The worsening Great Depression had, by the summer of 1931, occasioned renewed calls that the Hoover
PRESIDENCY adopt a more active federal role to ameliorate the growing UNEMPLOYMENT emergency. This clamoring, however, ran counter to President Herbert Hoover’s deeply ingrained opposition to such action, and he invoked his belief that the private sector remained a more palatable alternative. Yet, with the failure of the PRESIDENT’S Emergency Committee eor Employment (PECE) to realistically address skyrocketing unemployment rates, Hoover disbanded it and absorbed it into a new effort called the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR) in August 1931. The new organization bore a superficial resemblance to its predecessor and was headed by AT&T president Walter S. Gifford. But, whereas PECE focused upon the local public economy and private sector for job creation, POUR was tasked with organizing and coordinating a national fund-raising campaign to subsidize RELIEE for unemployed workers.
In operation, POUR shared many similarities with the Liberty Loan drives of World War I and the Community Chest drives of the 1920s. Here the government appealed to a sense of civic obligation through mass ADVERTISING in newspapers, magazines, and billboards emblazoned under the rubric “Of Course We Can Do It.” The public responded in kind by staging hundreds of benefit football games and air shows to raise funds to assist the unemployed. From an administration standpoint, POUR helped relief expenditures to nearly double over the winter of 1931-32. Unfortunately, the Great Depression had yet to bottom out, and it became painfully apparent that private donations simply could not address the problem adequately. By the spring of 1932, POUR funding was nearly exhausted, and Hoover, faced with an election that fall, was forced to make additional concessions to provide meaningful unemployment relief. Consequently, in 1932 POUR was disbanded following passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, which finally made allowances for direct federal intervention in the private sector.
Further reading: David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1979); Jeff Singleton, The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
