Shade Invoked

Republicans never tire of reminding the country of the nationwide depression which occurred during the first winter (1893-94) of President Stephen Grover Cleveland's second term. Last week in Chicago, however, the shade of Grover Cleveland was invoked to help out an optimistic lottery scheme of Republican Mayor William Hale Thompson's "to set the wheels of business going within 90 days." The Thompson plan: stores in Chicago and vicinity are to give away numbered tickets--bearing the portrait of Mayor Thompson--with every 25 purchase. Those who draw the winning tickets will receive prizes amounting to $1,000,000. Aware that the Post Office Department would consider his scheme illegal, said amazing Mayor Thompson: "I'm going to a medium who's in touch regularly with the spirit of Grover Cleveland. I'll tell the medium to get in touch with Grover Cleveland and I'll tell Cleveland: 'Grover, you were President of the United States during a hard-time period. We're going to have our drawing here in Chicago in our $1,000,000 prosperity drive. Now I want you to pick out the winning numbers.' "I'll get the numbers through the medium who'll be in a trance, and I'll write them down on a piece of paper. And nobody but me will know what those winning numbers are." Less occult was the manner in which the memory of Cleveland was recalled last week in Manhattan. Recalling the hard winter of 1893-94, said Jerome, grey-haired Major Domo and for 42 years an employe of smart Sherry's restaurant: "On either side of the 6th Avenue entrance to Central Park there was a soup kettle and there you could see long lines of people--men, women and little children --standing and waiting in six inches of snow. "All the good restaurants and hotels had many cancellations of dinners, balls and coming-out parties that had been planned. This season we, for one, haven't had a single cancellation. And I haven't seen a soup kitchen anywhere. Even in 1908, after the Roosevelt panic, there was more hardship than you can find now." Meantime, the following took place all over the country as the nation's relief organizations accelerated their pace in the race against human misery: P: In Washington President Hoover asked Congress for an extra $151,000,000 to pay wages on Federal works already authorized. While Democrats forgetful of their harmony pledges grumbled against giving him so much loose change with no strings attached, the House Appropriations Committee framed a bill for $110,000,000 to be used on road building, waterways, flood control, etc., promised that the balance would be forthcoming in the routine supply measures. P: In New York, John Davison Rockefeller & son gave Chairman Seward Prosser's committee $1,000,000, providing 200,000 days of work for the jobless. With Edward Stephen Harkness's gift of $500,000, the committee's total passed $4,000,000. This sum was what made it possible for little knots of men to be painting Central Park benches, digging sewers in The Bronx, performing clerical work in city hospitals, pitching manure on Park Avenue's thin central strip of grass. Total thus employed: 17,300. P: New Orleans jobless began hawking Louisiana oranges on the streets. Manhattan's unemployed fruit vendors sold tangerines two-for-5-c-. In Elizabeth, N. J., the idle sold celery. P: Duluth, whose plan has been organized in thoroughgoing fashion, card-indexed its unemployed, set them to sweeping brush out of the parks, repairing two naval vessels, building a municipal golf course. P: Patrick Cardinal Hayes ordered every pastor in the archdiocese of New York to add a prayer for relief in all masses where the rubric permits. P: In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the job less paved streets, shovelled snow. P: Chicago cleaned up its alleys, hired hundreds to repair and extend the Lake Michigan breakwater. Many found work preparing the site of the 1933 World's Fair. P: In San Francisco the idle planted grass, cleaned sand from streets, built roads, paths, cut firebreaks in the woods. Women stitched at sewing centres. P: Kansas City, Mo. fixed it so that 400 men would have 16 days a month cleaning streets, something." guarding public works, "doing P: In Washington, the Department of State, having been ordered by the President to issue no visas to immigrants who were likely to become public charges, an nounced that the number of aliens admitted to the land in October equalled only 13% of the quota.

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