Fourth Stage

Months ago Secretary of the Interior Harold Le Clair Ickes decided that his department deserved a better name and he more authority. Hence a bill appeared in Congress to rename the Department of the Interior the Department of Conservation. Last week the Senate passed and sent to the House a bill creating a Department of Conservation. Yet Secretary Ickes was anything but happy. The Senate bill gave him nothing but a new title, failed to give him administration of the Soil Conservation Service (new AAA), the Forest Service, the CCC. Worse still. Secretary Ickes' authority was on the point of being drastically deflated by the new relief bill coming before the Senate this week.

Since the New Deal came in, there have been three stages of relief. In the first stage (1933-34), Harold Ickes was the big fish with $3,300,000,000 to spend and lend for public works, and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins was a small fry with only $500,000,000 to spend. Because Mr. Ickes' public works were so slow starting, Mr. Hopkins had to set up Civil Works Administration to get the jobless through that first New Deal winter. In the second stage (1934-35) Secretary Ickes got an extra $500,000,000 to carry on his incomplete PWA program and Administrator Hopkins got a bigger slice with which, besides doles, to experiment with work relief, surplus farm commodities and rural rehabilitation. In the third stage (1935-36) President Roosevelt himself became the big relief man with $4,880,000,000 to allot as he saw fit. Secretary Ickes got the spending of only $440,000,000 of that amount, of which $100,000,000 was for housing. Administrator Hopkins spent $933,000,000 on doles before he succeeded in making the states take over direct relief. By June 30 he will have spent some $1,495,000,000 additional on Works Progress Administration, the fancy name for work relief. Also, a new relief man had appeared in the person of Rexford Tugwell who got $246,390,000 for rural resettlement.*

The Relief Bill of 1936 will produce the fourth stage which is theoretically the same as the third stage but smaller in size. Yet last week when Senators began looking into the matter, it appeared that Administrator Hopkins was going to be the only fish left in the relief pond. Of the $1,425,000,000 for relief in the next fiscal year all was allotted to him. Some $85,000,000 was set aside for rural rehabilitation, but the bill specified that Mr. Hopkins, not Dr. Tugwell, was to spend it. For Secretary Ickes and his Public Works there was not a cent. Dr. Tugwell kept smiling when these facts were brought out, admitted that under the terms of the bill his 17,000 employes would have no funds to work with, that, except for rural rehabilitation (taken over by WPA), all his other labors (subsistence homesteads, suburban resettlement, purchase of submarginal lands, etc.) would come to a full stop.

When the Press printed the news that Messrs. Ickes and Tugwell were now out of the relief picture, the President promptly denied it, told his press conference that the Resettlement Administration and PWA would go on. How was it possible under the relief bill? Only explanation given was the President's statement that it did not matter who signed the Rural Resettlement's checks. Of PWA, all that the President said was that Mr. Hopkins would furnish relief labor and Secretary Ickes would carry on with his $250,000,000 revolving loan fund.

*Last week the District of Columbia's U. S. Court of Appeals ruled the 1935 Relief Bill's provision for rural resettlement unconstitutional, as an excessive obligation of Congressional power to the President. Decision was on a suit by township and property owners to halt a Resettlement Administration housing project at Bound Brook, N. J.

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