produced the first official unemployment rates published by the US government.
The study estimated that there were 1,874,030 unemployed people in the United
States and 23,348,602 wage earners, implying an unemployment rate of 7.4%.19
This high estimated unemployment rate came at a time of great prosperity, and it
led people to question what would cause such high unemployment amidst
abundance.
In April 1928, a month later, the Baltimore Sun ran an article referring to the
theories of Sumner H. Slichter, who later became a prominent labor economist in
the 1940s and 1950s. In the article, readers are told that Slichter noted several
causes of unemployment but pointed out that “at present the most serious is
technological unemployment.” Specifically, “The reason we have this
unemployment is because we are eliminating jobs through labor-saving methods
faster than we are creating them.”20 These words, alongside the new official
reporting of unemployment statistics, created a contagion of the idea that a new
era of technological unemployment had arrived, and the Luddites’ fears were
renewed. The earlier agricultural depression, with its associated fears of labor-
saving machinery, began to look like a model for an industrial depression to
follow.
Stuart Chase, who later coined the term the “New Deal” in the title of a 1932
book, published Men and Machines in May 1929, during a period of rapidly
rising stock prices. The real, inflation-corrected, US stock market, as measured
by the S&P Composite Index, rose a final 20% in the five months after the
book’s publication, before the infamous October 1929 crash. But concerns about
rising unemployment were apparent even during the boom period. According to
Chase, we were approaching the “zero hour of accelerating unemployment”:21
Machinery saves labour in a given process; one man replaces ten. A certain
number of these men are needed to build and service a new machine, but
some of them are permanently displaced.… If purchasing power has reached
its limits of expansion because mechanization is progressing at an unheard of
rate, only unemployment can result. In other words, from now on, the better
able we are to produce, the worse we shall be off. Even if the accelerating
factor has not arrived, the misery of normal unemployment continues
unabated.
This is the economy of the madhouse.22

The book conveyed a sense that the beginnings of the catastrophe were
imminent: “Accelerating unemployment … if not already here, may conceivably
arrive at any moment.”23 This is significant: the narrative of out-of-control
unemployment was already starting to go viral before there was any sign of the
stock market crash of 1929.
During the days of sharp US stock market drops the week before the October
28–29, 1929, stock market crash, a nationally reported National Business Show
was running in New York, October 21–26, in a convention center (since
demolished) adjacent to Grand Central Station that many Wall Street people
passed through to and from work. The show emphasized immense progress in
robot technology in the office workplace. It was described after the show moved
to Chicago in November thus:
Exhibits in the national business show yesterday revealed that the business
office of the future will be a factory in which machines will replace the
human element, when the robot—the mechanical man—will be the principal
office worker.…
There were addressers, autographers, billers, calculators, cancelers,
binders, coin changers, form printers, duplicators, envelope sealers and
openers, folders, labelers, mail meters, pay roll machines, tabulators,
transcribers, and other mechanical marvels.…
A typewriting machine pounded out letters in forty different languages. A
portable computing machine which could be carried by a traveling salesman
was on exhibit.24