than all the rest of Mr. McEvoy's satirical skits put together"; Variety said that "Brother" was the only part of the show worth praising. Harburg later wrote that the song earned him several thousand dollars and helped him get started in the music business. Business leaders tried to have it banned from the radio, viewing the song as "a dangerous attack on the American economic system". They were unsuccessful, due to the song's popularity. William Zinsser writes that "[t]he song so lacerated the national conscience that radio stations banned it" for being "sympathetic to the unemployed". Few thematic Depression songs were popular, because Americans did not want music which reminded them of the economic situation, but "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" was "the exception that proved the rule". Unlike other popular songs of the same era which tended to be upbeat, with titles such as "Happy Days Are Here Again" (1929), "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (1930), and "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" (1931), "Brother" "put words and music to what many Americans were feeling—fear, grief, even anger". The song was one of the first musical works to take the Depression seriously. It was one of the most popular twenty songs of 1932 in the United States. Philip Furia and Michael Lasser wrote that the song "embodied the Depression for millions of Americans... No other popular song caught the spirit of its time with such urgency." In 2007, Clyde Haberman wrote that the song "endures as an anthem for the downtrodden and the forgotten". In 2011, Zinsser wrote that "Brother" "still hovers in the national memory; I can hear its ghostly echo in the chants of the Occupy Wall Street marchers". In a 2008 retrospective, NPR described it as "the anthem of the Great Depression". According to Meyerson and Ernest Harburg, the challenge that Yip Harburg faced in crafting the lyrics was "much like the challenge confronting the street-corner panhandler: to establish the character's individuality and the moral and political basis for his claim". They write that the latter achieved this by gradually building intimacy with the listener, starting in third person and moving into first, second, and then both first and second combined ("I'm your pal"). The internal rhymes help the listener remember that the singer was working towards a dream, which is now shattered. They also write that the song is a "masterpiece