PRESIDENT'S EMERGENCY COMMITTEE FOR EMPLOYMENT (PECE)

The President's Emergency Committee for Employment (PECE) was President Herbert Hoover's first organizational response to the economic crisis that became the "Great Depression." In October of 1930, Hoover appointed Colonel Arthur Woods to head PECE, a federal "employment committee," modeled on a similar federal organization established during the recession of 1921 and 1922 (also created by then Secretary of Commerce Hoover and chaired by Woods).

PECE's stated goal was "job-creation." This aim was to be accomplished by expanding federal employment, encouraging the expansion of locally financed public construction, and stimulating private sector job-creation schemes. The committee's literature urged Americans to "give a job" and "spread the work." Local governments were called upon to initiate construction projects already planned, and PECE officials advocated a large increase in federal public works spending. The committee also encouraged local private relief efforts and served as a clearinghouse for information on relief. However, the PECE did not raise relief funds directly nor did it attempt to encourage needed public appropriations for direct aid to the unemployed.

In hindsight, the PECE has been viewed as an ineffectual response to the emerging Depression, an example of Herbert Hoover's outdated "voluntarism" (reliance on private initiatives) and his resistance to a more aggressive federal policy. But in the fall of 1930, the Depression was not yet "great," and the PECE's re-employment proposals seemed to most Americans to be adequate, even innovative, experiments.

By the spring of 1931, however, the administration's anti-Depression policies were in disarray. Unemployment had reached unprecedented levels; private industry was laying off workers rather than creating jobs; and financially strapped local governments were reducing public employment. There was growing sentiment in the social work community and in Congress that a federal relief appropriation might soon be necessary. In April, PECE chairman Arthur Woods, disillusioned by the administration's refusal to fund a more generous federal public employment program, resigned. In August 1931 the PECE was reorganized and renamed the President's Organization for Unemployment Relief (POUR).

See Also: HOOVER, HERBERT; UNEMPLOYMENT, LEVELS OF.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bremer, William W. Depression Winters: Social Workers and the New Deal. 1984.

Brown, Josephine C. Public Relief, 1929–1939. 1939.

Burner, David. Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. 1984.

Grim, Carolyn. "The Unemployment Conference of 1921: An Experiment in National Cooperative Planning." Mid-America 55 (1973): 83–107.

Hayes, E. P. Activities of the President's Emergency Committee for Employment, 1930–1931. 1936.

Mullins, William H. The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929–1933. 1991.

JEFF SINGLETON