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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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you're hungry or not, but here's a quarter. For heaven's sakes have some fun.”

There were a lot of that kind in there as well as people who had really just lost a job.

The Hotel de Gink was very successful. Of course, it was a terrible fire hazard. They would cook in the building. They preferred to warm up their stew. There are terrific problems about managing a place like that. A bad egg would get in there. There would be riots among the men because they didn't like the bad egg. On the whole it was very successful, but it did not solve the problem of unemployment.

There is a report in existence - I suppose it can be found in the archives - that Bruere wrote then on the unemployed in New York City. We canvassed then some of the causes of unemployment. When we came to study unemployment in 1931 when I was Industrial Commissioner of New York, I put Henry Bruere on the committee to study it for the Governor. Henry Bruere said to me, “You know, I don't think we'll find anything very different from what we found as the causes of unemployment in 1916 or ‘17.” We didn't.

This was the first contact I ever had directly with mass unemployment. It wasn't the first contact I had had with labor situations, because I had had this contact with the organization of women in unions and the women's strike -





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