Perceiving Poverty Amid the Plenty

By Hugh Sidey

Rarely have so many eaten and drunk so much so magnificently in pursuit of a solution to national economic hard times.

Governors, Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet officers, diplomats, economists and the President himself gurgled and burped their way through a singular week of debate that included invocations of the specter of poverty and hunger.

The velvety sheen of tailored tuxedos was seen in candle-lighted dining rooms from the embassies to the White House. The big black limousines, their engines lapping contentedly, jammed the circular drive on the south lawn of the White House and filled the streets in front of elegant residences as the powerful hurried here and there, the women splendidly gowned, the men with furrowed brows that showed their concern for the jobless millions beyond.

A select group of Senators ate their way through oxtail soup, roast capon and apple pie at the White House on Monday night. The next morning Republican congressional leaders piled their plates with scrambled and poached eggs, bacon, sausage, toast and honey buns.

More men from the Hill came down to see Jerry that night, and they were served onion soup with croutons, pot roast, vegetables bouquetiere, lemon ice with strawberries.

Meantime, the Governors had assembled for their conference at the Mayflower Hotel, and they were striding from suite to suite, party to party, talking of the devastation that the recession was bringing to their states. The gentle sound of Jack Daniel's being splashed on the rocks and soda being added to Chivas Regal buoyed up these depressed spirits.

Breakfast came round again at the White House, and this time it was the bipartisan leadership who tucked in their napkins and attacked the eggs and bacon (plus ham), fresh orange juice and coffee. That same night all of the visiting Governors hurried to a formal dinner at the White House. There was consomme bellevue, supreme of chicken with fine herbs and rice pilaf, spinach timbale with carrots, pineapple sherbet with petits fours and demitasse. Digestion was stimulated by Meier Ohio sherry, Louis Martini Pinot Chardonnay and finally, for the toast, Taylor's New York State champagne brut. After dinner, Mike Carney's band from New York struck up, and the Governors and their ladies danced through the mellow night.

Toward the end of the week Maine's flinty Governor James B. Longley looked around him and wondered if the "level of comfort" in Washington was not so great that the nation's leaders were out of touch with the country.

He put his finger on an immense problem: the one of perception. The crisis so far is mostly one of statistics. Those Americans who lack basic food and shelter even now do so mostly from ignorance and mismanagement of the benefits available to them. Those around Washington who remember the bonus marchers of 1932 recall them as actually on a "hunger march." The men were destitute. Attorney Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran watched General Douglas MacArthur and his aide Dwight Eisenhower ride off to disperse this pitiful army on the Anacostia flats. New Dealer Abe Fortas came down as a kid lawyer out of Yale in the summer of 1933. He arrived in the Department of Agriculture with his suitcase and did not unpack it for three days and nights. He stayed right there working round the clock on a program to help save the food processors, some of whom sat in the office with him. They were frightened, humbled men. In the streets wherever Fortas walked were hungry, helpless people. No bureaucrat escaped the spectacle of despair.

The race now is to prevent even a minor recurrence of such a tragedy. But in a place where the basic elected salary is $42,500 and the average white-collar Government worker gets a secure $16,000 a year, and millions of dollars can be manipulated for "comfort," the sense of urgency sometimes lags.

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