WPA Primary

Like the late Huey Long, Minnesota's late Farmer-Labor Boss Floyd Bjornsjerne Olson left some mutually unfriendly political heirs. The de facto inheritor of the Olson mantle is serious, bespectacled Governor Elmer Austin Benson, who is engaged in a struggle for renomination in the June 20 primary. Opposed to him is Farmer-Labor's more conservative faction, whose Candidate Hjalmar Petersen was Governor for a few months in 1936 following the death of Governor Olson and who once quit the party because he thought it was going Communist. Last week the fight shifted to a new front.

A onetime Republican, Victor Christgau deserted that party after he was defeated for re-election to Congress in the 1932 primaries, turned up in Washington as an assistant administrator of AAA, where he lasted until Administrator Chester Davis' famed "purge" of radicals two years later. Victor Christgau was next given the $6,500 job of setting up WPA in his home State. Since 1935 he has administered $95,000,000 worth of Minnesota WPA projects in a manner not always acceptable to Elmer A. Benson. Their bitterest clash took place last winter, when Administrator Christgau refused to appropriate $700,000 for a weed eradication project sponsored by the Governor. Last fortnight, WPA's high command issued an order summarily removing Mr. Christgau, appointing Roy C. Jacobson, WPA field representative, as Minnesota's acting WPAdministrator.

Governor Benson soon crowed that this was a victory for progressives. But Mr. Christgau, who was in Redwood Falls to dedicate a new WPA-built community house at the Birch Coulee Dakota Indian agency and to receive a tribal distinction as Chief Standing Bear, last week began to broadcast a different account by telephone and telegraph. He announced that the real reason for the ouster was not his "meddling in politics," as Governor Benson and Senator Ernest Lundeen had charged, but his refusal to be "kicked upstairs" to a job in Washington, which Administrator Hopkins had offered him fortnight before. Minnesota's Farmer-Labor chieftains, said Mr. Christgau, wanted his job before the primary because there are only 17,759 Jobs on the State payroll but 60,000 on WPA. Candidate Petersen immediately took Mr. Christgau's part. So did Republican State Chairman W. M. Parker. So did three Democratic candidates for Governor, including U. S. District Attorney Victor Anderson, who had entered the race at the behest of James A. Farley and whose grumbling supporters could only conclude from the Christgau charges that Democrats Farley and Hopkins were working at cross purposes.

Hospitalized in New York, Administrator Hopkins did not answer either Mr. Christgau or his charges. New Mexico's Democratic Senator Carl A. Hatch urged the Christgau ouster as another argument for an amendment to the Lend-Spend Bill (see p. 11) to bar WPA personnel from "interfering with an election or affecting the results thereof."

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