contact with Louis Howe; and in the 1928 campaign Howe introduced him to Roosevelt. As Governor, Roosevelt fell into the habit of calling on Moley for drafts of speeches and statements, first in the field of juridical reform, and then more generally.

Moley was a stocky, square-shouldered man, streaks of gray in his thinning dark hair, shrewd, affable, and engaging, with a well-organized mind and a flair for speechwriting. His voice was low and drawling, his manner almost diffident; he constantly smoked a professor's heavy dark pipe; but he had a quiet persistence in pushing forward himself and his ideas. Among academicians, he played the role of the realist who understood practical politics, scoffed at idealism, and dismissed the higher fervor of reform with tolerant cynicism. "I feel no call to remedy evils," he liked to say. "I have not the slightest urge to be a reformer. Social workers make me very weary *. I am essentially a conservative fellow. I tilt at no windmills." As ringmaster of the experts, he was tactful and, as middleman for their ideas, judicious and sensible. Roosevelt found his efficiency of great value. But Moley also had his own interior stresses. He was emotional in his attachments and his jealousies; and his affability concealed anxieties that strain and time might bring to the surface.

VIII

***

Tugwell and Berle had greater confidence than Moley in the field of ideas but much less in the field of politics. Each approached worldly affairs with a curious mixture of tentativeness and arrogance. Tugwell, with his bright eyes and handsome profile, his bold enthusiasms, and audacious ideas, liked to shock, and often succeeded. Berle, slight, erect, quick of motion and brilliant of tongue, had been a child prodigy, a Harvard A.B. at 18, with experience ranging from the Versailles Conference to the Henry Street Settlement with Lillian Wald. He was capable, if necessary, of diplomacy; but, with his edgy manner and his intolerance of fools, he sometimes exploded in scarcasm and disgust. He had been a Hoover man in 1928 and was inclining toward Baker in 1932. Both men were continuously fertile in ideas, and neither was constrained by the past or intimidated by the future. It was of Berle that H. G. Wells remarked, "He began to unfold a view of the world to me which seemed to contain all I had ever learnt and thought, but better arranged and closer to reality."

Moley, Tugwell, and Berle agreed on the nature of the economic problem. For them all, bigness was inevitable in economic life; "competition, as such," as Moley put it, "was not inherently vir tuous *** [but] created as many abuses as it prevented." They all dismissed the Wilson-Brandeis program of breaking up big business as futile. The problem was not to atomize bigness but to place it under control-to end what Moley vividly called "the anarchy of concentrated economic power which, like a cannon loose on a frigate's deck, tore from one side to another, crushing those in its path." "We are no longer afraid of bigness," said Tugwell. *** We are

resolved to recognize openly that competition in most of its forms is wasteful and costly; that larger combinations must in any modern society prevail. *** Unrestricted individual competition is the death, not the life, of trade."

This was the background of the ideas they brought to Albany, talking them over with the Governor on the broad, old-fashioned porch of the Executive Mansion or around the fireplace in his study. Tugwell was dubious on his first Albany trip, expecting to meet the evasive executive he had read about in the newspapers. Roosevelt was in his chair on the veranda. Tugwell was instantly struck by the smile, the tossed head, the gesture with the cigarette holder. "Everything I saw and heard was merged in an impression of vitality." Later they went into the sprawling Victorian house filled with overstuffed chairs. They dined, sitting around a table laden with a profusion of jellies, pickles, hot biscuits, and nuts. Roosevelt attacked the roast duck with gusto but commented that he preferred wild duck, "well-hung and chased over the fire," a sophisticated taste astonishing to Tugwell. Then they retired to the library for eager, probing talk.

There were many such evenings. Moley urbanely steering the discussion, Tugwell and Berle flashing ahead with their ideas, Rosenman acting the devil's advocate, O'Connor offering the realist's comment, and always Roosevelt, listening, interrupting, joking, needling, crossexamining, absorbing the ideas and turning them over in his mind. With his broad family humor, he called the group his "Privy Council," as he spoke of "Sammy the Rose" and "Henry the Morgue"; but no one could tell from his genial curiosity what he accepted from them, or what he rejected. "We could throw out pieces of theory," Tugwell wrote later, "and perhaps they would find a place in his scheme. We could suggest relations; and perhaps the inventiveness of the suggestion would attract his notice. But the tapestry of the policy he was weaving was guided by an artist's conception which was not made known to us.'

IX

It was the economic crisis that dominated these evenings. The group rejected the latter-day Hoover thesis that the depression was International in origin. Tugwell expounded the underconsumptionist theory: the failure of business to pass on the gains of improved productivity either through higher wages or lower prices had caused a deficit of purchasing power which made depression inevitable. (The night after he had set this forth in Albany, a jobless man caught his sleeve on upper Broadway. Tugwell turned and said, "My friend, I did you a good turn last night." The panhandler stood openmouthed.) Roosevelt seemed to accept the underconsumptionist thesis as a matter of course. What should be done? Tugwell believed that prices of manufactured goods had to be forced down. "Why not raise wages too?" asked Roosevelt.

The

There were differences here. Tugwell, in his way, agreed with Mellon that the fever of the twenties had to run its course. struggle to maintain the price structure, he feared, would hold back recovery. But Berle and Roosevelt had inflationist leanings. The price of deflation seemed to them too great. Yet they conceded that inflation might do nothing but perpetuate structural maladjustment. Whatever their differences on the price question, Tugwell and Berle agreed that some prices should go down, some up. One day in May, Roosevelt asked Tugwell about money as a means of raising the price

level. Tugwell told him about the theory of the "commodity dollar" but tried to suggest that the purely monetary approach was inadequate. Roosevelt remained discontented; he wanted something simpler than we could provide."

When Roosevelt left for Warm Springs late in April 1932, he asked Moley and Rosenman to continue preparing memorandums "so I don't get too far behind on my homework." When Rosenman went down to visit Roosevelt 3 weeks later, be brought a great pile of documents, covering a variety of issues. By this time Roosevelt was scheduled to speak at Oglethorpe University. Ernest K. Lindley of the New York Herald Tribune, a sympathetic newspaperman who had absorbed many of Tugwell's and Berle's ideas, provided the Oglethorpe draft, with its emphasis on the need for planning and for bold, persistent experimentation.

This was the last speech of the preconvention campaign. But there was no rest for the brain trusters. Some policy questions were proving harder to crack than others; in particular, the agricultural problem-Tugwell's special job-remained baffling and unsatisfactory. Tugwell, regarding his own thinking on the subject as stale, rather desperately decided to attend a meeting of farm economists held in Chicago shortly before the convention. From Beardsley Ruml in Washington he had heard hints of new developments in the domestic allotment plan; at Chicago he could talk with M. L. Wilson, of Montana, who had become the plan's apostle. When he arrived in Chicago, he found not only Wilson, but Henry Wallace, of Iowa. For several days they talked late into the night in the dormitory rooms at the University of Chicago where they were billeted. Tugwell was finally persuaded that he had found what he was seeking a workable means of restricting agricultural production on which the farm leaders might agree.

But time was growing short. On Monday of convention week, Tugwell called Roosevelt and tried to unravel the intricacies of the plan. After half an hour, Roosevelt, finding he still did not get it, brought Rosenman to the phone. Rosenman could not get it either. Roosevelt laughed. "Well, Professor," he finally said to Tugwell, "put it in a telegram-200 or 300 words-and we'll work it into the speech. I'll take your word for it that it's the latest and most efficient model."

Moley had completed the first draft of an acceptance speech by the third week in June. Then he went on to Chicago, where he joined Tugwell, while Roosevelt and Rosenman began the long vigil in Albany. The Moley draft was too long, and Roosevelt worked away at odd moments with Rosenman to cut it down. The speech also lacked a conclusion. After listening to the all-night balloting, Rosenman, nervous and restless, retired with hot dogs and a pot of coffee to try his hand at writing the peroration which he half thought would never be used. It was then that Rosenman, jogged perhaps by the title of a Stuart Chase article in the current New Republic ("A New Deal for America") but without noting any special significance (any more than Roosevelt did when he came to deliver the words), set down the sentence, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."

[From The Nation, Dec. 10, 17, and 24, 1930]

FIGHTING UNEMPLOYMENT

I. ORGANIZING THE LABOR MARKET

(BY HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY)

Unemployment has become a permanent feature of American life. In no year since 1920, it is safe to say, has the average number of workers out of a job in nonagricultural employments fallen as low as 1,500,000. In the worst years it has probably been three times as great, students of the subject tell us, though nobody knows even approximately the actual number today. The difference between good and bad times is one of degree, but during good times we forget the whole thing. The more reason, then, that we should not let the present crisis pass without making at least a start on policies that give promise of reducing unemployment in future and eliminating its worst results. Organizations of the labor market, unemployment insurance, and stabilization of industry-these are the lines of attack on which scientific students of unemployment have centered attention, and no need for immediate relief measures ought to be allowed to divert attention from them.

At present we can think of nothing but unemployment due to hard times, or in more elegant language, the cyclical fluctuation of industry. As a matter of fact, the best figures that we have (poor enough at that) indicate that over any considerable period of time such fluctuation does not account for even as much as one-half of our total unemployment, the remaining amount being due to seasonal irregularity, the displacement of men by the introduction of better machinery and organization (technological unemployment), and casual labor, such as exists among the dockers of an unorganized port. Cyclical unemployment, from which we are now suffering, is the most spectacular of all, is due to causes the least understood, and is therefore the hardest to attack. It will be the less puzzling, the better we are able to isolate it from unemployment due to other causes. Full, accurate, prompt, and continuous knowledge of employment conditions throughout the country is a prerequisite to intelligent action in meeting other kinds of unemployment and thus paving the way to an attack on the baffling problem of cyclical fluctuation. Such knowledge it is impossible to get without a comprehensive organization of the labor market, and that organization is therefore a first condition of any intelligent program to prevent unemployment. It is a means both to knowledge and to direct prevention.

Nationwide organization of the labor market in a huge country like this will be largely organization by industrial districts. State lines mean little. Yet our efforts in the past have necessarily run largely

along State lines. Aside from the efforts of trade unions to inform their members of work opportunities, aside from the work of private fee-charging agencies, and aside from the short-lived wartime Federal Employment Service, what little has hitherto been done in organizing employment exchanges has been done by the States and municipalities. Yet according to the report of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1929, the total appropriations of all the State governments together for this purpose amounted to but $1,203,906, of which sum Illinois alone expended more than one-sixth. There were only 170 State and municipal public employment offices in the entire country. On June 25 last the number had risen to 176. Plainly enough, under the best conditions these more or less isolated efforts could not possibly meet the countrywide need for bringing together the worker and the job, to say nothing of furnishing the comprehensive and continuous information that is necessary.

But no one familiar with the history of these bureaus would maintain that most of them have worked satisfactorily. I quote the words of Benjamin M. Squires, chairman of the General Advisory Board of Illinois, who speaks understandingly and sympathetically of the work of such offices:

Their answer (that of personnel men) concurred with my own views as to public employment offices wherever they have been set up; and that is that the best labor does not apply there. And when they have tried to get help from the public employment offices they find the men sent do not fit the job. They state in further detail that the public employment offices are not well located, not well planned, not well staffed; that the personnel of the public employment offices is frequently controlled by political influence; and that the insecurity of the job makes it difficult to secure competent help through those offices.

Too often, as Mr. Squires suggests, State employment offices have been havens for political hacks; yet even so the record is by no means wholly barren, and in some cases notable and encouraging advances have been made recently.

Even if the record is somewhat discouraging, then, it ought to be noted that what little we know about the facts of unemployment we owe largely to the work of State departments of labor, like those of Massachusetts and New York, which over a period of years, with the cooperation of trade unions and employers, have been patiently building up a system of regular reports. The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics also, cooperating with the State bureaus, and depending on the direct reports of employers in States where such cooperation does not exist, now receives, directly and indirectly, reports from establishments employing almost 5 million workers. Its monthly figures give some information, at least, about the total number and proportion of unemployed workers in manufacturing, mining, public utilities, and trade. The Bureau's ill-advised efforts of last winter to get weekly reports for a time, in response to orders from above, threw the whole reporting situation into confusion; and the results were used by the administration, it will be remembered, to throw dust into the eyes of the public. Reporting machinery cannot be devised overnight. The Bureau recently called attention sharply to the fact that nobody knows, and that it is nobody's business to know, even the total number of men out of work throughout the country at