles. These are: First,


Works

Administration

masses—to the lower third of our population. We
have been brought up on the principle that it is
all right for the Government to grant big subsi-
dies to businessmen, because businessmen are em-
ployers—work givers, as the German term is. To
make Government funds available to the poor, except
in the minute doses of charity—seems wasteful, un-
businesslike. But it happens that we have develop-
ed a high economic machine which depends on mass
purchasing power, and that this mass purchasing
power can no longer be indirectly produced by
stimulating new investments, new additions to the
machinery of industrial production. It must be
directly pumped into the system at the bottom.

Of course in all this new type of spending and
pump-priming the size of our public debt, the amount
of our liabilities is important., But it is something
to be kept track of in relation to the purposes for
which the debt was incurred and in relation to the
credit of the Nation. And I can say from personal
knowledge that the present Administration is
watching these figures with the same care and vigi-
lance as any administration ever has.

What Did It Buy?

Let me give you a few simple figures. The gross
public debt as of March 3, 1938, after 5 years of the
present Administration, amounted to some 37%
billion dollars. This compares with a war debt
peak of 26% billion dollars in 1919, and with a total
of 21 billion dollars in March 1933, at the time the
present Administration took office. Thegross increase
in the public debt incurred by the present Adminis-
tration amounts to 16.8 billion dollars. To offset this
increase in the public debt there has been an increase
in actual Treasury assets—and I don’t mean the social
assets represented by the increase in the social wealth
of the Nation, which a proper form of bookkeeping


Works :
Progress thesé- countries the debt in relation to national income
Administration and national wealth is about two and a half times as

heavy as in our “spendthrift” United States.

But we are not out to increase needlessly our
national debt because other countries have a larger
relative debt. If we have increased our debt through
our great social investments, it has been done on the
principle of wise business management as well as
wise social management. The problem of financing
the public debt—any debt at whatever figure—is in
the last analysis a problem of stimulating and
maintaining the wealth-creating activities of the
Nation, whence come the taxes to pay the interest
and principal on the debt. Even if we had been
interested purely and exclusively in the prudent
management of the national debt, it would have
been necessary to increase the debt to stimulate the
national income, just as a private corporation often
finds it necessary to incur new debt in order to put
itself in a better business shape.

Obviously, no one believes that a nation can go on
forever piling up debts. But with the rising national
income, Federal budgets can and will be balanced
and the national debt retired in orderly fashion.

There you have the essentials of the current Fed-
eral attitude on several basic questions. In many
respects this country is holding the fort for democ-
racy. All over the world, men and women who love
human freedom are looking to the United States to
find the answer—the proper economic and social
balance that will make democracy safe.

Make Peace at Home

The greatest thing this Nation can do for inter-
national peace is to achieve domestic tranquillity,
domestic well-being. A nation, like an individual,
cannot cooperate to keep the peace if it is not at
peace with itself. We have no desire to isolate our-



What
picking. Last summer it was heavy in the Dust Is The
Bowl. Next winter the problem point may be American Way?

New York, just as this spring it was Chicago,
Detroit, and Cleveland. American business does
not operate on the basis of State lines or corporate
limits. The WPA, which takes up its labor slack,
must operate as business does. That is why it
must be Federal in character.

Now we come to that old hobgoblin—the terrible
burden of an ever-mounting public debt. Some
people seem to think the present Administration has
set out deliberately to destroy both our private habits
of thrift and our national credit by a revolutionary
policy of spending without end. I don’t think it is
necessary to dignify this charge by detailed refutation.
But I do feel that the debt itself, the reason for its in-
crease and the purposes for which the money was used
deserve the most serious and careful discussion.

Pump-Priming Is Old

How many people reading the newspapers and
listening to partisan political speeches are aware
of the fact that large public spending to prime the
pump of business is no new departure in our history?

Pump-priming has been carried on from the very
beginning of our national existence. It is true we
didn’t call it pump-priming in the past—but names
don’t matter, it is the reality that counts.

The very Constitutional Convention which drafted
our present Constitution was called for the express
purpose of formulating the principles of a strong
national government capable of fostering and de-
veloping the general welfare, capable of laying taxes
and incurring debts for the promotion of the general
welfare. From the very first years of Washington’s
administration the National Government intervened
with all its resources frequently and aggressively in
order to develop commerce, agriculture, and industry.



e
What
which guarantees the workers’ rights to self-organiza- Is The
tion and to collective bargaining by representatives American Way?
of their own choosing.

You people here, right next to the stee: and auto-
mobile districts, probably heard the preposterous
stories that the labor difficulties of last year were
deliberately planned by the Administration to
encourage labor to overthrow the American system
of private property. But I think we have to take
the labor difficulties and the Wagner Act in their
proper rational and historical perspective.

Unions Aid Balance

Now let me say that the Administration’s attitude
toward labor unions has been that of the reasonable,
progressive American, who has the interests of the
common man at heart. Unions are designed to
protect and improve the conditions of labor—the
interest of the common man, which bulks very large
in the general welfare.

Unions counterbalance the growth of corporations
and the concentration of economic power. In these
days no individual worker, unprotected by labor
unions, can hope to bargain on equal terms with
aggregations of great wealth and economic power.
From a social point of view, moreover, unions are
the only answer to the great technological revolution
which has transformed a laborer’s status from that
of an independent worker owning his own tools to
that of a human cog in a vast machine owned and
controlled by the employer.

Visualize in your own mind a worker in the long
assembly line of a modern industrial plant. What
does he possess except his precarious place in the
assembly line? Can you blame him for wanting to
cling to this place, and by organization with his
fellows to attempt to humanize his status by getting
‘some sort of tenure, vacations, good working



Works
Progress ful workers who lost their savings in bad securities
Administration or bad banks, of the holding companies which milked

the operating companies and kept up utility rates,
of the margin buyers and the sucker lists. Even in
times of panic, monopolies held up prices and cut
production, creating mass unemployment.

The American people believe that one of liberty’s
basic attributes is the chance to work for a living
and, through work, to attain a certain minimum of
security. They want to be independent—want free
markets and real competition. They saw these
things slipping away, and they turned for protection
to the only agency to which a democratic people
would turn—to their Government. That is why we
have the present Administration in Washington.

The policy of the Federal Government with respect
to business today is not dominated by the whim of
an individual, but it has been dictated by and with
the overwhelming approval of the people.

Whole System in Danger

In early 1933 the country was on the brink of
calamity. Millions of farmers and home owners
were about to lose their land, their homes, and their
savings. Business, large and small, the savings of
millions, would have been wiped out if the impending
bankruptcy of our insurance companies and banking
system had not been prevented.

Fifteen million breadwinners were without the
opportunity to earn their bread, and probably
another fifteen million were working only part time
and not earning much bread.

To have let things take their course—in accordance
with precedent—would have meant taking a major
step toward the destruction of the American system.
It would have meant such a redivision of ownership,
such a concentration of feudal overlordship at the
top and economic serfdom at the bottom that the



Intervention Is Not New

Fifty years ago, for example, Government was
regulating interstate commerce and_ legislating
against trusts, while twenty years ago it was liter-
ally running the railroads and plunging directly
into many business sectors on an emergency basis.
So you see these sorties of Government across the
mythical barrier which separated it from business
were definite and frequent long before the present
Federal Administration was even dreamed of. His-
tory records, also, that each of them was accom-
panied by the same cries of “foul” which we are
hearing today concerning attempts to regulate
security-selling, utilities, holding companies, and
the wages and hours of labor.

I would be the last to deny that the present
Federal Administration has crossed this imaginary
barrier, which is supposed to separate Government
from business, at more points, and in less time,
than any of its predecessors; but in return I would
expect you to grant that never before has the tra-
ditional division of functions failed so completely.

To be blunt, predatory business refused to take
the responsibility along with the privileges. It did
not see that the sovereign people, who gave it so
much freedom, were entitled, in return, to a work-
able economic system—to jobs, continued opportu-
nities, and security. Business, willing to attend to the
earning of money and the investing of profits, had little
interest in the democratic distribution of income.

Action by the People

Big business grew steadily richer and more ac-
quisitive. Surely I don’t need to repeat the tragic
story of the little merchants who lost their stores
and stayed on as managers or clerks, of the farm
owners who became tenants, of the army of trust-

e
What
Is The
American Way?



Works
Progress Pump-priming in those days took forms which
Administration kept us from recognizing it for what it was.

It took the form of giving away the national
domain in free land to veterans and then to all
settlers, of giving away vast areas to railroad com-
panies to help them build their systems. It took
the form of great internal improvements, of building
roads, subsidizing canals, dredging waterways, and
building harbors all with Government funds. It
took the form of a protective tariff to subsidize
infant industries and expand American employment.
It took the form of giving away certain sovereign
powers of the people—those intangible parts of the
public domain—such as franchises to public utility
| enterprises, the power to issue currency and create
credit to banks, and exclusive patent rights for in-
ventions—by means of which we deprived others of
the right to engage in these enterprises but enlarged
our industries, put men to work, created buying power.

Red Marks or Black?

These are a few examples of the pump-priming
which our American Government has engaged in
for 150 years. Pump-priming is as American as corn
on the cob.

Let me ask the people who deplore pump-priming in
1938 and complain bitterly about the growing national
debt, why were not similar complaints made while we
were pump-priming away our national domain? Is it
not because the national domain was never in the Fed-
eral balance sheet? When it was turned into purchas-
ing power, it was just that much met purchasing
power. Its loss did not create a bookkeeping deficit.

Today as we struggle with the problem of mass
unemployment, we realize that the loss of the public
domain was a very real loss regardless of its failure
to result in a red mark on our bookkeeping ledger.
We can wish we had it back, to use once more for



Works
Progress business. It has no desire whatever to harass or
Administration punish business. It fully realizes that business must

succeed, and must be able to work with government
if our economic system is to be preserved. It seeks
an understanding and a meeting of minds, not only
as to present points of conflict but as to methods
which will assure for the future, on the one hand,
justice and fair dealing to all the people, and on the
other, the confidence, success, and legitimate profits
of legitimate business enterprise. It has no quarrel
with business merely because it is big; but big or
little, it—the Government—intends to prevent prac-
tices which do violence to the effective working of
our economic system.

Both Must Prosper

There is no conflict between business and Govern-
ment, because there can be none. The conflict is
between interpretations of their relationships to each
other. Government, by consent of the governed,
must be concerned primarily with the welfare of the
Nation and all of its people. It has no choice. Our
system is so designed that if public officials do not
show this concern, they will be replaced by officials
who do. Concern for the national welfare means
concern for the practical success of all parts of it.

There will be honest differences as to the extent
to which Government feels it must be admitted to
economic affairs in behalf of the general welfare.
It is conceivable that these differences will be present,
in greater or less degree, for years to come. But
they should not be clouded with charges that the
Government is willfully handicapping an institution
which it well knows must prosper if either business or
Government is to succeed.

Now let us consider the attitude of the present
Administration toward labor, particularly its part in
the enactment and enforcement of the Wagner Act,



ee

i ft i
sentir al i
75 a tregiee eerste
i US E et ts
Res decree is



What fs the |
AMERICAN WAY é

ZG MARRY LHOPKINS dada
WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION

ira

SAlitite pelea



either. At the same time, loose and unproved
charges of racketeering should not be used to discredit
the great labor movement or the Wagner Act, both
of which are wedded to highly legitimate purposes.

Labor's Growing Pains

To my mind, the reason for the labor difficulties
of last year was not any revolutionary desire on the
part of the workers to overturn the American sys-
tem. The fact is that the two groups were func-
tioning in unfamiliar territory. The suspicions that
had developed from earlier tensions had the effect
of engendering misinterpretations of trivial actions,
so that these actions took on the appearance of deep-
laid plots for the destruction of the other side. If a
foreman gave a worker a black look, it was imme-
diately interpreted as being an indication that the
employer was about to engage in an attempt to
break the union. The employees would not trust
their grievances to arbitration because they knew
from past experience that arbitration machinery
could be used to cheat them out of their just dues.

It is significant that in those industries, such as
the railroads, where unions were old and well-
established, or even in those businesses where
experienced leaders on both sides were able to take
command (as in those steel companies where agree-
ments were readily negotiated without the necessity
of strikes)—there we found no insurmountable labor
difficulties. Witness, for example, the statement of
Myron Taylor, former chairman of the board of
U. S. Steel Corporation, in his farewell address to
the corporation. “The union,” he said, “has
scrupulously followed the terms of its agreement and
insofar as I know, has made no unfair effort to bring
other employees into its ranks, while the corpora-
tion’s subsidiaries, during a very difficult period, have
been entirely free of labor disturbances of any kind.”

What
Is The
American Way?


Works
Progress conditions? He would be less than human in his
Administration responsibilities to himself and to his family if he did

not seek to stabilize his position through collective
organization and collective bargaining.

The Wagner Act

Since unions are necessary to protect the worker
in his human rights and aspirations, it is necessary
to protect the right of the worker to join unions and
to select representatives of his own choosing. Ex-
perience has shown that selfish and short-sighted
employers will use their economic power to prevent
workers from joining unions or to kill unions after
they have been formed.

The much-discussed Wagner Act simply creates a
mechanism designed to accomplish two broad social
purposes in connection with unions. On the one
hand the mechanism protects the right of labor to
organize. It protects that right against the unscru-
pulous employer or combination of employers, who
use all the vicious techniques described by the La
Follette Civil Liberties Committee to prevent indus-
trial workers from organizing and acting together in
their own interests. On the other hand, it is designed
to iron out disputes as to who should represent the
workers in any industry or in any plant in negotia-
tions with their employers.

In both of these phases the Wagner Act makes for
industrial peace, and not for industrial war. What
looked like industrial disturbance following the vali-
dation of the Wagner Act by the Supreme Court
was the bustle and tussle of organizational activity
which had been too long delayed in the past by
unfair employer practices.

I deplore as much as anybody else the racketeering
that sometimes takes place in labor unions, just as
I deplore the racketeering of monopolistic employ-
ers. The Wagner Act is not an endorsement of



What
American way would have become a mere memory. Is The
We could have lost, at one stroke, the whole Ameri- American Way?

can system of free enterprise, and we could have lost
it with all the paraphernalia of due process of law
which was designed precisely to safeguard it. One
must not forget that dictators have come into power
without violating the legal forms, and that but a few
weeks ago a once-proud people committed suicide as
a nation in the proper constitutional manner.

Yet even in this situation the faith of the people
in the American way of doing things did not falter.
There was no serious talk of hunting a new set of
ideals and a new way of life, but only of adapting the
old machinery, and implementing it, to make
democracy work.

A Business Editorial

Lincoln spoke of “patient confidence in the ulti-
mate justice of the people.” Whatever controls the
people now want government to exercise with rela-
tion to industry in behalf of a better and squarer
deal for everyone, the people can take away at any
time they feel industry does not need such controls.

I would like to read you a remarkable passage from
an editorial in a magazine: “If the principles of
democracy and of private enterprise are to be pre-
served, it is evident that private enterprise must
admit into its affairs a Government profoundly con-
cerned with the successful operation of the economic
system. It should in the future be the object of
Business, not to obstruct Government intervention
at any cost, but to see to it that the intervening
Government is enlightened in economic matters.”

This did not appear in an obscure radical pam-
phlet, but in one of the most luxurious of business
publications—Fortune magazine.

I can say from personal knowledge that the Gov-
ernment is not, and never has been, opposed to



What
might well count as assets. I mean orthodox finan- Is The
cial assets which any banker would recognize. American Way?

If we subtract these assets, the net increase in
debt incurred by the Administration’s program of
spending for relief and recovery is 10 billion dollars,
and this includes the soldiers’ bonus of over 2 billion
dollars which Congress in 1924 had contracted to pay.

Since 1933 this Government has engaged in large-
scale deficit spending. What did we get for this
spending?

Again, let’s leave out all the imponderable gains—
the restoration of the confidence of our people in
their form of government, the conservation of the
physical and spiritual welfare of our people, the
enrichment of our social environment with vast public
improvements. Let us concentrate only on the item
that bankers and bookkeepers understand—the in-
crease in the national income. Deficit spending from
1933 to 1937 very materially helped in raising the level
of our national income from 40 billion dollars to close
to 70 billion dollars. And notwithstanding the 9
months’ depression, brought about by the inability
of business to take over when the Government cur-
tailed its spending program, our national income
this year is expected to reach 63 billion dollars, which
is still over 20 billions greater than in 1932.

Debt Increase Is Small

What about our ability to bear the burden of
increased national debt? Well, the gross national
debt per capita today is some 15 percent greater
than what it was in August 1919, at the time of the
war-debt peak.

The per-capita interest burden on the gross debt—
which is the main thing—is actually 30 percent
smaller than in 1919—$7 as against $10. And if we
compare our debt burden with that of other coun-
tries—England or France—we find that in both of



An Address Delivered
at the Chautauqua Institution
Chautauqua, New York
July 16, 1938

e
What
Is The
American Way?


Works
Progress
Administration

The only way to find out about the value and
efficiency of the work is to check it. Recently we
asked 10 national organizations interested in civic
planning—organizations such as the American Engi-
neering Council, the American Municipal Associa-
tion, and the Society of Planning Officials—to make
such a Nation-wide check. They gathered reports
from 8,000 communities in all sections of the coun-
try. The evidence was beyond question that the
workers generally give an honest day’s labor, that
the workmanship is good and frequently equal to
private work, that the improvements are in the
great majority of cases badly needed by the com-
munities and yet beyond local resources without
the Federal pay checks to the workers.

Work Planned Locally

We know that the improvements are what the
communities need because the program is highly
decentralized, and the initiation of projects proceeds
from the bottom up and not from the top down.
Aside from a few Federal projects which involve
perhaps 2 percent of the program, every improve-
ment or public service must be originated, planned
and requested by a local agency of government.
Moreover, in order both to insure that most of the
Federal money goes into wages and to prove ear-
nestness, the local government must put in an
average of nearly one-fourth of the cost in local funds.
It is difficult to imagine any desire or ability on the
partof local officials to put over useless public workson
their own communities under these circumstances.

Allegations of political coercion of the workers are
making headlines these days. To weigh such
charges, one must define coercion. How can it be
accomplished? Either you must pad the pay rolls
with your friends, or you must discharge or threaten
to discharge those who differ with you politically, or


turn? To those who believe in a dole instead of jobs?

If it is a vice for the electorate, or any part of it,
to take notice when public officials live up to their
preelection pledges, then the whole principle of
representative government is incurably vicious.
American history is full of political movements
which came into power by promising new programs
of popular benefits, and then earned the respect and
gratitude of the people by keeping those promises.
There were the Whigs with their internal improve-
ments, the Jacksonian Democrats with their destruc-
tion of the money power, the early Republicans with
their slogan of free homesteads. It seems to me
that if there is any vice to be feared in representa-
tive government, it is the failure of candidates and
movements to keep their promises to the people, and
not the gratitude of the electorate for promises kept.

Filling in the Gaps

Regarding the charge of competition with private
enterprise, the whole program has been carefully
worked out to avoid it. Most of our difficulties of
operation arise from our own efforts to avoid such
competition, and yet at the same time to keep
millions of people, with an infinite range of skills
and experience, working at the things they can do
best in order that they will be fit for private work
when it comes along.

All over America we are filling in the gaps where
the economic system has failed to provide willing
citizens with a chance to work for their living.

If the automotive industry is forced to shut down
in Detroit, we do not say that is Michigan’s problem.
We realize that the workers in Detroit are jobless,
not because of anything local, or any fault of their
own, but because people in California and Florida
and Maine are unable to buy automobiles. Our
job may be bigger in the South just after cotton-


What is the
AME! RICAN WAY ?

BY HARRY i HOPKINS
spipigisn guiness

WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION
WASHINGTON, D. C.


ti

Bhs

arnt
fas



Lun nh

3 1706 60148354 3

BUSINESS: “There is no conflict between business
and government because there can be none.
The conflict is between interpretations of their
relationships to each other. Government, by
consent of the. governed, must be concerned pri-
marily with the welfare of the Nation and all of
its people. It has no choice. Our system is so
designed that if public officials do not show this
concern, they will be replaced by officials who
do. Concern for the national welfare means con-
cern for the practical success of all parts of it.’’

LABOR: ‘When unions and their objectives
become more universally accepted into the
scheme of things, when the leaders on both sides
learn to trust each other and become more expe-
rienced in their tasks, I feel sure that labor diffi-
culties will be minimized. I feel certain that in
the future, when we look back at 1936 and 1937,
we shall all recognize that what some took to be
a great revolutionary disturbance was simply the
growing pains of a truly American institution.”

SPENDING: ‘Pump-priming has been carried on
from the very beginning of our national existence.
Tt took the form of giving away the national
domain in free land . . . of giving vast areas to
railroad companies . . . of building roads, sub-
sidizing canals, dredging waterways, and build-
ing harbors, all with Government funds . . . of
a protective tariff to subsidize infant industries

. of giving away certain sovereign powers of
the people, such as franchises to public utilities,
the power to issue currency and create credit to
banks, and exclusive patent rights for inventions.
These are a few examples of the pump-priming
which our American Government has engaged
in for 150 years. Pump-priming is as American
as corn on the cob.”

ner

nase pg



Works
Progress When unions and their objectives become more
Administration universally accepted into the scheme of things, when

the leaders on both sides learn to trust each other
and become more experienced in their tasks, I feel
sure that labor difficulties will be minimized. I feel
certain that in the future, when we look back at 1936
and 1937, we shall all recognize that what some took
to be a great revolutionary disturbance was simply
the growing pains of a truly American institution.

Work or Dole?

Turning to the question of relief and spending, I
should say that the critics of the Administration’s
program have taken a very simple position. They
are for relief, and against spending. They are for
relief but in a penny-wise and pound-foolish way
they are opposed to the present comprehensive
Federal program of providing jobs at useful work
instead of a pittance dole to the needy unemployed.

Social Security provisions to cooperate with the
States in helping the aged, the blind, and the
dependent children are in another field—as is also
direct relief by the States to those who are unfit,
for various reasons, to work. On the other hand, the
unemployed to whom the Federal program applies
are those who are able-bodied but who can not find
private jobs and are dependent on a public helping
hand because of the failure of the economic system.
Millions of them have been given security jobs on the
WPA or other agencies of the Federal Works Program.
Jobs are all the WPA gives. It gives no direct
relief, all of which is handled by the States and locali-
ties. Every WPA check is in return for work done.

The critics who want relief but no spending will
tell you that a work program costs two or three
times as much as a direct relief program. Even if
the argument were true, it would be irrelevant,
because the American people, with an amazing



What
you must force campaign contributions in some way. Is The
In each locality, the eligibility of needy workers American Way?

for our program is determined, not by the WPA,
but by the constituted local welfare authorities. If
there is political discrimination at that point, it is a
matter for the local citizenry to handle. On the
other points I do not believe the WPA is perfect,
any more than democracy is perfect; but I believe it
is remarkably clean, for an organization of its size.
I believe it is freer from these pressures than most
large private enterprises.

Whom Would They Favor?

I believe the American people are very jealous of
these funds for relief, and deeply resent any political
misuse of them. For 5 years I have worked on that
basis. Anybody in America has the right to vote
as he pleases, and to keep his view secret or express
himself freely on it. Men in large jobs and small
jobs, in private life and public life, do it every year.
And other men are just as free to disagree. That
is the American way. Traditionally, American
workers have rebelled against pay-envelope political
pressure. They resent a slip pinned to the check
which says that if so-and-so is elected, the plant
will go on a half-time basis. They resented, in
1936, a pay-envelope attack on Social Security.
But they do not feel the same way about the news-
paper interview in which the boss simply announces
his own position. In that, he is no freer than they.

I confess that the logic of some of the current
opinion about so-called coercion is beyond my
understanding. It is frequently stated, in the
manner of a solemn accusation, that the workers of the
WPA are bound to be grateful to the present Adminis-
tration. The implication is that this constitutes some
terrible sort of turpitude, presumably on the part of
the Administration. To whom are they expected to