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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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fewer. There was still opportunity to work on business construction, or unskilled jobs of one kind and another. There were chances to earn a living.

So we made no great fuss about it, but we published it regularly every month. We published the fact that this committee was in existence and that this committee held hearings. It advertised itself not as studying a crisis of unemployment, but as studying the whole problem of cyclical unemployment in various industries, with the intention of making a plan and proposal.

Then with the stock market crash in '29 the lay-offs became acute almost immediately. By this time the crash itself frightened the press sufficiently so that the press began attaching to these little unsensational bulletins that we published in the Department of Labor perhaps an undue importance. That was not undue as it turned out, but it might have been undue importance.

I speak of all this because it was one of the major things I did in the New York Department of Labor. Right away we realized that we must write a report, make recommendations and put some of the recommendations into effect as soon as possible. A great many of the recommendations that could be put into effect were appeals to the various communities to





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