Pre-New Deal unemployment reform entered its last phase with the onset of the Great Depression. Increasing joblessness actually attracted the attention of labor scene observers already two years prior to the Wall Street disaster, and reformers attempted to respond accordingly. But it was the sharp rise in unemployment in the wake of the stock market crash that justified their exertions in the eyes of a growingly sympathetic public. State governments, their relief responsibility long-since established, now began seriously to grope for solutions. Their efforts to fight from the state house a catastrophe of at least national scope remained highly unrewarding. As a consequence the federal administration had ultimately to overcome its well-considered reluctance to move conspicuously and in a definite manner. It had implicitly recognized its essential responsibility as early as 1921 by organizing the President's Conference. Grudgingly, but step by step, it now followed through by translating this acknowledgment into deeds.

In the process, all remedial measures that had been conceived before World War I were now fully tested on the federal level. The first area to witness substantial federal commitment was counting. The extension of the Department of Labor's statistical services and the 1930 census inquiry were honest efforts; their inadequacy resulted from their technical limitations, not from a lack of federal good will. Somewhat less fervent, but still recognizable, was the Hoover administration's readiness to put a long-range planning bill on the statute books.