Ditches & Drawings

In its two-and-a-half years as the New Deal's chief weapon against unemployment, the Works Progress Administration has been the delight of cartoonists and paragraphers. The ubiquitous WPA signs, signifying men & women at work building bridges, painting murals, reciting Bernard Shaw or planting oysters--all under the direction of Washington-- seemed to the rugged individualists to be a vaguely comic extracurricular activity of the Federal Government.

Last week when President Roosevelt signed away $250,000,000 more for relief, WPA had become just about the grimmest thing in the country. The new appropriation will be spent before June 30, bringing the relief expenditures for the fiscal year of 1938 to $1,750,000,000. Most of the additional funds will pay the wages of 500,000 more relief workers. This spring, the total on the WPAyroll will be 2,500,000--the highest in two years with the exception of a single week during the 1936 drought.

With unemployment on its way back to where it was when WPA first appeared, Washington had little confidence that its $250,000,000 contributed anything to a fundamental solution of the problem. Last month, WPA offered an account of what the nation has been getting for its money. Through three ERA and two deficiency appropriation acts, a total of $8,671,078,685 has been granted by Congress for relief. More than half of this amount has been allocated to WPA, making it the New Deal's greatest spending agency. Wages and salaries accounted for 85% of the money spent. Administrative costs were well under the 5% maximum allowed by the law.

The report summarizes the accomplishments of more than 150,000 projects up to Oct. 1, 1937. Visible to the naked eye were 11,106 new public buildings (including 115 new armories), 43,870 miles of new highways, 19,272 new bridges, more than 11,500 miles of new roadside drainage ditches and 54,244 drawings, easel paintings, murals and sculptured works. Not so obvious were 128,057,654 school lunches served, 18,272,529 books catalogued and 24,099,607 rodents destroyed.

These staggering activities are today administered by Aubrey Williams, onetime social worker, whose salary is $9,500 a year. Relief Chief Harry Hopkins, who gets $12,000 a year, is conservative with the public's money, an inveterate gambler with his own. For three months Mr. Hopkins has been trying to recover from the physical effects of his appalling responsibility. Last week, reports from Florida, where he relieved the tedium of his convalescence with visits to the Hialeah race track, indicated that he would soon be ready to return to Washington.

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