The Great Depression, the Great Depression and the Great Recession

Inauguration day saw machine gun nests at the corners of federal buildings in washington for the first time since the civil war. The entire financial system had broken down and there were 17 million unemployed out of a population of about 25 million people. He set up workfair programmes, but he paid them below the minimum wage, so he wasn't stealing union jobs. His objective was not to create a sort of lumpin proletariat of people salaried - it was to get people to workdand then move them from the free market into the private sector as quickly as possible.