Daughters of the Depression

Mrs. Sarah Greenberg of Philadelphia got $4.80 a week. Out of that she spent $3 a week room rent; on the $1.80 she had left she ate "sardines and other things." But Mrs. Greenberg did not look as if $1.80 a week was quite enough. Last week, while the House Appropriations Committee debated the 1941 Relief Bill, Mrs. Greenberg and her many sisters "The Daughters of the American Depression" gathered in Washington and told how they had been getting along on relief. Wives of Congressmen and Cabinet officers came to listen also Eleanor Roosevelt.

Tall, gaunt Mrs. Hughes Easley, wife of a disabled electrical worker in St. Louis and the mother of eight, was elected "Mrs. Unemployed American Mother." Her family food allowance: $58.85 a month. Rent allowance: $10. Mrs. Roosevelt was invited to sit next Mrs. Easley at a reliefer's dinner. The menu: 2 oz. beef stew, % carrot, 1 onion, % potato, % slice of bread, 1 pat of oleomargarine, 1 canned prune. Mrs. Roosevelt agreed that the dinner was not quite enough.

Meantime, Congress had received the 1941 Relief Bill from the Appropriations Committee. Submitted with the bill was a report. An investigation of WPA, said the report, had shown abuses, waste of funds, politics in the administering of relief. WPA funds had been used to exterminate rats in New Orleans at $2.97 a rat, to build golf courses for the wealthy, to improve a yacht basin for a yacht club, to construct a ski jump in New Hampshire, to pay the expenses of Deputy WPA Administrator Howard 0. Hunter to Kentucky Derbies, to provide free tea parties and banquets for Government officials and local politicians. At Del Mar, Calif., $521,047 of WPA funds was used to build a race track which was later sold to Bing Crosby, in a deal in which WPA was admittedly "taken for a ride." The report also said that Communists had worked their way into New York projects.

Nevertheless, the bill sanctioned $975,650,000 for WPA for 1941, authorized the President to spend it within eight months. On that basis, WPA will receive almost if not quite as much as it did last year. The report added that Colonel F. C. Harrington, WPA Administrator, was making efforts to improve the agency. Mrs. Easley and Mrs. Greenberg didn't know about the race tracks and ski jumps. All they knew was that there was not quite enough oleomargarine, not quite enough sardines.

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