THE WHITE COLLAR
THREE YEARS OF WPA PROFESSIONAL
BY GRACE ADAMS
HE news from Washington early last
T June, that Congress would soon in-
crease the allotments of the Works Prog-
ress Administration, made perplexing
reading for those of us who still ding,
though now a little hesitantly, to a tradi-
tion that was once known quite unam-
biguously as "liberal." A person whose
"social conscience" is a matter of flexible,
humanitarian convictions rather than of
fixed party policies could hardly share
the rabid New Dealers' jubilation over
this "victory" of their principles-for by
then it was becoming plain that many
WPA dollars which had been intended to
feed and clothe the needy had been put
to far less worthy uses. Yet no one whose
memory of the bleak early years of the
depression was still clear could join with
a dear' conscience in the bitter denunci-
ations of the financial Tories-for point-
ing that memory and keeping it sharp was
the thought of some million desperate,
but once proud and competent men and
women who were destitute by 1935 and
who might still, but for the generous ges-
ture of a benevolent government, be sub-
sisting meagerly and shamefully upon
municipal charity.
Perhaps WPA funds have been spent
inefficiently, perhaps in some localities
WP A officials are not unlearned in politi-
cal chicanery; still it was "primarily" for
the benefit of the "skilled" and "profes-
sional" persons who had been "deprived
of their means of livelihood by forces be-
yond their control" that the basic the-
CHOKES
WORK.
ories of WP A, as opposed to those of all
other relief agencies, were firstpromul-
gated. And whenever during the past
three topsy-turvy economic years the cry
has gone up from'those who must eventu-
ally pay their bills that the "white-collar
projects" have been needlessly expensive,
there have come from 'Washington such
reassurances as these:
"We think our projects are worthwhile
and that the people who are working on
them may take a workman's proper pride
in their achievement. . . . If the men are
to b"e given useful, productive work in
which they may take a genuine satisfac-
tion, money must be provided for equip-
ment and materials. . . . Our primary
concern has been with the workers them-
selves ... maintaining their morale and
skills."
Now, to a kindhearted, liberal-minded
person actually doing useful and produc-
tive work of which he can be genuinely
proud-that is, to one who still derives his
livelihood from that free, splendid world
known to WP A workers, often only by
hearsay, as "private industry"-these few
simple sentences make good sense. They
also seem ample justification for any
blunders and extravagances that an or-
ganization so huge and so experimental
may perpetrate. But to the white-collar
project worker himself, automatically
signing his identification number to a
time sheet four times a day and furtively
cashing his ear-marked emergency relief
check once a week, such words as "pro-
 THE WHITE COLLAR
ductive," "useful," "genuine," "skill,"
"achievement," "morale," and "pride"
evoke a disturbing and nostalgic emotion
-the same feeling that comes to him
when he happens to remember the home
that he mortgaged or the possessions that
he pawned in the hope that he would soon
be a self-supporting citizen once more.
The white-collar relief worker remem-
bers the year of 1935 too-and the five
pinched and despairing years that went
before it-much more lastingly than the
rest of us do. He remembers the be-
wildered wonder with which he read
those first heartening dispatches coming
out from Washington and realized that
the national government was preparing
to do for him the one thing that at that
time no past employer, no well-meaning
relative, no local charity was able to do.
It was-going to make him an "independ-
cnt" and a "useful" citizen once more.
It was going to see that whatever apti-
tudes he possessed should not become
finally dulled through disuse, and that
the last remnants of his self-respect should
no longer be tattered by the regretful re-
fusals of employment agencies and the
grudging concessions of relief investiga-
tors. He was going to be allowed to
work again. He was going to be given a
job so well worth doing that the govern-
ment itself was ready to pay him "going
wages" to perform it.
It turned out though that after he had
tramped dazedly from one hastily assem-
bled WP A office to another, answered the
same questions over and over again, stood
impatiently in line for days, and waited
anxiously at home for weeks, he was not
given a job at all. He was given a slip of
flimsy paper containing a complex nu-
meral, which he learned to call a "dog-
tag" but which was known officially as a
Project Assignment Number.
In case the distinction between a job
and a project assignment seems as obscure
and unimportant to the person who reads
about it to-day as it did to the project
assignee himself three years ago, that dis-
tinction must be made clear. No one
who does not understand it can possibly
CHOKES 475
understand the unique position of the
white-collar WP A worker or the most sig-
nificant and obvious factors concerning
him-why he is a favorite target for both
radio jokes and communistic propaganda
and why also private industry even in its
comparatively recuperative months, dur-
ing 1936 and 1937, persistently refused to
re-employ him. Behind the technic of
work-by-projects lies a definite philoso-
phy, quickly discernible to anyone famil-
iar with the trends which American
pedagogy and psychiatry have followed
during the past three decades. Behind it
too lies the compromise of one of the most
humanitarian of all utopian dreams with
the immediate exigencies of politics and
economics.
II
The dream-which according to rumor
came to Mr. Harry Hopkins and Mr .
Aubrey Williams simultaneously in a din-
ing car of the Pennsylvania Railroad-
was that the money which the Roosevelt
Administration was prepared to spend in
helping industry to recover could be more
widely distributed by diverting it, tempo-
rarily, to the altogether worthy purpose
of "maintaining the morale and skills" of
the most deserving among the nation's
unemployed. The national government
would interview its jobless men and
women, determine the type of work they
could do best, and pay them for perform-
ing just such work until private industry,
through the impetus given it by the
spending of their salaries, would be ready
to re-employ them.
The realities with which this dream has
had to contend have been so numerous
that few were understood until the works
program was well under way; many have
not become clear to WP A officials even
now. The greatest, however, was appar-
ent before the original idea was put be-
fore Congress.
The aptitudes of the unemployed had
been as various as the industries and pro-
fessions that had once employed them.
They hadbeen salesmen, justices of the
peace, paperhangers, electricians, school-
476 HARPER'S MONTHLY
teachers, dentists, real estate agents, milli-
ners, machine operators, tailors, furriers,
actors, plumbers, plasterers, clergymen,
architects, butchers, officemanagers, com-
mercial travelers, reporters, nurses, weld-
ers, barbers, dressmakers, laundrymen,
and everything else that several million
once self-supporting individuals could
have been. To have kept all of them pro-
ficient at the only trades they knew the
Administration would have had to go
into business with a vengeance and be-
come a rich and suffocating rival of the
very industries it was attempting to re-
vive. This was obviously impossible.
So the first requirement for relief work
was that it should in no way compete with
any other work then being done through-
out the nation. The unemployed were
to be put back to work-but at tasks
which, by commercial and narrowly prac-
tical standards, should be valueless.
With the manual laborers this require-
ment raised no great difficulties. In
every community throughout the nation
there were roads that needed leveling,
parks that needed sprucing up, public
buildings that needed improvements.
So during 1935 almost two million per-
sons, in large cities as well as country
neighborhoods, were set to work with
rake and shovel and trowel. And there
for the purpose of this article they must
be left-to the ministrations of the politi-
cians and the mercies of the cartoonists;
for like the originators of the WP A pro-
gram our "primary" concern is with the
seven hundred thousand men and women
who during the past three years have been
employed on white-collar projects.
"We don't think," said administrator
Aubrey Williams, "a good musician
should be asked to turn second-rate la-
borer in order that a sewer may be laid
for relative permanency rather than a
concert given for the momentary pleas-
ure of our people." And neither, by
implication and WP A's specific design,
should anyone who had ever mani pulated
a slide rule or carried a brief case or
pounded a typewriter or served goods or
food across a counter, be asked to perform
MAGAZINE
the only kind of work that in our day is
known as "manual."
Intellectually this was a high ideal.
Yet considered in strictly practical terms,
what exactly is "work" whose ultimate
objective is neither permanency, nor
monetary value, but momentary pleasure?
It is not, as 'WPA's most callous critics in-
sist on calling it, plain loafing. It is ex-
actly what the WP A officialshave officially
designated it-a "cultural project."
Though these officialshave made "proj-
ect" one of the most commonly used
nouns in our contemporary vocabulary, it
was not they who first took this word,
which for centuries had referred, and by
definition should refer, to an indefinite
future, and by persistent repetition made
it descriptive of activities already per-
formed. This had been done for them
by the designers of that most typically
American of pedagogical philosophies-
progressive education.
When the fortunate youngsters of the
newer education imitate for their transi-
tory enjoyment, and under the benevo-
lent guidance of their teachers, the ac-
tions which their elders execute for more
remote and ulterior ends-daubing with
paints, modeling with clay, organizing
toy bands, printing two-page newspapers,
building make-believe boats, and drama-
tizing their own imaginative thoughts-
they are never described as accomplishing
individual tasks; they are always said to
be working collectively upon a project.
And so are the seven hundred thousand
men and women in WPA's professional
division, whether their activities concern
painting murals, asking housewives about
their budgets, taking measurements of
historical buildings, making scrapbooks
of the Sunday rotogravures, acting in
circuses, playing in dance orchestras, or
compiling bibliographies and translating
scientific treatises that no commercial
publisher will ever print.
Some activities such as band concerts
and vaudeville performances lend them-
selves naturally to the project method
and, therefore, seem to be carried on un-
der WPA sponsorship in the same way
 THE WHITE COLLAR
that they are conducted in the commercial
world. Yet even when such normally
sedentary and solitary occupations as re-
search work and literary composition are
adopted by WPA, they too are not only
blessed with the terminology of progres-
sive education but infused with its bus-
tling spirit of collective activity. And it
is only by keeping in mind the essentially
restless, squirming atmosphere of the
play-schools that an intelligent and com-
petent individual outside the WPA can
possibly understand how similar persons
within the WPA feel about the projects
upon which they are required to spend
six or five or three hours a day in return
for their $17, $19, or $22 weekly checks.
If, for instance, you live in an urban
community you have probably read in
your newspapers that a WPA educational
project is helping the backward children
in your city's schools to read or spell or
add more proficiently. Since you are fa-
miliar with the established custom of
"coaching" you believe that you under-
stand what the project workers are doing.
The truth is though that from what
you have read in the paper you know very
little of the project itself. You know
only its "service angle" -that fractional
part of it which has been "written up to
show" by the assistant professor of educa-
tion or the assistant grade-school princi-
pal who for reasons of his own "spon-
sored" it-for the precise purpose that it
has already served: that of attracting the
approving attention of intelligent per-
sons like yourself. The fortunate young
women who do the actual teaching are
comparatively so few that if they were all
dismissed to-morrow their absence would
scarcely be noticed except by the most
turbulently union-minded of their fel-
low-workers. The real project is com-
posed of hundreds of men and women
who never except by accident see a school
child. These are research workers, who
were once bank tellers, civil engineers,
lawyers, jewelers, automobile salesmen,
grocery clerks, but who now sit day after
day in crowded rooms copying in neat
rows the number of two-letter, three-let-
,CHOKES 477
ter, and four-letter words appearing in a
certain standard primer, which another
group of research workers will correlate
with similar word-lists which still other
"units" of research workers have already
compiled from other primers. These
people are collectively performing tasks
that seem as remote to them as they
do to you from the simple business of
teaching stupid little boys and girls to
learn their lessons more quickly, but
whichto the WPA officials are extremely
valuable tasks because they keep so many
men and women signing the time sheet
four times a day.
It is the same way when at your lending
library you come across one of the slim
brochures of information which from
time to time the cultural projects have
put out. This again is a "service" by-
product of the organic project itself, writ-
ten by a special group for a special pur-
pose. It may tell you many interesting
facts about the community in which you
live or the countryside you hope to visit
on your next vacation. It does not tell
you what will eventually become of the
millions of words which are being copied
into blue and yellow [arms, checked, re-
copied, classified, and filed away.
When you hear that one white-collar
project in your community is accompany-
ing school children to historic shrines and
another is helping foreigners to learn
English, you do not know, because no one
has thought it necessary to tell you, that
in order that the projects may operate,
the "teachers" and "counselors" assigned
to them must spend a large pan of their
time begging grade-school teachers to
lend them their charges for a few hours
each month, or cajoling Italian, Greek,
and Finnish housewives, who have al-
ready learned how best to placate relief
investigators, into exchanging the fluency
of their native tongues for a few clipped
sentences of tabloid English.
And if you have been caught up in the
enthusiasms of those who declare that the
few murals and canvases which the WP A
has exhibited in strategic cities would
seem to justify the millions it has spent on
478 HARPER'S MONTHLY
its art projects, you probably do not real-
ize that out of all those millions the men
and women who actually painted those
pictures received no more for their work
(in some cities considerably less) than the
thousands of persons who have become
"artists' merely by official classification,
and who block in the charts and copy the
inspirational posters and slogans that
adorn all WP A offices.
The persons who are now employed
upon the white-collar projects are pot of
course the care-free, tenderly nurtured
children ifor whose "momentary pleas-
ure" the technic of progressive education
was first devised. They are grown men
and women who before WP A put them
back to work had to submit to the most
humiliating experience of their lives-
that of confessing to a public social
worker, as well as to themselves, that they
could no longer, unaided, make a living.
So unlike the fortunate youngsters of the
play schools; the WP A workers did not
"create" their own projects, or even
choose those at which they would work;
they were "requisitioned" to them by a
process of mobilization which was nu-
merically as precise, and very nearly as
arbitrary, as that which had conscripted
the American Expeditionary Forces eight-
een years earlier.
r III
Even if the WPA officials' initial hope
of making their work program conform
to the specific abilities of the millions of
unemployed hadnot been scotched by the
Administration's non-competitive prom-
ise to business, their secondary hope, that
each needy worker might be "interviewed'
by a committee especially qualified to
pass upon his training and qualifica-
tions," would have given way before the
flood of relief dollars in 1935.
When a requisition came to a local re-
lief office for ten, fifty, a hundred, or a
thousand white-collar workers, the hard-
pressed, poorly paid "employment officer"
there, whose job up till now had been
mostly nominal, did-the very best that he
could. Within the requisite number of
MAGAZINE
days he supplied the requisite number
of workers by having his assistants go
through his files and select from them
those "clients" whose own unverified de-
scriptions of themselves seemed to qualify
them for the assignments.
If during the next week after this par-
ticular requisition was officially closed,
this same employment officer happened to
interview personally a dozen persons who
were especially fitted for the work to
which he had already assigned hundreds
of untrained and inexperienced people,
there was nothing that he or anyone else
could do about it. And if, when the next
requisition was open, he was obliged to
send these same competent persons to
more menial and less well paid tasks,
there was nothing that could be done
about that either.
"We do not think," said Aubrey Wil-
liams, "a good musician should be asked
to turn second-rate laborer." And yet
the only musician employed by WPA of
whom the world at large has heard is the
Italian boy whose hand-pick was hacking
the pavements of New York the morning
before an audition at the Hippodrome
won him the title role in "Pagliacci."
Ralph M. Easly, of the National Civic
Federation, claims to have definite proof
that only twenty-one per cent of the per-
sons employed on the Federal Writers
Project in New York City ever wrote for
a living, or saw a line of their own com-
position in print. Yet when this same
project went into operation in 1935 a
widely known author of light verse and
children's stories could not join it be-
cause two months before, when she was
first requisitioned to work relief, she had
confessed to an expert knowledge of ste-
nography and was, therefore, classified
irrevocably as a clerk.
Thus, even in the first flush months of
governmental spending, the fine free
ideals of progressive education were bent
to the precise implementation of military
conscription. Soon they were forced to
bow even deeper to legislative economics.
When the principles of the Works Prog-
ress Administration were first promul-
 THE WHITE COLLAR
gated in 1.934it seemed that the depth of
the depression must surely have been
reached. When Congress approved th
the next spring, industrial recovery
seemed so near that the money for "main-
taining the morale and skills" of the tem-
porarily unemployed was appropriated
for only six months' time; since then the
money for WP A's continuance has been
doled out for the same short periods. By
November I, 1935, all the millions of dol-
lars ear-marked for work relief had ale
ready been allocated to the thousands of
projects which claimed it. On that date
WP A closed its employment offices.
But Congress, like the WPA officials,
had depended upon business charts
rather than upon the independent tem-
per of the American people. When the
Emergency Relief Act of 1935 was passed
in April, America had indeed reached the
depth of its depression; and more capable
and ambitious persons were out of work
than ever before. Yet local relief rolls
had not yet registered the final desperate
plight of the nation's unemployed. As
late as 1936 hundreds of thousands of
American families, though in actual
want, were still too proud to apply for
the munificent bounties which they still
considered "charity."
Social workers from allover the coun-
try can offer good evidence that among
these "doubly underprivileged," who
were denied WP A employment because
they had not publicly declared themselves
indigent by November, 1935. were thou-
sands of men and women who were ex-
ceptionally worthy of places on the white-
collar projects. Yet. even as with the
WP A manual workers. our primary con-
cern is not with them, but with the seven
hundred thousand comparatively fortu-
nate persons who, because of actual desti-
tution, or from canny foresight, were ale
ready on local relief rolls when WP A was
inaugurated and were given white-collar
assignments on it. Fortunate they are, as
to the size of their weekly checks; yet the
same legislative finances that have dis-
qualified many of the unemployed for any
kind of work relief, have kept these seven
CHOKES 479
hundred usand continually jittery
about the jobs they now hold.
Fr the rly spring of 1936 till that
of 19 ~ WPA's allocations were not in-
creased, but continually curtailed. Dur-
ing that period there was scarcely a
month when the newspapers did not carry
announcements of reductions in the WPA
rolls; and never a day when rumors of
such reductions were not being whispered
about, discussed, and trembled over in
all white-collar projects. For work relief
firing, like work relief hiring, cannot
take account of individual needs; it must
be done in strict conformity to fixed
and predetermined numbers. The relief
worker has no way of knowing in advance
how large the next reduction will be, or
where it will strike, yet always there is
the chance that it may strike him.
The recent larger appropriations for
work relief will perhaps quell these anxie-
ties for a while. But as soon as the
Works Progress Administration is again
forced by Congress to economize, rumors
of dismissals will again sweep the proj-
ects, and a person who was requisitioned
in I938IWilllearn to share, with those who
have been white-collar workers for more
than three years, the perpetual dread of
finding a pink slip in his envelope-and
of having to admit, in finality and de-
spair, that the government, like private
industry, no longer has any use for what-
ever competence he once possessed.
IV
Though this persistent, morbid con-
cern over' dismissals may be a state of
mind difficult for an outsider to compre-
hend completely, what is forcibly appar-
ent to anyone who visits a white-collar
project for even a half hour, is the num-
ber of exceptionally young, seemingly
befuddled, and obviously infirm per-
sons employed upon it. The deliberate
weighting of the white-collar projects
with boys and girls who reached working
age after the depression had hit us in ear-
nest and were therefore unable to find
jobs commensurate with their educa-
 •
480 HARPER'S MONTHLY
tional attainments; with housewives who
had neither special training nor any voca-
tional experience; with men past the re-
tirement age in most industries; and with
persons whose physical afflictions had ren-
dered them unfit for manual labor, was
in line with WPA's broad policy of psy-
chiatric idealism. For surely a nation
which was preparing to spend billions on
the rehabilitation of those among its citi-
zens who were, supposedly, only tempo-
rarily unemployed, could afford a few
hundred thousands for those for whom
private industry would never again have
a place or to whom it had not yet given
the chance of earning a living. Yet the
psychological result of this generous and
compassionate gesture has been far from
salutary. Not only has it bred skepti-
cism in regard to the value of work which
can be no more adequately performed by
persons of exceptional training and abil-
ity than by boys and girls fresh from high
school, by men so deaf that an expert at
sign language must translate their in-
structions to them each morning, and
women so palsied that a special clerk has
to transcribe their almost illegible notes
each afternoon; more than this, the inclu-
sion of inexperienced and (to put it
bluntly) incapacitated persons upon proj-
ects originally planned for skilled and
competent workers tended to inject the
concept of permanency into an organiza-
tion that was intended to be temporary.
Like the originators of the WP A, the
experienced men and women whom it
originally employed looked upon work
relief as a stop-gap to private employ-
ment. But from the beginning the con-
fused middle-aged women, the feeble old
men, the persons who are crippled or af-
flicted with slight but definite neuroses,
have hoped fervently, though always
anxiously and suspiciously, that WP A's
weekly bounties will continue at least as
long as they live, while the young people
who have never worked before and who
know no other working standards except
those which WP A has imposed on them
are determined to make it last as long as
they want it to. To them work relief is
MAGAZINE
neither a stepping-stone to other employ-
ment nor a final refuge from an unkind
world. It is a vocation which, by great
good luck, they were able to enter at a
particularly precarious time and which
they have no intention of quitting for less
lucrative or more laborious occupations.
To distinguish between those who were
once able to regard WP A work as tempo-
rary and those whose highest hope and
most articulate objective is to make it
permanent, we have to go back to the
early months of 1937, when for a while
business seemed to be recovering from its
doldrums. Private industry was begin-
ning to re-employ again, Home Relief
rolls were shrinking, but the personnel of
the WPA changed noticeably only by
blanket dismissals dictated by economy.
The National Re-employment Service de-
cided to take a hand in the matter and
see if it could not put the most competent
of the WP Aers back into private work.
Little was heard of this effort in the out-
side world, for little came of it; after the
NRS's intensive drive was over the WPA
rolls were as big as they had been before;
private industry had refused to hire peo-
ple from the work-relief ranks.
But announcement of the proposed
drive made a stir in WP A offices. Orders
went out that all project work should be
stopped (as it is always stopped when
there is anything else that the project
workers might possibly do) until the NRS
had carefully interviewed all workers to
see what private jobs they might be quali-
fied to fill. Two young women received
the news at the same time with markedly
different reactions.
Miss A had come to New York before
the depression, bringing with her a much
younger sister. Through recommenda-
tions from her former employer in the
Middle West she easily found work as
private secretary to the president of a
wholesale clothing firm. She supported
herself and her sister and paid for the lat-
ter's schooling. In 1933 the clothing con-
cern failed and the two girls, who had
neither savings nor relatives to tide them
over until Miss A could get another job,
 •
THE WHITE COLLAR
were forced to apply for relief. Because
of her ability Miss A was immediately set
to work as a typist in the relief office at
$17 a week, upon which the girls lived
until 1935, when WPA went into effect
and Miss A was transferred to a "cultural
project." "That," she remembers think-
ing naively, "would be just wonderful.
I could do work that was worth while and
really interesting." But because she had
been classified as a typist in the relief of-
fice, she has remained a typist on \tVPA
and at the same salary; only now instead
of typing case histories she types long
sheets of numbers, of the significance of
which she has not until this day the slight-
est inkling.
Miss B, during the three years she has
been receiving $120 a month for working
21 hours a week on an educational proj-
ect, has lived with her family. Though
this is the first paying position she has
ever held, after her graduation from high
school in 1930 she was able to attend a
local college for a year and a half, study
for six months in a private secretarial
school, and spend another year at a con-
servatory in another city. She joined
the WPA during those early months of
1935 when the mobilization of the white-
collar projects was so frenzied that an ap-
plication for local relief was often ac-
cepted as a defini te test of need. Thus
she escaped the indignities of a home in-
vestigation; and because she described
herself calmly and confidently as a
teacher, she was not only accepted as such
but made "head teacher" over several doz-
ens of men and women, all of whom were
her superiors in age, education, experi-
ence, or proved earning ability.
When the news of the re-employment
drive reached the projects, Miss A was
hopeful. "If they'll only get me a real
job again," she said, "I don't care what
they pay me or what I have to do-just so
I can leave this outfit where signing the
time sheet right is the only thing that
really counts."
Miss B had different ideas. "Why, if
they find out I can type," she thought,
"they might put me to work in an office.
CHOKES 481
I'm no stenographer; I'm a teacher.
They won't make me work any 8 hours a
day for $14 a week!"
She was right; they didn't. Nor did
they offer a job to Miss A. And after the
re-employment drive was over Miss A had
a new item to add to her credo about sign-
ing the time sheet right being the only
thing that counts. This was: "If you
ever want a real job again never let any-
one know that you have been on WPA."
For persons like Miss A the failure of
the NRS to persuade private employers
to take them back to work meant the con-
firmation of a dread that had been be-
coming more certain whenever they had
sought other jobs-that to the real world
of industrial efficiency a WP A assignment
number was a badge of failure and in-
competence. Since then, as nothing has
occurred to dissipate this dread, the psy-
chological distinction between the once
efficient workers and those who are inex-
perienced or incapable has grown in-
creasingly dim. As their hopes of ob-
taining outside jobs recede, the men and
women who once held such jobs with
pride and competence begin to identify
their own futures with those of the WP A;
and like those who are lame or old or
sickly, they too begin to trust that work
relief will continue. And dominating
all the rest is the one truly articulate
group of WPA workers, whose attitude is
tainted neither by the pitiful gratitude of
the infirm nor the frustrated resentment
of the once competent: the young people
who share Miss B's philosophy and who
have organized the WP A unions with the
announced intention of treating the
United States Government as their per-
manent employer.
That the recipients of charity should
have the temerity to band together for the
specific purpose of striking against and
bargaining with the dispensers of that
charity strikes most rational observers as
an idea which even W. S. Gilbert might
have found fantastic. Yet the relation be-
tween the white-collar unions and WP A .
,
~
;
officialdom is neither so innocent nor :~
nearly so amusing as a Savoy libretto.
482 HARPER'S MONTHLY
An Administration which has gone on
record as favoring private industrial
unions can scarcely deny the right of or-
ganization to persons who are doing
work which this same Administration in-
sists is both "useful" and "productive."
Though the WPA officials are unable to
increase the wages of its relief workers
beyond the amounts allotted to them by
Congress, they can, as they have fre-
quently done, reduce the working hours
of any project that "bargains" noisily
enough. Furthermore, the official WP A
attitude toward the return of its em-
ployees to private industry is much closer
to Miss B's contempt than Miss A's eager-
ness. Miss A said that if she could get
a "real job" once more she didn't care
what she would have to do or what she
was paid. The official instruction on
that problem is that an individual shall
not voluntarily leave WP A except for a
full-time job at "standard or going rates
of pay."
Indeed, a man must feel very sure both
of himself and of his future before he
quits the relative security of governmen-
tal patronage for the heady independence
of private employment. Theoretically
he can return to work relief if "through
no fault of his own" his outside job col-
lapses; actually, congressional economics
and ever-changing relief restrictions make
re-employment on WP A an extremely
precarious matter.
When Mr. Easly made public his
charge that only twenty-one per cent of
the personnel of the' Federal Writers
Project had ever written for publication,
Mr. Henry Alsberg, that project's direc-
tor, answered him not by contradictory
statistics but with a list of distinguished
literary names that had been signed to
WPA pay rolls. It happened that the
first novelist he mentioned, and probably
the best known of them all, had for more
than a year been trying in vain to get
back the job of "assistant writer" on the
American Guidebook which he had re-
signed temporarily, or so he thought, in
order to complete a book of his own.
The novel was finished, but neither pub-
MAGAZINE
lished nor contracted for; and its author
was penniless. Yet, because of new and
more stringent regulations, he was firmly
barred from the WP A rolls.
v
It is in obeying certain inflexible rules,
which in an organization so vast must
often seem arbitrary, that the young peo-
ple on WP A have such a tremendous psy-
chological advantage over their more ex-
perienced elders. Since relief work is the'
only kind of work that thousandsof boys
and girls, and still other thousands of
middle-aged and elderly women, have
ever known, they accept its. peculiar re-
strictions with ease and without question.
But in complying with certain regula-
tions, the breaking of which would imme-
diately cost them their jobs, men and
women who have been trained to indus-
trial efficiency find themselves changing
and unmaking habits which it took them
years to learn.
There is, for example, the matter of
promptness. This is a virtue as neces-
sary on a project as in a department store
or a school house-yet within the WP A
it is promptness in reverse. For there
clock-watching is not a minor vice but a
prime necessity. If a project worker is
fifty-five minutes late getting to work, the
most damaging thing that can happen to
him is the loss of one hour's pay. But if
he is five minutes late in leaving work,
and his tardiness is detected, he is sub-
ject to instant dismissal. "Overtime" to
many a white-collar worker is merely a
literary term-a matter of "making up on
paper," under explicit directions from his
superiors, a certain number of required
"fiscal hours" which conilicting regula-
tions will not allow him to perform in
the flesh.
If some individual quirk of conscience
keeps a lone worker from signing his
name and identification number to the
solemn pledge which attests that he and
his colleagues have labored faithfully, in-
dustriously, and efficiently for 120 hours
a month, when in reality they have put in
 THE WHITE COLLAR
only 60 hours of desultory work, he will
of course lose one-half of his monthly pay.
But more than that, his record, which is
the only means by which he is known to
the officials who periodically reduce the
relief rolls, will show that he has will-
fully and without permission absented
himself from the tasks which according
to their records his co-workers performed
so faithfully. For in all of WPA's volu-
minous files there is no space for record-
ing the ethical niceties which distinguish
'. a conscientious man from a grumbler or
a loafer.
But' more important even than the
problem of time is the question of money.
Among all possible virtues, thrift would
seem to be the one which a man on relief
should cultivate. Yet under WPA regu-
lations thrift becomes the most dangerous
vice that he can acquire. The check
which a project worker receives each week
is not, after all, a wage paid to him for
necessary work, which he can spend or in-
vest or save as he wishes. It is a certain
fraction of several billions of dollars
which the government has intrusted to
him for immediate dispersal to a real-
estate agent, a grocery clerk, a depart-
ment store, a lunchroom, a moving-pic-
ture theater, or a corner saloon. If he
decides to betray this trust and, by deny.
ing himself new clothes or good food,
save some portion of his weekly sal-
ary against the time when WP A will no
longer employ him, he will find that time
miraculously hastened by his frugality.
He will, that is, unless he has learned how
to deceive the "special investigators"
whose business it is to discover just how
he and his co-workers use their money.
The man who has lost the privilege of
holding a private job soon finds that he
has also relinquished the right to own
private property or lead a private life.
VI
It is when he realizes that obeying to
the letter, and to the minute, certain fixed
and arbitrary rules makes his position on
WPA surer than the most efficient work
CHOKES 483
that he could possibly turn out, that a
project worker must face a thought more
devastating to his morale than the possi-
bility that private industry will never reo
employ him. This is the suspicion that
private industry may be wise in refusing
him a job. For as the once efficient
worker contemplates the methods by
which he is forced to perform the work
that he is allowed to do, he sees that he
has actually become more like the incom-
petent people with whom he is so closely
associated than the men and women who
labor hard and efficiently for what is com-
monly called an honest living-the men
and women who, however menial their
tasks or meager their wages, pay through
their taxes the Iiberal dole that he re-
ceives each week. The relief worker, if
he still holds to his personal integrity,
cannot escape the final humiliation from
which the national government, at the
cost of many billions of dollars, has tried
to spare him. However much he may try
to disguise it when discussing the attrac-
tions of his "job" or his "business" with
outsiders, to himself and his fellow-work-
ers he admits that, like the home-relief
clients, he also is subsisting upon a dole.
If his superiors could admit this too
they would save their government a great
deal of money and themselves many a
headache. But the high relief officials
cannot concede that WP A salaries are
doles without confessing that they are far
from equitable ones. They are doles ap-
portioned according neither to present
needs nor past earning abilities, but to
cultural classifications. Those who fear
that the New Deal is being run exclu-
sively for the laboring class should take
some measure of comfort from this new
aristocracy-not one of birth, to be sure,
but of artistic inclinations.
A WP A laborer with a wife, seven chilo
dren, and an aging father to support gets
no more for his leaf-raking or his sewer-
laying than one who is a childless, unmar-
ried orphan. And a WP A white-collar
clerk, who as a salesman or the proprietor
of his own business once earned five thou-
sand dollars a year, gets considerably
484 HARPER'S MONTHLY
less than tens of thousands of boys
and girls and elderly women who before
WP A employed them had never drawn
any salaries at all, but who, because they
had no past experience to classify them
for lowlier occupations, and also because
they once went to college or studied sing-
ing or visited museums, were able to clas-
sify themselves and be accepted as teach-
ers, musicians, and artists.
Among all relief workers those who re-
ceive the highest hourly pay are the WP A
artists in the large Eastern and Midwest-
ern cities. Among them are to be found
the several hundred painters and sculp-
tors who produced the murals and statues
which have become WPA's greatest pride
and strongest selling point. But concen-
trated in the cultural projects and,
through the weight of the numbers and
the strength of their unions, dominating
them, are the inexperienced, unencum-
bered, but highly articulate youngsters
who are so certain that work relief has
become their lifelong career.
Nobody with the least understanding
of human nature can blame these young
people who have neither families to sup-
port them nor influential friends to get
them jobs (for these were the prerequi-
sites of their WP A employment) for cling-
ing so determinedly to a way of life that
is so much more "interesting" and also so
much less laborious than that which the
average middle-class youth is able to pur-
sue even in normal times.
Yet the gigantic works program was not
inaugurated to encourage several thou-
sands of boys and girls to indulge their
artistic inclinations in the sure knowl-
edge that the government would con-
tinue to pay them liberal hourly wages
for doing so. It was inaugurated to help
that same forgotten man who was remem-
bered so dramatically in the 1932 presi-
dential campaign-the man who had
worked hard for his living, married, set-
tled down, paid his debts, and begotten
children, without any foreknowledge
that a general depression would so swiftly
MAGAZINE
leave him destitute. Among white-col-
lar workers those to whom the govern-
ment promised most have received its
smallest bounties and its stingiest moral
support.
What would happen to all these people
if the WP A were suddenly discontinued
we have no way of knowing-just as we
cannot be certain what might have hap-
pened to them if four years ago the Roose-
velt Administration had not decided that
it was so much better for a man's morale
to compel him to do "made work" at the
rate of $80 a month (the average cost of
keeping him on WP A) than to allow him
to seek "real work" at the rate of $33 (the
average amount that is spent on keeping
a family on a monthly dole).
I should hate to give aid and comfort
to those who argue for a straight dole
simply because it is cheaper and because
they are callous to the human tragedy of
unemployment. But there is this to be
said:
A man living on a straight dole may .
go hungry, he may chide himself for the
failure that he has become; but at least
he has one intellectual satisfaction-that
of admitting that spiritually as well as
financially he has struck bottom. And
from that honest admission, as the con-
tinuous turn-over in local relief rolls at-
tests, there has often come the determina-
tion to work at anything he can-so long
as what he does brings his family at least
two meals a day and frees him from the
necessity of confessing to anyone how he
makes or spends or saves his money.
The person who has worked for three
years on a white-collar project has already
lost this incentive to independent indus-
try, and so he opposes wi th all the vigor
he has left any change in the work relief
program; not because, if he is honest, he
considers the work he does worth while.
or even because he thinks the government
owes him a living, but simply because he
knows that so long as the WP A continues
as it is he can draw larger bounties from
it than from any other public charity.