Along the "American Way": The New Deal's Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed

Abstract

BECAUSE historians have accepted economic innovation as the standard by which to measure the New Deal's accomplishments, New Deal historiography has tended to discount the importance that reformers of the 1930s attached to the psychological effects of many federal programs.' Among American social work reformers, for example, stock manipulations and monopolistic business arrangements held less social significance than the traumatic psychic dislocation caused by simple joblessness. Unemployed, man lost his self-respect . . . ambition and pride, testified settlement headworker Lillian D. Wald.2 New Deal administrator Harry L. Hopkins noted, a workless man has little status at home and less with his friends, condition which reinforces his own sense of failure. Finally, Hopkins observed, Those who are forced to accept charity, no matter how unwillingly, are first pitied, then disdained by society in general.3