The 10 million unemployed plus the 5 million living on land which can never be farmed are a continuing menace to the established industry and agriculture of the United States. To solve it means decentralized industrial planning relative to land. If industry does not seize this opportunity, its only effective defense against serious trouble will be such a revival in business that two-thirds of the unemployed will be put to work again at their accustomed places in the big cities. It would seem high time for those big industries which are truly conservative and interested in their long-time welfare to begin to do a little real planning about the unemployment problem. Agriculture should be in on this, because the wrong kind of decentralization would increase the burden of agriculture.
Land planning is no longer an academic question.
A wise use of our land is intimately related to future of industry and the unemployed. So long as there are more than five million unemployed in the United States, there will be a steady and irresistible push toward the lower living costs of open country. Nearly half of the unemployed are under thirty years of age. The larger part of them have at least high school education and many have college diplomas. They are well equipped in mind and body and can see no good reason why it is so hard for them to find jobs.