NYA Birthday

For a three-year-old, National Youth Administration gets a sizable allowance.

Last week it was announced that NYA's spending money would be $74,500,000. This sum exceeded last year's birthday present by $24,500,000. And for the first time, Congress had given NYA a direct allotment instead of lumping it with other miscellaneous WPA funds. From these facts, Washington observers concluded that NYA has become a permanent contour on the U. S. relief map.

In June 1935, Franklin Roosevelt announced: "I have determined that we shall do something for the Nation's unemployed youth." Their number, about 2,500,000 (aged 16-24) out of both school and work, did not include the army of 500,000 which the New Deal had put into CCC camps. A new agency, NYA, was put into the hands of social-working Deputy WPAdministrator Aubrey Willis Williams, who at the age of six went to work in a torpedo factory. In spite of setbacks and criticism, Aubrey Williams pushed ahead with NYA. With the help of Executive Director Richard R. Brown, he set up a two-fold machine which gave spare-time academic work to students, part-time public work to vagrants. Across the U. S., youth won wages and self-confidence as they catalogued, filed, checked records, cleared parks and playgrounds, plowed, harrowed, reaped, graded, dumped, filled, drained, made heavy-duty roads and blue-shale tennis courts, built dairy barns and country schools, feed houses and flop houses, stitched, cooked, nursed, painted, studied, bought their board & keep and sent a little something home.

But the NYA graph has not been a smoothly rising curve. Objectors have fought it because they feared politics, threats to academic freedom. Aid reached less than half the boys and girls who asked for it. In 1937 the fund was severely cut (to $50,000,000). Finicky colleges like Harvard and Yale haughtily kept NYA out because its pay was skimpy. It was criticized for having such lay figures as Glenn Cunningham, William Green, Owen D. Young, the late Amelia Earhart on its advisory board.

Two important trends showed through Director Williams' report last week: NYA begins to think public works relief more important than academic relief; employers scouting schools and colleges have begun to ask for NYA students. But the big news of last week's birthday was that the child seemed virtually past danger from economic undernourishment or political pox.

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