[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Printing Office, 1945); Joseph E. Reeve, Monetary Reform Movements (Washington,
D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943), pp. 1ff.; U.S. Senate,
Committee on Judiciary, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings on S. 3059
(Washington, D.C., 1930).
1930 251
Senate: Senator Hiram Johnson (R., Calif.), head of the subcom-
mittee considering the measure, approved, as did Senator Vanden-
berg (R., Mich.) and President Hoover. An outpouring of the
nation s economists endorsed the Wagner Bill, in petitions pre-
sented to Congress by Professors Samuel Joseph of the City Col-
lege of New York, and Joseph P. Chamberlain of Columbia Uni-
versity. Joseph s petition asserted that the bill laid the foundation
for a national program to relieve unemployment, and that the
principle of public works was widely accepted by economists as
a means of stimulating construction and putting men to work.15
15
The economists and others who signed these petitions included the follow-
ing:
Edith Abbott Edward A. Filene Harry A. Millis
Asher Achinstein Irving Fisher Broadus Mitchell
Emily Green Balch Elisha M. Friedman
Harold G. Moulton
Bruce Bliven A. Anton Friedrich
Paul M. O Leary
Sophinisba P. Breckenridge S. Colum Gilfillan
Thomas I. Parkinson
Paul F. Brissenden Meredith B. Givens
S. Howard Patterson
William Adams Brown, Jr. Carter Goodrich
Harold L. Reed
Edward C. Carter Henry F. Grady
Father John A. Ryan
Ralph Cassady, Jr. Robert L. Hale
Francis B. Sayre
Waddill Catchings Walton Hamilton
G.T. Schwenning
Zechariah Chafee, Jr. Mason B. Hammond
Henry R. Seager
Joseph P. Chamberlain Charles O. Hardy
Thorsten Sellin
John Bates Clark Sidney Hillman
Mary K. Simkhovitch
John Maurice Clark Arthur N. Holcombe
Nahum I. Stone
Victor S. Clark Paul T. Homan
Frank Tannenbaum
Joanna C. Colcord B.W. Huebsch
Frank W. Taussig
John R. Commons Alvin S. Johnson
Ordway Tead
Morris L. Cooke H.V. Kaltenborn
Willard Thorp
Morris A. Copeland Edwin W. Kemmerer
Mary Van Kleeck
Malcolm Cowley Willford I. King
Oswald G. Villard
Donald Cowling Alfred Knopf
Lillian Wald
Jerome Davis Hazel Kyrk
J.P. Warbasse
Davis F. Dewey Harry W. Laidler
Colston E. Warne
Paul H. Douglas Corliss Lamont
Stephen P. Duggan Kenneth S. Latourette Gordon S. Watkins
Seba Eldridge William Leiserson
William O. Weyforth
Henry Pratt Fairchild J.E. LeRossignol
Joseph H. Willits
John M. Ferguson Roswell C. McCrea
Chase Going Woodhouse
Frank A. Fetter Otto Tod Mallery Matthew Woll
252 America s Great Depression
The Senate passed the Wagner Bill by an unrecorded vote. The
bill ran into delays in the House despite the almost complete lack
of opposition in the hearings and the pressure for the bill exerted
by Andrews, Green, Perkins, Emery, Douglas, Foster and Catch-
ings. Representative George S. Graham (R., Penn.), Chairman of
the Judiciary Committee, managed to amend the substance out of
the bill, and thus to deadlock the Senate House Conference and
block the bill.16 In the meanwhile, Congress approved the various
Hoover requests for additional public works appropriations,
although one $150 million request was cut to $116 million.
In December, 1930, the Emergency Committee for Federal
Public Works, headed by Harold S. Butenheim, editor of American
City, appealed for large-scale borrowing of one billion dollars for
public works, and the plea was endorsed by 93 leading economists.
Among these were Thomas S. Adams, Thomas Nixon Carver,
Edgar S. Furniss, Edwin R.A. Seligman, Leo Wolman, and many
of the names on the Wagner Bill petitions.17 Finally, in February,
1931, Congress passed the Employment Stabilization Act in orig-
inal form and Hoover gladly signed the measure. He quickly des-
ignated the Secretary of Commerce as chairman of the Federal
Also involved in the agitation, by virtue of their being officers and members
of the American Association for Labor Legislation during this period, were the
following economists and other intellectual leaders:
Willard E. Atkins
Harold M. Groves
Donald Richberg
C.C. Burlingham
Luther Gulick
Bernard L. Shientag
Stuart Chase
Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont
Sumner H. Slichter
Dorothy W. Douglas
Eduard C. Lindeman
Edwin S. Smith
Richard T. Ely
William N. Loucks
George Soule
Felix Frankfurter
Wesley C. Mitchell
William F. Willoughby
Arthur D. Gayer
Jessica Peixotto
Edwin E. Witte
16
Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of The American Worker, 1920 1933,
p. 304.
17
See Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New
York: Viking Press, 1959), vol. 5, pp. 674 75.
1930 253
Employment Stabilization Board.18 The Senate also did something
in the same month destined to have far-reaching effects in the
future: it passed the Wagner resolution to study the establishment
of Federal unemployment insurance.
Behind the scenes, Gerard Swope, president of General Electric,
urged a much larger public works plan upon Hoover. In September,
1930, Swope proposed to Hoover an immediate one billion dollar
bond issue for Federal public works, to be matched by another one
billion dollars similarly raised by state and local governments,
under Federal guarantee. Swope s favorite argument was to point
to wartime, with its bold national planning, as the ideal to be emu-
lated. Fortunately, Hoover s own leanings in this direction were
much too cautious to allow the adoption of Swope s proposal.19
Also urging Hoover further than he would go was Colonel
Arthur Woods, head of the President s Emergency Committee for
Employment, who suggested a $750 million federal state public-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]