186 UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 
see them directing men and women to well-rounded specialists in definite industries 
rather than referring them, as now, merely to jobs. 
Until, then, a community has one clearing house where all folks seeking work 
register their state and needs, any figures as to the number unemployed in that 
community at a given time will be the more or less inspired opinions of people 
willing to express themselves on a subject the layman knows as much about as 
the authorities. All the man in the street has to do in order to puncture their 
logistics is to inquire who counted the jobless, and how. 
But assuming, not for argument but for thought, that some day someone with 
a will and a wad reduces the x to a quantity known and indisputable. What 
then? How long would it be wise to use the figure thus gained as a pole star 
from which to make commercial reckonings? Not long, eertainly, in this day of 
news flashes and rapid transportation, for no industrial species moves faster than 
real job hunters in pursuit of real jobs. 
Early of an autumn morning a few years back I mailed from an anthracite 
center a registered, rush, special-delivery envelope to my superiors up the line. 
[t contained unemployment data—the views and forecasts of scores of coal-belt 
people I'd talked with regarding the more or less voluntary unemployment then 
existing there, and the number of miners idle, of mechanical and operating depart- 
ment employes temporarily furloughed by the railroads serving the region, and 
of platform crews laid off by the local traction company. Sources of authority 
had contributed the figures almost to a decimal point. 
SOME VERY NICE STATISTICS RUINED 
The envelope had hardly reached a mail sack before I was in the depot of the 
2ity’s largest railroad en route to another community affected with the same 
scourge. For 10 minutes I stood in line at a ticket window as inside and out 
hundreds of men of Old World extraction milled their way through stacks of 
baggage. Three tickets windows were working to capacity at 6 o'clock in the 
morning. The vanguard of the unemployed I'd tabbed so religiously were leav- 
ing for greener fields, where jobs in orchards, on road and power-plant construc- 
tion, in the bituminous belt and steel mills beckoned them. ) 
How many? No one knew. “Thousands,” was the best the head ticket 
agent could vouchasafe when I passed his way a week later. “Thousands by 
rail and automobile every week.” And when I returned to my offices, a night's 
ride distant, associates told me of the hundreds of baggage-laden tourists who 
had stormed the office, for many of whom they'd found jobs. 
Not only, then, are figures on unemployment of fleeting value but a sponsor- 
ship of them by public officials or by groups imbued with the public interest may 
well spur others, equally public-spirited, to ask: ‘For what useful purpose?” 
“The American specific for unemployment is employment. Does it help the 
morale of a community, bolster the confidence and stimulate its manufacturers 
to recall old employes or to take on new ones to learn that exactly 11 per cent, 
we'll say, of the community's or of the nation’s workers are idle and therefore 
not potential buyers?” 
The queries are Mr. Walter J. Lloyd’s, director of the bureau of employment of 
the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry at Harrisburg, and Federal 
director of the United States Employment Service for that Commonwealth. 
He went on to say: 
“It's a thing we should think about before we play publicly with figures. The 
individual, private or public, no matter how well-intentioned his purpose, who 
stresses unduly the extent of unemployment in a community, hacks at the very 
keystone of business and destroys the sole remedy for unemployment. And 
he serves ill those he most earnestly wishes to help, for a community whose 
leaders lose confidence stagnates until their confidence revives. 
“Many, I know, will disagree with me. I respect both their opinions and 
their lofty aims. But let them for a moment put themselves in the place of men 
who haven’t found the work they need. Will not the same figures that shatter 
the confidence of the manufacturer rob the jobless man of the quality he most 
needs—hope? Do not the jobless see and feel enough of unemployment without 
having the real or fancied fact that exactly so many others are in the same boat 
with them and their own prospects, therefore, made dimmer?” 
From a brief case he handed me a paper. ‘“Doesn’t that impress you as a 
nelpful bit of employment publicity. encouraging both to the worker and to the 
smployer?”’ 
I glanced at the paper. It contained a 200-word paragraph to the effect that 
employment within a certain distriet served bv his bureau was ranidiv mounting