Hot Pan

"This exhibition shows the wealth created by the skill and artistry of America's unemployed."

So read an inscription on a big U-shaped building at the World's Fair which, still unfinished last week, was a focus of embarrassment for the Works Progress Administration, whose show at the Fair it is. Representative Woodrum's committee to investigate WPA before voting its 1940 money (TIME, April 20, et seq.), sent to New York City two Treasury engineers to look into the costs and efficiency of WPA projects compared to private projects. The Treasury's men made clear that WPA's monument to itself is a monument also to expense.

WPA originally told Congress the building would cost $250.000. So far, after several changes of plan, it has cost $544,000. Per cubic foot it cost 43 1/2-c-, compared to 20-c- per cubic foot for the nearby Federal Building. Of 1,049 workers on the project's pay roll, only 17.7% were Reliefers; the balance was high-paid labor.

The Treasury men found, after examining other projects in WPA's New York City area, that WPA costs were, as a rule, two and one-half times private costs. To all of this, New York City's WPAdministrator, Lieut. Colonel Brehon Burke Somervell, D.S.C., a 47-year-old West Pointer from Arkansas, replied: "Everybody in town knows that the WPA is doing a pretty good job now."

He contended that WPA work was 75%-80% as efficient as private; the Treasury men had examined only a few of his 10.000 projects, had picked unfair examples. The building at the Fair, he said, was expensive and employed a lot of non-Relief labor because it had to be rushed.

Meanwhile in Washington, the Woodrum committee went marching on through the WTA jungle of fact and rumor.

>The national director of the Writers' Project was accused by one of his erstwhile supervisors of inspiring a sit-down strike in which some 200 literary WPA-sters seized and held the writers' headquarters in Manhattan in 1937.

> As for the Theatre Project, it had spent $1,468,365 producing 27 plays, many of them flops. Congressman Taber of New York called "putrid" a bit in Sing For Your Supper where an old man appears and sings, "I don't wanna be intellectual. I wanna be sexual."

>The entire committee goggled at a book compiled by the Arts Project, a catalogue of female models available to its workers. It contained page after page of women's photographs. Negroes and Whites, most of them nudes.

Colonel Francis Clark ("Pink") Harrington. WPA's head man, well knew that the Woodrum committee's inquiry was the hottest pan WPA has yet been on, that, in the Senate, Jimmy Byrnes was quietly preparing to amend the Relief setup so as to require States and localities to contribute one-third of the cost. Awaiting his turn to testify before the Woodrum committee. Colonel Harrington spent a busy week getting 200.000 cut off his rolls to bring them down to 2,600.000. He knew this could not be done without local disturbances. Sure enough, in Flint. Mich., 750 families cut off relief established a "death watch'' camp in a public park, threatened to march on Flint's food warehouses.

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