Fraud v. Fraud

The deadliest ammunition which Republicans have yet received for sniping at Democrats with charges that Relief is being used for the meanest kind of political purposes has been furnished them by West Virginia's Democratic Senator Rush Dew Holt. When that brash young politician uprose in the Senate last month and charged that the Works Progress Administration in his State was rotten with politics, impartial observers explained this astonishing Democratic outburst as a clear case of sour grapes.

His colleague and onetime ally, West Virginia's senior Senator Matthew Mansfield Neely, had apparently grabbed off all the best WPA jobs for his friends while Senator-elect Holt was waiting to grow old enough to take his seat. Senator Neely strengthened this view by proving that Senator Holt had tried in vain to get WPA jobs for his own friends, a revelation which effectively disposed of Senator Holt's display of outraged virtue but did not dispose of his charges. Unless the letters, telegrams, salary lists and list of jobholders with their political sponsors which he brandished-in evidence were to be regarded as fraudulent, the young Senator had made out a damaging case against WPA in West Virginia.

That those documents were indeed fraudulent was the clear and shocking implication of a letter which WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins sent to Senator Holt last week. An investigation by his agents, declared the Administrator, had shown the Senator's charges to be almost totally false. Not a single relief worker in West Virginia had obtained his WPA job through political influence. Administrative appointments had been made solely on the basis of merit, 60% of successful applicants having had no political endorsement whatever. Senator Neely could not have dipped his fingers into this potential patronage pie because he was away on a Philippine junket while the organization was being formed. The only instance of political solicitation of funds from relief workers which the investigators had uncovered was "to pay the expenses of broadcasting a speech delivered by Senator Holt at St. Mary's, W. Va. on Feb. 7."

This public jolt left Senator Holt enraged but far from speechless. Storming onto the Senate floor, from which his Democratic colleagues soon ostentatiously departed, he unloosed a harangue reminiscent of the late Huey Long on an off day. "I do not know where Mr. Hopkins bought the whitewash," roared the 30-year-old Senator, "but if I could have had the contract for the whitewash he used in this report [on the West Virginia WPA] I could retire for life on just the commissions. . . .

"The investigation . . . was a sham, a fraud and a-farce. . . . Sending any of Mr. Hopkins' force down to investigate . . . in West Virginia was like sending Baby Face Nelson to investigate John Dillinger. . . . There are more lies per square inch in that particular report than in any other report in the history of the United States. . . .

"I spoke about whitewash a minute ago.

Do you know what Mr. Hopkins and his friends have done? They have appropriated $644,000 for sanitary privies in West Virginia and $224,000 for feeding children. That is a wonderful exhibit of what he is trying to do."

"Oh yeah, is that all?" drawled Harry Hopkins when breathless newshawks had finished reporting to him this interesting revelation of a Senatorial mind. "Well, I'm not going to say a damned thing."

Same day, Administrator Hopkins revealed an incident which made observers wonder just how much he does not know about what is going on in his vast WPA machine. Up to last month he had been under the impression that certain buildings being built with WPA funds in four Mississippi towns were going to be used as vocational training schools. Last month he discovered that instead, they were about to be turned over to private manufacturers for use as textile mills. Local newspapers had been publicizing this perversion right along. The supply of funds was promptly stopped, an investigation started; but by that time the factories were 65% to 95% completed. "Wait till I get to the bottom of this," cried Harry Hopkins to newshawks last week. "I'll write your story for you and it'll be just as hot as you want it."

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