This paper argues that the direct job-creation strategy adopted by the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in programs like the WPA (the “New Deal strategy”) is best understood as an effort to secure what the New Dealers came to regard as a human rights entitlement—the right...

This article identifies and explores means of meeting political and strategic challenges to the enactment of a federal job creation program sufficiently large and well-targeted to cope with mass unemployment. The challenges include: anti-government ideology; perceived failure of the Obama...