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Wagner Urges Unemployment Relief Action Senator Robert Wagner june 14, 1930 During the winter of every depression I have heard the fair-weather prophets make the smug prediction that the spring would bring relief. Unfortunately when the spring arrived the winter was never far behind, and again the unemployed were treated to the cold comfort of the exasperating pronouncement from Washington that “spring would bring relief.” I wish the public could in some way express its unmitigated weariness of this sort of soothsaying. Too long already has sham propaganda served to excuse the failure to take hold of the problem of unemployment rationally and e¤ectively . It is time we become impatient with inaction. Will not our grandchildren regard it as quite incomprehensible that in 1930 millions of Americans went hungry because we had produced too much food; that millions of men, women, and children were cold because we had produced too much clothing? I am not speaking in parables. It is the literal truth that today we are su¤ering want in the midst of unprecedented plenty; our workers go without wages because they had learned to work too well. It is this condition which justiWes our impatience with statesmanship which regards unemployment as inevitable and poverty as incurable. I do not believe that unemployment is inevitable. We have never tried to do anything about it. We have never assembled the necessary information. We have never applied to the problem the organized intelligence of our people. The worker must be given a greater measure of security, some protection against the haunting fear of enforced idleness, before he can lead the broad and full life which the rich endowment of natural resources of this country intended he should enjoy. To me it seems plain that the responsibility of the federal government must not be shirked, for the prevention of unemployment is a distinctly national obligation. Unemployment today is not produced by local causes. The forces which make for the shutdown of factories, the curtailment of activity in the mines and on the railroads, are forces which operate on a national and worldwide scale. The individual workman, the individual business, the state, are helpless when an economic storm breaks upon the country. Only the coordinated strength of the entire nation is competent to deal with such powerful economic forces. The federal government is always engaged in constructing highways, developing rivers and harbors, erecting Xood-control structures and public buildings. It should plan these projects in advance and time them so as to make available opportunities for employment when private business slackens. And the government should join with the states in the establishment of a nationwide system of public employment oªces so as to assist workers to Wnd jobs and to Wagner / Urge Unemployment Relief Action 285 assist employers to Wnd workers with the least amount of delay and the least amount of friction. This is but a bare outline of what the federal government can do toward the prevention of unemployment. If there were political advantages to be secured by championing the cause of the unemployed, this problem would have been tackled long ago. The unemployed never make campaign contributions. They do not control any portion of the press through which to bring their plight home to the American people. They maintain no lobby in Washington to tell their depressing story to their representatives in Congress. Their only spokesmen are those who have responded to the common call of humanity; the only advocates of their cause are those who pursue the welfare of our country irrespective of party advantage. Will Congress choose the way out of unemployment, the way of intelligent organization , the way of responsible action, the way of sensible prevention? Or I hesitate to suggest the alternative: Will America continue to walk the rutted road of want in this age of plenty? —Robert Wagner was a U.S. senator from New York from 1927 to 1949 and author of the labor legislation that bears his name. The Long Plan for Recovery Senator Huey P. Long april 1, 1933 With the one law which I propose to submit, I think most of our diªculties will be brought to an almost immediate end. To carry out President Roosevelt’s plan as announced in his inaugural address for redistribution and to prevent unjust accumulation of wealth, I am now drawing a law, but without consort with the president, for the following: A capital levy tax, principally on fortunes above $10...

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