Word: thompsons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Dotty Thompson began it, Artic Krock took up the torch, and now Mark Sullivan has done his bit. They are all pumping hard for their common claim that unemployment has dropped to the two million level of pre-depression days. Each maintains that the bad old New Dealers know that joblessness is no longer a real problem, but won't admit it, because then "they must confess the success of the American system, and they won't do that." Their arguments are, as a Supreme Court Justice has put it, "interesting but only mildly persuasive...
Last week a statistical novice, buxom Columnist Dorothy Thompson, told her 7,500,000 readers that the experts were screwloose. Speaking through her mythical breakfast companion The Grouse (grouch), who quarrels with her for being stupid and writes on the tablecloth,*Miss Thompson proved to her own satisfaction that not nine nor ten nor twelve million, but only two million were unemployed...
Quoting N. I. C. B. figures for December 1929, she found that in that month 46,344,000-38% of the population-had jobs. In December 1939, 48,609,983 were working. Increase by Miss Thompson's subtraction: 1,865,983. Increase by old-fashioned subtraction: 2,265,983. In those ten years the population had upped 10,000,000. Of this increase, 38% would normally be expected to have reached working age. Net loss in employment, therefore...
...Miss Thompson's startling discovery was hailed next day by Washington Pundit Arthur Krock. Writing from his New York Times office, on the seventh floor of Washington's ivory-colored Albee Building, Mr. Krock hinted further that the Government dared not admit the wonderful truth lest it get no more money for relief funds. Likewise, the Republicans ignored the truth for fear of conceding that Roosevelt had actually produced recovery...
...Dealers' first impulse was to laugh. Nimble-brained, birdlike Isador Lubin, chief numbers man of the New Deal as Commissioner of Labor Statistics, declined to dignify the Thompson-Krock "discovery" with a reply. But by the time the columnists had each propounded a second column in defense of their discovery, their detractors gulped...