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25 Million
It must be confessed that, compared to Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt in the early years of the New Deal appears as a veritable St. George on a white horse galloping with streaming banners to the rescue of the unemployed. When he took office on March 4, 1933, the number of unemployed stood at an all-time high of 17,500,000. The relief system had broken down as disastrously as the banking system – though the front-page headlines went to the sufferings of the bankers rather than of the unemployed. As Governor of New York, Roosevelt had taken public issue with Hoover, insisting that relief was a state responsibility. (Hoover had taken the position that it was immoral for any political subdivision larger than a county to take official notice of unemployment.) The Governor had backed up his word by getting the state legislature to pass the Wicks Bill, which in 1931 set up for New York the first of the state relief organizations. Great things were therefore expected of the new President.
Under White House leadership, Congress passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act, appropriating $500,000,000 to be given as Federal grants-in-aid to the states to help finance their relief programs. The President signed the bill on May 12, 1933. As administrator of the FERA he appointed Harry Hopkins, a professional social worker, who had been head of the New York relief organization.
For all this show of action, actual relief expenditures somehow lagged. By August 21, three months after FERA had been established and almost six months after Roosevelt had taken office, only $139,000,000 had been given out in grants. [8] The fact is that the real interest of the President and his advisers, then as later, was not in relief but in recovery. Their approach has never been based on the needs of the unemployed but rather on what they would call “positive measures to restore prosperity”.
The ragged, hungry masses of the unemployed present a problem which, it has long been evident, bores and irritates the genial master of the White House. This imputes no exceptional heartlessness to the President. He is a humanitarian over the radio – and also, no doubt, in his personal life – but his primary political task is to make capitalism “work”. He knows quite well that unless he does this, the votes of the unemployed will be of no use to him, and that if he does it, he won’t need them. The second proposition he illustrated clearly enough by drastically cutting WPA at the first sign of an upturn in 1936. He has, therefore, preferred to treat unemployment with recovery rather than relief measures. An advantage or a disadvantage of this system – depending on one’s point of view – is that when the recovery measures blow up, as they always do, the unemployed are the chief victims of the explosion. An example is the recent defeat by Congress of the Administration’s lending-spending program. The President now claims that he had suggested the one-third cut in WPA only because the spending program – a “positive recovery measure” – would give jobs to those dropped from WPA But Congress accepted his WPA cut and rejected his spending program, leaving the unemployed holding the bag as usual.
On June 16, 1933, the President signed the bill which really appealed to him and his advisers as a way of meeting the unemployment problem: the National Industrial Recovery Act, significantly described by New Dealers as “essentially an employment measure”. This firstborn of the prolific breed of New Deal white rabbits was divided into NRA and PWA: while private industry was regulating itself back to prosperity under the Blue Eagle, the Public Works Authority was supposed to prime the pump with a $3,300,000,000 public works program. The theory was that for every job on PWA, two jobs would be created in the industries supplying its materials. The President hopefully described PWA as “a bridge over which men may pass from relief to normal employment”.
But the Blue Eagle laid an egg and the PWA bridge never reached the other side of the abyss. As the fifth winter of the depression approached, it became clear that a more direct attack on unemployment was necessary. Some left-wing advisers persuaded the President that a big work relief program, giving millions of men quick jobs on projects requiring little expenditure for materials, would turn the trick which PWA had flubbed. They were aided by the most renowned advocate of this particular panacea for capitalist ills, the English economist, J.M. Keynes, who visited the White House and made a deep impression on Roosevelt. On November 8, 1933, the President set aside $400,000,000 of PWA funds to be used by a new agency, the Civil Works Administration, which would be run by Hopkins and his FERA organization.
The CWA was much the most generous and humane of all New Deal relief programs. (It is significant that it was sold to the President as a recovery rather than a relief measure.) By the middle of January, 1934, 4,000,000 men were working on CWA projects throughout the country. Half were drawn from FERA-financed state work relief rolls, the other half were from the ranks of the unemployed not on relief. It was the first and last time that a Federal work program provided jobs for workers without requiring them first to pauperize themselves in order to get on local relief rolls. Prevailing wages were paid for a full-time working week, not the “security wage” that came in later with WPA Finally, FERA continued to help the states provide for the millions who were unemployable or who could not be accommodated on CWA.
During these winter months of 1933–1934, relief was being given to 27,750,000 men, women and children, or over one-fifth the population. This was an all-time high. It was reached then not because the need was greatest – it had been greater a year earlier and would be greater in the winter of 1937–1938 – but because for a few months the New Deal had a program which came somewhere near providing for all the unemployed who needed relief. This modest standard was never again achieved.
Social workers and relief administrators throughout the country hailed CWA as a great step forward. “I shall never forget,” writes one, “the tremendous enthusiasm with which it was greeted and the inspiring meeting held in Washington on November 15, 1933, when it was launched.” [9] President Roosevelt addressed the gathering and in moving terms described CWA as aimed especially at all who were “too proud to go and ask for relief”. As a recovery measure, however, CWA soon proved much too expensive. Worse yet. “many employers objected that the wages paid by the Government were attracting men from private industry”. [10] On February 28, 1934, therefore, three months after the “inspiring meeting”, the President announced that CWA was to be liquidated as quickly as possible. Evidently the Presidential sympathy for those “too proud to ask for relief” had evaporated. In the future, indeed, millions who asked for relief with no pride at all were to find it impossible to get.
Within a week 52,000 letters and 7,000 telegrams inundated the White (House and FERA headquarters protesting the destruction of CWA. Unemployed demonstrations took place all over the country. For months an average of one delegation a week called on Harry Hopkins to ask for the restoration of CWA. [11] Nor was Hopkins in any doubt as to what his fellow social workers thought about this move. William Hodson, now relief commissioner for New York City, expressed himself thus:
I say it was a tragedy when the Federal Government abandoned the CWA program on March 31, 1934. It is true that the President had announced the program as temporary in nature; nevertheless the people of the country believed that civil works would be carried on and tapered off gradually as the employment index rose and people could leave civil works employment for jobs in regular industry. This was not to be and the sudden transition from work and wages without a needs test, to work relief on the basis of destitution was a bitter shock to the unemployed. [12]
C.W. Bookman, executive secretary of the Cincinnati Community Chest, had this to say:
Probably the most serious defect of the CWA was the hope it built up in the hearts of millions of unemployed, and then dashed to earth, that at last a job at a reasonable wage was to be provided for them by their government until such time as industry could reemploy them ... It was a serious thing to destroy the confidence and break down the morale of ten to twelve million people who, through no fault of their own, had endured four years of privation and want. [13]
Serious or not, the Administration did it. Up to this point, social workers had endorsed the New Deal in relief with whole-hearted and rather naive enthusiasm. The junking of CWA was a terrible shock to them. More shocks were to follow. The attitude of the National Conference of Social Work and the American Association of Social Workers became increasingly disillusioned, critical, even hostile as the New Deal relief policies came to have an ever more Hooverian coloration. Politically unsophisticated, they did not understand what speedily became crystal clear to the President: that the unemployed were a political liability rather than an asset. Once this great truth had dawned on the Administration, it acted with characteristic decision. CWA was liquidated with brutal rapidity. In February, 3,216,000 workers were on its rolls. In April, there were 38,000 left. The beanstalk had grown up overnight and was chopped down at one stroke.
Those CWA workers who could qualify as paupers went back to state and local relief, financed mostly by FERA The rest had to wait until they had exhausted all their resources before they were allowed the privilege of home relief. After the rosy dream of CWA, this was bad enough. But something much worse was coming.
In his annual message to Congress of January 4, 1935, President Roosevelt outlined a new relief policy. When the Federal government had taken over the major responsibility for relief in 1933, the move had been universally popular. The breakdown of local relief had gone so far that many conservatives feared actual revolution. The states and communities welcomed Federal funds as, in many cases, the only way to escape bankruptcy. But as conditions improved, the right wing demanded more and more insistently that the Federal credit be no longer used to support the unemployed. What had been a universally popular program in 1933, two years latter had become a sore spot, a vulnerable point in New Deal policies. And relief, unlike the Neutrality Act or the Supreme Court reorganization, is not the kind of an issue on which the White House will put up a fight.
It was reported that the President’s new program “had been laid down at a conference in December 1934 of the National Industrial Conference Board and the National Association of Manufacturers, representing business and banking leadership in the United States. These leaders had demanded an end to relief from the Federal Treasury and that where work was provided it should be paid for at less than the normal rate of wages in order that there might be no incentive to remain in public work rather than to seek private employment”. [14] On the relief issue, as on so many others, big business joined hands with the Congressional spokesmen for the backward South and with the forces of rural and small-town conservatism throughout the nation. (Any one who follows the Gallup and Fortune polls must be struck with the similarity of political sentiment shown by the wealthy and the farmers.) Pressure of this sort was more than a reformist Administration could resist, especially since no comparable pressure was ever exerted from the left on the relief issue. The keynote of the President’s 1935 message, and of all subsequent New Deal relief policy, was his blunt statement: “The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.”
The President’s new program sounded reasonable enough. He put the total number of heads-of-families on relief at 5,000,000. Of these, he estimated that 1,500,000 were “unemployable” because of age or other disabilities. These he proposed to turn over to the state and local governments, without any aid from the Federal Treasury. The remaining 3,500,000 “employables” were to be given jobs on a gigantic new $4,000,000,000 Federal work relief program, which began to take shape in the spring of 1935 as the WPA (Workers Progress Administration). Thus the Federal Government got out of relief, as demanded by business, and provided jobs instead of the dole, as demanded by the unemployed. But the 3,500,000 jobs in practise turned out to be an illusion. That figure was approached only twice in the history of WPA, and the average in its four years of operation has been closer to 2,000,000. The White House has consistently tried to reduce the WPA rolls, purging hundreds of thousands of WPA workers every time the slightest business upturn gave an excuse. The one-third slash now being made in the rolls at the request of the President, on the grounds of a microscopic rise in the business index, is merely the latest of a long series.
But even had WPA provided the 3,500,000 jobs promised by the President, it would still have been grossly inadequate. At the time the program was first announced in 1935 there were 12,000,000 employable workers out of a job, and almost 7,000,000 households on the relief rolls. Thus the effect of the new program was to formally disavow Federal responsibility for the great majority of the unemployed, and to throw these millions back onto the streets and communities for support. Up to 1935, three-fourths of the nation’s relief bill had been paid by the Federal Treasury, through FERA’s grants-in-aid to the states. From now on, the unemployed were divided into a minority on WPA and a great majority, getting on the average about $25 a month per family to live on as against the $50 average WPA pay. From now on, WPA came to be regarded as simply a big employer, like the US Steel Corp., which hired and fired workers as the fluctuations of business conditions – in this case, the political interests of the New Deal – dictated. From now on, the communities struggled to keep the bulk of the unemployed alive, and since their financial resources were inadequate, the result was a nation-wide drop in relief standards and a return in large areas to the misery and chaos of Hooverian days.
There were also several minor jokers in the new program, whose rich humor the unemployed slowly came to appreciate.
1. One of the scandals of Hooverism had been its refusal of all help to the masses of men and boys whom the depression set wandering about the country, looking for work. The New Deal at once accepted responsibility for transient relief – obviously a job that could be done only by the Federal government – and put into effect an intelligent and humane program. This was now tossed out the window.
“In September, 1935, the order was issued to the states to close intake at the transient treatment centers and camps and to liquidate the entire program as of November first. The transient, unsettled person was to become the ‘forgotten man’ of the New Deal, as he had been of the old ... The stream of transient flow was driven underground. We had returned to the chaos of March, 1933.” [15]
The sufferings of the people described in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath are a dramatic illustration of what has happened to the transients.
2. There was no provision for increasing WPA pay to provide for big families – though it was supposed to be a “security wage”. It was calculated that workers with more than three dependents were better off under home relief, which allowed extra money for more children, than under WPA There were many cases of real suffering in large families whose head had been forced to take a WPA job, under pain of losing relief altogether.
“The transfer from work relief to WPA,” writes a social worker, “means the complete abandonment of the family wage on relief operations, which was one of the most enlightened procedures developed under FERA” [16]
It is an indication of the remoteness of the WPA administration from the living needs of the unemployed that this injustice, neither difficult nor expensive to rectify, has remained unchanged down to the present.
3. The best joke of all, however, one so good the President repeated it this spring, was what WPA did – or rather, attempted to do – about wage rates. This deserves a section to itself.
The first event in the life of the newborn WPA was a strike which offers some instructive parallels and contrasts to the 1939 WPA strike. CWA had given full-time work at prevailing wage rates. Its successor, the Emergency Work Relief program of FERA, had kept the prevailing wage principle, but had cut down the hours of the highly paid workers so that they were able to earn only a “security wage”. That is to say, skilled workers were paid at union rates, but were given only a third or a half as many hours work per month as the unskilled workers. Business had long been pressing for the abandonment of the prevailing wage principle on relief jobs.
In his WPA message, the President said:
“Compensation ... should be in the form of security payments which should be larger than the amount now received as a relief dole but at the same time not so large as to encourage the rejection of opportunities for private employment.”
The unions tried to get Congress to attach to the WPA bill the McCarran amendment, stipulating that prevailing wages were to be paid. The New Deal forces killed this amendment, but permitted a “compromise”: the whole question of wage rates was to be left up to the President.
Just what this compromise was worth and just how loyal a friend of labor was the great humanitarian in the White House – these matters became clear as the WPA program was launched that summer. From the White House came the categorical order: security wages, without reference to prevailing rates of pay, were to be paid on all WPA projects. In New York City, where the first attempt was made to get WPA into operation, this meant that the wages of common labor rose from $50 to $55 a month, while hours of work rose from 96 to 120 a month. Skilled workers were even worse off: their wages rose 50% (from $61 to $93.50), their hours increased 130% (from 48 to 120).
The first Emergency Work Relief projects were transferred to WPA in New York City on August 5, 1935. Before their unions had taken formal action, bricklayers, ironworkers, plasterers, plumbers, and other skilled workers began walking out on the job. General Hugh Johnson, WPA administrator for New York, flew down to Atlantic City to plead with the AFL leadership to call off the strike. (It is interesting to note how much more seriously the New Deal took this strike than the 1939 strike: Johnson appealed frantically to the leaders and the rank and file, in person and on the radio; whereas his successor, Colonel Somervell, didn’t trouble to make more than routine press releases throughout the strike.) The strike continued to grow. On August 9, the Central Trades and Labor Council, after a formal strike vote, made it official.
The backbone of resistance to the strike was clearly located in the White House. Johnson was known to have been against the new wage policy. “Labor doesn’t like it and I don’t like it,” he said, adding correctly: “It’s going to give me a lot of headaches.” [17] He was badly heckled by the Trades Council when he appeared before it with a last-minute plea hot to vote the strike.
“The union delegates challenged his statements, his logic and arguments. They cited things he had said while NRA administrator in support of the prevailing wage rate, and asked why he had changed his mind.” [18]
Since he hadn’t changed his mind, the General found such questions hard to answer. Mayor LaGuardia, also, was in an obviously uncomfortable position.
“I can’t see how there should be a strike on relief jobs,” he said on August 7. “But after all, we’re living in a free country. You can’t make any one work if he doesn’t want to work.” [19]
But there was never any question as to the attitude of the President. On August 10 he came out publicly against the strike, with the usual You-Can’t-Strike-Against-the-Government line. He took swift steps to implement his words: WPA administrators were authorized to recruit scabs through the National Re-Employment Service; and an executive order forbade the use of Federal funds for home relief to WPA strikers. [20] Since from half to three-quarters of every community’s relief funds came from FERA, and since no separate accounting was practical, this meant that it was almost impossible to pay relief to strikers. Even so, it was not until August 15, after two weeks of evasion and indecision, that LaGuardia dared to announce that strikers would not receive city relief. (In 1939, he made this announcement on the first day of the strike.)
The course of the strike was a curious one. On August 13 the papers jubilantly announced its complete collapse.
“Among the membership of the striking unions,” commented the NY Times, “the ‘work-or-starve’ order of President Roosevelt was described as having broken the strike spirit before it spread widely.”
For a month, the strike dropped almost completely out of the press. In spite of the efforts of the then militant Workers Alliance to arouse the unskilled workers, the strike never approached a mass movement. The unions stuck to it persistently, however, and on September 18, Johnson, admitting he had not been able to get the program up to capacity, hinted at a concession on the wage principle. The Administration had not even tried to launch WPA projects on any large scale in the rest of the country. Two days later, Hopkins, after negotiations with President Meany of the New York Federation of Labor, authorized state administrators to adjust wages – by cutting hours per month – as seemed best to them. If this was not, as the NY Times labelled it in an indignant editorial, “a complete capitulation to the demands of union leaders”, it meant at least that the status quo as of before WPA had been restored. WPA, like FERA, would pay union wages wherever the unions were strong.
In 1936 the AFL was able to get Congress to write into the WPA bill a definite commitment to the prevailing wage principle. Labor’s friend in the White House, however, bided his time patiently. This spring the President took advantage of the reactionary temper of Congress to have his man, Colonel Harrington, urge the Woodrum Committee that prevailing wages be junked. It is still too early to say definitely whether the Administration has finally won its long fight. It has on its side this time two great advantages: the more reactionary political climate in 1939 than in 1935; and the fact that it is much harder to strike successfully against a law passed by Congress than against a mere administrative ruling, such as was overturned by the 1935 strike.
Delayed by the strike, the WPA program went ahead slowly. It was not until the end of 1935 that the last of the FERA grants were made, and the Federal government was out of “this business of relief”. In the process of shifting from FERA to WPA, the New Deal did some characteristic chiselling at the expense of the unemployed, by dismantling the old program faster than the new one was built up. “The fine social consciousness which characterized the early days of the New Deal,” lamented the Nation in its most pathetic style, “appears to have faded.” [21] The “fading” brought a more vigorous reaction from the unemployed of Kansas City, who stormed the Wyandotte County court house in August to protest a cut of two-thirds in relief rates.
“The protest,” stated the NY Times, “followed a curtailment in relief funds made necessary by a cut in Federal work relief funds for the county from $225,000 to $80,000 a month, pending start of the WPA program.” (Italics mine.)
The chief effect of the withdrawal of FERA funds – and this was permanent and not temporary – was a return to the chaos, the glaring inequities, and the subhuman relief standards of Hooverian times. The effect on the unemployed, in some ways, was even worse, since a full six years of depression by now had drained dry their last financial resources. But even here the New Deal tried to coin some political capital, by contrasting the declining local relief standards with the relatively high wages paid on WPA! Thus Aubrey Williams, the man whom the sob-sisters of the liberal press talk about in Lincolnesque terms, said proudly:
“By September of this year, the average relief payment had already receded to $25.90 and in some states had sunk to $4.50 a month. Under the work program, on the other hand, the wage payment approximates $50 a month. Thus we have achieved through a work program what two and a half years of a relief program could not accomplish.” [22]
And this was the spokesman for the extreme left wing of the New Deal relief apparatus!
At the end of the year, the American Association of Social Workers conducted, through its chapters throughout the nation, a survey of relief conditions: It reported that the new relief set-up had resulted in “low-grade pauper treatment over wide areas”. Conditions among the millions who couldn’t get onto WPA were worse than they had been at any time since the beginning of the New Deal, and were actually worse than they had been in the last months of the Hoover administration. [23] Another report pointed out that WPA had fallen short by 500,000 of the 3,500,000 jobs promised a year ago by the President. [24]
The White House answered these criticisms by suggesting to the new Congress that in the fiscal year 1936–1937 WPA could get along on an appropriation of $1,500,000,000, which was $500,000,000 less than would have been needed even to continue it on the low level it reached in 1935. In the first six months of 1936, one out of every five WPA workers was cut off the rolls. This was the first of those recurrent mass purges which have been the most prominent feature of WPA policy. To quote an article in the Saturday Evening Post, of all places:
“The purges are purely arbitrary. Mr. Hopkins orders one when he has an idea the job market will stand it, and if Mr. Hopkins’ idea should ever be wrong, God alone would have to help the reliefers cut off the rolls.” [25]
Another purge took place in the fall. “Mr. Roosevelt is personally responsible for the present attempt to cut 150,000 workers off from the WPA rolls,” wrote the New Republic’s Washington correspondent.
“All sources agree that, during the campaign, he became greatly disturbed over WPA spending. As soon as the votes of the WPA voters were safely counted, he is supposed to have given the order for dismissals.” [26]
In his Baltimore speech of April 29, 1936, the President had for the first time publicly admitted that unemployment looked like a permanent problem. And yet his first post-election speech was an appeal for contributions to the Community Chest drive, expressing the hope that, as prosperity returned, relief would become once more a matter for local charity. The parallel with Hoover was becoming embarrassing.
On November 16, Farley indiscreetly revealed what was in the back of “The Boss’s” mind when he told reporters that WPA was to be liquidated and relief shifted back entirely to the states and communities. By December the WPA rolls had been so deeply cut, with such an alarming rise in local relief rolls as a consequence, that the Conference of American Mayors cabled a desperate appeal to the President, off on a “goodwill” junket tour of South America. [27] Unless the firings were stopped, they threatened to appeal directly to Congress. But the firings went on.
This is a good place for a few words on just what happens to those who are dropped from WPA in these purges, the greatest of which is taking place at this very moment. In asking for a smaller WPA appropriation in 1936, the President used for the first time his by now routine excuse: business is improving, and so those purged will get jobs in private industry. Year after year, this argument has been advanced by the White House. Year after year, it has turned out to be, to put it politely, fallacious. There may be some dispute as to the precise nature of the technological and economic reasons for this – next month we will examine them. But there is little question as to what becomes of those cut off the rolls. A little of the evidence may be cited.
1936: A WPA survey of sample cases “closed for administrative reasons” found that less than 10% of the families averaged three meals a day. Most of them had “somewhat less than two meals a day”, many had only one.
“Fresh meat, eggs, butter, cheese and milk had practically disappeared from their diets ... Most of them were destitute, lacking practically everything required for health and social efficiency. Some lived on food given by friends. Others begged scraps from stores.” [28]
1937: That summer, before the fall slump, 335,000 workers were purged from WPA In New York City 23,700 out of 25,000 purgees applied at once for home relief, and 14,600 were at once placed on the rolls. In Illinois the state relief commission reported an increase of 12,213 cases whereas the normal seasonal trend called for a decline of up to 14,000 cases. In Indianapolis 60% of those laid off applied at once for home relief, in Cleveland and Columbus 75%. A survey made by the NY Post after this purge showed that 1.5% of those dropped had gotten full-time jobs, 10% had part-time jobs, 54% were on home relief, and the rest existing God knows how. [29]
1938: In the fall of 1938, after another purge, the WPA made a study of what had become of those dismissed in five representative cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, New Bedford and San Francisco. The New Republic summarized the findings:
“The average WPA wage over the whole country is $55 a month, which gives no leeway for savings. Thirty days after being dismissed, one-fifth have no income whatever. A fifth are living on friends and relatives, and another fifth are dependent mainly on direct relief. Two-fifths are earning on the average $25 per month from work in private industry, almost entirely, of course, part-time and odd jobs. Three months later the proportion on direct relief has risen to about one-half, and the proportion that has applied is much larger.
“In many parts of the country, direct relief is not available at all. Numerous states refuse relief to any one who is ‘employable’, whether he can get a job or not. A former WPA worker is considered an employable. But even those places which help a dismissed WPA man have only limited funds. (When many are discharged at once – and WPA dismissals are nearly always on that scale – funds run out and a crisis occurs. Then you have conditions like those seen in Chicago recently, where nobody got more than15 per cent of what he needed for clothing, shelter, medicine, etc.” [30]
Early in 1937, as the business index continued to rise, the President had Harry Hopkins announce a further cut of 600,000 by the end of June. This time protests came not only from the Workers Alliance and the Mayors’ Conference, but also from a hastily formed committee of the governors of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, who journeyed in a body to the White House to urge that no further cuts be made. The President told them he would give “serious and sympathetic” consideration to their plea.
This last proposal of the great humanitarian in the White House was too much even for the faithful Harry Hopkins to stomach. He obediently announced that 600,000 were to be dropped, but he also testified frankly before a Congressional committee that it would be impossible to cut that many without causing “widespread suffering”. He also made a prophecy which the business boomlet of that very summer was to verify down to the last iota:
“Carefully prepared estimates show that unemployment will approximate 6,500,000 to 7,500,000 in 1937, even with a return to 1929 levels of production. This figure can be taken as a minimum.” [31]
Despite all protests from mayors, governors and his own WPA administrator, the President insisted on carrying out the cut, as may be seen by reference to Chart II. In the spring of 1937, Grace Abbott devoted the presidential address at the National Conference of Social Work to a bitter attack on New Deal relief policy. “The Federal government’s withdrawal from the home assistance program led to the chaos in which we now find ourselves. The whole relief program has collapsed in many areas.” Indignantly she described “the homes without food and without fuel in bitter weather, the children too hungry to go to school, whole families without warm clothing and bedding, the people without provision for medical care, and the evictions that have gone on so relentlessly”. She charged there were “people actually living on nothing but surplus commodities in whole areas”. [32] (On this last, see under Orange Stamps, Blue Stamps on page 282.)
Such protests fell on ears even deafer than usual. Business was still on the upgrade, the 1936–1937 boomlet was approaching its climax, and the White House was making political hay while the sun shone by drastically cutting down on all Government expenditures, especially WPA By the fall of 1937, WPA had been reduced to its all-time low. That fall, business started on a nose dive, caused chiefly by the withdrawal of public spending, which for speed and steepness of decline was unprecedented in oar history. The downward curve of WPA collided disastrously with a sharp upward curve of unemployment – see Chart I. Between September 1937 and January 1938 non-agricultural employment dropped from 35,000,000 to 32,200,000. The White House met the crisis in the best Hooverian tradition. For months the WPA rolls were held down to the low figure they had reached just before the crash. The Federal Government, indeed, refused to recognize officially the existence of the decline, except vaguely as “a temporary recession”. Two months after it began, the President, speaking on the radio for the annual Community Chest drive, declared that “the return of prosperity” meant that the Federal Government “will more and more narrow the circle of its relief activities”. Once more he washed his hands of responsibility for the unemployed:
“Although Federal relief activities will have to be curtailed, there must needs be no abatement of state, local and individual relief work. Indeed, local and private activities must be increased.” [33]
By the end of the year, unemployment had grown so serious that the Administration was forced to increase the WPA rolls to 1,950,000 – this figure being 500,000 under the 1936–1937 average, although the need was at least twice as great this winter. On February 10, the President reluctantly asked for a $250,000,000 deficiency appropriation. The CIO had wanted $1,000,000,000 appropriated, the Mayors’ Conference, $400,000,000. “On both sides of the Capitol, the President’s letter was referred to as a ‘conservative’ request.” [34] Between September 1937 and May 1938, 3,300,000 non-agricultural workers lost their jobs; WPA rolls expanded in that period by only 1,300,000, and it took several months of deepening depression to get this modest expansion even started. What this meant in human terms was revealed by a nation-wide survey made by the American Association of Social Workers that winter:
Relief allowances, already below levels necessary to maintain life and health, have been further pared; relief has been made hard to get and difficult to endure ... Relief offices have been closed periodically; new applicants are being refused Family groups which include a so-called employable denied any relief in many sections. Malnutrition common among relief families throughout the country. Children kept from school because of lack of clothing ... Wholesale evictions ... In Chicago an analysis of the clothing needs of 100 men on relief showed 72 without overcoats, 7 without any kind of a jacket, 40 with bad shoes, and 10 without underwear of any kind.” [35]
As it had year after year, the Association recommended that Federal funds be granted to the states for relief, and, also as he had year after year, the President paid no attention to this recommendation.
The preceding fall, before the “recession” had gone very far, the President was reported to have decided to ask for a total WPA appropriation of $1,000,000,000 for 1938–1939. But by the spring of 1938 even the White House didn’t dare to oppose the demand from all quarters for a bigger WPA appropriation. There was a slight improvement in business that summer and fall. At once, the old policy of drastic reduction of WPA was put into force. According to one survey: “From November 1938 to January 1939, WPA wages declined sharply – by nearly 10% in two months – while general relief rose even more sharply – by 19%. Between November and January, 310,000 persons throughout the United States had resigned or were laid off from WPA jobs and were not replaced; during that same period the general relief rolls had increased by more than 241,000 cases. In January 1939, although the total expenditure for relief was less than in November, 1938 – because of shrinkage of WPA expenditures – there were still nearly 23,000,000 persons on relief in more than 7,000,000 families.” [36]
8. M Stevenson & L.W. Brown: Unemployment Relief Legislation, Federal and State, 1933 (Public Administration Service pub. no. 34, Chicago, 1934).
9. This Business of Relief, Proceedings of the American Assn. of Social Workers, Washington, D.C., Feb. 14–16, 1936 (AASW, New York City, 1936).
10. This Question of Relief (Public Affairs Pamphlet, No. 8, 1936).
11. On the Dole: 17,000,000 (Fortune, October 1934).
12. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Kansas City, May 20–26, 1934.
14. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Montreal, June 9–15, 1935.
15. After Five Years: The Unsolved Problem of the Transient Unemployed, 1932–1937 (Comm. on Care of the Transient & Homeless, New York, May 1937).
16. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Atlantic City, May 18–23, 1936.
17. John D. Millett: The Works Progress Administration in New York City (Committee on Public Administration, Social Science Research Council, Chicago, 1938).
18. NY Times, Aug. 9, 1935.
19. NY Times, Aug. 7. 1935.
20. Helen Seymour: When Clients Organize (Am. Public Welfare Assn., Chicago. 1937).
21. Nation, Oct. 23, 1935.
23. New Republic, Feb. 26, 1936.
25. Our Biggest Business – Relief, by Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge (Saturday Evening Post, April 3, 1937).
26. New Republic, Dec. 23, 1936.
27. NY Times, Dec. 3, 1936.
28. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Indianapolis, May 23–29, 1937.
29. Nation, Sept. 5 1937
30. New Republic, Oct. 19, 1938.
33. NY Times, Oct. 18, 1937.
34. NY Times, Feb. 10, 1938.
35. NY Times, March 21, 1938.
36. Report on Relief Conditions by Am. Assn. Social Workers (Quoted in Labor Notes for July 1939).
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