Relief & Yardstick

Last week President Roosevelt spent seven more sunny days aboard the Nourmahal in Bahaman waters. All the U. S. heard of him was the tick-tick of wireless bulletins received and distributed to the Press at Miami. While the President played, the professional poor made the most of his absence from Washington. Rain-bedraggled radicals trudged back & forth in front of the White House bearing placards: "Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned--Roosevelt Fishes While the Unemployed Starve."

The President, however, dropped his fishing tackle and started home the instant his services were really needed to keep the unemployed from starving. In Washington Congress put the last legislative touches to his $4,880,000,000 relief bill, sped it South by special carrier for his signature. Washington newshawks wallowed in a wordy mire of exaggeration about what the biggest peacetime money bill in U. S. history would accomplish and such headlines as "7,000,000 JOBS DUE IN VICTORY OF WORKS BILL'' appeared over ecstatic dispatches. More realistic, Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins estimated that $4,000,000,000 would provide a year's work for only half that number. And many a Democrat who voted for the bill shook his head and privately admitted that he feared it would, like most of its predecessors, prove a public disappointment as a Depression-solver. Only four days before, the Untied States News had given them a full page devoted to two statistics: 1) total expenditures of the U. S. for 124 years (including four wars) from 1789 to July 1913--$24,500,000,000; 2) total expenditures, actual and budgeted, for three years under Franklin Roosevelt, from July 1933 to July 1936--$24,200,000,000.

Obvious was one conclusion. The U. S. electorate would sooner or later have to be convinced that Franklin Roosevelt's $24,200,000,000 was well spent or the political consequences would be appalling. As it happened, two of the mostly widely read U. S. pundits were last week arguing that very question. One of them, Pundit Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribune, challenged the other, Pundit Frank R. Kent of the Baltimore Sun, who has steadily contended that the New Deal is a failure.

The particular Kent apothegm at issue: "A great many friendly people . . . have gone along with Mr. Roosevelt for two years, first, because they were scared; second, because they liked him; third, because they thought his experiments might work out. After two years during which they have given him everything he asked --unrestricted money and unlimited power --after two years, they find the experiments have not worked out. On the contrary, without exception, they are soggy and sick. The number of people on the dole, so far from decreasing as business improved, has increased appallingly until today, all records broken, it is admitted 22,000,000--or one-sixth of the nation-- are living on relief. . . . The relief roll is the acid test and by that test he has failed. There is no other yardstick that can be used. By it, after two years of power, he checks short--and by his own figures."

Retorted Walter Lippmann last week: "What [Kent] should have said is that there is no other yardstick he can use to prove that everything without exception is a failure."

Lippmann points to prove that growing relief rolls are no good yardstick of the President's performance, 1) Two years ago many unemployed were still-living on their savings. Now, their savings exhausted, some of them may be on relief and others have jobs. Thus payrolls and relief rolls can mount at the same time. 2) The demoralizing character of the existing relief system leads some men to prefer the dole to jobs. 3) People are on relief today who two years ago were starving and homeless.

Pundit Lippmann's conclusions: "There is no one yardstick. . . . Whether we like Franklin Roosevelt or dislike him, he is the President of the United States and there is no one else to whom the country can now turn for leadership. He is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. ... He is entitled to be judged not merely by the silly promises of his overzealous adherents, not merely by his own unguarded political generalizations, but by the depth, the severity, and the extent of the crisis that he inherited. . . ."

When the man under discussion debarked from the destroyer Farragut which had whisked him overnight from the Bahamas, the depth, severity and extent of the crisis was not written on his face. The President hailed Governor Sholtz:

"It is good to see you, Governor. I'm always glad to get back to Florida. This is going to be an annual event. All you people on shore look like palefaces."

Then, accompanied by two of his socialite fishing friends, he boarded his special train and ordered it to proceed, not to Washington but to Manhattan, for his last day at sea had been marked by news of the death of his cousin and Minister to Canada, Warren Delano Robbins (see p. 70). On his way to the Robbins funeral, the President took time to study, if not the extent of the Depression, the extent of the power given him to cope with it. Secretary Marvin Mclntyre gave 'nim the airborne text of the relief bill to study and sign. Later, as the Presidential special sped through the murky dusk over South Carolina's flat coastal plain. Franklin Roosevelt, sitting in his drawing room took a pen from Secretary Mclntyre and signed over to himself $4,880,000,000 to be spent on giving "jobs."

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