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The thing that was principally in my mind, in Roosevelt's mind and in the other Cabinet members' minds, were the awful pressures with regard to the suffering of the people under the long, continued unemployment, which had gotten to be not only unemployment, but distress unemployment. That is, the resources of individuals, of groups, and of families, had been exhausted. The resources, also, of many cities and towns had been exhausted in relief money. They didn't have any more to give. The situation of personal hardship and personal suffering was very intense at this time. There wasn't a day or an hour that I wasn't bombarded with new evidences of the intensity of the suffering and the great restlessness of the people under it. I don't mean to imply by that that there was any revolutionary mood or feeling, but there was a feeling of not being able to endure it much longer - “What shall we do? Can't you do something quick? Can't we get help right away?” A great many of these appeals came from municipalities towns and state organizations.

The President held a conference with the Governors within a very few days, for which I prepared a fairly complete memorandum on the subject in which I was very much interested - that is, interstate relations and interstate agreements with regard to labor legislation. We'd been working on that in New York for at least a year or more before I came to Washington. We had