That’s what my then eighty-six year old Uncle Lou said. To me. In a moment when others weren’t present. I asked if it had been a WPA job and he said that it had been with the CCC. I wanted to hear more, but the private moment was lost as others rejoined us. It was as if Uncle Lou had shared a secret with me. Or maybe it was only a secret because he’d never spoken of that time of his life. The few years before WWII and his seven year enlistment in the US Navy. More than a decade before he’d met and later married my mother’s sister.
“Mr. Roosevelt Gave Me A Job.”
Some sixty-five years later and for a reason or reasons unknown to me, it still resonated enough for him to speak of it. If only briefly, possibly in passing, but not in front of his wife and her other relatives. What was unmistakeable in his phrasing, tone, and feeling was gratitude and respect for Mr. Roosevelt. Unlikely to have been shared within the very conservative Catholic family he married into. Perhaps and perhaps not forgotten over the decades when he cast his secret ballot.
Lou was one of the fortunate ones that during a period of high youth unemployment* Mr. Roosevelt gave him a job. A job that likely contributed to the well-being of his parents and siblings as well as himself, but for a nation even more than that. As Eleanor Roosevelt so clearly articulated in 1934 :
“I have moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.”
–New York Times, 5/34
Watching the GOP freak-out over the latest unemployment rate of 7.8% is somewhat amusing until I recall that President Obama has stated that government doesn’t create jobs. That would be one issue on which Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney seem to agree. When this country needs another Mr. Roosevelt, we get two candidates espousing the outsourcing of job creation to the free market fairy. Because today there are millions of mature and financially secure Americans like my Uncle Lou that today say, “Mr. Reagan gave me a job.”
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Worth reading: Bob Herbert’s For Obama, No More Excuses
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In the face of the worst economic calamity since the 1930s, the United States needed a mammoth job-creation and economic revitalization program, a New Deal for the 21st century. But that would have required presidential leadership capable of challenging the formidable opposition mounted by the very folks who caused the crisis in the first place. Instead we got a woefully insufficient stimulus program and a failed effort at some kind of grand bargain between the president and the retrograde Republicans in Congress. That grand bargain would have imposed austerity measures that would
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* Youth unemployment as high as 30% according to The Roosevelt Institute That 30% may be a wild under-estimate given current evidence in the US and other countries. Recent US figures on youth unemployment have been on the order of twice that of the overall unemployment rate. That multiple of two-times is what is currently seen in Ireland. Two-times plus in Spain and Greece, but a whopping three and half times in Italy. Therefore, when the aggregate US unemployment rate was 25% during the Hoover Depression, why was the a youth unemployment rate a mere 20% higher?
