Huge Housing Program and an Early Return to The Gold Standard Are Necessary for Recovery

Urging a huge housing program as the easiest road to recovery, Oliver M. W. Sprague '94, Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Banking and Finance in the Business School, addressed a large group of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters yesterday in Agassiz House at Radcliffe.

"If we could produce houses for the masses of people at a 25 per cent reduction," he declared, "this depression would be over speedily." He supported the Administration's plan to carry out their housing program through the use of relief money.

Since the United States will always need purchasers for her exports, Dr. Sprague does not feel that she can withdraw from the international scene. "We are unsuccessful participants, however, in international affairs," he said, "because of three factors: our suspicion that the other fellow is going to put over some Machiavellian trick on us; our Senate cannot move deftly and rapidly enough to keep pace with the international parleys and agreements; and our fear for sovereign rights.

"We need a certain amount of produce which can be obtained only through foreign trade and if our export markets were closed, the tobacco and grain sections of this country would be fatally struck, but we cannot hope for an increase in our export balance because the buyers have no more money. Under the present circumstances it seems impossible that there would be a simultaneous increase in imports and exports.

"An early return to the gold standard would be the greatest service the United States could do for the process of recovery. Our monetary principles have been of a selfish nature that has wrecked the financial systems of the oriental countries, and a return to gold would stabilize the world unrest.

"The NRA in the United States is ineffective in solving the domestic situation because it only aids separate industries, while it has not increased the demand for labor or raised the standard of living.