Boondoggles

If people were hogs the problem of relief would be as easy as dumping slops into a trough. But people are not hogs and hence relief is a very difficult, complex affair. What makes it even more so is the relatively small number of jobless who once made a living with their heads instead of their hands--white-collar folk who are too proud to repair streets, too sensitive to sit at home eating their hearts out on the dole. The relief administrator's problem is to find occupation for them which is socially useful, yet does not compete with private business. Two winters ago the nation had a sample of the lengths to which relief administrators may be driven by such a puzzle when CWA paid educated men & women to produce grand opera in the Ozarks, study the Relation of Fascism to Women's Education, make dolls out of old inner tubes, translate German manuscripts on plant diseases, write poems inside a 900-word vocabulary, The nation tolerantly lumped all such doings under the head of "just raking leaves back & forth."

Last week the spotlight was turned once more on such activities in the city which has not only the largest local relief population in the U.S. but also has more than its share of white-collar idle. If every man, woman & child in Providence, Birmingham, Dallas, Akron, Oklahoma City and Omaha were on relief they would approximately equal the number of persons in New York City now living on government bounties. They number 1,400,000-- one-fifth the total population.* To support them costs about $20,000,000 per month, of which the city supplies onefourth, the State onefourth, the Federal Government one-half. About 17% of them are aliens or people who have taken out their first papers. Only 120,000 of them work for their relief pay, and of these only 19,500 are employed on white-collar projects. But the activities of those 19,500, as revealed by an Aldermanic investigation, were enough to crowd New York's front pages with exciting news most of last week.

Maps. Dr. Caspar J. Kraemer Jr., a mellow, twinkly professor of Latin and Greek at New York University, was summoned by the investigating committee to explain how the Work Relief Division's cartographic project, which he heads, was employing 200 men at a cost of $290,000 per year. About 70% of his maps, models and charts, testified Professor Kraemer, were modern relief maps, including some of New York City & vicinity which would be useful in regional planning. The Committee's counsel called a list of the other 30%. They included the Geographic Distribution of Ancient Greek Dialects, an Isothermic Map of the Mediterranean Region, a Profile of the Excavations at Kish, Early Bronze Age Intercourse, a Genealogy of the Julian-Claudian Line, the Roman Coinage of the Alexandrian Mint. One stopped the counsel: "The Geographical Distribution of the Chief Type of Fibulae."

"What does that mean? Bones in the leg?" asked he.

"Safety pins," said Professor Kraemer.

"Safety pins?" echoed the counsel.

"Ancient safety pins," said the professor.

"Then," said the examiner, "we have a map of the Movement of Peoples in die Second Millenium. That is a little remote, is it not? I mean, it is not exactly hot news."

"It happens to be news, yes, Counsel," replied imperturbable Professor Kraemer who declared his maps would be cheap at $2,000,000 per year.

Machines. "You have charge of Project 89?" the examiner asked Dr. Irving Lorge, bespectacled, self-assured young psychological researcher at Columbia University's Teachers College.

"I am the sponsor of Project 89-fb 125x," replied Dr. Lorge. "Commonly known as Project 89, isn't it?"

"It is known to me only as 89-fb 125x and I always refer to it as such."

Precise Dr. Lorge proceeded to explain that Project 89-fb 125x, which has already cost $160,000 and will cost another $160,000 before it is finished, comprised three phases. One was a study of semantics, in which relief workers were engaged in counting some 2,500,000 words to determine their frequency and that of their various shades of meaning. Another group was experimenting with a bicycle ergometer, described as "a machine used for measuring the cost of physical work in terms of metabolism used in psychological experimentation." The third group made its living on a "learning machine." That, explained Dr. Lorge, is an elaborate contrivance "which subjects simultaneously a group of 13 to a learning situation in which stimuli are presented and each subject makes responses." A "unit" of right responses wins a nickel. A wrong answer may bring a fine.

"Does the money drop out of a slot?" inquired the examiner.

"There is an automatic counting device on it," said Dr. Lorge, going on to explain that he paid most of the rewards out of his own pocket, that an intellectual wizard once took him for $18 in one day.

"Chicken Survey." Michael Weintraub, a onetime cloak & suit man, was not happy about his relief job. That job was to go from door to door, ask each New York housewife her origin, nationality, family income, number in family, number of children, number of servants, number of boarders; whether she had bought any poultry in the past seven days; if so, what day, what kind of fowl, what weight, what cost per Ib.; was it slaughtered in New York; was it plucked? He was also supposed to gather data on eggs, but Michael Weintraub said sadly that the door was usually slammed in his face before he got well started on the fowl. He did not know what happened to the little information he managed to gather. He said the "chicken survey," which will have cost $100,000 by July 1, employed more than 100 canvassers besides himself. Asked his opinion of the survey, Michael Weintraub said, "I should say I think it is ridiculous."

Real Estate. Project 33 and Project 276 got the committee's special attention. Project 276, which employed 350 men at a cost of $318,000, was a real estate survey of New York City. Project 33, which simultaneously employed 1,200 men at a cost of nearly $2,000,000, was also a real estate survey of New York City. To the committee it looked as if the workers on the two projects had simply been retracing each other's steps. A deputy tax commissioner testified that for 30 years private firms had been supplying his department with the same data on Manhattan real estate at a cost of $1,639 Per year.

Fun. Relief by recreation, it developed, was costing the city more than $3,000,000 per year. One phase of this activity was eurythmic dancing as taught by Myra J. Wilcoxon, onetime lowan.

"You were appointed by whom?" the examiner asked her.

"My appointment I received on the card, it was not named the person who appointed me," replied flustered Myra J. Wilcoxon.

"What is eurythmic dancing?" she was asked.

"Any kind of dancing is eurythmic dancing," said Myra Wilcoxon. "I have never seen any dancing which is not eurythmic."

Not until Robert Marshall appeared did New Yorkers find a word to cover all the Work Relief Division's white-collar activities. Robert Marshall said he was in charge of teaching 150 men to make boondoggles.

"What," asked the examiner, "is boondoggles?"

Robert Marshall sighed. "I spend a good deal of time explaining it," said he. "Boondoggles is simply a term "applied back in the pioneer days to things we call gadgets today. ... In other words, it is a chamber of horrors where boys perform crafts that are not designed for finesse and fine work but simply a utility purpose." To illustrate, Mr. Marshall named plaited or woven belts, sleeping bags, linoleum block printing.

Next day "boondoggles" appeared in large black type in every city newspaper. Newshawks tried to trace it down. Lexicographer Frank H. Vizetelly searched his source books back to Andrew Jackson's time, gave up. "I never heard of that one," declared Dan Beard, grizzled old Boy Scout. "What is it, anyway? Something you drink out of, perhaps?"

Finally it was discovered that the word "boondoggle" had been invented seven years ago by a 15-year-old Eagle Scout as a name for a braid he had woven of many-colored strands. Edward of Wales, it was recalled, had worn a red, black' brown & blue boondoggle around his hat at the Scout Jamboree in England in 1929

Defense. The Work Relief Division found many an apologist and defender. The Division's head, Col. William J. Wilgus, had already threatened to resign after a humiliating raid made on his office by the Aldermanic committee's investigators. But after last week's revelations he sent the committee chairman an indignant letter: "Give me an opportunity promptly to appear before you. ... Do not promote the ruin of this great organization engaged in activities which mean so much for the preservation of society."

Professor Kraemer hastened to inform the Press that the "millenium" referred to in his map of the Movement of Peoples m the Second Millenium meant the years 2000-1000 B. C., not the second coming of Christ. He also said the map had been copied from a book called Who Were the Greeks?, had cost about $6. ( The city's relief head declared the chicken survey" had been undertaken at the request of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, the AAA and the New York Live Poultry Code Authority. Its aim: to eliminate waste and irregularities in the poultry business at a possible saving to the city of $16,000,000 per year.

"Records show," cried one of Col. Wilgus' assistants, "that accidents have been less since boondoggles and similar activities gave poor children something to do and kept them off the street."

Hottest defense of all came from the nation's Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins in Washington. Newshawks who trooped into his office to twit him about boondoggles and ancient safety pins were quickly sobered. He was mad clean through. "Investigate?" barked he. "No! There's nothing the matter. Those are good projects, all of them. People who don't understand foreign languages sometimes laugh when they hear them. Dumb people make fun of things they can't understand.

"We have been giving work to a lot of white-collar people ... and 97% of all the money spent on these projects has gone for relief--only 3% for materials. We have no apologies to make for any of these projects. Most of them will be continued and there will be a lot more of the same type. We haven't done enough for the white-collar people. . . . The only critics are people who want to abolish work relief and people who are too damned dumb to appreciate the finer things of life."

Commented New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia: "There are some people who laugh if they hear a foreign language spoken--they think that's funny." At week's end the Mayor acted. By radio he informed citizens that Oswald Whitman Knauth, Ph.D., 47, department store executive and onetime Princeton economics instructor, had been appointed "super-director" of city relief.

Announced Super-director Knauth: "I bring to this job nothing but horse sense. Perhaps I'm an idiot for taking it."

*Last week one Morris Baron, a greyish little ex-tailor who had been on home relief for three years, rushed into a Manhattan relief depot, screamed: "I want you should buy my wife a dress. Other women get Easter dresses. My wife she wants one. The city should buy her a dress." Thrown out by a policeman, he returned after ten minutes, shrieking: "Down with everything! Home relief, phooie!" Six policemen were summoned to carry him to jail.

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