ance. Voluntary private plans will never cover more than a fraction of the workers, and we must not be diverted from the real task by any idea that they will meet the need. The United States ought to utilize the rich European experience, and side by side with labor exchanges develop compulsory public insurance plans on an actuarial basis, with employers, employees, and the Government contributing, perhaps equally, and with benefits held strictly within actual insurance limits. If extraordinary employment at any time makes it necessary to go beyond those limits, let the State meet the whole cost and not ask the insurance system to carry an impossible load. Under our conditions, we believe that such action would rarely be necessary. If anyone criticizes this extension as a "dole" let him suggest something better, or else admit his preference for charity.

In the present constitutional position, how can the Federal Government do its duty in respect to insurance? It can certainly, on the subsidy principle, offer to match State funds for insurance, dollar for dollar, again with a view to a national system in which State systems would ultimately be merged. The money for that purpose ought to come, in first instance, from higher income surtaxes and estate taxes. The 15,780 persons who in 1928 had incomes above $100,000 received in all $4,903 million and paid income and surtaxes of $700 million, or a little more than 14 percent. To raise this figure to 25 percent (an extremely moderate rate) would make a half-billion dollars annually available to subsidize State insurance systems, and would be a trifling move in the direction of reducing that inequality of distribution which now imperils our economic and social system. We could thus take the first step toward a national insurance scheme.

Organization of the labor market and unemployment insurance by themselves will not solve the problem of unemployment, as the experience of Great Britain and Germany since the war indicates. In fact, insurance may be so handled as to increase the number of men out of work. The great preventive of unemployment is the stabilization of industry, and both publicly and privately we must use every possible means to that end. Our most powerful single agency, the Federal Reserve System, prostituted under the present and the preceding administration to purposes of stock gambling and political advantage, must in future be used primarily for stability. There are possibilities, exaggerated in recent discussions, in the long-time planning of public works. Let both Federal and State Governments now draw up carefully studied plans of needed public improvements, extending over, say, 10 years or more; let them secure the necessary bond authorizations; and then let the less pressing items be held back against the next period of hard times. Something can be done thus. The major task, however that of keeping fundamental industries running on an even keel-requires planning and action on a nationwide and a worldwide scale. The conquest of unemployment requires not only a national economic council to organize a planned national economy, but an international economic conference to work out the methods of international organization and control essential to a stable world industrial order. Today certain shortsighted cap

tains of industry and finance and their political satellites all over the world bedevil all efforts at national and international organization that threaten to interfere in any way with their pursuit of profits. They may be well assured that the success of their endeavors will spell disaster; for unless the industrial leaders and the political rulers of the Western World can find a way to stabilize industry and get rid of the miseries of unemployment, the men who work and suffer will some day overturn their rule. If we do not want communism, let us abolish unemployment.

[From "The Crisis of the Old Order," Houghton Mifflin Co., publishers]

RESPONSIBILITY IN ALBANY

(BY ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, Jr.)

VI

If the Walker case overshadowed F.D.R.'s reform program in his second term, his developing presidential candidacy overshadowed it even more. State issues had absorbed him since 1928. Now it seemed time for him to turn his attention once again to the Nation. He had, of course, a mind well stocked with a variety of ideas and opinions on national questions. Still, his interest in both the American past and the present had tended to be practical and specific rather than reflective. He though he loved history; but serious history-analytical history- really bored him. What he really loved were books of travel or adventure or antiquarian reconstructions of the nautical or Hudson River past. He had no sustained interest in political philosophy or in economic theory.

There remained, however, a framework of general ideas in terms of which he approached contemporary issues. Whiling away time during his convalescence, he had embarked on the composition of a history of the United States. All that remains probably all that was written-is the introduction, a bold sketch of the historical background of the age of discovery. But the terms of his approach were significant. Mechanical change, he felt, had brought about "a clear division of humanity into classes," where "a mere handful, certainly less than one in a hundred, owned and controlled the very lives and fortunes of the other ninety-nine." In such terms-"technical progress" and "social conflict”—he portrayed the decline of feudalism, the quickening of commerce, the rise of the middle class, and the expansion of Europe to the West.

He recurred to themes of change and conflict when he lectured at Milton Academy in 1926. History, he declared, remembering Endicott Peabody, had followed a series of up-and-down curves, but the up curves were always the longer. Change was inevitable in any society; unrest was "a healthy sign"; and social disorder was caused "as much by those who fear change as by those who seek revolution." Let not modern Rip Van Winkles seek "to justify conservatism by calling all who seek new things heretics or anarchists." Our national danger lay not in radicalism but in "too long a period of the do-nothing or reactionary standards." Science had transformed the conditions. of existence."No person who truly visualizes the future doubts that we are at the threshold of an era of cooperative endeavor between peoples and continents." As yet, we still suffered "from an ancient disease known as 'class consciousness.'" We talked of service; but "true

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service will not come until all the world recognizes all the rest of the world as one big family."

The challenge to American leadership, as he saw it in 1928, was to fit together "an old political order fashioned by a pastoral civilization and a new social order fashioned by a technical civilization.” This required, he told the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1929, a new recognition of society's obligations to the sick, the poor, and the helpless. "What used to be the privilege of the few," he said, "has come to be the accepted heritage of the many."

His conception of what he called at Harvard "The Age of Social Consciousness" drew strength, of course, from his conservationist's theory of government as trustee for the people, obligated to preserve and develop the nation's inheritance. It represented more broadly the welling up of the old emotions of the new nationalism and the new freedom-a tough grasp on central ideas of justice and welfare based on a profound commitment to old American dreams of progress. He believed in an ascertainable public interest and considered it worth fighting for.

One other strain entered in: that was his country squire's scorn for the rich who lacked a sense of social responsibility. This clearly ran through Franklin Roosevelt, even if he never articulated it so dramatically as did Hudson River neighbor, Herbert Claiborne Pell, of Hopewell Junction. Pell, who had grown up in Tuxedo and Newport in more splendid days and served as Democratic State chairman in New York for a time in the twenties, had no use for the businessmen who took over after the war. "The destinies of the world were handed them on a plate in 1920. Their piglike rush for immediate profits knocked over the whole feast in 9 years. These are the people, who with an ignorance equalled only by their impudence, set themselves up as the proper leaders of the country." He considered both aristocrat and bourgeois totally selfish, but the aristocrat at least thought of the interest of his grandson, while the bourgeois thought only of himself. By 1931, Pell disgustedly instructed the managers of his property not to invest a dollar in any American corporation. The country was doomed, he said, until it could liberate itself from the rich. "They have shown no realization that what they call free enterprise means anyting but greed." Don't fool yourself, he warned his own class: the masses "will overwhelm us or protect us according to whether they have been cheated or treated fairly."

Pell's words were too biting for Roosevelt's more politic temperament. But Roosevelt combined a similar sense of nobless oblige and community responsibility with a landed gentleman's disdain for trade and an aristocrat's lightheartedness and complacency. His long acquaintance with the rich gave him advantages in dealing with them. "Wilson thought that the rich were villains," said an old friend of Roosevelt's; "Mr. Roosevelt knew they were foolish and ignorant." He had no respect for their judgment or their aspirations. "We may well ask," he said in a Fourth of July speech in 1929, "are we in danger of a new caveman's club, of a new feudal system, of the creation of such a highly centralized industrial control that we may have to bring forth a new Declaration of Independence?" The crash destroyed no illusions for him. It only confirmed his sense of the greed and stupidity of business leadership.

VII

Still, he could cope with the crash emotionally better than he could intellectually. All he could recall of the classical economics he had learned at Harvard now seemed irrelevant. "Our professors"-he would describe a circle on the desk-"taught us: this sector of the circle is wealth, this sector here is empty, and so on. All gone!"

Sam Rosenman was no better prepared to deal with the economics of depression. "If you were to be nominated tomorrow and had to start a campaign trip within 10 days," he told Roosevelt in March 1932, "we'd be in an awful fix." Broad impressions were not enough; somewhere there had to be specific ideas. Whom should we consult? Roosevelt asked. Not businessmen nor politicians, said Rosenman; they had had their chance and fallen on their faces. "I think we ought to steer clear of all those. *** My idea is this: Why not go to the universities of the country? You have been having some good experiences with college professors. I think they wouldn't be afraid to strike out on new paths just because the paths are new."

Roosevelt puffed on his cigarette. The idea could hardly have been new to him: he had been calling on college professors ever since the beginning of his governorship. Two months before, at lunch with Prof. Raymond Moley, of Columbia, he had made an apparently casual remark which Moley had interpreted as an invitation to help on the national campaign. Rosenman, acting independently, now proposed that Moley be made a key figure in the operation. Nodding, Roosevelt told Rosenman to go ahead.

Rosenman promptly called Moley to explain the importance of equipping the Governor with a corps of experts. "He made it easy for me to encourage the notion that he was the originator of this happy idea," Moley later wrote. "To have said that it had occupied my thoughts every waking hour [since the lunch with Roosevelt] would have been unkind and stupid." In any case, Moley responded gratefully. When he and Rosenman met a short time later with Basil O'Connor in New York, Moley had already drawn up a list of topics and of men who might deal with them.

For agriculture, Moley nominated his Claremont Avenue neighbor and Columbia colleague, Rexford G. Tugwell. For credit, he suggested Prof. Adolf A. Berle, Jr., of the Columbia Law School. Other Columbia professors were proposed, some of whom contributed memorandums and joined the Albany discussions. But Moley, Tugwell, and Berle, along with Rosenman and O'Connor, were the most durable members of what was soon known as Roosevelt's brains (later brain)

trust.

Though Moley was not a man of the intellectual stature of Tugwell or Berle, he was unquestioningly accepted by them and by Roosevelt and Rosenman as leader of the group. A native of Ohio, 45 years old in the spring of 1932, he was a political scientist whose specialty was the administration of criminal justice. He had been fired early by the reform ideals of Tom Johnson and Newton D. Baker in Cleveland and had dabbled in Ohio politics 15 years before, even becoming mayor of the tiny village of Olmsted Falls. But he had decided to retain his academic base and in 1923 moved east to join the government department at Columbia. His interest in criminal justice brought him into