New Targets

If Congressional critics of WPA needed a shining target to shoot at in the coming session, Aubrey Williams, the gaunt, zealous, wavy-haired, hollow-eyed social worker who is Harry Hopkins' Deputy Administrator, last week supplied one. Mr. Williams makes speeches extemporaneously or from rough notes. He is the man who last summer blurted at the Workers' Alliance to "keep your friends in power" in the elections. Last week, addressing the Southern Conference for Human Welfare at Birmingham, Ala. (see p. 13), where he used to work in a store, Deputy Williams was heard to say: "I am not sure that class warfare is not all right."

When this fighting phrase was flashed across the land, Mr. Williams expostulated that by "class warfare" he means such accomplished facts as collective bargaining, "the clash of employe and employer, the clash of one industrial group against another. . . . There are other forms than class warfare of solving these problems, but realistically, it may not be possible to avoid it."

Loose-tongued Mr. Williams' chief was also on the defensive in the newspapers last week. To the New York Times Harry Hopkins wrote a letter denying that he ever said, as reported by Timesman Arthur Krock and others: "We will spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect" (TIME, Nov. 21). Timesman Krock replied: "Among those who heard it is a most reputable citizen of New York and, in lighter hours, a playmate of Mr. Hopkins. They were at the Empire [City] race track in Yonkers at the time. . . . Had I not verified it and been assured that it was said seriously, I should not have reprinted the remark. I am sorry Mr. Hopkins is embarrassed by the publication, and I can well understand that it may cause special difficulties with the Senate if he is nominated to the Cabinet. But, since I know the informant to be accurate, and since his recreational associations with Mr. Hopkins are very close, I can only conclude that Mr. Hopkins has forgotten the incident, though he should easily recognize the consistency of the remark."

Anyone who challenges the accuracy of the Times's Krock, who last spring won a Pulitzer Prize for an interview with Franklin Roosevelt, has indeed made a challenge, but Mr. Hopkins wrote again to the Times, again disowning the quotation. This time Mr. Krock replied: "I saw him [Mr. Hopkins] on ... the very day of the publication to which he now so violently objects, and he said nothing about it at all. The friend who quoted Mr. Hopkins as substantially repeated is of excellent repute and not at all hard of hearing. ... I learned his identity in confidence.* . . ."

*Hopkins' playmates include: Herbert Bayard Swope, Morton Schwartz, Max Gordon, Harold E. Talbott.

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