This article recorded portions of the battle on Capitol Hill that were waged between the Spring and Winter of 1937 when Congress was crafting legislation that would establish a minimum wage law for the nation's employees as well as a maximum amount of working hours they would be expected to toil before additional payments would be required. This legislation would also see to it that children were removed from the American labor force. The subject at hand is the Black-Connery Bill and it passed into law as the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In order for FDR's Federal Government to layout their planned economy they had to be able to forecast the future trends in unemployment, and with that in mind it was deemed suitable that a committee be convened to study the matter. The board of brainiacs called themselves the National Resources Committee and their study was boundless and all encompassing. This article summarizes the findings of one of the organization subcommittees; their 450,000-word report was titled "Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implications of of New Inventions". The head of this subcommittee was the famed sociology professor William F. Ogburn, and as the title implied, the report studied the blessing and the curse that is the nature of technological innovation.
A report from the regional directors of the Resettlement Administration (an arm of the FDR's Department of Agriculture) stated that:
"15,000 farmers have moved out of the Dakotas, Western Kansas and Eastern Montana, leaving soil which because a aridity or exhaustion could not yield any crop... [Having moved to the states of the Pacific Northwestern] Some of them are squatting in shacks and makeshift dwellings made of tree branches, stray boards [and] strips of tin." A columnist writing for the magazine New Outlook following the first nine months of the New Deal, weighed carefully all the assorted alphabet agencies and edicts that President Roosevelt created in hopes that the U.S. economy would once more spring to life. He concluded that there was nothing to look forward to and compared FDR to the con-men on the street corners who scam the passersby into playing their shell games; difference being that FDR's shells were both empty.
Click here to read about the first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration.
An article about FDR's scheme to create an American Utopia purchased with high taxation. The article closes with an amusing poem about the tyranny of taxation. A great observer of the Washington merry-go-round, columnist Jay Franklin (1897 – 1967) pointed out in this article that there are Federal agencies entrusted with the sorts of information that, when analyzed properly, will serve both as an indicator of prosperity and of misery as they spread or recede across the land. "...if one wished to know whether the people were desperate and suffering there were certain matters which would demonstrate it:"
"the number of evictions, the number of illegitimate births, the number of articles pawned or redeemed, the growth or decline of unnatural vice, the number of suicides. Information on these points, if currently accessible, in compact statistical form, would show whether the people were socially happy or economically satisfied." |
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