>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. [ Silence ] >> Good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm John Cole. I'm the Director for the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which is the reading promotion arm. The Center for the Book was created in 1977 by Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin who wanted the Library of Congress to reach out and promote books, reading, literacy around the country in ways that were new to the Library of Congress at the time, and we do that largely around the country through a system of affiliated state centers for the book that promote books and literacy in their respective states often by promoting local writers, and so we're very much into book, state book festivals. Our centers, some of them, have author wide, state wide author awards programs, all kinds of ways of promoting books and reading. We also have non-profit reading promotion partners that help us in our various ways of supporting projects. We are a unique public private partnership and when we were created the understanding was that while the Library of Congress eventually would pay our salaries that we would raise our own funding for our own programs, which has a good side and a bad side to it, but the good side is that it keeps us flexible and gives us more ways of moving ahead to do what we can see as interesting and innovative projects. Here at the Library of Congress we're deeply involved in the National Book Festival, for example, and administer the Author Program. We also have a brand new project I'd like to mention. It's the Library of Congress Literacy Awards, which were initiated by David Rubenstein, the well-known benefactor in the Washington area who supports cultural activities, especially government and American history related activities. And that is an international award so you can see that we're really spread over all kinds of different activities. One of the most important ones here at the Library is where you are. It's for the something we call the Books and Beyond Author series, which was initiated in 1996, the idea that we would show off books that had some relationship, new books and authors often, who had a relationship to the Library of Congress one way or another. Many of them, most of them in some way have used the Library's resources but in other instances they've been part of a special project that the Library has initiated. One example would be with the Publishing Office. If we have some books that are based on special thematic projects that cut across the Library resource guides and things, we are a natural place to help them promote those and let people know about them. All of our talks are filmed for later viewing on the Library of Congress's website. There are more than 300 Books and Beyond talks on the website and I should add more than 700 talks by authors at our National Book Festivals, so that's really an untapped resource in a way. So thus warned, please turn off all things electronic and also please know that the way we will be doing this is after Ruth's presentation there'll be a quick, short, I think, question and answer session and if you ask a question you also are authorizing us to include you in our website and I thank you in advance for that. Ruth Ellen Wasem has worked in the Congressional research service since 1987, first as an analyst and specialist in social legislation and since 2000 as a specialist in immigration policy. In that capacity she has written many reports, many, many reports for Congress and made many presentations that provide research and policy analysis on a wide range of immigration subjects and issues. But you may have noticed that the book she's talking about today is not about immigration. Tackling Unemployment the Legislative Dynamics of the Employment Act of 1946 is instead an astute, historical analysis of another topic however that's very much on the minds of today's legislatures; alleviating unemployment and stimulating job creation. Books and Beyond presentations often are as much about the story behind the book as well as, at least in the case of non-fiction, the relevance of the author's conclusions for the world in which we live. I've asked Ruth in the short period we have together to do the impossible. In the context of the book explain to us a little bit about its origins but also why unemployment as a topic has been chosen for this book and why it's important and relevant for members of Congress today. Please join me in welcoming Ruth. [Applause] >> Ruth Wasem: Well thank you very much for coming, I guess it's this afternoon, on a bleak and rainy day. I'm glad to see you and it is an interesting story and there's a few of you in the room that know the whole history. Back in the early 80's when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, in the midst of a very severe recession, particularly in the mid-west, I was looking for a dissertation topic and I came up with this, the Full Employment Act of 1945 as a subject. I wrote the dissertation, by the time I actually completed it it was 1989 and I was padded on the head saying nice job, but nobody cared. By 1989 folks thought they had really solved the problem of unemployment, the economy was on its, you know, perking along just fine and so the dissertation sat on the shelf for 25 years. Longer than that actually. In 2009 when you're listening to all the pundits on TV talking about making their pronouncements about the past and how things used to work or didn't work, and I'm thinking these guys don't know what they're talking about. Surely, surely someone has written on this since my modest dissertation back in the 1980's. So I did a lit search, which is pretty easy to do when you work with the Library of Congress and scoured around to find anything that might have been written on the subject. Low and behold nobody else had, and I got to thinking well if nobody thought it was worth publishing my dissertation, why would anybody else get published. So I pulled it off the shelf, read it again and embarked on the afterhours task of turning it into a book, and it ended up, a lot of the dissertationy stuff is still on the floor in my basement but a lot of new research was added. And what also came out I think is the insights of 25 years of working for Congress. I took a more seasoned look in my analysis than the naive graduate student from the 1980's. So this is what I'm going to talk about today and for all of you who have something sitting on your shelf think about it again, you never know when it may become timely and unfortunately for the bad economy and the recession of 2009, other people's misfortune, led to the publication of my book. And it's very clear that the topic that we're talking about, what is the proper role of the federal government in the economy, is not a new question. It's something that people have been grappling with for years, and so that is the essential question that I discuss. Prior to the Great Depression unemployment and poverty were seen as local rather than federal problems and the expression was unemployment compensation then was a night in jail and a train ticket out of town. They just shuffled people along, there were poor farms and things like that but there was no concept or commitment beyond local support for people in need and there was considerable change as a result of the Great Depression in the responsibility of caring for people when they faced hard times brought on by unemployment. But it's safe to say, I think it's clear to say, that the ideas that the federal government should engage in employment stimulation and should ensure employment or full employment are rooted in the experiences of the Great Depression. I'm going to show you a graph that gives you a sense of the unemployment levels of what the country was experiencing then, and as you can see the levels of unemployment and the percent of the population that was unemployed were substantial, substantial. People, in the book I talk about the coverage of people living off of dandelion soup and people starved to death. In certain parts of the country it was a terrible, terrible situation, and you can't have 25 percent of the population being unemployed without having most families affected through some relative or someone they knew or people that they were associated with who had been affected. Even if you were a business man, if you ran a store, you know your business started failing because people couldn't afford to buy your goods, so it was a substantial, substantial effect that truly did change people's view about what should be done when it's that wide spread. Another important point I want to make in presenting the kind of big picture background of the debate is just how the composition of the labor force changed in the first half of the 20th century, and it's all about the color. You can see, even if you can't read the different occupations that I have along the column, green was decreasing and that's agricultural, either farmers or farm laborers. Blue was on the rise and that's basically laborers, industrial work, manufacturing, and also the taupes and the folks at the top of the professionals, the proprietors those were also on the increase as occupations. So the labor force of the country, which had been shifting over the deck the first 50 years that also, played a role in how people viewed the role of the federal government. Public opinion at that time, research on polling, was a relatively new science and it didn't get, you know, today it's pervasive, you can't turn on anything without the latest polls on this or that and back then it wasn't news. You had, Gallop would do maybe a weekly press release to try to get something in some of the newspapers but people did not follow public opinion like they do now. But there were people doing it and it had gotten to the point where it was not as sophisticated as today but they had developed some fairly good sampling techniques and I'm going to present to you, I have a whole chapter about the public opinion in my book. I'm going to present to you a couple of slides to give you a sense of what people were thinking. You might remember from the earlier slide, by the time the war started, by 1941, unemployment had shrunk considerably, and so when they asked people in 1941 whether they thought there would be jobs after the war, you can see people were very pessimistic. There was a clear sense in the American peoples' minds that the reason unemployment had gone down was because of the war; wartime spending, the war production effort and military service. Individuals did not think that the economy had turned around. By 1940, the mid-40's, there was growing awareness of research and discussions among economists about the concept of full employment and that's basically everyone who wants a job and is able to work can find a job, that was how it was loosely defined then and I go into great detail in my book about what that really means. Surprisingly 99 percent of the people surveyed by the National Opinion Research, NOR which is still in Chicago today, 99 percent of the people surveyed thought that full employment should be a post-war aim. And so this question then breaks down of that subset of the 99 percent how many think it could actually be done and this, that's why I wanted to present this. This is what surprises me that 69 percent actually thought it could be done. Not only that, you know, that it should be done but that it actually could be done and that kind of faith in the government, pretty amazing I would say. Now the media during this time was largely presenting accounts of the war, war correspondence, but and when they did cover the economy it was always about how the economy was booming, it was very glowing reports and I studied a lot of different, you know, scandal on the newspapers from around the country and it was pretty consistent coverage of things were looking up and they would quote the head of GM and other corporate leaders in the business community about how things were going, but Fortune Magazine did a series and had, Roper actually did a series of questions of business leaders. They found a cross section of business leaders that they monitored longitudinally over time on a variety of issues and what I'm presenting here is the cross section of business executives whether they thought there would be serious unemployment in their sector during the post-war period. Again, despite the robust economy during the war and a general demeanor that everyone engaged in that things were going great, I think it's pretty surprising to see how pessimistic business was overall. And a concern when you really think that only 29 percent of the executives surveyed thought that the only types, only kind of unemployment, would be the natural kind that occurred during job shifts, and that actually a third of them thought it would be worse than the '37-'40 period where we had that second spike in the Great Depression, it's pretty startling to me. So you, the sense you get is everyone was kind of putting on a positive face but underneath had grave concerns. The rising popularity of the concept of full employment and the government intervening and getting engaged in this was not met without opposition and the classical economists as well as a whole host of business leaders and political leaders engaged in their own response to that, and the example that I particularly like to talk about is that of Friedrich Hayek, later a Nobel Prize winning economist who wrote a book, The Road to Serfdom, which talked, it's thick, it's huge, and it talked about how-and Hayek you must remember was from the Austrian school and so he had been an economist over there when Fascism and Nazis came to power, and so he wrote from the perspective that government intervention would lead to totalitarianism. And his perspective was key to being used to oppose government involvement because it was seen as if the government gets involved you lose freedoms, and not only was Hayek's massive economic analysis turned into a Reader's Digest condensed volume, which set a lot of records. For those of you that remember Reader's Digest condensed volumes and imagine that it set records of millions sold. It was also turned into a cartoon by Look Magazine and I just have a few panels of the 12 panel cartoon presented here, but they, and again, General Motors had several million of these cartoons reprinted and placed, they sent to all their workers and widely distributed as a way to warn people that federal involvement could lead to totalitarianism. And Hayek traveled all over the country, in fact the Baltimore Sun always did a quote of the day and at least once a week during the period of when Hayek's book was being promoted, the quote of the day was from Hayek and from The Road to Serfdom. So he got wide and broad attention, particularly again for a sophisticated economist that they were trying to have the average person understand what he was saying. Nonetheless in 1945 when the National Research Center asked do you think it should or should not be the government's job to see if there are enough jobs in the country for everybody who wants to work, 79 percent, overwhelming 79 percent, responded yes. And I think when you think about the debate today and you look at the public opinion today and how highly contentious the role of the government is in people's lives and whether they even think the government is apiaceous enough to something, this response is pretty amazing. Well now we get to the legislation and it, I'll just briefly mention or I'll just show you this slide of some of the building blocks. One of the key thing and this was Alvin Hansen who was known as the American Keynes, an economist published, he was working with a lot of scholars that worked in the New Deal and the war effort. Some of them volunteered their time, others were positioned in government jobs and he wrote a report called After the War for Employment. Surprisingly it got wide reading. I've even got some polling data where they asked people whether they read it and were familiar with it and while the Roosevelt administration was doing that, as those of us who work on the Hill know, Congress wasn't going to miss a beat and the Senate established a special select committee on post-war economy and the House the following year followed suit. These committees had a lot of hearings, issued reports. Interestingly enough the Senate committee articulated support for full employment but when you read how they actually defined what that would be, it wouldn't be the government role, they just thought boy it would be great if everybody had a job. And so what is interesting to watch is when Congress starts getting in the mix is the recognition that this is an idea, a phrase, a valence term that you want to use because the public loves it, but you want to manipulate it in your ways. And then working very quietly at the end of the war was a really fine group of economists in various government agencies that were pulled together to work on a post-war economic policy, and their white paper makes fascinating reading, and they also shared that with legislative staff. This is what comes out then if you look at the people in what I mean by full employment and the full employment legislation and what was accepted as the four pillars at that point in time, in the mid-40's, it was the government's responsibility, you had to establish an apparatus, it involved national economic planning and it included a guarantee of employment. Those were the four things to look for in the legislation. Now the Senate took the lead. Bills were dropped in both chambers at the beginning of the session but the Senate took the lead on acting on this and their bill did have the four principles that I just mentioned. The only real controversy and I know someone in the audience, Emily, is familiar with this one was the provision about whether women with housekeeping responsibilities were to be excluded or included, and that was the first thing dropped in the markup that was they stroke a thing, struck out the provision that said women didn't have to be included if they had housekeeping responsibilities, and so but otherwise it had surprisingly smooth sailing through the Senate, and I think of the keys, and I used the Taft papers here at the Library when I was doing my research, and Robert Taft was known as Mr. Republican. He was the leading policy figure in the Republican Party in the 40's and until his death in the 1950's, and was quite conservative I think you would say. He also wanted to be President and he really played an instrumental role in adding the provisions to the Senate bill that ensured that if you embarked on fiscal policies that were for job creation, for stimulus is what we'd call it today, that you raise the taxes to pay for it. And Taft was always consistently saying the government needs to pay for this, and so when they added Taft's amendment to do that the bill passed the Senate with 98 votes, or 96 votes, so it sailed through the Senate once Taft was on board, which shocked the conservative and the business community because they were not expecting this to go this way. But the House took a very different tact. You would think a bill like this would be assigned to a committee like what would be work force, education labor, the various things today. It went to what was then the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department that was chaired by a man from Alabama, Carter Menasco [assumed spelling] and the ranking republican was a gentleman from Michigan, Clara Hoffman, who was associated, well, I'll let you read the book to find out about those two. They add some of the more colorful accounts in the book, are the people on the House Expenditures Committee, and this is another interesting thing if any of you get involved in drafting legislation, because during the debate in the administration over the white paper and when they were working with the Hill in developing the legislation, there was an internal administration fight over who would be in charge of this and you can just imagine this today. Who would get-well the Bureau of the Budget, which is now OPM, I mean OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, they wanted control, they wanted control of this and there were other voices that said no, we really need to have, create a new entity to do this but they lost out on the political structure. So when the Senate, when they were writing their bill they gave the responsibility to the Bureau of the Budget. That led to the House parliamentarian saying well Bureau of the Budget well it must go to Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Branch. So you know a mistake that should never have been made, that committee, and I do analysis of how much more conservative that committee was then had it gone to some of the other committees it could have been assigned to, and on both sides of the isle in terms of the voting things for them, so the House committee was not going to buy this full employment stuff. They wrote a whole new bill, it was a contentious fight, the floor debate, unlike the Senate-the Senate floor debate, when I revisited all this stuff a couple of years ago and I'm reading this, is that the Senate debate was sophisticated and they talked about the tradeoffs of federal investments in bridges and dams and but fiscal responsibility, when should we raise taxes, how should we balance this out, so it was a really good, I would say, policy and economic debate of trying to understand how to balance this stuff out. It gets to the House and I mean to tell you some of the stuff, I mean if you think all the stuff when they talk about acrimony today, it was certainly present in 1944 in the House of Representatives. Name calling, it got, it boiled down to state's rights and totalitarianism and big government and then other people wanting to exploit the poor and I mean it was just the tensions were pretty amazing and again, pretty lively reading for the Congressional record. So you ended up with two very different bills. Truman went ahead and told them go ahead and pass anything; we'll get what we want out of conference. Truman was actively involved and that's one of the things actually my book is a revisionist interpretation of the Truman administration role in all of this. I had the good fortune to get funding to go to the Truman Library and go through his personal papers and I have his handwritten, you know, I read his handwritten notes on the legislative proposal saying agree to this, don't agree to this and he felt very strongly that even if the House bill was going to be, well basically he had some words for it I probably shouldn't say since I'm being recorded, but they just wanted to get a bill out so they could go to conference and he could sign something and that's basically what happened; the lively floor debate. And so this is just a scale, I did a lot of, particularly in my dissertation I did a lot of statistical work and statistical modeling, most of this again was relegated to an appendix in the book, but it gives you a sense of the differences in terms of House and Senate support for the concept of full employment, and you can just see it's pretty sharply different. I also did some modeling and I will just give you the sense of how it played out and obviously political party is important. The Democrats were more likely to support this but remember this was a period of the southern democrats, so you basically had two democratic parties, and I had ran my analysis with two different democratic parties; the south and then all the democrats that weren't in the south. And what I found, the most interesting part of my model it explained over half the variance. I had pretty high R squares. One of my friends said well you're just documenting the obvious, but I think whenever you can explain at least half of what Congress is doing with a statistical model, I felt pretty good about that, and what I was able to do was explain the democrats who deviated from their party or like the southern democrats who deviated and then the republicans who deviated from their party, and what became clear in this statistical analysis is that it was their congressional districts that had been most severely affected by the Great Depression. I used the 1938 survey of unemployment and built-you don't want to hear of all the data files I built, but suffice to say I had a measure and I called that the memory of the Great Depression, that was my measure and I also had other socioeconomic indicators. A lot of them fed into party. These measures, and that's why I did structured equations because I wanted to isolate out how much of it led to partisan change and then how much of it had a direct effect on how the extent to which people supported full employment, and there was no question that what happened in the districts did make a difference. And that same fear that the public opinion data I showed you a few moments ago about a resumption of unemployment when the war ended clearly impacted some, some members of Congress. What they finally passed was very different than either bill, no surprise there again. The conference report yielded a totally new bill and this is basically the law that we have today. It said it wasn't full employment; it was maximum employment, whether you want to call that word smithing or important policy difference we can talk about. They created the Council of Economic Advisors, what we call the Joint Economic Committee, and it's said that the government had to afford opportunities for employment and create those structures. After the bill passed, within a few months, they were doing-I pulled this polling data to give you a sense of what people thought, and you can see that people were a lot more optimistic. Now partly it was because things, unemployment hadn't resumed that much after the war, but it was also the sense, I would argue, that when the federal government said we're going to do something about it, people felt that they would, and so you just see a totally different tenor in the public mood. Now I can stop now with just the history if there's a lot of folks who want to ask questions, or I can give you a few slides where I try to assess the kind of so what. So what happened? And I'll do that since I don't see anybody looking real eager. >> Why die on a small cross. >> Ruth Wasem: So this gives you just a sweep of recessions and unemployment rates. This figure is commonly used, maybe not the bright yellow I picked, but commonly used to depict the extent to which we've had economic hard times, and you'll see that you know it's up and down. We've had quite a few recessions and the high levels of unemployment that we experienced most recently are comparable to what we had in the early 80's with the Reagan recessions and it looks pretty similar but it's been up and down. I took a look at infrastructure spending because I looked at what are the key things that when they discuss the Employment Act were the integral parts and infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy was clearly one of them. And so this shows how, the infrastructure spending was at its peak as a function of GDP in the Eisenhower years. And of course that's the National Highway System clearly was important and I do talk about in the book how Eisenhower became a Keynesian and it made a big difference, so you can see that kind of trend over time and what's noteworthy about this is the blue line I would argue; the decline in infrastructure spending as a rate of GDP, particularly when unemployment would go up. The next picture I'm going to give you is taxes. You hear a lot about the tax rates and obviously taxation was a big deal in the debate over the Employment Act, it was Senator Taft's key point, it was a very important to Arthur Burns when he chaired the Council of Economic Advisors before he later headed the Federal Reserve under Nixon. He was Eisenhower's Head of the council and it was important in the Kennedy years when they did the major tax cuts to stimulate the economy. You can see the tax rate has changed substantially since the 1950's and over this period and I will let you, I mean, one of the things you'll notice in the three charts I'm showing you is how dramatic things changed in the 80's. In every one of these charts and I didn't realize it until I was done but you see it particularly here as well, this has to do with then the final chart I will present to you, per capita income and you can see particularly when you look at the blue line that was going up throughout the period until you get to about the 1980's and then it flattened out. The top one percent, of course, continued to fly even more so in recent years. That dip in 2000, early 2000's, was the tech, when the tech bubble burst, just so if you're wondering. The top one percent were really affected by that. It didn't seem to affect that many other people. But this gives you a sense of how things kind of, and there's some wonderful research of the economist Claudia Goldman has done, particularly an article she did with Robert Margo on wage compression, and they point to the wage compression that occurred in the post-World War II period and how it lasted through the 70's but shifted and has changed substantially and that's why you hear a lot of talk now about the income gaps. Now I'm not going to tell you that all the good stuff happened because of the Employment Act because it's a lot more complicated than that, but I don't think it was serendipitous that the passage of the Employment Act of 1946 was the beginning point of all of these positive changes that our economy experienced for the next several decades. That concludes my talk. [ Applause ] I would love to hear some questions. Bert you have your hand up. [Low audio] You know I don't have a publicist and that sends these out. Oh I was asked whether I had sent an autograph copy to Senator Paul and my answer is I don't have a publicist or a budget and so I have not been sending these out. I would leave that to you, any of you in the room if you think there are people you would like to have read the book, I will leave that to you. Yes? [ Low Audio ] Well it was interesting as I said because the original draft of the bill would have exempted women housekeeping responsibilities from the calculation and they kept in terms of determining maximum employment, if women wanted to work it set that standard. At least it had gender equity in its concept. I don't think it, beyond that symbolic change that it acknowledged because of women in the war effort in making that change to the bill. I don't think that it otherwise would have made-I would claim that it made a big difference. I think other things going on did that, other aspects of society affected that. Will? >> I was wondering in your research did you find much evidence of lobbying efforts that were made on the House after this bill sailed through the Senate? Were there efforts in the business community to change the possible outcome in the House to prevent it from being [low audio] >> Ruth Wasem: In your, Will has asked about lobbying efforts to change the bill after it sailed through the Senate and activities in the House, and lobbying actually, the intense lobbying on this legislation led to the passage of the Major Lobbying Act in that same Congress because they were so heavily lobbied on this bill, not just by the business community but labor and liberal coalitions, this had a grass roots organization on both sides, it was pretty intense and in fact it's funny. There was a book written in 1950 that won all sorts of awards called Congress Makes a Law by Stephen K. Bailey, and it was required reading. I see a couple of people nodding; they probably had to read it in when they took the class on Congress. It's a great book. It was path breaking. Got some things wrong from my perspective but path breaking book and it was on this legislation, and it basically talked about the corrosive and corrupted effect of the lobbyists. By today's standards it, you know, I mean, I really didn't think anybody engaged in anything particularly disturbing, they were just doing their jobs. Again, it's that vantage point of history how you view things, but it was pretty intense. Interesting, the business community was split. Something the CED, Committee on Economic Development of business leaders was forming at that time and they actually supported the federal role in the economy because in some sectors of the economy, having government management helped them do the planning and helped them in business, so there were a lot of business people that wanted the government to be more involved. So there was a deep divide [inaudible] in the business community over what role the government should play. Yes? >> I'm curious what you think the mechanism is that there was that translated the 1946 Act into the chart you're showing us on the screen. >> Ruth Wasem: A couple of things. The Council of Economic Advisors and the Joint Committee were much, much more active then in terms of formulating policies to try to achieve the goals. The Joint Committee in its early years, and this was key; it had the leadership of all the key authorizing committees that would have been involved in doing job creation, economic stimulation, education to improve human capital, all the ingredients, those people served also on the Joint Economic Committee. They tried to bring together these things and there was a wonderful conference on the tenth anniversary of the Employment Act. It's interesting to read because it was bipartisan and everyone spoke about how important it was and there was several Senators and Congressmen there as well as administration officials and scholars who talked about how the Employment Act really gave them the justification for some, it gave a mandate for others and it created the apparatus to try to achieve some of these things that the government could be involved in, but it didn't make it mandatory and that was probably what made it better than the original bills. Instead of having it be a rigid requirement it, the final Act had the flexibility so that if people wanted to do these things they were allowed to now, the federal government allowed them to, and the apparatuses were there to bring the people together to think about what should be done. And there was a greater coordination as well with the Federal Reserve in terms of monetary policy but it enabled it as active fiscal policy and again, had the key people that would be involved in the spending programs and the taxation and all of that to think collectively. And it required a manual budget that had to be a budget that would maintain employment and a report from the President. So it had everybody thinking about this and trying to address this, so that's why I think it was important. It didn't require it but it enabled. Since you've already asked a question I'm going to let Kathy ask one. Yes? [ Low Audio ] Has there been any polling in the 21st century of the government's role in full employment and the answer is full employment is not in the lexicon now. It hasn't been since the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment and Opportunity Act of 1978 and I touch on that in the book. Instead of it being a reinvigoration of the concept it was kind of like the nail in the coffin of the concept. And again it fits very nicely in terms of that generational cycle because of how they struggled in periods of high inflation and other issues to how do you continue to do Act of this fiscal policy, so it fell off the lexicon. Today I haven't seen polling. It would be interesting. I know some people that would like to ask that question but I think we have a very different view today on the role of the government in some of these things, but yes I hope somebody would ask that someday. Latisha? [ Low Audio ] I've been asked what do I attribute the breakaway of the top one percent in the 80's and I'm not an economist, I'm a historian and a policy wonk and I will leave that question to the economists. It's a rich, rich field, lots of scholarship on the widening of the income gap and I pretty much defer to those who look at that. It has to do with human capital, it has to do with the technological revolution and how technology changed the nature of work, it has to do with tax policies, a whole host of different things but again I would leave that to an economist. Emily? [ Low Audio ] I've just been asked what the significance of dropping full employment from the act and replacing it with maximum employment, and to me it was an important political change and you know today how words can be so important and some people just needed political cover. Full employment conjured up in some peoples' minds a totalitarian state, and while the public loved the idea it was scary in some parts of the country and certainly to some people and some sectors of the economy, it was too much government. Maximum employment was something that people could agree on, people could agree on. It seemed both possible and reasonable to try to achieve and kind of benign, you know? One of the things that I found in going through all this old survey data was they asked people what, about free enterprise and everybody, oh love free enterprise, it was off the charts, everybody wanted free enterprise, and then they asked them what it meant, and there was like hardly anybody in the survey that could explain it, and they even started giving them what it was and they couldn't, you know, but it saw these things are just valuating terms that we either instinctively don't like or we instinctively identify with. Full employment became one of those words and I think that's why it's gone from the lexicon. It conjures up too many different images, too many different thoughts especially when you get to the role of the government. Bob? >> Am I correct though back at the time of Humphrey Hawkins and a lot of that there was a lot of debate though on what constitutes full employment. Wasn't it 4.6? >> Ruth Wasem: Yes. I've just been asked about the debate [multiple speakers] Yes. Asked about the debate about what constitutes full employment and by the time you get into the 70's when you're dealing with high levels of inflation, you know, troubles in the economy and a whole different set of problems that the government hadn't faced, the idea of what meant the definition was certainly debated, and we still talk about full employment as a measurement of when it's only frictional unemployment, that kind of natural unemployment that occurs when people are changing jobs, so the term has a use and a meaning in that sense and it still does, but as a goal, as a requirement that the government should try to achieve, it lost its saliency. Yes? >> What was the stance of unions to this? Did they have a particular role [multiple speakers] still a need for unions and how did those things play together? >> Ruth Wasem: The unions, I've been asked about the role of the unions in this legislation and the unions weren't as initially as involved in this as other groups but they certainly joined the bandwagon, got involved and I think played two major roles. One was disseminating doing the grass roots organizing, because in those days the unions were a wonderful vehicle, particularly when you didn't have any support from the print media as an alternative way to get the word out, and you've got to remember this was before television, but it was not before radio, and radio was the big deal and there were union, there was the Voice of Labor, there were union radio stations and that's one of the things that I really missed in being able to do this because you know, most of that radio is not, was not preserved or recorded. I am convinced and I would love someone to do, you know, a young historian looking for a thesis topic to look at what did radio cover. Here at the library actually we have the NBC Radio collections and I would love somebody to research that and look at the role, not just on this subject, but a whole host of things in terms of educating the public and being a major source of debate and discussion. >> Time for one more question. >> Ruth Wasem: One more? Bert? >> You said earlier that you separated most of the democrats and southern democrats and some of the republicans from most republicans. If you had combined them what, how much of a change would that have made? >> Ruth Wasem: Oh I didn't separate-- I was able to identify what distinguished republicans who supported the bill from those who didn't based on the demographic characteristics, the economic characteristics. In terms of my analysis of this, the reason I pulled the southern democrats out because I was looking at election returns and you know the partisan competitiveness of their districts, as well as I was modeling ideology, southern democrats were very unique in that they didn't have general election opponents, they were politically quite conservative, so the democratic party at that point in time you had the southern democrats, which were the most conservative constituency, the rest of the democrats, which were the most liberal, and then the republicans fell in the middle, which I actually think is one of the reasons when they talk about how the democrats and republicans have become so polarized today, I actually think it's because those things have shifted in the last 50 years. >> Alright, well Ruth, let's give Ruth a hand. [ Applause ] Ruth, thank you so much. It was fun listening to you and learning from you. I now know you do have an opinion on just about every topic. It's refreshing to meet someone who has that feeling and can express themselves to well. And we try at the Center for the Book, every other year at least, to have a CRS Wonk symposium and this was it today and I think we all enjoyed it. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.