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seats off the harvester machine - one of those iron seats - were letting the girls sit on that and it nearly killed them. They were better off standing.

So I didn't know how deeply his heart was involved, nor did I know, nor could I estimate at that time, how far the political support of the people of the United States could be rallied to ideas of this sort. How could any of us tell? There was no feeling at this time, February 1933, of a “New Deal.” The Governor had no such ideas in his mind that could be called the New Deal. I can swear to that. When I say, as I did in my book, that the New Deal was improvised as we went along, and it was not a plan, a program, a plot, as some darn fool who writes about it says it was, I mean what I say. It wasn't even a practical, sensible, “what-do-we-do-first?” and “what-do-we-do-second?” plan. It wasn't as concrete, and systematic and intelligent as that.

Nobody knew, least of all the President-elect, whether the most important thing was to balance the budget, to conserve the trees out in the wilderness, or to feed the unemployed at the Bowery mission. That's literally true. There was no conviction about which things came first and which things second. I suppose each of us had our own ideas of what was first.