"These works brought all these people here. Something should be done to get them at work again"
About this Quote
A king touring hardship and talking like a hiring manager: that tonal mismatch is the point. Edward VIII is reacting to crowds drawn not by spectacle, but by public works and the thin hope they represented. “These works” reads as infrastructure on the surface, but it’s really a proxy for social order. The projects didn’t just build roads or dams; they organized idle time, redistributed wages, and kept resentment from curdling into unrest. When he says the works “brought all these people here,” he’s acknowledging a new political fact in the modern mass age: large gatherings don’t need ideology to form, only necessity.
“Something should be done” is a royal phrase that pretends to be modest while smuggling in authority. It’s deliberately vague, the sort of sentence that lets a monarch gesture toward action without naming costs, policy, or accountability. The subtext is paternalism with a practical edge: people are framed less as citizens with claims than as a workforce that must be kept occupied. “Get them at work again” carries a moral charge, implying unemployment is as much a behavioral problem as an economic one.
Context matters: Edward’s reign sat in the long shadow of the Great Depression and in a Europe jittery with extremism. Governments learned that joblessness wasn’t merely hardship; it was fuel. The line reveals an establishment instinct to treat employment as social pacification - humane on the face, defensive underneath.
“Something should be done” is a royal phrase that pretends to be modest while smuggling in authority. It’s deliberately vague, the sort of sentence that lets a monarch gesture toward action without naming costs, policy, or accountability. The subtext is paternalism with a practical edge: people are framed less as citizens with claims than as a workforce that must be kept occupied. “Get them at work again” carries a moral charge, implying unemployment is as much a behavioral problem as an economic one.
Context matters: Edward’s reign sat in the long shadow of the Great Depression and in a Europe jittery with extremism. Governments learned that joblessness wasn’t merely hardship; it was fuel. The line reveals an establishment instinct to treat employment as social pacification - humane on the face, defensive underneath.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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