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Labor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Dream
Book chapter

Labor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Dream

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt
Class, pp.449-465
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
08/24/2017
DOI: 10.1002/9781119395485.ch30

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Abstract

The first response to the unemployment that defined the Great Depression was labor's call for sharing the work. In the share‐the‐work issue and Black‐Connery, Roosevelt and his advisors found a foil, a contrasting and coherent background of opposition that set his inchoate views in bright relief and helped disclose specific policy alternatives, which taken together revealed a guiding philosophy, what Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, would later identify as “Salvation by Work”. Roosevelt's new vision was simply the opposite of the old American dream—perpetual economic growth and more work instead of abundance and the opening of Higher Progress. Instead of opting for expanding the realm of freedom and facing the autotelic challenge that generations of Americans had struggled with, Roosevelt, and then the nation, chose the perpetual creation of needs and eternal expansion of necessity, accepting the new, daunting challenge to create sufficient work for all to have “full‐time” jobs, forevermore.
Black‐Connery bill Great Depression Hoover's voluntaristic system national work‐sharing movement Roosevelt's dream unemployment

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