The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

A small contingent of college graduates are, like Tom Shutt, “concerned about [...] problems of industry,” and although they don’t agree about everything, they are more or less in contact and agree more or less about their immediate shared goals, including “to make personal contacts with the workers, and find out what they were thinking and perhaps suggest new thoughts to them” (197). These graduates join companies, get to know their colleagues, and position themselves to join unions, “if and when such a thing might come into being” (198).

To these young people, income inequality seems to be the obvious cause of unemployment:

Too large a share of the product of industry went to the owners, who spent it in new investments, rather than to the workers, who could have spent it for food and clothing and other needs. The wages of the workers wouldn’t buy their product, and so production slowed down, and wages fell still lower, and the farmers had no market for their […] corn (198).

Worst of all, the New Deal was reviving industry without significantly lowering unemployment:

Production had come back to pre-depression levels with only two-thirds of the former number of workers. So it appeared that ten million unemployed were to be a permanent feature of American life; and of course they would always be at the factory gates, beating down wages of the others (198).