(In the one-minute video above, Harry Hopkins defends unemployed Americans and the WPA. This short video clip is from a much longer Paramount newsreel, ca. 1935-36, and is shown here for non-commercial, educational purposes.)
The video above is poor quality but the audio is not too bad. However, if you have trouble hearing it, here is what Hopkins says:
"Three and half million men and women in America are being taken from the relief rolls and put to work. Not a single project has been approved or disapproved or pushed forward for any partisan or political reasons. We are building thousands of schools and farm-to-market roads in rural areas of America. We are building city streets, playgrounds, parks, sewers, in the great cities of America for the thousands unemployed in those cities. The unemployed want to work, they are not chiselers. They are doing useful work. This in spite of the impression that partisan critics would attempt to create in the minds of the American people. With constructive critics I have no quarrel. But I do have a quarrel with those who knowingly misrepresent the facts and attempt to besmirch the characters of millions of unemployed citizens of the United States."
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