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This is the transition year in New Deal relief policy, but transition to what? The future depends on too many outside factors – notably the possibility of a European war, which may already be an actuality by the time this appears in print – for any very definite predictions. But there are two main tendencies in the Administration’s relief policies of late years which seem to point towards the kind of relief most likely to develop in the future. Let us conclude with some consideration of what each of these means to the unemployed masses.
For some months now the New Deal has been experimenting with a new way of distributing surplus farm produce to the unemployed. There is nothing new in the basic idea. Even Hoover’s Federal Farm Board used to hand over large quantities of surplus wheat and cotton to the Red Cross for free distribution among the unemployed. And after the disastrous political kickback from the original AAA policy of ploughing under cotton and destroying hogs – an error which to this day provides excellent ammunition to the New Deal’s opponents – the Administration turned to the same method to disembarrass itself of some of the huge stocks of farm products it bought to keep up farm prices. For years now the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation has been shipping carloads of free food to local relief authorities. Last year it gave away $62,000,000 worth. This was a mere drop in the bottomless bucket of New Deal farm subsidies. It was of peculiar importance, however, in the general relief picture.
When the Federal government in 1935 threw back onto the states the burden of supporting most of the unemployed, every one knew that in large areas neither the resources nor the willingness existed to do much supporting. It was politically impossible, however, for the New Deal to allow any large number of citizens to starve to death – to starve suddenly, that is, gradual starvation being another matter and politically quite permissible. Here is where the FSCC came in. Its food has always been distributed with the formal stipulation that it is to be used to supplement relief and not in place of relief. The stipulation was purely formal, however, and there are no recorded instances of G-men being sent to track down violations. In many rural areas, especially in the South and Southwest, surplus commodities have been the principal staff of life of the unemployed population. It is an unsteady staff to lean on: one week it may be cabbages, prunes and celery, the next butter and grapefruit, and the third navy beans, radishes, and eggs. But it explains how unemployed families in Oklahoma can live on $4 a month – the rest of the explanation being they don’t eat much.
In the past, the FSCC simply bought the produce in the wholesale market and shipped it to the relief authorities for distribution. The new plan is much more ingenious. Relief families are sold orange stamps, good at their grocer’s for any kind of foodstuffs, but only for food. The inducement to buy is that with every $1 of orange stamps, they get, free, 50 cents worth of blue stamps. These latter are good only for whatever farm commodities the FSCC declares to be “surplus” that week. The local relief authorities then pay the grocer cash for his orange stamps and the FSCC pays him cash for his blue stamps. Thus surplus commodities, instead of being shortcircuited from wholesaler to the consumer, go through all the regular channels of trade, with each middleman and retailer making his profit in the process. It means that the food trade as well as the farmer now gets a Federal subsidy.
The parentage of this ingenious plan can be traced to a meeting of wholesalers and retailers held in Chicago early in 1939. The assembled merchants adopted the plan with enthusiasm and arranged to press it in Washington. [43] In March, it was formally announced by Milo Perkins, the aggressive and high-powered young head of the FSCC, at a meeting in Washington of the National Food and Grocery Conference Committee. According to Business Week, Mr. Perkins, who used to be a manufacturer himself, made a “highly favorable impression” on the assembled grocers, who were delighted to find him “a practical business man who understands business problems”. [44] Secretary Wallace has also claimed paternity of the plan. The one thing certain is that no one connected with giving relief to the unemployed had very much to do with it.
The next step was to try out the plan on the dog – i.e., the unemployed. Every one understood this might be a ticklish business. At the Washington conference, it was agreed that a careful preliminary sounding-out should be made of various communities, and that the plan would be experimentally launched only in those where the unemployed seemed to be receptive. On May 16, it was first tried out, in Rochester, N.Y. There was one significant change in plans. As originally worked out in Washington, the plan was compulsory. Government experts were to determine “scientifically” just how much of a relief family’s budget should be spent on food, taking into consideration, of course, geographical and other factors. This amount would be deducted from the family’s relief check and given it in the form of orange stamps, good only for food. To this would be added the 50% “bonus” in blue stamps. By the time the Rochester test was made, however, the plan had been made voluntary. The unemployed were paid their usual cash relief, and could buy stamps or not as they chose. Even so, there was much nervousness as to just how the plan would go over. A half dozen high New Deal officials travelled to Rochester to watch its first steps in life. The response from those on relief was reasonably favorable – the local grocers, of course, were more than pleased – and it was decided to try it next in Dayton, Ohio. Again, the original plan was to make it compulsory, so as to compare it with Rochester, but at the last moment the New Dealers again lost their nerve. The plan has to date been tried out successfully in four cities and seems to have a big future before it. This year the FSC expects to spend as much as $100,000,000 on it – almost double last year’s figure. Politically, the plan is a masterstroke. It gives the unemployed more to eat. And it subsidizes not only the farmers but also the wholesale and retail merchants. These latter, unaccustomed to Federal largesse, have been loud in their rejoicings. And the small business vote has never been spurned by American politicians.
It seems ungrateful to look such a fine gift horse in the mouth, but there is a great deal more, for the unemployed, in the project than an addition to their diet. The compulsory feature, temporarily suspended, may easily be slipped back once the thing gets working smoothly. (Even now relief families must buy orange stamps to get the blue “bonus”, thus submitting their buying to some degree of official regulation.) From stamps for food it is a short step to stamps for clothing, and for everything else it seems wise to permit the jobless to have, until their entire consumption is regulated by decree and they live a caste apart, cut off from the rest of capitalist society on a moneyless, subsistence level. Already it has been unofficially announced that the plan will be extended to cotton textiles, in order to get rid of between 600,000 and 700,000 bales from the huge cotton carry-over in the Government’s warehouses. At the moment of writing, also, the plan is being extended in another and even more significant direction. In Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, non-relief families with incomes of less than $19.50 a week are to be allowed to buy the stamps. As Chart III shows, Oklahoma has the lowest standard of relief in the country. The stamp plan is here being used as a means of keeping families from demanding relief, in fact as a substitute for relief. Local officials who don’t make use of it this way will be exceptionally high-minded indeed.
In the fall of 1933, the FERA sent out a questionnaire to the states asking whether they paid relief in cash or in kind. Of the 31 states replying, 28 stated they paid no direct cash relief whatever. [45] One of the great struggles of FERA in those early years of idealistic reformism was to get relief authorities to pay in cash and not in groceries. By 1935 the battle was largely won, and social workers praised the advance. But here, as in other matters, they have become increasingly alarmed at the turn things have lately taken. The brutal truth is that the mildest sort of reformist progress has by now become a luxury which the New Deal cannot politically afford. The ultimate effect of the food stamp plan promises to be to fasten on the unemployed once more the grocery-basket relief of Hooverian years. But the plan is the kind of recovery measure with relief trimmings that has always been the favorite approach of the Administration to the unemployment problem. And it is by its usefulness to farm prices and to the food trade rather than to the unemployed that it will be judged. In the frank words of a Washington news service for business men: “Idea of plan is primarily to help farmers dispose of crops, secondarily to feed the unemployed.”
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But the stamp plan is not the chief future worry of the unemployed. Far more serious is the clearly expressed determination of the New Deal to throw the whole relief problem back into the laps of the states and communities whence it was plucked in 1933. Already, as we have seen, great progress has been made in this direction. The 1939–1940 WPA bill will add another 1,000,000 employables to the local relief rolls before the winter is out. This survey of New Deal relief policies – especially of their future trend – may therefore well conclude with an examination of two points.
There is copious evidence as to the first question. A little of it is briefly reviewed below.
The classic example of the effects of Federal withdrawal from relief activities is what happened in New Jersey in the summer of 1936. By the beginning of the year, all Federal relief funds had been withdrawn. The state legislature set up a state relief organization, which functioned for a few months. But in April the State senate refused to vote any funds and turned the state’s 270,000 unemployed over entirely to the care of local governments. A month later, the NY Times made a survey of the results. Its findings – which the Times, of course, found admirable – may be summarized:
Trenton: Rolls cut from 3,682 cases to 1,602, cost per month from $102,000 to $30,000. “Nearly all the people we had to drop took it philosophically,” said the welfare supervisor.
Camden: 4,630 cases cut to 2,856. Relief director: “We’re going after the chisellers.”
Atlantic City: 3,105 cases cut to 1,700. Relief director: “We gave every case dropped a two weeks food order, telling them it was to be their last. Almost all of them took it for granted the city could not afford to support them. ‘We’ll try to get along somehow, at least through the summer,’ they would say.”
Williamstown: Relief per family $1 to $2 a week. Case of worker with silicosis, his wife and his two kids “living” on $2 a week.
Hoboken: 2,000 cases cut to 90. City poormaster, Barck, 71 years old: “I’m in favor of giving the old American pioneer spirit a chance to assert itself.” (In February 1938, Barck met his death at the hands of Joseph Scutellaro, an unemployed mason, who plunged a letter-spike into Barck’s heart when the poormaster refused relief and suggested Scutellaro’s young wife could make money on the streets.)
The American Association of Social Workers also looked into New Jersey relief that summer and added a few touches to the picture: Many towns gave no relief to single men, none to families resident less than five years ... Food budgets were cut in half in most places, with no money for rent, clothing, medical care, gas and electricity. ... Some towns solved the problem by issuing licenses to beg to all unemployed ... Others put them at forced labor, or turned them over to local sweatshops, at low wages ... Many “poormasters” – the term suggests the Elizabethan antiquity of the relief set-up here, as in many other states – fed their charges exclusively on surplus commodities distributed free by the FSCC. Typical ration for two weeks for a family of three: one package peas, six cans beef, one jar jam, one package prunes, six cans evaporated milk, one package oatmeal ... The Association concluded: “New Jersey is experimenting with slow starvation for relief recipients.” [46]
For three months in the spring of 1936, the Pennsylvania legislature was deadlocked on the question of relief. Early in July, in the midst of the deadlock, funds ran out completely. For nine days no relief was paid in the state. Another legislative tie-up at the end of the month cut off all relief for ten more days. The Philadelphia Non-partisan Committee on Relief investigated to see how the unemployed got through these periods. The NY Times of August 2, 1936, reported:
The survey disclosed that 67% of those cut off from relief “eked out subsistence through peddling, begging or scavenging, or pawning articles of clothing and carefully husbanded possessions” and that 25.2% were “about equally divided between dependence upon already overburdened private agencies, relatives, friends and neighbors in only slightly more fortunate circumstances, and upon food orders distributed by the police stations” ... About one-fourth of the families had some current income, averaging $3.78 per week per family ... In three-fourths of the cases there was no such income ... “Many ate surplus Federal commodities, consisting of flour, beef and beans.”
The committee announced that its conclusion was similar to that reached by the Community Council of Philadelphia which, after a like study in 1932 when 52,000 families were “off relief” for more than ten weeks, asserted that “people do not starve to death when relief stops. They just starve, with a margin by which life persists maintained by the pity of their neighbors and by a sort of scavenging on the community.”
“Although relief has been resumed ... families have mortgaged their future existence: scanty supplies of Winter clothing will have to be replaced; tools sold for food will have to be repurchased and debts will have to be repaid ... The effect on their mental state cannot be expressed in measurable terms.”
In the spring of 1938, the legislatures of Ohio and of Illinois failed to vote relief funds. The basic cause was the same in both cases: the hostility of the dominant rural and small-town bloc to the increasing relief needs of the big cities. In Cleveland and Chicago, relief for a period of months broke down completely. A single news item will give some idea of just what this meant to the unemployed:
Chicago, May 21: The second largest city in this country, Chicago, has followed Cleveland, the sixth largest, into relief bankruptcy ... 93,000 families – 270,000 persons – have been receiving direct relief in Chicago. 69,000 of those families, those whose names begin with the letters “A” through “NUT”, received their May checks before the funds ran out. 34,000 families whose names fall between the letters “NUU” and “Z” can receive no aid until some action is taken by the legislature ... Meanwhile, relief stations are distributing small quantities of foodstuffs from the Federal Surplus Commodities Corp. ... This is a typical handout for a relief family in Chicago today: 5 cents worth of dry beans, 29 cents of butter, 9 cents of cabbage, 6½ cents of celery, 5 cents of rice, and 9 cents of prunes – 60½ cents worth. This, plus another 55 cents worth later in the month is to last an average family of three persons until June ... In Cleveland the situation is worse because it has been going on longer, since the end of April ... Governor Henry Homer of Illinois and Mayor Burton of Cleveland had made the identical statement: “No one will be allowed to starve.” [47]
Note: On May 19, WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins said: “No one is going to starve. The legislatures will take care of that.” They did.
The New Republic for March 22, 1939, printed a letter from a social worker in Texas:
Now they’re talking about dropping the WPA and substituting direct relief. That will mean a lot of starving people here in the South ... Texas gives no direct relief except old-age assistance (partly Federal funds) ... I do not know of any county that gives more than emergency aid to employment cases. This sort of aid may be about a dollar a month for staples such as sugar, salt, coffee. Surplus commodities are the only foodstuffs given ... The WPA in Texas and in the South as a whole is the only source of aid for able-bodied workers ... When I was in the Dallas district two weeks ago, a woman with children had killed herself because she was refused assignment to a sewing project In the East Texas district over 24,000 families were awaiting assignment to the WPA. Last year in Washington County, Mississippi, the richest county in the state, the average monthly payment for old-age assistance was $3.71 ... The old-age clients in Greenville, the county seat, were sent to a soup kitchen supported by Sunday movie benefits. There they could get soup and bread twice a day and take some home for the other meal if they brought a bucket.
It is depressing that, at this late date, after all the experience piled up since 1929, it is still necessary to demonstrate the elementary fact that only the Federal Government can give adequate relief to the unemployed. The recent policy of the New Deal, however, makes it necessary to give, in the briefest outline, the reasons why the states and communities cannot, even if they would, cope with unemployment relief. There are roughly five major reasons:
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(1) Three-quarters of all state and local revenues come from general property taxes, almost wholly on real-estate. Since this form of property has been especially hard hit by the depression, tax assessments have had to be cut down and tax delinquencies have been common. During the 1929–1935 decline, 3,000 local governments defaulted on their debts. Many more have undoubtedly joined them in bankruptcy since the 1937 slump. This means forced economies in all services – not only relief but also schools, police, even garbage collecting. (Chicago, which has been bankrupt for years, is the classic example.) The one big source of revenue still open to states and communities for raising relief funds is the general sales tax, already used for that purpose in New York City and many other places. This is the kind of tax, of course, that bears most heavily on the masses. [48]
(2) For all the reactionary cry of “politics in relief!”, there has been remarkably little of it in either FERA, CWA or WPA It is the state, city, and county machines that make relief into a political football. The Earle administration in Pennsylvania, for example, used relief funds freely in the 1938 state elections. In Luzerne County, 12,000 road-making jobs were given out a few weeks before election day. An engineer later testified, in court, that 368 would have been an “adequate” working force. [49] After their votes had been registered, the unemployed, of course, were laid off wholesale. According to official state figures, 162,764 relief checks were issued on the weekly pay day falling on November 4, 1938, and 51,887 on the next pay day, November 11. Election day was November 8. [50]
(3) The number and complexity of local government units often make it impossible to organize relief sensibly. Each one of the 1,400 townships in Illnois runs its own relief system, completely independently of the other 1,399. [51] Sometimes a relief family on one side of a street will get twice as much milk for its baby as a family across the way in another county. Local relief officials are generally political appointees. A survey made in 1934 of the 425 poor districts in Pennsylvania showed that not a single one of the 967 persons in charge of them had any training whatsoever in social work. One third of them were farmers. [52]
“Persons recruited for the disbursing of relief in this period of purely local control,” reads another report, “were as a rule not adequate for the job. In one county, an ex-deputy sheriff was named ‘case supervisor’ ... because he was said to ‘know every one in the county.’ His method of checking up on applicants for relief was unique. He drove his car as far as the hard roads made going easy, then blew his horn. Every one came running.” [53]
(4) State legislatures usually will put to shame the most reactionary Congress on the matter of relief. The role which the Southern Democrats play in Congress on the relief issue is played in these legislatures – and usually even more effectively – by representatives from the country districts. The rural population doesn’t understand the need for relief. Mentally still living in the world of the unexhausted frontier, the farmers believe the unemployed don’t work because they are shiftless, and so they strongly object to supporting the unemployed. In states like Texas and Oklahoma where the rural counties completely dominate, relief standards are unbelievably low. (See Chart III.) In the big cities, where social thought is more advanced and where the unemployed are more organized and articulate, relief standards are higher. In states like Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania the unemployed often get the worst of both worlds: unemployment is a serious problem because of the many urban, industrialized areas, and yet relief funds are voted by a legislature often controlled by the farming districts. The result is such chronic collapses of relief as are described above.
(5) But these are all minor points compared to the fact that, in this period of monopoly capitalism, the American economy is integrated nationally, not locally. The economic forces that produce unemployment operate on a national scale. At the same time, there are the most tremendous variations between different communities as to both the amount of unemployment and the resources available for its relief. Unemployment varies widely at any given time between different industries. In September, 1937, for instance, 8% of the workers in manufacturing were idle, as against 24% in mining, 42% in construction, and 26% in fishing and forestry. [54] It is not surprising, therefore, to find wide variations also between different parts of the country. The 1937 unemployment census showed that unemployment was much more severe in New England, the Middle Atlantic states and the South than in the rest of the country. [55] The Middle Atlantic states have the wealth to cope with relief, but the South has not. In 1931 the national average of taxable wealth was $1961 per capita. In ten Southern states, it was less than 1,000. The taxable wealth in the richest state was about five times that in the poorest. [56] In the light of such statistics, it is not surprising to find that community A often has three times the relief load and half the resources to meet it with that community B has. As Chart III shows, this spring the average family in Oklahoma got $4 in relief a month, while the average New York family got $37. But the Oklahoma family was just as hungry as the New York family. Only a Federally financed and administered relief system will level out such inequities. The New Deal has gathered into the hands of the Federal government unprecedentedly wide powers to deal with interstate crime, to regulate various parts of the economic system, to control the radio, the courts, the whole fabric of social life. To this trend – an inevitable and long overdue development – there has been one great exception. The New Deal, as we have seen, for years has been shoving the relief problem ever more insistently back onto the states and communities. The more it is permitted to do so, the more desperate will become the plight of the unemployed.
43. NY Times, March 1, 1939.
44. Business Week, March 18, 1939.
45. Joanne C. Colcord: Cash Relief (Russell Sage Foundation, 1936).
46. NY Post, July 4, 1936.
47. NY Herald-Tribune, May 22, 1938.
48. See reference 9.
49. NY Times, June 17, 1939.
50. Editorial, Saturday Evening Post, June 10, 1939.
51. The Rundown of Relief, by Samuel Lubell and Walter Everett (Nation, August 20, 1938).
55. Census of Partial Employment, Unemployment and Occupations: 1937, Vol. IV – John D. Biggers. Administrator (GPO, 1938).
56. See reference 9.
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