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and not Industrial Commissioner, I had had a study made of unemployment in the State of New York which was paid for mostly by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Merchants Association. They made a very good study of it, but employment boomed. We thought there was going to be a decline right after the war, but it changed over to a boom.

However, early in '30, right after the crash, I suggested to the Governor that we appoint this committee on unemployment. In the Department of Labor we knew - and they must have known it, but never published it in the federal Department of Labor - that employment was falling off. We knew it was falling off in the State of New York before the '29 crash. It didn't fall off because of the '29 crash. The '29 crash took place because business was already declining. It just got reflected in the market, probably six months or more after it had begun. It was falling off quite steadily from month to month. The figures that we gathered in the Department of Labor in New York State showed that.

I remember Mr. Leonard W. Hatch and E. B. Patton, who were our economists and statisticians, saying to me, “This is true all over the United States. The same thing is going on and we'd better watch it carefully.”

It was at that time that I suggested to the Governor