Department of Labor Quotes
When TR was the NYC Police Commissioner, Riis had given him midnight tours of the precincts so Roosevelt could see for himself what the police were and were not doing. When he became Governor, his labor inspectors never reported the terrible sweatshop conditions that the newspapers were writing about. So TR asked Riis to arrange some personal “visits”. The two of them alone would show up at a sweatshop in the middle of the day and the governor would simply introduce himself to the owner, who dared not prohibit the Governor from coming in and then asking questions of workers and managers. Even in modern times that would not happen in a large state. The Governor then realized that the state labor inspectors were not doing their jobs and covering up the problems. Major changes took place.
The Labor Department never would commit to a recommendation. The Job Corps leadership examined the insufficient data and made their best guess which for the most part turned out to be right as the Job Corps was the most effective youth job training program in the history of the country. It and Head Start were the only two of the anti-poverty programs that were still operational into the 21st century. Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand expressed the same idea more generally in {482001}.
