John Strachey

Society

The unemployed under the New Deal

• 24 April 2008
• 1 comment

Taken from The New Statesman 17 March 1934 During the Great Depression of the 1930s, mass unemployment affected the industrial state of Pennsylvania more than many others. John Strachey, a leading Marxist intellectual at the time and later a Labour government minister, visited the small town of York to see how those without wages survived. His restrained article showed how debilitating the lack of a proper support system for the unemployed was early in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Selected by Robert Taylor