Dole's End?

The year was still very young when President Roosevelt launched his $4,000,000,000 Work Relief ship with the sanguine hope that 3,500,000 jobless family heads and unmarried adults could be rescued from their demoralizing Dole lifeboats by July 1, put to useful, morale-sustaining work on board. Last week the year was dying and many a hope and many a deadline for attaining that goal lay dead along the way.

A two-month Congressional blockade, quarreling pilots, a cautious paymaster and the staggering difficulty of creating honest work for multimillions of hands had made the Relief ship's progress painfully slow and stormy. By July 1 not a single new job had been made. When the next major deadline, Nov. 1, came & went with the goal less than half achieved. President Roosevelt cautiously predicted that "a great majority" of the promised jobs would have been provided by Dec. 1. WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins flatly set that date as the last & final deadline for ending the Federal dole, with the idea that all 3,500,000 citizens would then be at work.

Day before that deadline last week Administrator Hopkins, having shipped off some $39,000,000 to the 22 states still on the Federal dole list, announced that they would get no more, that FERA would be promptly liquidated. Whether he had made equally good on his job promise could not be told until last-minute reports were in and tallied. But in Atlanta President Roosevelt reported with "a certain satisfaction" that 3,125,000 persons were usefully at work on Nov. 27. In Washington, Acting FERAdministrator Aubrey Williams chimed assurance that all 3,500,000 employables would have relief jobs by the night of Nov. 30.

When the year began President Roosevelt and his aides thought $880,000,000 would be enough to taper off the dole. The year's total was approximately $1,322,000,000. Grand dole total since May 1933: $3,694,000,000.

Prime relief problem last week was whether the dole could be ended simply by saying so. Almost a year ago Harry Hopkins ordered all states and communities to shoulder the burden of their unemployables by Feb. 1 (TIME, Jan. 7). When he issued that same order last week, the question remained as to what the Federal Government would do if some states and communities were unable or unwilling to obey. "When some of the people of a great and wealthy country are suffering from starvation," President Roosevelt declared at Atlanta, "an honest government has no choice."

When he was ordered from Washington last week to up his quota of jobs from 220,000 to 255,000. New York City's WPAdministrator Victor Ridder despairingly cried that, because most remaining employables without jobs were unskilled, he did not see how he could possibly do it. "It appears that we are getting down to the end of the string," said he. "The city seems to have reached the saturation point in WPA projects."

Making a gallant effort nonetheless, Administrator Ridder prepared to set 1,300 women to sponging and mending National Guard uniforms, another 2,500 to erasing scribbles and thumbprints from the city's used school books.

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