Personal Problem

Behind the public palaver over his latest tax proposal (see p. 13) President Roosevelt worked long & hard last week over a tougher, more immediate problem --Relief. He had made it his peculiar personal problem when he asked and got from Congress $4,000,000,000 and the right to spend it as he saw fit. With this fat fund firmly in hand, his promise to the country was to end the dole and give 3,500,000 jobless real jobs. And by last week he was up against a hard mathematical fact: $4,000,000,000 divided among 3,500,000 jobs gave only $1,142 per job.

Direct labor is only a fraction of the cost of a job. Secretary Ickes' public works, by his own estimate, average $2,132 for every man employed because steel, stone, cement, lumber and other heavy materials have to be bought for such projects. Obviously President Roosevelt would have to cut down on the number of jobs he would be able to give out of his $4,000,000,000 or else he would have to strike out all expensive materials from his schedule and thereby reduce the kind of work offered almost to the leaf-raking level of the old CWA. He had already promised millions for a great dam on Passamaquoddy Bay, Maine. He had to finish up public works Mr. Ickes started last year and the year before. When some $1,800,000,000 of his $4,000,000,000 had been allotted, the President had good reason to worry about the average job-cost of his projects. Early last week, when Harry Hopkins had his state relief administrators assembled in Washington, the President emphasized that costs must be held to about $1,143 a family. Few days later, when Undersecretary of Agriculture Tugwell convened his Regional Resettlement Directors, the President made them a little speech, reminding them forcefully of that figure, which was playing so large a part in his own thoughts. Said he: "It will challenge your ingenuity!"

Making jobs without materials last week challenged all New Deal project-makers. Mr. Ickes figured that if he could get cities and states to put up 55% of the cost of public works he could get his costs down to $959--but most cities and states are too hard pressed to leap at the chance. The President said nothing, but Washington was certain that the bulk of the $4,000,000,000 was going eventually to drop into the lap of Harry Hopkins. He alone needs little stone or steel, can put a white collar man on the payroll at a cost of 20-c- (for pencil and paper), a laborer at a cost of $1 (for a rake). For his $4,000,000,000 last week it looked as if the President would get an abundance of wooden bridges, sidewalk and sewer repair, touring theatrical companies and a census-taking on practically everything from retail liquor stores to the number of unemployed.

P: Gracefully ending a memorable chapter of New Deal history, the President had Donald Richberg to luncheon, bade him Godspeed back to private life.

P: Boarding a train one night Franklin Roosevelt was whisked to New London. There on the Thames, aboard the Sequoia, he entertained his old friend Felix Frankfurter. To the Presidential ear the Harvard professor confided that he had been asked to furnish a list of important works that he had never read. Dr. Frankfurter's list:

1) The U. S. Constitution

2) Das Kapital by Karl Marx

3) Darwin's Origin of Species

P: Having seen Harvard freshmen and the junior varsity--in which Franklin D. Jr. rowed No. 4--beaten by Yale crews, from the referee's launch, the President did not wait to see the Harvard varsity beaten again in a race that was postponed one day because of rough water (see p. 52). Instead he returned to Hyde Park for a secluded weekend, went to Manhattan to have dinner at his house on East 65th Street, continued on to Washington to demand immediate enactment of his tax proposals.

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