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"Well," I said, "that is all I want." I don't want you to put any blocks in my way. We'll see what we can do. There are plenty of people," I said, "who want it badly and will work for it."

This was the way it all began.

Then, of course, we got into office and the relief problem was overwhelming, and the NRA was making an awful noise. You couldn't hear anything else. It was a little difficult to keep the idea alive, but I took it upon myself to mention unemployment insurance at least every second meeting of the Cabinet -- just to mention it so that it wouldn't die; so it wouldn't get out of people's minds. Finally, the time came when the Vice President, John Garner, said, "I think we ought to be doing something for the poorer kind of people." He, too, was keeping it alive.

By the way, I remember that John L. Lewis called him "that red-faced whisky-drinking old man." Garner was an extraordinary person; although certainly no flaming radical. But when some of these problems were discussed in cabinet meetings, it is John N. Garner that I remember. Being a little deaf, he would lean forward to listen with his hand cupped to his ear, and I remember his getting awfully out of patience at the long-winded elaborate statements that people made about the unemployment situation that existed in those years. Finally, he would burst out and he would say, "Mr. President, Mr. President, I think we promised to do something for the poorer kind of people. We'd better be about it. We'd better be about it and not talk so much." He understood the poorer kind of people to be the people who needed something; he didn't know what. He knew nothing about social insurance, but the poorer kind of people were the people that had to be helped. This, of course, was absolutely true.

By this time it was quite late. It was June 1934 before we got to the point that the NRA was quiet enough, and relief was quiet enough so that we could think about this thing seriously. So I mentioned it again, and then I proposed to the President, since he was trying to close Congress earlier than usual, that we establish our study right now and that we get a bill ready to present the next year -- the next session -- which would be the first of January 1935. This was all right; nobody objected because it was a study problem. We discussed it in Cabinet one day, and I remember it was interesting to see thee views these Cabinet officers took. I remember plainly what each of them said. Henry Wallace was the most educated of any of them on social matters, and he said, yes, he was in favor of it, but this was no time to do it because it was deflationary to take tax money from the general public and give it into government hands. He indicated that "Tax money should be circulated to stimulate the economy." Henry Morgenthau, Secretary to the Treasury, agreed to that. Navy didn't have any ideas at all--at least none they wanted to express. Harold Ickes merely said "Okay" in a rather Ickesian tone. Secretary of War, George Durn, who had been the Governor of Utah and was a splendid person -- heart in the right place, intelligent, and industrious, a good person -- said, "I think it's got to be done, Mr. President; the quicker the better." And so it went around the table. Dan Roper of South Carolina said, "I think it is a very good idea. It sounds very good."

Anyhow, they all more or less agreed that the President should appoint a committee, so then we had to decide how.

I suddenly became frightened as I saw what the committee might be, you know -- a regular congressional public-administration investigatory committee -- that would take 10 years to make a report. So I tried to stop any proposals of that sort. The others had begun to say that Senator Such-and-Such ought to be on it and Senator So-and-So, etc., and perhaps a few Governors should be on it. You know what happens when you get a great big committee with all sorts of representative people on it; it's a terrible job to get anything out of it.

We came to think the President should appoint just a little committee to explore the subject. It should consist of members of the Cabinet in order to keep this thing "close up" so that the President could be sure they didn't get off on the wrong foot; that they didn't go proposing some crazy ideas, you know -- over-liberal -- and also so they didn't get to proposing very, very conservative ideas which wouldn't give the unemployed and the aged much of anything. We needed the President's stand on this, so only those who were responsible only to the President were proposed for appointment.

The President did appoint members of the Cabinet and he called it the Committee on Economic Security. He didn't like the word "social." That meant the dole; he wanted that dropped out, so we dropped it out. Semantics meant nothing to me. At any rate, we dropped the word "social" and we had a Committee on Economic Security.

Of course, everybody since then has pointed out that it wasn't "economic security" at all; and even before we got around to making the report, we regretted the idea that we had ever had the name because it was really social. Everybody was talking about how the economy was busted and we needed a good economic program, so this was the Committee on Economic Security. Congress hastily received the President's report and authorized the committee, but adjourned without making any appropriation to support the committee.