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So we knew a little bit about social insurance, and even the words "social insurance" had come to be at least academic words. People who studied the matter -- students and highbrows -- generally could understand what it meant, but they seem never to have thought of insuring against other social hazards. Social problems were taken care of by the States, which appropriated money and provided homes or institutions for the victims of the toughest types of hazards; and by voluntary organizations which did all they could to relieve the sufferings caused by particular hazards. So we went along amiably, you know, always in our genial American optimistic way, believing that everything would turn out all right.

IT'S PEOPLE WHO SUFFER

Two or three studies -of social insurance- were started at one time or another. Nearly always a report of some sort was made, but before the report got written and filed, the crisis was over, and so we forgot about the problem. "That will never happen again," we said. This was notably true in 1919, just after the First World War.

New York City had a terrific problem of unemployment, which was hazardous because it involved so many people. The experience was short, sharp, and painful. The unemployed and homeless were allowed to sleep in the churches, I remember. Henry Brewer and Paul Kennedy, who was then the head of the New York Association for Labor Legislation, opened a place down on the Bowery called the Hotel de Gink, which was a clean, cheap, and honest lodging-house where a man could get free lodging if necessary and could do just about as he pleased. If he was a low-down fellow, nobody ever noticed it unless he was a thief. He couldn't steal; but almost anything else he could do. That wasn't true, of course, of the municipal lodging-house. If he was badly behaved, he just got turned out; whereas at the Hotel de Gink, he could do anything. He could sing vulgar songs and make vulgar jokes and make a noise and all that kind of thing. On the other hand, one didn't see the women and children, or the families dependent on other people. They were known to be part of the problem, but they did not show.

When we came to the problem of doing something for the "poorer kind of people" (as John Garner called them) in 1933 after the Roosevelt administration took office, we, of course had had a very recent experience with poverty. Since 1929 we had experienced the short, sudden drop of everything. The total economy had gone to pieces; just shook to pieces under us, beginning, of course, with the stock market crash. A banking crisis followed it. A manufacturing crisis followed it. Everybody felt it. In less than a year it was a terror.

NOT HIRING

People were so alarmed that all through the rest of 1929, 1930, and 1931, the specter of unemployment -- of starvation, of hunger, of the wandering boys, of the broken homes, of the families separated while somebody went out to look for work -- stalked everywhere. The unpaid rent, the eviction notices, the furniture and bedding on the sidewalk, the old lady weeping over it, the children crying, the father out looking for a truck to move their belongings himself to his sister's flat or some relative's already overcrowded tenement, or just sitting there bewilderedly waiting for some charity officer to come and move him somewhere. I saw goods stay on the sidewalk in front of the same house with the same children weeping on top of the blankets for 3 days before anybody came to relieve the situation!

These were the years in which developed, you remember, in New York City -- and later in other cities -- the pattern of the apple sellers. Some kindhearted man who had a surplus of apples -- because the farmers were in this depression, too -- thought of getting rid of his apples (which he couldn't sell) by giving them to the unemployed to sell. So they got them every morning somewhere down in the market. Nobody asked them to prove they were unemployed. I'm sure they were because no man in his right mind would have taken a big basket of apples to try and sell at 5 cents apiece in a poverty-stricken community -- out of which he would make just a little bit of pocket money -- unless he had been out of work, out of wages, out of money, out of everything.

Some of you may remember how strange the ideas of the public were about the apples. I tell you this because it's a clue to the public mentality of the times -- 1929 to 1935. In the New Yorker magazine there was a cartoon of two sort of prissy-looking ladies with their hands crossed, walking down the street and looking as if they were not unemployed themselves. Here was the big basket of apples, and here was the man selling them with a little sign saying: "Unemployed -- Apples 5 cents." As they looked at the apples, one lady said to the other, "They look perfectly delicious." "Oh, they do, indeed," said the other, "I wish I could have one." "Oh no, you mustn't," said the first. "They're for the unemployed."

Though you may find it difficult to believe, ideas as silly as that were actually broadcast in the community. And many other strange notions added to the confused situation.