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CHURCHILL, Winston S. Draft typescript signed ("Winston S. Churchill"), "America - Beware!" n.d. [ca. summer 1931]. 8 pages, 4to, AUTOGRAPH EMENDATIONS AND CORRECTIONS IN CHURCHILL'S HAND, punch hole at top left .
CHURCHILL, Winston S. Draft typescript signed ("Winston S. Churchill"), "America - Beware!" n.d. [ca. summer 1931]. 8 pages, 4to, AUTOGRAPH EMENDATIONS AND CORRECTIONS IN CHURCHILL'S HAND, punch hole at top left . "AMERICA -- BEWARE!" CHURCHILL'S WARNS AMERICANS AGAINST CREATING A POLITICAL UNDERCLASS OF THE PERMANENT UNEMPLOYED "The world depression has hit the New World even harder than the Old," Churchill writes in this strongly worded piece for the Hearst newspaper syndicate. "The system of the United States seemed securely founded on a growing prosperity. Now that that prosperity has been rudely checked, the system is called into question." Faced with massive unemployment, Americans may be inclined to turn to British models of unemployment insurance, such as the one Churchill helped devise. But he warns of the danger of creeping socialism. What started out as a limited benefit in 1909 became, just ten years later, "the naked Dole!" There are "enormous pitfalls," he warns, to expanding unemployment coverage. For "once the numbers of unemployed drawing State aid...reaches a certain proportion of the electorate, you have the hideous spectacle of the 'dole-vote'. Political parties are forced to trim their sails to this new breeze. 'Further and better doles for the dole-drawers' becomes a slogan... To sum up, unemployment insurance is sound enough if limited to trades, & if managed on a strictly actuarial basis. It is folly to mix it up with charity; it is madness to mix it up with politics." Churchill stepped up his journalist and literary output in 1931 to make up for his own considerable losses during the Great Depression. The workload was burdensome, he told his son Randolph, "but that is much better than being unemployed" (Gilbert, 5:407).