AP Photo
Presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, right, with FDR in September 1939
In the 110-page report released by the Biden-Sanders unity task force, the word “job” is mentioned over 130 times. Nothing better highlights the economic crisis facing the nation.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 51 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. An estimated 31 million still rely on them. On top of this dismal news, ten million jobs may be forever lost, with almost 50 percent of those laid off believing they will have no job to return to even when the pandemic is under control.
We are encouraged that former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, has made clear that he intends to be more Rooseveltian than Roosevelt. The combined economic, health, racial, and environmental stakes are even higher today than those FDR faced in 1933.
As the grandchildren of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and one of his closest advisers, Harry Hopkins, we understand the challenges that Biden will face should he win in November. Biden and his team will need to deal with massive, long-term unemployment on a scale not seen since World War II. Their policies for tackling the unemployment crisis — and a dozen other interconnected challenges — will undergo close scrutiny and face aggressive opposition. Biden has promised to “go bold,” and we are pleased that he has. Boldness and persistence, not a return to normalcy, is the only path forward.
We hope that Joe Biden’s “greatest primary task” as president will be, once again, to provide the dignity of a wage-paying job to the vast army of unemployed Americans.
Roosevelt’s boldest policy when he took office in 1933 was to create federal programs that provided unemployed Americans with wage-paying jobs doing useful work. FDR announced this daring departure in his First Inaugural address. “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work,” he said. “This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.”
Within weeks, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) began to hire young men (unfortunately, no women) to carry out projects to restore America’s depleted land, replenish forests, and improve national parks. Alongside the CCC, Harry Hopkins created two other jobs programs — the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA)— that moved millions of unemployed adults from the “relief” rolls into wage-paying jobs, where they built thousands of useful infrastructure projects and more.
We hope that Joe Biden’s “greatest primary task” as president will be, once again, to provide the dignity of a wage-paying job to the vast army of unemployed Americans. Just as during the Great Depression, the millions today who have lost their jobs, or seen their wages shrink, do not want welfare. They want , need , and deserve jobs: temporary transitional jobs, drawing on the experience of the WPA, to the extent that the private sector cannot absorb them.
They also deserve a higher federal minimum wage, significant tax relief, paid leave, and affordable child care. All this should be at the top of Biden’s jobs agenda: to be more Rooseveltian than Roosevelt.
The signature achievement of FDR’s New Deal, in the end, wasn’t wave after wave of specific laws or thousands of public-works projects. Rather, its greatest triumph was the ability to restore confidence in the great American democratic experiment, lay a broad foundation of economic security for a growing number of workers and their families, and curb the abuses in banking and finance that undermined the nation’s economy.
This was no small feat. In an age where ideological extremism rooted in hate and fear nearly destroyed democratic institutions on a global scale, FDR, Hopkins, and the rest of the New Dealers charted a steady, optimistic course that over time brought prosperity and stability to millions of American families. As Hopkins said of the millions of men and women of the WPA: “The things they have actually accomplished all over America should be an inspiration to every reasonable person and an everlasting answer to all the grievous insults that have been heaped on the heads of the unemployed.”
While the decades since the New Deal have seen progress toward racial justice, gender equality, and a cleaner environment, there is still a long, long way to go. Blacks and other minorities face grievous inequities in this country. Women are paid less for the same work men do. Pollution-driven climate change threatens life and societies around the globe. Yet the goal of a just and equitable society remains within reach. If elected, a Biden administration has an opportunity to right the social wrongs of the past, and move toward saving the Earth itself, by championing an inclusive, bold 21st Century New Deal.
Boldness and persistence, not a return to normalcy, is the only path forward.
One of the first priorities of a Biden administration should therefore be a government assurance of a job paying a decent wage. Americans across the board will benefit. A jobs program that draws on the lessons of the WPA will also reduce racial disparities and improve the environment; many needed programs to protect the planet will require sustained labor, and we have the means and opportunity to enact them immediately.
Currently, gross incompetence and callousness are the modus operandi of the White House. The American people long for better. They desperately want the “bold, persistent experimentation” that FDR, Hopkins, and the New Dealers provided during the Great Depression. They deserve again a government that works for the many, not the privileged few.
A federal jobs program that puts Americans back to work — as part of a broader 21st Century New Deal that tackles our most severe economic, health, and environmental problems and greatly reduces racial inequities — would not merely be a Biden administration solution to specific domestic problems. It will help restore confidence in our society’s core value that government is the servant of the people. It will begin to repair our divided population and heal our deepest wounds. It will uplift the better angels of our nature. Above all, it will advance the prospect that our democratic experiment, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, shall not perish from the Earth.
