I’m a long way from home, now. Working for Secretary Perkins is going to be quite the change from being a social worker back in Indianapolis. I got the call that the office of the President could use a woman with my capabilities within the Public Employment Bureau. Imagine my surprise! The Labor department is going to be a meaningful place with Roosevelt taking office. Part of my job will be to cooperate on interdepartmental initiatives and communicate policy properly. Although, based on the speech happening behind me, the President will be quite effective at communicating on his own. Can you hear that?

I was not a part of his Brain Trust or even the New York governor’s office, which means I still do not know what to expect. Other colleagues with a social worker background have been speculating that the President’s hatred of the Dole is going to keep us from helping the poor the way we would like to. Maybe I am naive, as some of the men in the office have already started to insist, but I think it is our job to show him that these times call for more than what governments have offered in the past. I can see that in him.

But enough about that – It’s time to celebrate, then I will get to work!

I want to bring aid to the people directly, that is where my talents are best used. Instead, my first task is to help prepare speeches about the banks. The President has decided to declare a Bank Holiday. According to some of the transition team members,before he took office the President had been pressuring President Hoover to close the banks until they could be back on solid footing, to prevent the runs on the banks that we have been watching fearfully for too long.
Banking is not my area of expertise, so I sought out staff from the Treasury Department, from Woodin’s inner circle. The previous administration, I learned, had been more prepared for this step than I thought, since it the President’s Proclamation actually first read: “I Herbert Hoover, President of the United States of America.”
Not everything was just for the average citizens who put their money and trust in their local banks. They wanted to keep bank investors from taking out money in the form of gold, which would deplete the gold reserves.
It sounds like a powerful first step, but I can’t help but think that the people who need our help will only stop losing money, they won’t get anything back, yet. If the President can use his power to rearrange banks for investors like a checkerboard, what else can we get him to do?

There was a commotion on the front lawn of the White House this morning. To celebrate prohibition’s repeal, a factory brought a large truck with cases of beer just after midnight. “President Roosevelt, the first real beer is yours!”
I must say, I always thought of beer merely as a vice. Where I grew up, unrestricted alcohol made men and their families suffer terribly. I worked to repair the damage that drinking did to some families. After all, as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union said, “no nation drank itself out of a Depression.”
However, what are our priorities? I work in the Labor department, and have been constantly seeking the ear of the President to argue for more job-creating measures. Congressman Thomas H. Cullen appealed to our offices personally, promising that the bill would eventually create up to 1 million jobs – how could I disapprove of that?
There are other realities that are accompanying this Economy Act that worry me more than beer. It cuts federal budgets, rewriting veterans’ pensions rules, and even forbids women to work for the government if their husbands are already federally employed. That both the House and the Senate have passed it shows how eager they are to try everything they can to stop the hemorrhaging of the Depression. I only wish the President had listened to more of the members of Congress that spoke up on behalf of the needy that will lose pensions, access to federal aid, and more.

Drink up, everyone.

Sometimes I feel so removed from the people that we are trying to help. With that in mind, I want to give you an opportunity to see the back-and-forth involved in the upcoming bill for industrial relief. I come down on one side rather passionately, but I will reserve my opinion until I have displayed the two options.

First, the Black Bill:

• Cap work weeks at 30 hours
• Ban interstate trade of products made by workers who had hours greater than 30 per week
• Force the hire of 25% more workers
• Workers who were working more than those hours would see their wages adjusted to compensate for the cut in hours

Then, the National Industrial Recovery Act:

• Businesses can develop “codes of fair competition”
• minimum wage and child labor protections
• Union organizing protections
• $3.3 Billion in Public Works

Which suits your needs best?
The former is much more focused than the latter, and Secretary Perkins tried to work with it, but the Senator from Alabama whose name is on the bill was rather rigid about the stipulations in their entirety. Congress, in turn, was not amenable to the bill at all. And so now we hope for passage of the NIRA.
Now you know what it is like to work for the President. There were three other bills various departments were also working on, simultaneously! The cabinet, the House, the Senate, are all throwing ideas together under the President. The outcomes are hardly guaranteed, and compromise is key.

It is infinitely easier to administer to an individual member of the working poor than it is to try and meet the needs of a multitude of them through economic reform. Trying to explain how that economic reform will help the working poor is even harder. I give you my latest attempt, with inspiration from L. Frank Baum:
Dorothy has been indirectly uprooted by a cyclone in rural Kansas. In Oz, the Wicked Witch has exploited the laborer, the Tin Woodsman; the Scarecrow is without means to save himself, and the Cowardly Lion was once a powerful force but his roar has become the only menacing quality he has left. Dorothy just wants to go home. The ragtag team looks to the Wizard to give them the opportunities to fulfill their desires. He projects the image of a powerful leader, but being everything to everyone is just his outer shell and is a feeble old man inside. Dorothy has to follow a golden road, but it is her SILVER shoes that can get her back to her family safe and sound.
Bimetallism, the specter of Willliam Jennings Bryan’s populist movement has returned to mainstream politics almost forty years after the first edition of the Wizard Of Oz. This time it is tied to inflation, to help alleviate the debt of the farmer. The President has thus decided to devalue the dollar – and take thus allow the people to walk on the gold road in silver slippers, too.

The President sounds like something out of a storybook himself when talking about his decision. Taking advice from Dorothy was, he said, “the only legitimate method of putting the country back on its feet without destroying human values.”

There was so much enthusiasm in the beginning. It feels like so long ago that I was worrying about getting banking legislation through Congress. Washington, with a few challenges here and there, still seemed rather agreeable to me. However the Federal Emergency Relief Act has come up against the Old Right, even within the Public Employment Office. The idea that government can give mandates to businesses does not sit well with their non-interventionist ideology. We had finally gotten the president to bring government directly to the people, and the devil has taken this moment to perch on his shoulder and spout reactionary nonsense!
Just today, Governor Eugene Talmadge called the FERA a waste of taxpayers’ money, and a way to reward the shiftless and lazy. All because the South is upset that the Administration sets the rules for the ways in which states doll out relief. Don’t they understand that we want to keep the money out of the hands of the shiftless and lazy? We want to put people to work, that is the whole object of the Act.
The President hates the idea of the dole, and even he understands why he had to sign it into law. It’s a joint effort between the federal and state government agencies, when did it become so hard to cooperate –
And apparently Secretary Perkins just got back from a meeting where Republican Senator Simeon D. Fess just complained that “Uncle Sam is looked upon as a Santa Claus to give alms.”
Attack the bill on it’s merits, don’t just cry socialism, it’s absurd!

I had tears in my eyes after the passage of the NIRA. I didn’t even cry at the inauguration. The people will finally get a chance to help better their stations in life through the Public Works Administration, being created as part of the National Recovery Act.
I cannot even tell you how much convincing it took. Back in April, Secretary Perkins wanted $5 Billion in grants, and that did not sit well with the President. 3.3 Billion became the final number, it’s oddly specific. That too was almost dropped on the final bill back in May. We worked all night before Mrs. Perkins met with the President, preparing to defend including Public Works in the Industrial Relief Bill. What better way to relieve an industry?
Said the President, “Between these twin efforts – public works and industrial re-employment – it is not too much to expect that a great many men and women can be taken from the ranks of the unemployed before winter comes.”
I feel so proud that they left the provision in. Secretary Perkins fought so valiantly, and now the people will get the relief that they need. Let the naysayers accuse Uncle of Sam of being Santa Claus. For that matter, let us be cast as the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy! If you had seen the children in the cities and towns across this nation who had to go without food, clothing and shelter because their parents had no work, you wouldn’t care what your political opponents thought of your legislation, either.
But don’t take it from me:

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