As I was reading the 1934 letters from Wayne Parrish to Harry Hopkins, the first thing that popped to my mind was the current economic state of the United States because of our current recession. In his first and second letters, Parrish constantly emphasizes the point that the major outcry in society was for jobs, similar to what is occurring today with the unemployment rate above 10% as of November. Much of the similarities that I saw however were regarding what the federal government was doing to help these people. During the Great Depression there was President Roosevelt’s New Deal and today there is President Obama’s stimulus plan. Today people debate if the stimulus package will help us or hurt us but according to the letters, people in the 1930s were depending on the government to bail them out. They felt that “the government has a definite responsibility and obligation to provide a minimum subsistence level for every person, regardless of jobs.” Just like now, lower class workers back then were counting on the government to create federal jobs for them. We don’t know all that President Obama is going to do during his term, so we cant be exactly sure of how it will all affect the different people throughout America or the different neighborhoods in New York City. I’m actually not completely sure of how the new stimulus package is affecting each New York City neighborhood differently (which would be interesting to find out), yet the overall outcry just like during the Great Depression is for jobs.

Picture from:

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html