A Rare Instance

CITIES & STATES

Last year reporters for the Indianapolis Star turned over rocks in the State Welfare Department's yard and found some fascinating bugs underneath. On the relief rolls were residents of $160-a-month apartments, drivers of new cars, racetrack habitues, Florida vacationers. Members of the Indiana legislature took one look, then pushed through a bill to open assistance records to public view. They believed that the risk of publicity would scare the chiselers off relief.

Federal Security Administrator Oscar Ewing, a native Hoosier himself, promptly turned off the federal faucet which was pouring $20 million a year into Indiana for assistance. A federal law passed in 1939, he pointed out, made relief rolls secret. Chief reason for the law: the records had been used in several states, notably Ohio, to compile political mailing lists.

Indiana took its case to court, but lost. Then governors of some other states spoke up, demanding that each state have the right to decide whether the rolls should be open to the public. Georgia's Herman Talmadge said that his state could save one-third of its welfare funds.

Indiana's Senator William Jenner finally got a provision in the federal tax increase bill to permit each state to make its own decision. Harry Truman charged that the Jenner amendment, "may well result in unwarranted publicity, and personal indignity and unhappiness for aged people and others receiving public assistance." But Truman signed the bill.

This week Indiana was again entitled to federal assistance funds, and other states-including Georgia, Florida. Alabama, Illinois, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Connecticut and Tennessee-were moving to open their relief rolls. The question of whether such publicity would do more good than harm could be argued interminably, but it was not necessarily a federal question, and the states had asserted their right to answer it. The Jenner amendment was one of the few eddies in the current of political power which for 19 years has flowed steadily in the direction of Washington.

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