Still No Starving

Long have prophets of evil gloomed over the troubles that will come when the U. S. first tries to reduce Relief expenditures. Last week Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins returned to his office in Washington and ran head first into a docket of such troubles. For while he was conferring with his regional administrators in New Orleans, his Assistant Aubrey Williams had announced the first Relief cut.

Of the $1,425,000,000 Relief fund appropriated by Congress, $1,150,000,000 was already spent in the first five months of the fiscal year and not enough remains to last through January, much less to July. This is due to politics, which kept the Relief appropriation low so as to make a good showing before election; to an Act of God, Drought, which put 325,000 extras on the Relief rolls; and to a miscalculation of Man. As industry increased its payrolls the WPA payrolls did not decrease proportionately. The cut as Mr. Williams announced it called for a reduction of WPA's expenditures from $165,000,090 in November to $152,000,000 in December. This was to be accomplished by:

1) Transferring 250,000 drought relief cases to the Resettlement Administration. This is a half-saving since WPA paid them about $40 and RA can pay them only about $20 a month. However RA has only $14,000,000 of its $85,000,000 appropriation left, will also need a new appropriation by Feb. 1.

2) Cutting some 5,000 administrative and non-Relief persons off the payrolls.

3) Weeding out about 150,000 reliefers who had private resources, some members of whose families had got private jobs, etc., etc.

When Mr. Hopkins got back to Washington he found the kickbacks had been swift and vigorous. In big centres of unemployment, notably Manhattan and Los Angeles, reliefers had instituted sit-down strikes. Some of the New Deal's strongest supporters were having fits. One of them, Publisher J. David Stern, editorialized in his New York Post:

''Suppose you had been knocked unconscious in an auto accident on the day before election.

"And suppose you regained consciousness only yesterday. . . .

"Who would you think had won the election?

"Roosevelt? Or Landon?

"The answer's obvious. You'd think it was Landon."

The strongest Relief lobby in the U. S. --the Conference of Mayors--had gone into action. Headed by Mayor LaGuardia of New York, who has among his constituents nearly 10% of the 2,500,000 people on the WPA payrolls and who forbade his police to obey the local WPAdministrator's request to oust sit-down strikers from WPA offices, a delegation of mayors had invaded Washington, demanded continuation of Relief at November levels, offered to lobby a new Relief appropriation through Congress as soon as it meets in January, sent an indignant wireless to Franklin Roosevelt at sea.

Observers in Washington believed that President Roosevelt gave orders before leaving the U. S. to reduce Relief costs, to get them down to $100,000,000 a month before asking for more money. When Mr. Hopkins got back to Washington he refused to say whether or not he had heard from the President, but he did say to the press, not once but over & over: "Now I want to make it clear that no one who needs Relief will be dropped. And if anyone is dropped he can get back on again." Mayor LaGuardia winged down to Washington, saw Mr. Hopkins and winged home mollified. The attempt to reduce Relief expenditures had been stopped in its tracks. The slogan of the U. S. as for three years past was still, "No one shall starve."

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