Philosophy & Practice

When in 1931 President Hoover said, "No one is going hungry," he was expressing nothing more than a pious hope. It was definitely not a promise because he was unwilling to back his words with Federal funds. In the Hoover philosophy such a move was "un-American," therefore unthinkable. It was also unnecessary. Hungry U. S. citizens had always been fed by the private charity of their fellows. In Herbert Hoover's own experience as relief administrator that charity had overflowed to care for hungry Belgians, hungry Russians, hungry Americans caught in the Mississippi flood. Remembering the past, it seemed to him that U. S. charity was inexhaustible.

Other eyes saw the burden of misery growing, saw private charity breaking down in city after city, county after county, state after state. On every side voices, angry or august, cried that the situation was unparalleled, demanding unparalleled action. But Herbert Hoover clung to the philosophy of the good neighbor, continued to translate it into official do-nothingness. It was for this, in no small measure, that millions of citizens rose up in November 1932 to sweep him from office.

As President, Franklin Roosevelt tossed philosophy overboard, faced facts. His choice lay between direct Federal relief and mass starvation accompanied by almost inevitable rebellion. Promptly-- through CWA, PWA, CCC, FERA--he began pouring public millions into private pockets. As the Government rushed in to support and finally almost supplant private charity, solvent citizens took notice. Since they were paying the Federal relief bill through taxation, they began to doubt the practical necessity of any longer subscribing to private charities. In 1932, 120 cities contributed $57,800,000 to private charities. Last year the same cities contributed $29,450,000.

It was in the face of these stark facts that some 200 civic leaders and social workers gathered in Washington last week to launch the Fourth Mobilization for Human Needs, super-campaign of propaganda for all private charities. At its head, as he had been under President Hoover, was able, eloquent Newton Diehl Baker of Cleveland, Wartime Secretary of War. The mobilizers gathered first on the White House lawn for a greeting from the President. His job was difficult: to steer the sentiment of the country back to the Hoover philosophy of voluntary giving while continuing the Roosevelt practice of direct relief based on involuntary taxation. Declared the President :

"Beginning with those first winters of suffering in Jamestown and Plymouth, it has been the American habit to render aid to those who need it. ... No thinking or experienced person insets today that the responsibility of the community shall be eliminated by passing on this great and humane task to any central body at the seat of the Federal Government. You and I know that it has been with reluctance and only because we have realized the imperative need for additional help that the Federal Government has been compelled to undertake the task of supplementing the more normal methods which have been in use for many generations.

"I repeat what I told you last year: that the primary responsibility for community needs rests upon the community itself."

Replied Chairman Baker, in true Hooverian vein: "Any extended system of Federal relief, however necessary, is attended by dangers..... It is our eager hope, as we know it is yours, that soon the entire burden of relief may be returned to local shoulders. . . . We venture to hope that this winter will see us past the edge of the crisis."

After the speeches Mrs. Roosevelt and 50 women Mobilizers retired to the State dining room. At a luncheon of all the Mobilizers, Federal Emergency Relief Administrator Harry L. Hopkins, who had previously in the day pointed to 14 states as shirkers of their relief burden,* had his chance to say what he thinks, as opposed to what he does. Barked he: "I am thoroughly fed up on cities and states passing the buck to us, when people in their communities need and are not getting relief. And I am beginning to think, of some states now represented in this room, that we might better move right out and say to such people. 'If you don't care for the people in your own communities, as I am sorry to say it would seem some do not, then why should we care more than you?'

* Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin.

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