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No . 4 -- 133 8 Northwest<>rn University Library OOCUME.NTS iuoM T H E WO F K S P F O G R A M -- Works Progr ess Admi nist rati on Fo r Pelease in Mo rning Paper ~ of Tuesday, Oc tob er 13, 1 936 . The following address was deli ve red by Harry L. Hopkins, Administ rat or of t h e Works Pr ogres s Administrat::. on, at the WPA's Free Exhibit at Ph iladelphia at 7:30 P.M., Monday night, Oc t ober 12 , 1936 : Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-1338 In all .America, the grea test barni.ge of ch8rges which is being laid down against the federal work-relief p rogram is based on Pennsylvania. come here to meet it. I have Every day in the newspapers, every night on the radio, national Republican leaders join with local ward-heelers in the concentra,ted chorus of condemna.tion. Why, in the months of September and October, 1936, do you h~ar and read so much about WP-A in Pennsylvaniar I will admit that alongside the old-line polit.ical postgraduates who are running th;is attack, I am a babe in arms. But even l can add up a plain situ~ti0n and get the answer. This battle in Pennsylvania is between two specific groups - those who represent modern social practice and those who represent what your own State Department of Welfare has described as seventeenth-century poor relief in the twentieth century. Local Republican bosses in this State are waging holy war for the return of the happy days when Poor Boards took relief money and spent it for the best interests of whoever was boss • .And campaigners for the highest office in the land are not above joining them becaus e after all, only one other State has more elect~ral votes. Thus far in this political football game they have played with WPA, there haven 1 t been any rules. They have alleged we fired men we never employed from projects that did not exist. George Green of 1524 North Hutchinson Street, in this city, is a good example. He signed an affadavit that he was discharged from a WPA project because he registered. Republican, In the first place, he never worked for WPA, a~d in the second plaee, the re never was any such project as the one he alleged he was discharged from. I understand there is some kind of an unfinished trestle at Parker's Landing in Armstrong County. this trestle • The charge was printed that WP.A wasted $62,000 on .As a matter of fact, it was a total fabrication. anything to do with the trestle. WP.A. never had This parade of ridiculous falsehoods originates with Grundy and his crowd, and is passed along by his well-paid agent, William Hard. Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-1338 -2- Hard recently charged over the radio that three memb ers of one family, all active Democrats, were all working for WPA in the Philadelphia district-Mrs. Winnie Booker, Wilfred Booker and Coffield Booker. Careful investigation of the charge revealed that Mrs. Winnie Booker never worked for us at any time, that there is no record of a Coffield Booker's ever having been employed, and that Wilfred Booker resigned last July. they are bringing against us. These are ty-pical examp les of the sort of charges I could give you dozens more. As soon as we give the true answers, they drop them like hot potatoes and rush on to new fantasies. I do not expect them to accept any rules, let alone rules of my choosing. But I think eny fair-minded citizen will agree to t his one: WPA in Pennsylvania is to be measured, there must be a yardstick. measuring-rod? If the W'nat is a fair I say it is what Pennsylvania had before. In 1932, there were nearly a million and a qua.rt er Pennsylvanians out of .111ork - over 30% of your working population. Another 30%, according to 1 the Governor were working half-time or less. Your State In this crisis, what did you get within the State? legislature voted. $10,000,000 in the First Talbot Act. law was 11 conceived in politics and born in h:=itred.11 the local Poor Boards without supervision. Your Governor said the It turned the money over to The contemptible story of wha.t happened to it has now been ferreted out - waste, discrimination on the basis of grudges, favoring of particula.r grocery stores, squeezing the destitute out of compensation and insurance. Local political racketeers -paid p e rsonal taxes with this money. The stories of many of these boards, for years back , are utterly incredible. Of- ficial reports showthat one district bought 5,800 cigars for its officials in 1931 at 11 cents each, and 29 cases of rye whiskey for $1,000. In another, 528 bottles of ginger ale and 950 cigars helped to build up an administrative overhead. of 36 percent. When an investigation threatened, many of the r e cords were mysteriously burned. Members took their wives to conventions on relief money, framed dummy real-estate deals and worked insurance ra.ckets. They paid. big architects' fees in periods during which there was no construction. entirely above favoritism. ".lualified voters! One board was It divided the relief money evenly among all the This is the pictm·e of local Poor Board relief. Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-1338 -3- There are dozans of such examples in the public records. families of officia ls got special favors. horbi tan t prices. -Whole Stores were favored which ch8.rged ex- Records were sketchy or non-existent, In 1934 the Sta te Auditor-General said one-seventh of the First Talbot Act money went for questionable or illegal expenditures. These boards were manned mainly by ward-hee lers. expense ran from 13 to 40 per cent. Administrative For the whole State in 1933 it was over 18 p er cent, in Philadelphia over 27 per cent. In contrast, the WPA 1 s overhead in Pennsylvania is less than 4 per cent. Herbert Hoover once coined a phrase. "Poli tics with human misery." I know of no place in America to which it can be ap plied more aptly than to the Pennsylvania Poor Boards during the time he was President of the United Stat e s. All your decent people, of both parties, have been trying to get rid of them for years. WPA. Who keens them with you? The very people who are making this fight on The l oca l Republican machine. The ablest social experts in your Sta te dwell in constant fear that they will return to newer at any time. you can't stop by cutting off tent~cles. They are an octopus For they were fed by the richest boodle the S~ate ever knew, and they will not stop trying to get it back. again in 1935. You may have heard of the Batchelor bill. They tried It proposed to displace the State Emergency Reli ef Board and give relief money back to the Poor Boards. It even passed· the Republican Senate. But your good Governor managed to get it laid on the shelf in the House I supp ose Ex-President Hoover must know something about this history, yet he spnke to the Republican Women of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia only five months ago and this is what he said: "Re turn the administration of relief again to State and local nonpartisan committees of leading citizens. the need of the unemployed. Give them such Federal subsidy as meets Take the favoritism of politics out of the bread of relief.". Mr. Hoover now is willing to grant federal subsidies for relief, though four years ago he was "opposed to any direct , or . i:i;idirect federal dole." Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY He 4-1338 -4- advocated. what he called 11 encouragerr.ent of voluntary cooperation in the comro11.11i ty. 11 I know thcit many volunteer ae;encies have done excellent and unselfish work in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. They deserve great credit. But it seems to me I recall something about a Republican apule re.cket which was expo sed by the Philadelphia Record in 1931. apple-vendors? How much tribute did. they squeeze out of unemp loyed Something over $100,000 a year. Mayor Mackey 1 s charity show thAt same year. $36 ever reached. the poor. I also seem to recall Republican Out of every $100 collected, only The thing was so rotten that the newspPp erman who exposed it won the Pulitzer Prize! Of course it is not news that Herbert Hoover occasionally changed his mind or blinked the facts. In 1930 he said, 11 our difficulties in 1922 were far more severe than at present,n and assured us we had passed the worst. In March 1931 he felt the worst would be over in 60 days. A year later he had to find some way of explaining why recovery had not come. Who did he blame, He blamed tp.e delay on the extravagance of the House of Representatives because it ha.d. appropriated an extra $137,000,000 to give jobs to the unemployed at road-building, Mr. Hoover had a curious complex about lending American dollars for relief in foreign countries. But he stubbornly refused, in the light of wide- spread evidence presented to him personally, to do anything about the destitute of his own country. Back in 1917 he was the spearhead of the drive that got $75;000,000 from the United States Government for Belgian relief. And in 1924, while he was Secretary of Commerce, he pleaded in vain for $10,000,000 in Federal funds for relief in Germany, Yet when his l')Wn country stood at a desperate cross- roads, and he was its Chief Executive, all he would do was to utter unctuous phrases about individual initiative. I do not want to appear jingoistic, to help stricken people abroad, I only want to the high pri'ests of present-day criticism. of these. 11 de■unk the backgrounds of some of William Randolph Hearst is another He feels our spending is inexcusable. the Columbia network on June 2, 1931; I do not deplore these efforts Let me quote what he said over This is not a time to reduce National debt. It is a time to increase ~e.tional debt and increase the expenditures of the Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-1338 -5- Government in p ublic works in emp loyment of labor, and thereby increase prosperity. Then, out of prospe rity, to pay the debt. 11 He said p rosperity could be restored by a Federal appropriation of $5,000 , 000 , 000 for empl0yment of labor at prevailing wages, but the plan would. succeed only if the Government spent the money and 11 did not sit on it permanently like a deluded hen on a porcelain doorknob." Well, Pennsylvania drifted along into the beginning of 1933 and your State legislature was in a political deadlock for 14 long weeks without passing a. reli ef bill. Your relief officials know how near you were to riots and blood shed in March, 1933. are some headlines: Wrecked Again 11 ; 11 11 The threats were printed in all your newspap ers. 300 ,000 Beg Q,uick Action on State Aid 11 ; Here "State Relief rlans Governor Appeals to Clargy to Ave rt Starvation Riots. 11 In Washington, C.W.A. was our first big effort at work-relief. was set up in winter, in a crisis. It Nowadays, judged by present standards of WPA, CWA was only a beginning. But it seems that CWA was pretty welcome here. Arthur Dunham, Secretary of the relief division of Pennsylvania Public Chariti e s wrote this in 1934: 11 The CWA program met with general enthusiasm in Pennsyl va.n ia -- there was a certain clean-cut quality about it; it was real work on r eal jobs for real wages. 11 Back in 1932, Presi dent Hoover rejected a public works program submitted by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Re said the program not only was too expensive but it represented "the building of a com:!TI1lllity beyond its neeessiti e s. 11 What are the necessities of a community or a State? I wonder if :Pennsylvania will find unnecessary the fourteen hun i r ed mil e s of new r/'\ads ani streets that WPA is building, or the thirte en ti1ous1:,.nd mil e s it is improving. Is the construction or the ii;iproving of more than five hundred Pennsylvania bridges a thing to be deplore d? WPA is building or improving 1,500 new schools in Pennsylvania, 28 airp orts, 400 other public builiings, 300 miles of sewers, 100 miles of wa ter lines and a thousana. parks and p l aygrounds. But p e rhap s such fore- sight is sup erfluous. Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-1338 -6- You had a flood last Spring. c in the city of York saved the town. The work that WPA had done on Codorus Today WPA is building a million dollar on the Susquehanna river at Wilkes Barre, and doing extensive work at ,town. Over 89,000 W'PA workers fought that flood day and night. ~omen on sewing projects made clothes and bedding for the victims. Thousands of Many local ;h authorities have said that WPA clean-up work was the biggest factor in the intion of any serious epidemic. A WPA worker at Williamsport toiled 83 hours without food or sleep ~eseued 45 persons before he fainted from sheer exhaustion. of people you do not hear about from the political These are the racket eers who are chiefly ~ested in getting their hands back on relief money. ii.PA workers are beautifying Fairmount Park in this City. Ohief En- ir Alan Corson of the Park Commission has been high in his praise of this work. tys he was requested by the Commission to thank ths -' 1lJ;A. Depression stopped work on your Museum of Art in 1932 with twenty-eight iries finished. WPA workers have completed t wenty-six additional rooms, with substantial help from is. Museum funds. The work involved thirty different skilled If you want to know anything about the workmanship, the economy, the spirit 1e politics on that project I refer you to Dr. Fiske Kimball, Director of [useum. We have learned a great deal about work relief. You can see in this >Urse samples of a number of the kinds of useful public work which local oftls have requested for the employment of their own local people. This work .nfinite variety, because the people it is designed for have an infinite ity of talents and experience. It must preserve their ability to work and keep ready for a return to private jobs. We make no apology for finding suitable for non-manual workers--for teachers and artists and nurses and clerical and 1ical people. The local officials who originated these projects and share · cost have testified as to their worth. In the light of American experience since the War, we make no apology ;he money we have spent or the way we have spent it. During twelve years, Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-1338 -7- tder three successive Republican presidents, the .American people were encouraged , send to Europe for the benefit of foreign countries a total of fourteen .llion American dollars. We have spent less than six billion, in our worst depression, for the lemployed of America. - We have lifted the whole face of this country with many lousands of public improvements, and the improvements are right here, added ,tional wealth, to be used by generations to come. The last Republican administration let people starve. ley divided relief money among political henchmen. ,ey had soup lines and Hoovervilles. We fed them • . We stopped this racket. We abolished them. We provided jobs. ,ey had riots, and we have order, because we have given the jobless man a .ance. 00000000000 Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
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