Big Push

Slim, rich, sharp-nosed Nathan Straus, whose late Cousin Jesse Isidor was Ambassador to France, and whose other cousins Percy and Jack run the big R. H. Macy department store in Manhattan, last week proclaimed proudly to the Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia :

"For more than a century the slums of America have each year grown in size. In 1939, they have begun to shrink."

Mr. Straus knew this because for nearly two years he has run United States Housing Authority, with $800,000,000 to lend to local authorities for slum clearance, more millions to grant in outright rent subsidy gifts. On July 4 he celebrated with the formal opening of USHA's first four completed projects: "Rosewood" in Austin, Tex.; "Brentwood Park" in Jacksonville, Fla.; "Lakeview" in Buffalo, N. Y.; "Red Hook" in Brooklyn. He had 41 other projects under way. By year's end he hoped to have 200 going. With his $800,000,000 authority he would have provided new, airy, sunny, low-rent housing for more than 160,000 slum families.

Part of the object of Administrator Straus's speech was to push a bill (already passed by the Senate) to increase his loan fund by another $800,000,000, his grant-in-aid money by $45,000,000 more per year. If he could get that, Nathan Straus could be on his way to re-housing 400,000 families.

Nathan Straus's job is sociological. Franklin Roosevelt's immediate reason for expanding it is economic. Giving USHA another $800,000,000 is a big feature of the Great White Rabbit of 1939 whereby business recovery is to be accelerated in time for the 1940 election. In his speech, Mr. Straus stressed that all USHA work goes to private contractors. It is thus at the mercy of whatever restrictive influences may be exerted on Housing by makers and distributors of materials, by building contractors, by building trades unions. It was to clear the road for a big industrial push behind Housing that the Temporary National Economic ("Monopoly") Committee held hearings all last fortnight to search for such restrictive influences.

Private capitalists such as President Henry Bruere of Bowery Savings Bank (Manhattan) and Board Chairman Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. stepped before the committee to suggest, politely, that the Government has gone far enough with low-cost Housing in the rental field, since that is the field (as distinct from the home-owning field) into which large private capital seeking profit might go if encouraged.

But private capital, say the New Dealers, will stand to benefit if behind the whole Housing push is put another force, which Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced last fortnight, amplified last week. This force is to be "the greatest trust-busting drive ever attempted." Simultaneously on a score of fronts, the Department of Justice will presently crack down on all manner of building-restrainers.

In announcing this drive, Mr. Arnold devoted only a short, gentle paragraph to labor unions. But last week, with the A. F. of L.'s building trades strikes on WPA full blown throughout the land, Attorney General Murphy declared: "We will expose racketeering and drive it to cover by prosecution."

To make prosecution of all restraint combinations simpler and swifter, the Monopoly Committee last week recommended that the antitrust laws be amended to provide civil penalties (fines) as well as criminal for antitrust violations. It also called for revision of the patent laws to: 1) stimulate private initiative, 2) prohibit the use of patents to hamper trade.

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