Jobless

Lamentable is the lack of reliable statistics on U. S. unemployment. Only ten states gather local figures for compilation by the U. S. Labor Department. Not until the 1930 Census is taken in April can the true picture of labor conditions throughout the land be revealed. When President Hoover happily announced last month that U. S. employment had at last turned upward following the stockmarket crash, it was at best an intelligent guess. New York State Industrial Commissioner Frances Perkins declared last week that January unemployment in her state was the worst in 15 years, that labor conditions were "very serious." While the U. S. Labor Department insisted that employment would be normal in 90 days, Communists stirred hungry, cold, jobless men and women to demonstrations which required no statisticians to interpret. Last week's samples:

In Cleveland, with its 40% foreign-born and 65% foreign-blooded, a smartly attired gentleman named Chairman Louis Petrash was presiding over a meeting of the Welfare Committee of the City Council. Before the committee was a letter from the Communist Council of the Unemployed, which demanded immediate relief in money and work for 75,000 jobless Clevelanders.

Suddenly there was a great shouting and shuffling in City Hall corridors. A tattered mob led by Communists crowded into the high-ceiled, paneled council chamber until it was full. Outside were 2,000 more frenzied demonstrators. When police tried to clear the City Hall steps, a dozen men jumped on gigantic Inspector George J. Matowitz. He shook them like rats off his shoulders, shouted orders for more police. Mob fists crunched and pummeled. Knives flashed. Fire engines clattered up. Hose lines were connected. The mob was washed away. Behind it was left trampled Sol Jagoda with a broken back, trampled William Lux with a fractured skull, many hats, fragments of clothes, splatters of blood. Inspector Matowitz had had his coat tails torn off. Three policemen were hurt, eight mobsters arrested.

In Philadelphia, a crowd of 250 marched to City Hall to proclaim : "While the manufacturers are reaping huge profits and Mayor Mackey goes on vacation trips, there are 200,000 unemployed workers in the city." Timing their demonstration with the return of Mayor Mackey from the West Indies, they tried to force their way into his office, had a 15-minute tussle with 150 policemen, retreated leaving placards, Communist circulars that warned of a nation-unemployment demonstration.

In Newark, N. J., 400 jobless workers gathered at Headquarters of Trade Unity League (which had published the circulars scattered in Philadelphia's City Hall plaza). There they heard President Hoover described as "the lackey of Wall Street . . . J. P. Morgan's office boy." Police entered, ordered the audience to disperse. Eight men and a girl refused to go, were arrested and arraigned for advocating, by speech, hostility to and destruction of "the government of the U. S., of Newark and New Jersey."

In New York City, Robert Fulton Cutting, aristocratic Board President of Cooper Union, said that "some sort of an unemployment dole" should be handed out to unassimilable unskilled job-seekers who each winter flock to Manhattan.

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