Different Times, Same Cruelty

Here's an observation from the Great Depression that reminds me of today's cruelty towards the unemployed:

"The very employers who had thought highly enough of workers to use their services for four, eight, twelve or sixteen years, now began to talk of them openly as lazy fellows or spongers, willing to accept the taxpayers' money. The same persons who had once been moved to sympathy by the pitiful predicament of workers whom they had seen dislodged from regular jobs, now began to lump them all into a general category of the undeserving."

--Harry Hopkins, in "Spending to Save," p. 110, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1936.