Even before the Great Depression, the United States was struggling with a number of political, cultural and economic issues. Things got a lot worse beginning with a stock market crash the same year President Herbert Hoover began his term in office. In Wisconsin, events were even more dire: a drought destroyed much of the farm crop in the 30s, while urban jobs fell by 75%. Wisconsin dealt with the situation as only a state with a historic streak of liberalism could – they passed the nation’s first unemployment compensation act.

On this day, January 28, in 1932, the Wisconsin unemployment compensation law passed, providing for the first time out-of-work lenders free payments from an employer-contributed fund. The law had been proposed as early as the 1920s, but was always defeated.

In the decades before the Depression, employees who lost their jobs were thought to have been either of poor character or particularly unlucky — either way, not deserving of a special dispensation. It took the stock market crash and a 25% jobless rate at the peak of the Depression to force a change in attitude, viewing unemployment as an inevitable feature of the new economy. Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance program worked well enough to be copied at a national level by Hoover’s successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.