Relief

After 17 long days in the Senate Appropriations Committee the President's bill giving him $4,000,000,000 for work relief plus $880,000.000 to continue present relief programs, saw the light of the Senate floor. Carter Glass, who in Committee had voted unsuccessfully to cut it down to a $2,880,000,000 dole, as Appropriations Chairman dutifully expounded its purpose. When he had finished, Senator Borah inquired:

"Wouldn't this bill accomplish the same thing if it were only one line long and stated merely that the President was authorized to spend $4,000.000,000 as he saw fit to relieve distress?"

"It might be argued that such a bill . . . would amount to the same thing," confessed Mr. Glass with admirable honesty.

Mr. Borah's inquiry was only the opening gun of a Republican bombardment. The Republicans had held a caucus and for once found themselves in some unanimity. The thing they were most unanimous about was that the $4.000,000,000 ought to be spent not later than June 30, 1936, instead of 1937 as specified in the bill. On that point their unanimity could do them no possible good, because the Democratic majority, disunited as they might be on other points, were united against the Republicans on that one: for on that point depended the question of whether there should be a Santa Claus in the election of November 1936. The Republicans' next most unanimous decision was to incorporate in the bill the direct requirement for the payment of the "prevailing wages" (i. e. in most cases union wages) rather than a relief wage of around $50 a month as planned by the Administration. This was something on which they could make trouble for the Administration, for the President had only just got it eliminated in committee by a special appeal to Senator Glass.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who regards himself as a Republican big gun since his victory in Michigan last autumn, laid down the first major bombardment. As became a man with Presidential aspirations, it was 15.000 words long.

In his purplest passage he proclaimed: "It represents four or five billion dollars' worth of lost liberty and the erection of a corresponding. Presidential speculation. It was born in the mysterious dark; it has defied intelligent illumination; its only merit is a pious, puzzling hope; its program is a lottery, and its only justification is the counsel of desperation."

But the battle had just begun.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Franklin Roosevelt was doing his best to influence the fortunes of the war. On the eve of the Senate debate he had General Robert E. Wood, president of Sears, Roebuck, come to Washington. An advocate of dollar devaluation, of the self- contained-nation theory of trade, General Wood has long been sympathetic with New Deal experiments. As businessman, he has served on NRA's Consumers' Advisory Board, on Secretary Roper's Business Council. Newshawks jumped to the conclusion that the President was grooming General Wood to succeed S. Clay Williams when NRA is renewed and reorganized (see p. 11).

But Franklin Roosevelt had a much more immediate use for the Wartime Quartermaster General, now a mail-order magnate. Before the Republicans could discharge the full weight of their artillery against the political implication of giving the President $4,000,000,000 to spend as he feels like, Franklin Roosevelt let it be announced that not a politician but a businessman was going to have the chief say in allotting the $4,000,000,000 for work relief--General Wood, chief consultant and adviser on spending.

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