A New Deal for Youth

April 28, 2023

Mary McLeod Bethune, NYA director of Negro Activities; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and NYA Director Aubrey Willis Williams.
Source: thegrio.com

Sources disagree over how much First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had to prod her husband to establish the National Youth Administration (NYA). However, there is no question that Mrs. Roosevelt was deeply troubled over the plight of the nation’s youth—that they might become another stranded or lost generation. This fear, moreover, was the impetus for her vigorous role in the initiation, planning and daily operation of the NYA—and her high-profile role in promoting public awareness of its achievements. Significantly, FDR referred to the NYA as “the missus’s organization!”

NYA recruitment poster
Courtesy, LOC

Established in 1935, the NYA was a leader in gender as well as racial equity: the number of girls served sometimes equaled or exceeded the number of boys! The dynamic educator Mary McLeod Bethune who headed the New Deal’s informal “black cabinet” that advised the administration on racial policies, was named the NYA’s Director of Negro Affairs, responsible for the implementation of the racially progressive policies that both Mrs. Roosevelt and the NYA’s Director Aubrey Williams espoused.

Williams, born and raised in Alabama, deplored the fact that Blacks were not being treated fairly by government projects and was determined to make the NYA an exception. His progressivism (“one of the pinkest of the pink,” according to Representative Hamilton Fish), made Williams—and the NYA—a target among some in Congress that had refused to enact an anti-lynching law.

Girls in NYA war training program, San Augustine, Texas, 1943.
Photo: John Vachon, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information photograph collection. Courtesy, LOC

No age group escaped hardship during the Great Depression, but the cohort served by the NYA, young men and women ages 16 to 25, was especially hard hit. In 1935 when the NYA was inaugurated, an estimated five million of that age group were out of school and unemployed. At the beginning of the New Deal, the Children’s Bureau estimated that 23,000 adolescent hobos traveled the country riding the rails and hitchhiking along highways in search of work. Unemployment among black youth was much higher than that of white youth and Blacks found it extremely difficult to get a job, even in agriculture or domestic and personal service.

The NYA provided work relief to out-of-school, unemployed youth and work-study aid to make it possible for students to remain in high school or attend college. Youth who lacked proper medical care for economic reasons received it through the NYA. Such student aid programs were widespread and popular.

"Projects for Out-of-School Youth," Inaugural Parade, Washington, D.C., 1937.
Credit: Wikipedia

The first NYA work relief projects paid little attention to training possibilities. They provided work experience, but of a general, unskilled nature. NYA youth helped build parks and playgrounds; worked as aides to public authorities; looked after crippled children; assisted state and local traffic departments; and repaired books in local libraries—work that was useful to communities but less so to enrollees.

To aid rural youth who weren’t able to come to work in the morning and return home each night, some live-in projects were developed. In one such residence, girls from neighboring counties worked on a machine sewing project in the afternoon and, having not completed high school, attended classes each morning. By mid-1938, one hundred such centers were in operation, often at abandoned CCC camps or campuses of agricultural colleges. The NYA partnered with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to help youths who wished to take up farming. The NYA would train them in efficient farming methods and the FSA would lend them money to go into business.

Girls at NYA welding class at Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Florida, 1943.
Young women made up about 43 percent of the National Youth Administration’s total enrollment. Photo: Gordon Parks

From mid-1940 defense began to dominate the NYA. By early 1942, the out-of-school program had been abandoned, construction projects ended and the work study programs terminated. The emphasis became “industrial training,” mainly in machine-shop work, sheet-metal trades, welding, and electrical industries. Employment in the defense industry supplied the vital ingredient of job training often missing in a depressed economy.

One of a handful of New Deal programs that had progressive racial policies, the NYA employed 2.6 million young men and women in its out-of-school work program and more than 2 million in its student work program during its nine-year run. Growing opposition to the New Deal, Republican victories in the 1942 mid-term election, education officials’ fear that vocational training encroached on their domain and Aubrey Williams’s progressivism contributed to the demise of the NYA.

Men in training at NYA machine shop.
Courtesy, Encyclopedia of Alabama

Congress killed the NYA in January 1944 despite its popularity, advancement of racial and gender diversity and exemplary contribution to war production.

My Day, The First Lady in Her Own Words
By Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg

June 26, 2017

Far and wide, over this country, I have said that for generations to come, there would be people using the things created by WPA workers during this period of depression. The sad part of it is that, of course, few people will realize who built the schools, or the parks, or the playgrounds or the recreation centers.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, August 1939

Mrs. Roosevelt , journalist
She wrote “My Day” six days a week for more than 20 years.

Imagine writing a 500-word newspaper column six days a week, some of them while serving as First Lady. Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, My Day, which ran from 1936 until 1962, appeared in 90 newspapers in all parts of the country and, at its height, reached an audience of more than four million.

Inviting her readers into the White House, ER’s column told them about what she did as First Lady, introduced them to her family and friends, and offered her impressions of books, concerts, and plays. Chatty and informal, My Day nonetheless was imbued with ER’s inimitable humanitarian perspective. Later, “on her own,” she wrote about serving as U.S. delegate to United Nations and framing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

My Day
Eleanor Roosevelt’s column appeared in 90 newspapers across the country.

As First Lady Eleanor was a great proponent of the New Deal programs that provided jobs to millions of unemployed workers while greatly expanding and enriching the nation’s resources. Nowhere is this more apparent than in My Day, where she reported on her nationwide travels to visit projects undertaken by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC,), Public Works Administration, (PWA), and National Youth Administration (NYA).

Here are a few examples:

March 10, 1936, Detroit: I set out to visit some WPA projects. First, the project where immunization against whooping cough is being studied….Then we went to another project, a municipal garage which will be a tremendous building…. this project is being supervised by the city engineers and the work was considered as good as any contract work.

November 13, 1936, Milwaukee: I have just come back from one of the most interesting mornings I have ever spent…. a handicraft project for unskilled women…They are binding scrap books for children; books to be used in hospitals; and books for the Braille project….

Visiting New Deal projects
In 1937, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt helped lay the cornerstone for WPA project in Montgomery County, Kentucky.

March 21, 1937, Austin I went out to see a roadside park, one of the NYA projects that has proved most successful in this state. They have built one hundred and sixty-six of these parks….

March 17, 1938, Los Angeles … the Fresno airport… has been greatly improved by WPA labor…some of the buildings have been moved and the administration building has been built. Then we drove through the park to see the artificial lake the WPA has constructed.

February 13, 1939, Washington, DC… a visit I paid to the new Department of the Interior building to look at the murals. Henry Varnum Poor’s mural of wildlife is a grand piece of work. You almost feel that you are walking right into the scene and that the men and birds are alive…. Don’t fail to see them if you are in Washington.

The First Lady on the air, 1941
In addition to her newspaper column, she reached millions through her weekly radio address.

For many years, the memory of these projects and its workers faded– as Mrs. Roosevelt feared they would. Thanks to the Living New Deal, the public is being made aware of these enormous contributions. May such recognition lead us to recognize that our great gaps in infrastructure, environmental sustainability, human services, and access to culture could once again be filled by men and women in need of living-wage work.

Social Security at 80: Still Missing the Keystone

September 9, 2015

Signing the Social Security Act, 1935
FDR signs the Social Security Act with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the Cabinet.

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, declaring: “If the Senate and the House of Representatives … had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.” Nonetheless, Roosevelt acknowledged that the groundbreaking legislation was “a cornerstone in a structure … by no means complete.”

Once the cornerstone was laid, Social Security soon expanded. Initially, its two social insurance programs, Old Age Insurance and Unemployment Insurance, covered only a portion of the work force. Left out were workers in very small establishments and the public sector, along with the self-employed. Also excluded were domestic workers—largely women and agricultural workers—occupations in which many African Americans were employed.

Within four years Social Security extended benefits to widows and orphans. In 1950, Congress added coverage for domestic and agricultural laborers. Disability insurance was also added in the fifties, and Medicare in the mid-1960s. In 1972, automatic cost-of-living increases began. Unemployment Insurance has been less expandable, but groups previously excluded became covered in 1970 when Congress also provided for automatic extensions of benefits during recessions when many workers are laid off.

Social Security Poster 1935
Social Security was funded entirely by payroll taxes.

Headed by FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the Committee on Economic Security, which proposed the Social Security Act, recognized that “employment assurance” was the key to economic security. The committee acknowledged that public-work programs might be necessary not only during periods of economic depression, but during normal times as well. Roosevelt and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins considered creating a permanent government employment program for those still jobless after receiving short-term unemployment compensation.

Ultimately, the government settled on permanent, short-term Unemployment Insurance as part of the Social Security Act, and a temporary employment program—the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired millions of people and vastly enriched the country’s physical, social, and cultural resources. The WPA was terminated during World War II when job creation became temporarily unnecessary. Thus, Perkins wrote in the mid-1940s, “Unemployment Insurance stands alone as the only protection for people out of work.”

What might Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Perkins have said when, in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, many jobless workers collected extended unemployment benefits instead of getting paid to restore the country’s decaying infrastructure, making our economy and planet more sustainable, and providing sorely needed social services?

Ida May Fuller, 1940
Ida May Fuller was the first to receive a monthly Social Security check. She received $22.54.

Nearly seven years after the Great Recession 20 million people remain jobless or are forced to work part time. The proportion of working-age people working or actively looking for work is the lowest since 1976.

Federal legislation pending in Congress comes close to completing the Social Security edifice begun 80 years ago. The Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment & Training Act, https://conyers.house.gov/index.cfm/jobs introduced by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) commits the U.S. to full employment at a living wage, paid for by a small tax on financial transactions. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s (D-OH) bill for a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps https://kaptur.house.gov/images/114th-Kaptur-CCC-bill.pdf would, like its famous New Deal predecessor, create needed jobs dedicated to preserving and restoring the nation’s resources.

Let’s observe Social Security’s 80th birthday by taking steps toward employment assurance—jobs—the keystone of economic security.