A Guarantee, Not a Promise: Hubert Humphrey, Full Employment, and the Long History of the 1970s

This paper will explore the left-liberal coalition behind full employment, or a job guarantee, in the “long 1970s.” It positions Hubert Humphrey as the core figure in the history—one of the remaining Cold War liberals behind national planning, and the architect of full employment legislation in the 1970s. Most historians argue that Humphrey’s ambitions for full employment reflected either the dying gasp of New Deal liberalism or the endurance of “big-government” policies in a conservative era. This paper takes a different approach. By examining the broad coalition of organizations and individuals on the Left who backed a job guarantee in the 1970s (civil rights and black power advocates, women’s rights activists, anti-war, anti-nuclear, and anti-militarist groups, and a hodgepodge of socialist organizations), this paper suggests that Humphrey was behind the times on full employment—that the Left had greater, more ambitious ideas for a full employment program that also offered Americans a basic income, universal health care, and family assistance alongside a job guarantee. I argue that the full employment bill Humphrey sponsored with Democratic representative Augustus Hawkins—which became the Humphrey-Hawkins Act—displayed Humphrey’s longstanding unwillingness to embrace ideas from the Left during the Cold War, ideas that could have strengthened the bill and broadened the coalition behind a job guarantee. Historians should not reward the Humphrey-Hawkins Act simply because it passed Congress in an era of creeping right-wing revanchism; but instead, scholars should examine the range of possibilities—and limits too—that emerged from the left/liberal coalition backing full employment in the 1970s.