This is a book about some of the cheers that American society gave on behalf of the unemployed in the two generations straddling the turn of the twentieth century.

More precisely, the book discusses the evolution of unemployment reform up to the end of the Hoover presidency. It does not deal extensively with the well–known measures of the New Deal period, which for the first time aimed at combating joblessness in America on a large scale. It looks rather at the far less understood process that led up to these measures. The unemployment action of the New Deal and its precedents during the Hoover administration had a long history stretching over more than a half century. It was the experience of the depression of the 1870s that initiated the rethinking of accepted laissez–faire rules and engendered a development that reached maturation during the economic downturn of the 1930s. By the time the New Deal began, the important prerequisites of effective action – public acceptance of large–scale governmental involvement and an informed understanding of what specific measures constituted viable propositions – were in place as a result of the laborious toil of decades of dedicated reform work.

With advancing industrialization, unemployment had taken on a new quality. It had probably always been wrong to assume that everybody who wanted work would find it.