American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

industry, organized under the proper influences, could do it all provided they had the information on which to act. The national government waged war and conducted foreign and economic policy, but virtually its only domestic role was to compile the necessary information for business and industry and bring it to the attention of leaders in the private sector and in state and local governments. It became their job, from then on, to act in response to business trends—in the case of recession, for example, to increase spending on plants and public works to counteract the downturn. Hoover had urged the adoption of such countercyclical spending to smooth out hiccups in the business cycle since his days as commerce secretary. Never before had the government taken even this small hand in guiding the economy, a role Hoover, a baseball fan, likened to umpiring rather than playing in the game. But when the depression struck, as president he gave himself few options otherwise, either to attack unemployment or to alleviate the hardships it caused. If federal money could not be spent to create jobs or provide food, clothing, and shelter, the money had to come from somewhere else. And if the state and local governments had tapped all their taxing power and were too broke even to pay their own employees, which was the case in Chicago with its teachers, the only source of money left was voluntary givers. This is where the president now turned.
    Persuasion was another of his beliefs. Hoover had great faith in the power of words, assurances, appearances. Like engineering, the art of advertising was also on the rise, and brand names such as Camel cigarettes, Maxwell House coffee, and Coca-Cola were increasing their market share with popular slogans such as Maxwell House’s “Good to the last drop.” None of this was lost on the president; he had once told the Saturday Evening Post that “the world lives by phrases.” In a later era, he would have been noted for his belief in “spin.” As jobs kept disappearing, he judged language by its potential for encouragement.
    In the fall of 1930, he had appointed an Emergency Committee for Employment. A dispatch from Washington at the time reported that “President Hoover has summoned Colonel Arthur Woods to help place 2,500,000 persons back to work this winter.” Woods, the committee chair, was a former New York City police commissioner and an officer in the army’s air corps during the world war; he had worked in relief during the 1920–21 depression, when a drop in manufacturing triggered a jump in joblessness. Hoover instructed him to approach unemployment as a local problem, but Woods could find no local solutions. He decided it required action on a national scale and, as Father Cox and others were also to do, urged the president to submit a plan of federally funded public works to the Congress. Hoover dismissed the idea, Woods resigned, and the committee dissolved.
    By March 1931, half a year later, unemployment had worsened drastically. Eight million people were now out of work, double the number just one year earlier. And the numbers of the unemployed kept rising. In August, Hoover replaced the first committee with another, the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR). Its chair was American Telephone and Telegraph president Walter S. Gifford, who also chaired the Charity Organization Society of New York; like Hoover, Gifford believed in voluntary private action. POUR mounted an advertising and publicity campaign to encourage private giving. This was more to Hoover’s liking, and the president himself launched the campaign in a nationwide radio address on October 18, in which again he left no room for a federal program: “No governmental action, no economic doctrine, no economic plan or project can replace that God-imposed responsibility of the individual man and woman to their neighbors.” The depression, he said, was “a passing incident in our national life,”