Favorite Factory

Subsistence homesteads, PWA's house & garden projects to keep the starving alive in semi-rural communities, have no more ardent supporter than Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt. One of her favorites is for jobless miners at Reedsville, W. Va. Part of the Reedsville project is erection of a factory to make furniture and post-office equipment. Secretary Ickes enthusiastically allocated $525,000 of PWA funds to build and equip a factory to employ 125 men. To provide the factory with work, a provision was popped into the regular Post Office Appropriation bill to operate the factory and take over its output. Last week the House of Representatives dealt this favorite project of the First Lady a stiff blow.

When the Post Office Appropriation bill first came up two months ago, Representative Louis Ludlow of Indianapolis, seat of a big post office-box factory, got the authority for taking over Reedsville's output knocked out of the bill. When the bill went .to the Senate, that gallant body put the authority back in. Secretary Ickes remarked acidly that evidently Mrs. Roosevelt's "Socialistic project" was to be given a trial.

His forecast was premature. Last week in the House vote on the conference report on the Post Office bill there was a showdown on Reedsville--a showdown that split party lines and involved more than the question of favoring the business of a few Representatives' constituents. In favor of the Reedsville project were: 1) the argument that the factory's costs would enable the Government to judge more expertly whether private manufacturers were charging too much for post-office equipment; 2) the fact that the humanitarian aims of the Reedsville project are thoroughly in accord with New Deal principles; 3) the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt personally wants it.

Mrs. Isabella Greenway, who succeeded Budget Director Lewis Douglas as Arizona's lone Representative, fought on the floor for the project of her schoolgirl friend at whose wedding she was a bridesmaid. Cried Congresswoman Greenway: "This is a far broader issue than a furniture factory, the leading lady of the land, or the purchase of one particular commodity. . . . We are well into the experiment of decentralization of wealth, and it has to be accompanied with the decentralization of industry. . . . There are 14 of these experiments going on in the U. S. today. . . . Private industry, to my absolute knowledge, was begged to go down to Reedsville and make this experiment."

Those who opposed the measure were free in saying that they did not intend to be bossed by a whim of Mrs. Roosevelt. Furniture makers from all over the country furnished the opposition with ammunition charging that the Government was not only going into competition with them but building a new factory when there was not work enough to keep their own factories occupied. For every speech made in favor of Reedsville in terms of the New Deal there was another speech denouncing State socialism and government in business. Most telling indictment against Reedsville's 125-man, $525,000 factory was an offer made to the Government by William M. Storey, furniture maker of Winston-Salem, N. C.: "I tender you a 125-man furniture factory, modern, completely and well equipped, already operating, at a price of $52.500, which is one tenth of your $525,000 appropriation. This would be a saving of $472,500 plus a half million feet of good, dry lumber that I will throw in for good measure, plus transportation of your miners down to North Carolina. . . .

"The greatest value in your plan did not occur to me at first, but probably it is the woof of the whole scheme as it has been thought out. I can now see how it is soon going to solve the unemployment problem: First, the coal miners would not turn out much furniture, and what they did wouldn't last long; then as business gets better and more coal is needed we could send our destitute furniture workers up to the coal mines, and as they wouldn't be able to mine enough coal to keep up steam in our factories the oil business would be stimulated, and so on and on to prosperity?"

When the House vote came the First Lady and her Reedsville project could command only no ballots. To reject the Senate's appropriation 168 Democrats joined with 104 Republicans and three Farm-Laborites.

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