At the lowest ebb of the Great Depression, the Federal government broke with centuries of economic orthodoxy to grapple with an economic crisis that had thrown anywhere from a quarter to a third of the American workforce onto the breadlines. For the first time in American history, the government would directly employ the jobless in an effort to bring down national unemployment rates. "Public At Work: Direct Job Creation Policy From the New Deal to the Rise of Reagan" traces the tumultuous and often unexplored history of direct job creation policy, beginning with an exploration of the intellectual and programmatic development of the Works Progress Administration within the New Deal and its impact on the Great Depression, which was far more successful in combating mass unemployment than many historians have recognized.

By 1945-6, when debates over full employment consumed the Congress, direct job creation stood at the verge of becoming the foundation of American economic and social welfare policy. "Public At Work" points to intellectual and ideological choices within liberalism as the reason why at the very moment when the Full Employment Bill of 1945 promised to make the U.S a leader in the full employment field, jobs policy was rapidly de-institutionalized and pushed to the margins of policy discourse. Despite this setback, direct job creation survived as an intellectual and policy contender within the War on Poverty task forces where it challenged then-dominant "culture of poverty" theories of poverty - creating a bridge between New Deal liberalism and post-war liberalism.

"Public At Work" concludes by demonstrating how direct job creation -- through the vehicle of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act -- was very much the fulcrum of the crisis of the New Deal order, as the collapse of the Keynesian consensus divided the economic establishment and the Democratic Party at a time of high unemployment and high inflation.