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Well, here again was a problem. I remember talking to the President, and he said, "Well, look, Harry Hopkins has got all that money. They just made enormous appropriations for Harry Hopkins' relief problem. Go get some of Harry's money."

"Well, I said, "I don't think that's legal, is it? It belongs to Harry." "Oh, well, you can get it," he said.

It was a bright idea really. I don't know why they don't do it more in the Government now. "Borrow people; just borrow what you need for staff. Why, there are all kinds of people working in Washington -- thousands of them. Borrow them. The Army's got them; the Navy's got them; Agriculture's got them; Labor's got them; everybody's got thousands of people working for them. They don't really need all of them," he said.

So we borrowed them. Mostly it was Agriculture and Labor who contributed to the staff, and the Attorney General gave us half a dozen lawyers whom he didn't know what to do with otherwise. They were good people, it so happened, and I had the pick of them.

Then we took $125,000 from Harry Hopkins, but on a promise. We promised that we would employ only the unemployed with that $125,000. But that was all right, because plenty of statisticians, plenty of college professors, plenty of people who knew how to dig for facts and so forth -- who were unemployed. There were stenographers, of course, and clerks by the dozens who were unemployed. That was a very good scheme. We used only persons otherwise unemployed and the thing got off to a good start.

Well, we had a great many difficulties. If you have administered a new program you know some of the problems we went through getting this one organized.

We knew we had to have actuaries. Well, the Lions Club of America and some other big service organizations put up the money for actuaries. Think of that! It was a really a wonderful thing that they did, because none of us had clear ideas about actuaries. But they had a small insurance system in their own scheme of things and they knew actuaries. So they gave us their actuaries; and the Equitable Life Assurance Society also gave us two actuaries. That was a little political pull inside the Equitable Assurance Co., I must admit; but still we got two first-class actuaries from them. In addition, we got a lot of able and willing people just as "gifts."

COMMITTEE GOES TO WORK

Of course, we had to have a driver. That was why we got Ed Witte from the University of Wisconsin. We borrowed him, first for 3 months, and then for the duration of the problem. He was a tower of strength because he knew how to direct and how to get work out of people who were scattered about in the organization. We didn't have much time because we set ourselves January 1, 1935 as the date to report our plan. We borrowed university people who, beginning in July, were on summer vacation -- quantities of them. I didn't know as much about university people then as I do now, but university people -- teachers and professors -- are a problem in themselves. They have great pride of opinion, and they are quite vocal. They can give voice to their opinions wonderfully, and they can write reports very readily. It takes comparatively little time to write a report, but it is a different thing to do what the report recommends.

We soon found that we had a team of very high-strung people on our hands and somebody had to direct them, but Witte was just perfect. He was a university man himself. He was accustomed to dealing with irate and excited scholars who didn't want to be disputed about things they knew, or thought they knew; and he was a very practical man, too. He'd been in the legislative bill-drafting department at the State of Wisconsin, and he knew how to set up a law; that is, what you had to have in it. He knew what the situation required and (with his superior knowledge) he could calm down those scholars better than any of the rest of us could.

At any rate, we worked all summer. We had the Technical Board on Economic Security made up of Government officials. We had an Advisory Council on Economic Security which was the employers, organized labor, and the general public. They were easier to handle because the "general public" had been picked; you know, the way you pick a committee. They were all perfectly good people. Even the employers had been well picked. There was Marion Folsom of Eastman Kodak Co. Some of us happened to know him to be a good man with a kind of social mind; and you know what became of him. He worked for that committee and later he turned up as head of the whole Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. A very good person -- a man of great ability who really dedicated himself to the promotion of these ideas. It was a terribly hot summer and everybody worked hard all the time and finally we actually did bring forth a report on the first of January 1935. it was a report that recommended unemployment insurance and old-age insurance but omitted health insurance just because the experts couldn't get through with health insurance in time to make a report on it.