Old Bones & New

To put it brutally you can keep a dog hungry for a long while, but you can't grab a bone from him without being bitten.--Socialist Norman Thomas on the reduction of Civil Works Administration payments to 4,000,000 otherwise jobless men and women.

Let us have no pious platitudes about the end of relief. We are going to keep on providing relief--probably permanently.--New Dealer Raymond Moley in his magazine Today.

Such ominous predictions last week accompanied President Roosevelt's determined effort to demobilize the Civil Works program by May 1. Already the CWA payroll had been cut from its peak to 2,609,500. Further reductions were to follow at the rate of 275,000 a week.

But the jobless of the land were not to have their old bones of relief taken from them without getting something in return. After much cogitation the President last week announced his ideas of the kind of new bones Relief Administrator Hopkins would provide by May 1. A White House statement began: "The experience of the past nine months has shown that the problem of unemployment must be faced on more than one front." Three fronts on which the President proposed to face it:

Farm Front. Direct relief is not suited for farmers. Instead, relief funds are to be used to finance indigent farmers who give up farming a single cash crop and go in for diversified farming to supply their own needs but not to raise crops for glutted markets. To meet minimum cash needs some may be given paid jobs working on roads and in national parks, or even repairing their own tumble-down homes. The chief effort, however, is to teach them subsistence farming and find opportunities for them to work part time in small local industries.

Stranded Front. A large group of unemployed (perhaps 300,000 families) live in communities where the one local industry is dead or dying and there is no work or prospect of work. Efforts are to be made to transport such stranded populations wholesale to some other community where they can be taught subsistence homesteading and provided with "supplemental or industrial opportunities" to regain a normal standard of living.

City Front. Work relief will be provided for able-bodied unemployed in cities. Only those who are destitute will get this assistance which will last for no one man longer than six months. A specific effort will be made to find work for teachers, engineers, architects, artists, nurses, etc. Destitute persons unable to work because of age or health will, as now, be given direct relief.

Significance. Made to look as much like CWA as possible--in order to appease those who want CWA continued--the new program is obviously intended to be different. An important point is that, instead of hiring any properly registered unemployed person, the new program will aid only those actually in want. Furthermore, since CWA costs $200,000,000 a month and only $500,000,000 has been provided to run the new program for eight months (May 1 to Jan. 1, 1935), it is evident that jobs will not be for a fixed number of hours each week but for only enough hours per man to let him earn what relief agencies calculate as the minimum requirements for human life.

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