SMOKE GETS IN HER EYES

Dotty Thompson began it, Artic Krock took up the torch, and now Mark Sullivan has done his bit. They are all pumping hard for their common claim that unemployment has dropped to the two million level of pre-depression days. Each maintains that the bad old New Dealers know that joblessness is no longer a real problem, but won't admit it, because then "they must confess the success of the American system, and they won't do that." Their arguments are, as a Supreme Court Justice has put it, "interesting but only mildly persuasive."

In reaching her conclusions about the number of unemployed, Miss Thompson rather blithely neglects some "hard economic facts." She assumes that the population age distribution has remained constant since--1929; it hasn't, with the result that many more now enter the labor market annually than in Hoover days. She neglects the fact that the depression has caused many people of seek work who would otherwise stay at home -- women especially. She adopts a special estimate of unemployment in 1929, instead of taking the average of the accepted figures. And finally, she declines to consider W. P. A.'ers as unemployed. All of which leads to the conclusion that, though Dotty is entitled to her opinion, it is only an opinion.

Probably it is true, however, that unemployment has grown less of late. The New Dealers should be the first to admit that. They maintain that government spending produced a wave of recovery, and that the Roosevelt recession came only when pump-priming was halted. For them to deny that public money has helped correct economic distress would be pointless self-castigation. Sullivan and Krock have only misunderstood, or misinterpreted, the New Deal protest at Miss Thompson's figures.

What the kitchen cabineteers are arguing is simply this: that without government spending the present upturn would not have come, and that there is still plenty of unemployment to warrant continued government activity. That is not "suppression of the truth." It is not even necessarily prompted by a belief that the economy has hit a period of "secular stagnation," for which "collectivism" is the only solution. It is simply a caution that all is not yet right with the economic system, and that the deceptive Thompson figures should not lead us to cut public activity more rapidly than the business revival justifies. Nine million or two million, there are still enough unemployed around to make them a problem that demands vigorous federal action.