FDR, New Deals, and the Limits of Power 199keep us on. It would be enough if we weren’t in debt. We are in debt about
$500. Everything we get we get on Credit. We have gotten in so deep in
debt that we can’t get out. We are desperate. We can’t think of any way
out... We can’t go to school because we are in debt.... We don’t even
have decent clothes to wear and with winter coming on we don’t know
what we’re going to do for bed clothes. Nothing we have is paid for....
We are worse off than a W.P.A. worker... sometimes it makes me so blue
just thinking of it I cry and sometimes think I’ll kill myself but that
wouldn’t solve anything for the rest of them. Collectors come every day
wanting their money but we haven’t got it. When pay day comes we have
about 1/ 10 of what it takes to pay up. It is about to run me crazy. You can
investigate us if you want to. We have no friend because of debt. I need
glasses but I can’t get them because I haven’t any money. We didn’t have
any Christmas last year and I guess we won’t this year.You have heard my story so please please please help us if you can because
you don’t know what it’s like to be in debt.If you want a list of the people we owe I will send them.Respectively Yours.N. C.FDR, despite the attacks by his political enemies that he was a radical or
a leftist, was not even a Keynesian, though programs like the WPA seemed to
have features of Lord Keynes’s ideas in them. He thought that the jobs pro-
grams and economic stimulus policies he had pursued had done enough and
the depression was ending, so cutting back on jobs and other “pump-priming,”
or economic stimulus, policies would create a balanced budget, which was his
priority. Instead, of course, they reduced money and wages and that was
deadly for the New Deal. In mid-1938, FDR did go to Congress and get
$3.75 billion in new spending, and the Fed eased up on credit, so there was