(This is a series of excerpts from The Progressive magazine in the 1930s that are especially relevant today. You can find other delectable items in the current issue of The Progressive, which commemorates the magazine’s 100th anniversary.)

Human Wreckage: A Plea for Federal Relief
By William Green
President, American Federation of Labor
February 20, 1932

With city relief breaking down, with private charity totally unable to meet the needs of the unemployment, we are now face to face with an unprecedented unemployment crisis.

With relief provision totally inadequate for even the winter months, we must look ahead now to the needs of the year. Only thus can we prevent a fearful toll of human wreckage. A conservative estimate places the probable unemployment for 1932 between six and seven million as an average.

Already we are hearing from bankrupt cities and towns reports of unprecedented suffering they cannot meet. Some are not even paying their schoolteachers. Community chests, after a valiant effort to collect funds from private sources, report their funds inadequate; the need is four times that of 1928, their funds only 25 per cent more. Isolated industrial sections outside the cities—coal fields, textile-mill villages—have no resources outside their industry to cope with their problem. Even large cities are not meeting their relief needs. Thus the responsibility of caring for those out of work is thrown back on their relatives, friends, and neighbors, who can least afford to give of their own meager incomes. This burden, added to wage cuts and part-time work, reduces our living standards to the point of poverty in millions of homes.

Only one agency can meet the relief problem now that all other resources have been proved inadequate—the federal government. By taxation it can distribute the burden of this year where it can be borne with least injury to our citizenship.

Back to the 1930s, Part II

Back to the 1930s, Part I