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They all began making plans. I suppose that in the year 1932 I must have been to twenty meetings, or two-day sessions of well-intentioned groups who were thinking of a planned economy, or a planned society. This was before they had any ideas of a political change. They were thinking in terms of “How can you plan for production, consumption, distribution in such a way so that it will not bring about these debacles?”

There was one great meeting of the Academy of Political Science in Philadelphia that touched on just that. It was certainly a most respectable outfit. I had been at that conference, so I know what went on. I was only contributing something about some of our experiments about mitigating unemployment - not preventing, but mitigating unemployment. That went on everywhere.

Roosevelt was perfectly aware of that. There was the idea of planning something that would prevent these economic disasters that were everywhere. I think Roosevelt mentioned that night that he had had so many letters already from people all over the country who had a plan about how to stabilize the economy, how to plan the society so there wouldn't be such disasters. He said, “There's a very great amount of public interest in it.”

I said, “Even on the basis of the little trial balloons