Pets of a President

Enthusiasm for his favorite relief project took President Roosevelt to the Department of Commerce building one morning last week to inspect an exhibit of subsistence homesteads and other forms of local selfhelp. Set up in the auditorium were models of homesteads, samples of co-operative-made furniture, rugs, tools, quilts, etc. Before he left the White House the President had not intended to make a speech to a heterogeneous audience which included three Cabinet members, Bernard Baruch, the Federal Administrator of Relief, some Congressmen. Mrs. Roosevelt and many a humble relief worker. But by the time he left the auditorium stage he had been so carried away by what he called "my pet children" that he had spent half an hour, leaning over the back of a chair and talking spontaneously. Though the White House had no text of his informal words, alert newshawks caught most of them. Declared the President :

"I don't see why there isn't a greater enthusiasm for planning. We seem to be more prone to favor panaceas, the suggested legislation that they tell us will cure everything in 30 days."

He went on to explain what he meant by planning--instead of giving direct cash relief to unemployed and stranded populations, set them up in occupations and surroundings where they can support themselves. "The Government is rich enough to accomplish this. We need to make these people self-sustaining. We are not going to take them by force or against their wills out of one community and transplant them to another. By using grey matter--Brain Trust or otherwise--we are going to make these experiments so attractive and successful that more people will apply than can be handled.

"When there is talk of revolution in this country, you tell that person who mentions revolution that there is one too many letters in that word and it should be evolution."

Plan-Maker. The President's "pet children" are also problem children, and Milburn L. Wilson, the man whose exhibit touched off the President's enthusiasm, is their tutor. Tutor Wilson was an Iowa farm boy, who got a college education and went back to farming. Later he became head of the division of Farm Management for the Department of Agriculture. As a professor at Montana State College, he plunged into the problem of dry-farming, of raising more wheat per acre than had been grown before. Soon overproduction reversed his problem. He disowns authorship of the Domestic Allotment Plan for cutting the same farm output which he helped to stimulate but, because he was largely responsible for formulating it as finally adopted, he was called to Washington a year ago and made Wheat Production Administrator. Last August the President's "pet children" were set upon his knee and he was told to see what he could do about them, as Director of Subsistence Homesteads with 25,000,000 federal dollars.

Experiments. Neither Director Wilson nor anyone else knew what a subsistence homestead was when he began. There were at least three chief possibilities: 1) to provide men who worked in large city industries with homes and small garden plots where they could live and raise much of what they needed when unemployed; 2) to set the same class of workers up in small communities and provide small industries for a cash income; 3) to transfer farmers from worn-out lands to homesteads of 30 or 40 acres on good land where they can grow their own food and perhaps pick up a little pin money from local industries or home handicraft.

Professor Wilson is trying all three possibilities, with variations. His work tied in with self-help co-operatives which sprang up during Depression for barter of goods and exchange of services between unemployed. There are today some 340 of these organizations in the U. S. Since last summer Federal Emergency Relief Corp. has made grants of working capital to more than half of the total, has helped them to establish co-operative industries. As such industries were needed to supplement the incomes of Director Wilson's subsistence homesteaders, the two movements interlock.

Mr. Wilson furnished capital to buy land and erect houses--cheap land but good. The co-operatives frequently furnished the homesteaders and the labor for building, so that the total cost per homestead was kept down below $2,500. Local corporations were formed wherever possible to run the projects, and the homesteaders agreed to pay off the original costs with interest at 4% over a period of 30 years. On a few projects, such as Mrs. Roosevelt's favorite near Reedsville, W. Va., no local organization was at hand and Mr. Wilson had to finance it completely. Size of projects vary from 35 to 500 homesteads, cost Federal Subsistence Homesteads Corp. anywhere from $50,000 to $1,000,000 each.

By last week it had 36 projects in the making. Most advanced was at Dayton where some co-operative workers were already moving into their new homes scattered in small groups in the outskirts of the city. An entirely different type of project is at Monticello, Ga., where work under an expert engineer and architect was well under way by last week. There, 75 miles from the President's own Warm Springs, 12,000 acres of old estates have been bought up, and buildings are being reconditioned, so that farmers from ''rural slums" can be settled in better surroundings. At Reedsville, W. Va., coal miners who have more or less permanently lost their jobs are being transported from nearby mines. In New Jersey a group of clothing workers from New York City's slums are to be planted on homesteads and their work brought to them by truck.

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