$2 to All

In the District of Columbia a Civil Works Administration supervisor was arrested last week for collecting bribes from workers seeking advancement. In Los Angeles two women were arrested for conspiracy to defraud the Government in CWA work and a grand jury was just warming up for a series of indictments. In Pennsylvania a CWA engineer was dismissed for having taken a commission on a CWA job. The Oregon department of the American Legion passed resolutions complaining that people not in need were getting CWA jobs, that CWA was full of favoritism and inefficiency. In Harvey, outskirt of Chicago, six employed politicians were booted off a CWA sewer job. In the District of Columbia, skilled workers in the Navy Yard complained that their wage--88-c- an hour, less 15%--was under the $1.10 CWA rate. In West

Virginia the Legislature commanded an investigation of CWA projects.

Almost overnight CWA graft had festered up to make ugly headlines and set honest heads to shaking. President Roosevelt was getting 300 letters a day complaining about padded payrolls, false expense accounts, job-selling and political preference in CWA projects. Harry Lloyd Hopkins, young New York social worker whom the President made CWA head to put 4,000,000 men to work over the winter, had complaints from every State in the union except Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Admitting that he was "tremendously disconcerted" by the charges of graft against his organization, Mr. Hopkins declared: "We'll do our own housecleaning. Our legal department tells me all this is nothing more than was bound to happen. But I never anticipated anything of the kind. I suppose I'm naive and unsophisticated but that's the truth and I feel very badly about it. . . . The thing gets too big for you to keep in touch with all your people and those things happen."

The Public Works Administration whose slowness in providing jobs caused the CWA to be set up as a temporary measure, took the job of investigating CWA complaints. Fifteen CWA and three PWA graft cases* were handed over to the Attorney General for investigation. Mr. Hopkins began sending out Army engineers to check up on CWA work. When he appointed one for Cook County, Ill. (Chicago), the entire Illinois CWA Commission promptly resigned.

Yet the wave of complaints against the way CWA was run was only a mild ripple compared to the comber of complaints against the plan to stop running CWA altogether. Since Nov. 25 Mr. Hopkins has put 4,000,000 men on his payroll, paid them with checks on the U. S. Treasury and used up most of $400,000,000 allotted to him. This form of direct relief was originally planned to last only until Feb. 15 when PWA projects and business recovery were scheduled to provide fresh jobs. Not only pick & shovel men laying sidewalks, building wharves, working on public parks, chasing starlings (see p. 14) but skilled workers repairing public buildings, women as social workers and dishwashers, actors doing plays for schoolchildren, contract bridge experts teaching the U. S. their game, chemists working at Johns Hopkins to eliminate carbon monoxide fumes from automobiles, and artists decorating public buildings would on that date lose their places on the Federal payroll.

Fortnight ago when funds began to run low and CWA began to taper off its work, a veritable storm of protest arose. Thousands of letters a day arrived at Mr. Hopkin's office protesting the ending of CWA.

Congressmen were swamped with red-hot pleas. Governors wailed to the President that their States would never be able to carry the unemployment load if the Federal Government stepped out from under.

Two facts became apparent: 1) the CWA which has in two months handed out about $2 per capita for every inhabitant of the U. S. has become the most popular part of the New Deal; 2) like the British dole this form of relief was going to be far harder to stop than to start. Mr. Hop kins himself is in favor of preserving CWA, or something like it, as a permanent measure for unemployment relief, a substitute for unemployment insurance. Other CWA Administrators predict that "it is going to last longer than most people imagine." Socialist Norman Thomas cried out that $1,000,000,000 was the least amount needed for carrying CWA forward.

Such views did not harmonize with those of the President who at the start had no intention of rooting CWA permanently in his program. At the present rate of expenditure CWA would cost $2,000,000,000 a year, enough to wreck even his open-handed plans of U. S. financing. More over the free spending which made CWA so popular was bound to result in bigger scandals of the kind of which he was already getting his first sour taste.

President Roosevelt decided last week to try tapering his way out of the diffi culty. His plan : To end May 1 ; to begin Feb. 15 discharging CWA workers in the South at the rate of 500,000 a week and moving north as the frost comes out of the ground. For this purpose he asked Congress for $350,000,000, requested an other $600,000,000 for relief, part of which, to placate Congress, may be used in CWA fashion but not under CWA

*In Iowa last week a grand jury investigating PWA graft indicted Lieutenant Governor Nelson George Kraschel for conspiracy to defraud the Government.

*CWA mail last week: 37,000 letters (67.8% from laborers). Their subject matter: complaints, 62.6%; asking money 22.2%; praise 6.1%; seeking general information 5.3%: gratitude 3.1%; new plans for ending Depression 7/10 of 1%.

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