American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work Read Online Free PDF

and “the number who are threatened with privation is a minor percentage.”
    The next morning’s report in the New York Times said the president was “depending on the efforts of individual communities to preclude the appropriation of relief funds by Congress.”
    From October 19 to November 25, 1931, Americans were bombarded with ads from every conceivable source: newspapers, magazines, billboards, and the radio trumpeted “the thrill of a great spiritual experience. In those few weeks millions of dollars will be raised in cities and towns throughout the land, and the fear of cold and hunger will be banished from the hearts of thousands.” But humorist Will Rogers, recruited to draw listeners to the initial broadcast, had placed the campaign’s challenge in perspective with typical barbed wit: “You have just heard Mr. Gifford, the biggest hello man in the world, a very fine high-caliber man, but what a job he has got! Mr. Hoover just told him, ‘Gifford, I have a remarkable job for you; you are to feed the several million unemployed.’
    “‘With what?’ says Gifford.
    “‘That’s what makes the job remarkable. If you had something to do it with, it wouldn’t be remarkable.’”
    POUR’s campaign aimed to raise $12 million, or about $1.20 for every person who then was unemployed, but Gifford did little beyond promoting the idea that giving was spiritually uplifting. In January 1932, as Cox’s haggard Pennsylvanians were descending on the capital to plead for a government jobs program, Gifford was testifying before a Senate committee studying unemployment. He did not have much to say. He told the senators he had no idea how much money the campaign had raised. Nor did he know how many people were unemployed, how many were receiving charity, how relief needs differed from place to place, or how local governments were supposed to raise money to provide relief. Nevertheless, he assured the senators, local resources could meet the need. Federal intervention, he said, would only reduce the amount of private giving and make the problem worse.
    To be fair, Gifford was not the only idiot. Many business and industry leaders, surveyed for a New Year’s Day story on their outlook for the year ahead, had predicted that 1931 would bring a business recovery. The main reason for this optimism appeared to be the conviction that 1931 couldn’t possibly be as bad as 1930. It “is a new year,” said Alfred P. Sloan, the president of General Motors. “We should enter it with new ideas, new measures, new confidence, new hope…'if our attitude toward the new problems of the new year is constructive, rather than critical, we shall make greater progress in 1931 than we did in 1930.” Colonel Michael Friedsam, the founder and head of the upscale New York department store B. Altman & Co., said, “I firmly believe that business in general is now in a good position to begin reconstruction, and that good management, vision, and courage, which are inherent in American business, will now start things moving in the right direction.” National Steel Corporation chairman Ernest T. Weir concurred: “I think there is assurance that we are close to the turning point and can confidently expect 1931 to be a year of more normal general business.”
    What else could the captains of industry and the business leaders say? But their predictions proved to be as wrong as Hoover’s each time he asserted that recovery was “right around the corner.” The fine qualities that Friedsam attributed to his fellow executives had deserted them. No one in business or government, bound to the framework of their beliefs, had a clue about how to solve the crisis.
    And unemployment kept rising, inexorably, remorselessly. Yet the president still treated the problem as a crisis of confidence, something to be talked away, or joked or rhymed or sung about. “What this country needs is a good big laugh,” he had said early in 1931. “There seems to be a