Dreamland

Shortly after breakfast one morning last week. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes bustled into the White House office with jaw set, brow beetling. He had had a most disturbing experience at the breakfast table: his morning paper had announced that Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins was going to cut the New Deal's newest, biggest and most expensive cake, the $4,880,000,000 Work Relief Bill. What did that announcement mean? the irate Cabinet officer demanded of sleepy-eyed Presidential Secretary Early. Had the President gone back on his promise that he, Harold Ickes, was to subdivide the funds allotted to public works under the new bill? He wanted explanations or retractions. Hastily a White House communique announced that the Press was mistaken, that only one hand should hold the cake knife and that hand belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Despite all protestations, it was apparent that final passage of the Work Relief Bill would bring much relief, if not to the unemployed, at least to the Administration. The greedy efforts of New Deal administrators to beat one another to the money bags which also held prestige, power and national headlines were getting uncomfortably obvious.

To get his Work Relief Bill past the House originally the President had to promise that Secretary Ickes would not have chief charge of spending the $4,880,000,000. Congress likes neither the slow pace at which the PW Administrator put out the $3,300,000,000 of the original Public Works appropriation nor his crusty attitude toward politicians seeking political favors. Mr. Ickes still battled in private for a hefty slice of the $4,880,000,000, but last week everything seemed to be going against him. Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell took away his Soil Erosion Service as the cornerstone for a new dreamland of relief. Administrator Hopkins, who had the advantage of tripping to Florida with the President, apparently got the honor of supervising the work relief appropriation.

Grim days for Mr. Ickes were gay days for Dr. Tugwell. The Columbia economist's hair, greying when he went to Washington, has now turned definitely silver but the lines of care which go with such a change are strikingly missing from his handsome, young face. Last week the Tugwell eyes were shining more brightly than ever at the prospect of a golden opportunity.

Although the Brain Truster last year told the Senators who confirmed his appointment as Undersecretary of Agriculture that he got mud on his boots (when vacationing on his father's fruit farm in upstate New York), his job in life has been not in the fields but at a desk. By the same token his prime enthusiasms do not spring from the sight of an unusually good stand of wheat but rather from the contemplation of an unusual, bold, far-reaching economic idea. Last week he had extraordinary scope for such ideas, for he was about to carry out the land-use portions of the President's latest relief program. His cut was tentatively set at $350,000,000 for erosion control, reforestation, etc.; $100,000,000 for rural electrification; $500,000,000 for rural rehabilitation--nearly a billion dollars. And he could have practically the whole U. S. to play with.

What would Dr. Tugwell do with this cash, this country, this chance? Up to this week he was not yet ready to say but there were plenty of grandiose ideas lying about his office. He could do over the Mississippi Valley as the Mississippi Valley Committee has suggested (TIME, Jan. 7). In Part II, p. 176, of the National Resources Board's report was a map that made the U. S. look as if it were having a severe attack of smallpox. Its title: "Areas in which it Appears Desirable to Encourage Permanent Retirement of a Substantial Part of the Arable Farming and Develop Constructive Use of the Land Not to be in Farms." Dr. Tugwell might well be tempted to wipe away those pock marks. And on p. 158 was a map of "Areas Characterized by Farm Units too Small to Provide Adequate Family Living," which offered the young Brain Truster immense opportunities.

Or again Undersecretary Tugwell, free from the fetters of his own Department, might choose to care for lands underprivileged by nature--bogs and deserts. More stimulating still, he might take the tenant farmers of the South and Midwest out of their present hovels, put them in model villages, set them to tilling fertile communal lands. He might even tear down city tenements and move their dwellers to modernistic pueblos lying amid fresh fields whence workers might commute to factories. All these and similar possibilities he considered, for they were big ideas to be drawn big on maps, changes to be written of in history. With a drawing account of a billion dollars. Dr. Tugwell's imagination quickened and moved as it had not done since he first went to Washington two years ago.

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