Schools v. Golf Links

When Palermo, N. Dak.'s schoolhouse burned, its citizens asked the Public Works Administration to help them build a new one with some of President Roosevelt's four billion work relief dollars. PW Administrator Harold Ickes was willing, but not Works Progress Administrator Harry Hopkins, who passes on the work-producing potentialities of all relief jobs. Schoolhouses take too much money for materials, too little for men, and half of Palermo's 205 citizens were on relief. Last week angry Palermitans were peppering WPA headquarters with protests because Administrator Hopkins had vetoed their schoolhouse, promised them a golf course and a bird sanctuary instead.

By last week the whole, vast work relief machine was threatening to crack up on just the issue presented by Palermo, multiplied thousands of times throughout the country. Trouble was that President Roosevelt had given the machine two operators with fundamentally different ideas of how it should be run. Operator Ickes wanted to go slow, take no chance of waste, build things of lasting value. Operator Hopkins wanted to set the machine at top speed, put the greatest possible number of hands to work on quick, small, cheap jobs.

Both men were taking their President at his word. When he asked Congress for his work relief billions last January, Franklin Roosevelt declared that all work to be done "should be useful -- not just for a day or for a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the nation." That sounded like such things as schoolhouses. When he got the money the President announced that his primary purpose was to put 3,500,000 jobless citizens to work as quickly as possible. That, after somebody had divided $4,000,000,000 by 3,500,000, sounded like such things as golf courses and bird sanctuaries.

Nobody knew last week just how much of the work relief fund had been spent, but the National Emergency Council reported that some $3,340,000,000 had been earmarked for various spending agencies. Of this sum close to $1,500,000,000 had been set aside for PWA, CCC, rural resettlement and sundry engineering jobs; $484,000,000 for roads; $612,000,000 for WPA; $710,000,000 for direct relief. Some $1,250,000,000 was still to be divided up. President Roosevelt had set Sept. 12 as the day when all applications must be in. Days before that deadline Messrs. Hopkins and Ickes were both ready to spend every remaining dollar & more, each in his own way. The two clashed head-on when Mr. Hopkins vetoed 1,908 out of 2,000 PWA projects approved by Mr. Ickes.

"They're all good projects," snorted Mr. Ickes at a press conference last week. Mr. Hopkins said they cost too much, the PW Administrator went on, but their average cost was only $958 per worker. "I never was much at figures," growled he, "but I don't think I'm the only one in the Government."

Furthermore, said Secretary Ickes, nobody in the relief organization had the right to veto a project. Only President Roosevelt could do that. Mr. Ickes smiled grimly: "The President called up last night and asked me to come up, and I thought I'd go."

Into Hyde Park next day trooped Mr. Ickes and his new Undersecretary of the Interior Charles West; Mr. Hopkins and his crack statistician, Corrington Gill; Frank Walker, Rex Tugwell, Budget Director Daniel Bell. Morning, afternoon & evening pencils scratched, words flew across the big library table in Hyde Park House. When the visitors set out for Washington late at night Mr. Hopkins looked chipper, Mr. Ickes glum.

Next day President Roosevelt called correspondents into the library, announced his decision. The problem, said he, was simply one of dollars, men and time. PWA's heavy program could not get well started until next spring. So far the relief program had put only 800,000 persons to work, 500,000 of them in the CCC. Therefore from December to March most of Work Relief's loose change was going to Mr. Hopkins for his quick, small, cheap jobs--adding up to something like Mr. Hopkins' old "leaf-raking" CWA program. By March, declared the President, that program could be tapered off, and Mr. Ickes could get busy on whatever projects he had found before Dec. 15 which could be completed within a year, would cost no more than $850 per worker. Gloomily PWA officials figured that half their program would have to be junked.

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