Machinery Quotes
This was written in the early years of the Great Depression. Over 25 percent of Americans were out of world. The stock market had crashed and many banks failed wiping out family savings where there was any. Social Security, Bank and Stock Market Regulations were not yet passed. The New Deal government was just starting creating jobs, but there was great concern that the capitalistic system had failed. Thomas and other critics were right that the U. S. Government had not before used its machinery for “ease and security of living”; they called for the adoption of state socialism. President Roosevelt however instead reformed American capitalism by adding substantial regulation, provided direct relief to the unemployed poor, stimulated the economy, created Social Security, Federal Deposit Bank Insurance, unemployment insurance and initiated massive public works programs. It took almost a decade but American Capitalism was saved and transformed to the greatest industrial output and standard of living increase the world had known. It was not until 2008 that the capitalistic American economy melted down again. Regulation of corporations had diminished. The banks failed and had to be bailed out again but as the result of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and other programs there was some cushioning of the effect of the Great Recession. The middle and lower class insecurity was back along with the wealthy taking a much larger proportion of the national wealth. The big difference was that few called for an end to capitalism and the political debate was on how best to fix the weaknesses of capitalism. Even most socialists around the world had built their Social Democracies around a capitalistic economic structure.
This was the point of view that was adopted by the Western Allies about the German Nazis and collaborators in the other European nations. However, not everyone agreed at the time with this policy. Lord Russell, the British Nuremburg Prosecutor resigned over this policy. He had case files against over 100,000 Nazi’s who had committed war crimes that he was not allowed to pursue. There was one Western county that did not follow this policy—Norway. They actually tried, convicted and jailed 10 percent of their entire population for collaboration. Their rehabilitation was just fine without the services of these criminals and they became the richest per capita country in the West including the U.S. The issue will be debated by historians of each generation.
Technology has always displaced and replaced workers, but most industrial technological breakthroughs, in the long run, have created new jobs and better paid ones. What worried Gompers did not appear to materialize in his lifetime, but actually became and issue on the later years of the 20th century and the early 21st century where the computer the robot, and the sophisticated software began to replace workers at a faster rate than new opportunities were created. Gompers was one of the harbingers of things to come.
The First Lady was very practical. Although she was a strong advocate of women working in all areas of the labor force, she also realized that there were very few women who had done so before and thus there were few role models for them. So women did not generally know how to dress to keep themselves safe. And if she thought any information was needed, she used her daily syndicated column in many of America’s newspapers to convey that information.
One of the arguments in favor of machinery and automation has always been that new and better jobs are created for the people who run and maintain the machines. However as Marx observed in 1867 that is of no comfort to the person who is replaced by the machine. Also with the computer and modern robots, the control and operation is often done by another computer. Even much of the computer programming is done by computer.
