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    Parker House,
    Boston, Mass.
    November 3, 1934.

    Dear Mr. Hopkins,

    A quick summary of what I've been able to gather is that:

  1. (1) Private employment is about the same as this time last year, with most business men expecting their businesses to follow last winter's curve, a few confident it will be better and none that I saw expecting it to be worse;

  2. (2) Monthly relief needs for the State as a whole will rise this winter 10-15 percent above the August figures (Public Welfare plus ERA);

  3. (3) Relief clients, despite the logic of the situation and publish reports (viz. Fortune Magazine, October) feel absolutely no resentment, rarely any gratitude, but for the most part an acceptance of relief as something to wrest a continued existence from.

  4. This applies particularly to Boston, for as yet I've not seen relief clients elsewhere, but apparently here the idea has never entered their heads that perhaps this is semi-permanent, at least. There is no feeling as there is, say, among the London poor, that their condition may continue. Their whole attitude toward relief is founded on this sanguine confidence in the future. This was true even in the only case I happened to visit that had been on relief back in 1922 and would have been marginal, on and off relief, regardless of the depression. This same assurance colors the reaction of

  5. (4) Business men and public, among whom, despite the ardors of the campaign, I found no one who did not accept the necessity of relief and the necessity of the Federal Government's helping the localities. They told me there were such objectors to the program per se, but even the most rock-ribbed conservative I could ferret out classed such opposition as partisan and infinitesimal in importance. The objections I heard were to the way the thing is being done and not to the fact that it is being done; even these objections are formless and as yet show no signs of even starting to crystallize into opposition.

  6. Two events just after I came to Boston ten days ago dramatized two phases of relief, and particularly of ERA work relief, that I think are part of the background of all public reaction to the program here, both on the part of clients and taxpayers:

  7. The Federal Grand Jury charges of corruption, etc., on the part of a third of the 355 local Mass. Administrators.

  8. The shutdown for a week of practically all ERA work projects in the State because it happened to be a long month and the money had been figured to last only four payrolls.

  9. (An ERA relief worker's budget, of course, is figured by the week, and if it is figured correctly it leaves nothing for him to save against the rainy day when five paydays happen to come in the same month. The workers are allowed, I believe, to make the time up in the next 20 days, or so, but that sort of administrative complexity cuts down largely upon any added sense of security that ERA might be expected to give). This and other factors, such as the fact that projects come to an end and that then it takes some time to get back on Public Welfare rolls again are factors in the cases reported here and there where unemployed are said to have declined ERA work even though it would give them more money because they and their families have more security on Public Welfare.

  10. At the same time there seems to be a firm conviction among business men, social workers and public here (I didn't broach it to clients) that ERA is even more political than Public Welfare, at least in its local units which determine who gets the jobs. One of the bases of such feeling is that ERA has a chance to be more political in the nature of the case, since it provides jobs for only a fourth or so of those who apply, while Public Welfare in some fashion has to take care of all comers. The charges in the midst of the campaign if widespread inefficiency and worse on the part of local ERA administrations, made by the foreman of the Federal Grand Jury, and his subsequent arrest on charges of taking a bribe in the same connection, have naturally not decreased the general suspicion of politics.

  11. I do not mean to overemphasize the criticism, because as I said people unanimously recognize the necessity for relief and for Federal aid in it. On the way the program is being carried out they are widely ignorant, recognize their ignorance, having thrown up their hands some time back over ever understanding the various Governmental "alphabets." They are as yet reserving judgment, tolerantly expecting a certain amount of administrative fumbles and of politics in such a large program, and content for the time not to know how large a part these may play. Their suspicions in these regards naturally vary according to the bias of the individual and the particular incidents that may have come to his attention.

  12. Typical is Charles Pinkham of Lynn (grandson of Lydia the medicine girl, but with his brothers running a Lynn bank and large real estate interests, with contacts all over New England, young, liberal, head of Lynn's United Charities drive, recently Republican candidate for the Legislature but not much involved in politics, really) who said purely and simply that he knew nothing of relief, saw it was necessary and thought it was a swell thing to give people work instead of a dole. He added with a laugh: "The only idea I have of ERA and that of all the people I know comes from the fact that we have a fine municipal golf course here. Everyone in Lynn plays on it and the ERA workers keep it perfect. There are enough of them so that they can cut each blade of grass with a pair of scissors. And so the people of Lynn get their idea of ERA from seeing these people lounging around smoking and shouting remarks on the golfers' form."

  13. Though naturally, because of the medicine business, a passionate hater of the Tugwell phases of the New Deal, he hopes that the rest of it will succeed and sets great store, as they all seem to in Lynn, especially the bank, by the Federal Housing campaign. He is one of the fem I met (the others being two advertising men) who think business likely to be distinctly better this winter than last year. His feeling about NRA, of which he was local chairman in the early days, is that it was a good thing but has fallen by its own weight of administrative complexity and he hopes relief won't do the same. I've given his view at such length because he seems typical of the liberal Republican whose support is essential if public opinion is to support a socially-minded program in this part of the world.

  14. Another more acid test in the same field was an old Tufts professor I've known for years, Republican of the hardest water, on Cambridge party councils for half a century or so, who said he saw no objections to the Government in relief, since the localities had to be helped, and had heard none voiced except as pure partisan politics.

  15. Of 521 replies received to a questionnaire by the rock-ribbed New England Council in September (half were by manufacturers, a quarter by bankers) only one asked abolition of Federal relief. The council's own commentator sums up the replies under this head: "There is pretty general endorsement of the relief program--that is, of the idea that people must be fed, clothed and sheltered. There is criticism of the way it is being done but not so much as I should have expected."

  16. I found no business man (or anyone else) who felt that the time had come to cut losses and giver relief the cheapest way regardless. There is a (to me) surprising general recognition on the part of employers that the preservation of the morale of the people on relief is as essential to the employers, if they are ever to know prosperity and need labor again, as it is to the people themselves.

  17. Dudley Harmon, active head of the New England Council, is one of the two citizens I've met who've taken enough intelligent interest in relief to try to know something of what's going on and actually to think about the problem, feels that the complexity of the Mass. set-up is one of the greatest difficulties here, that the solution if the whole problem lies in the arousing of local responsibility and imagination to grapple with the task of administration. The other lay citizen I speak of joins him in that and in the feeling that by-and-large up to now the people best qualified to help with the job in Mass. haven't been called upon. Perhaps both have axes to grind, but if so they fooled me.

  18. In particular the sympathetic approach of Harmon to the whole thing (minimizing specific failings in the realization that the job had to be done) seemed interesting to me, because the New England Council are just the people I'd have expected to carp everlastingly even if the actual sincerity, every cooperation or the organization could give in increasing local understanding the problem and helping the localities to face it as their own responsibility even though they are being aided by Federal money.

  19. The confusion that these people speak of and that lies behind the general public lack of an informed interest in the program is real enough. I came here from New York (Louisa Wilson's office, TERA) innocently thinking I was to study one thing, relief, only to find I had to study two separate and independent things, Public Welfare direct relief and ERA work relief. The division, and the lack of even reasonably uniform Public Welfare standards throughout the State makes it difficult if not impossible for anyone to make even a reasonable guess as to what the relief needs may be this winter.

  20. The figures I've given you above are from the State ERA statistical department and tally roughly with Mr. Rotch's estimate that "if we could have $500,000 more a month for ERA in the coming months and $1,000,000 more in the peak winter months (more than August) we could do a pretty good job." But the figures come from adding up the estimates of local welfare officers whose standards are so different that the total is as meaningless as to add apples to peanuts.

  21. There are other factors of confusion in the lack of an informed public interest, even among those who might be expected to have one. Generally throughout the State direct relief clients are made to put in their time to give some "work" in return. Of course no money is spent on materials so this is all "leaf-raking." In the City of Boston, for instance, Public Welfare has about twice as many men riding around on garbage trucks, and so forth, eighteen or so to a truck, as ERA has at work. Even if all ERA projects and workers were bang-up wonderful by sheer weight of numbers the PW "workers" would color public reaction to the work program, for the distinction between people "on work relief" and people who get relief but have to work for it is too precious to expect the public ever to grasp.

  22. The man in the street, when he sees people loafing on the job, thinks of them as ERA workers indiscriminately, performing in his state of mind the unification of public relief agencies that in other States has actually taken place.

  23. It follows naturally that the division between PW and ERA, which has led to such complexities that you can't explain; even the set-up to an ordinary intelligent individual in 10 or 15 minutes, brings its own administrative difficulties. ERA has been forced by the situation into arbitrary positions that cut down on its effectiveness and acclaim. Because it gives only work relief it has to set up work relief in the various towns on the basis of the relief need and not the basis of how rapidly worthwhile work projects can be developed. I've not been around yet to see the actual effects of this but obviously by this method it cannot operate so efficiently as it could if there were enough flexibilities so that in a town where there was a fine opportunity for a work program this was the major form of relief, while in a town where such opportunities had not as yet been worked out, direct relief was the chief form.

  24. Another result of this division of the two forms of relief that logically should go hand in hand is ERA's ruling that it will give work only to its "A-1" class of applicants, breadwinners with two or more dependents.

  25. In the City of Boston there are 24,000 of these, 50,000 registrants (the exact number is not known) are out of luck as far as ERA jobs go. The engineering part of the Boston City ERA howls that this makes it difficult to get competent workers, Mr. Swartwout, in charge there, adding picturesquely that "it's just putting a premium on the village bulls" and that for some reason the more children a man has the worse a worker he is. Thus is this field also ERA has been forced to a primary consideration of need instead of efficiency, a situation that would not exist if the two major forms of relief were pooled under one management and work relief given where it would be most useful to the community, both in building morale and in the work done.

  26. The way the division of responsibility works out to the bewilderment of all is illustrated by the present arrangements for getting coal to needy families this winter. ERA, Public Welfare and private charities people, by the way, unanimously attacked me on the matter of coal as soon as I had my head in the door, Father Barry, of the Catholic Charities, saying that last winter's distribution of coal was "the greatest thing the government's done tangibly to keep up the morale, not only of relief cases, but of others who were thereby kept off relief." This year, since there is no Federal coal, the Public Welfare is to supply its own clients, private charity is to tackle the job from then on to the extent of its resources, and when these are gone Public Welfare, with ultimate legal responsibility for the needy, will try to handle the rest. Private charity is thus forced, by the Mass. set-up, to spend itself in a field taken care of by public agencies elsewhere, and is baffled and sore over it.

  27. The ERA client himself, if he didn't happen to have been drawn from Public Welfare rolls in the first place, will find himself shunted in the matter of coal, first to private charities and then, when their resources are exhausted, to Public Welfare. (Such was the arrangement a week ago; I've not kept up-to-the-minute.) Already in other connections there was a duplication of agencies (A man on PW who hopes for an ERA job must register separately and have an independent investigation of his need, a tragic waste when good caseworkers are so hard to get in sufficient quantity and the costs of good supervision are so high at best).

  28. But worst in the confusion is the difference in standards throughout the State between ERA and Public Welfare. Because of the cleavage between the two, Federal funds have had no effect of raising PW standards, and the Federal agency has simply had to set its own standard independently. Thus more than half of ERA workers in Boston (unskilled labor) are in this case: The ERA tells them, "With your family your budget should be $14.25 (let us say) but because of our limitation on the number of hours you may work (24), we can pay you only $12." But in that case the PW budget for this man would be only $9, so PW will not supplement. It will do so only when its own budget estimate for him exceeds what he gets on ERA, so it works out that only those ERA workers with such a whapping number of kids that they can qualify are given supplementary PW relief of $3. (The PW maximum is $15 for 7 dependents or over; in practice they seem to supplement only in cases where the maximum is involved, i.e., they don't bother much about amounts under $3). A shrewd observer at the State ERA said, "I think the clients have given up long ago trying to figure it out, but are glad to get what they can without understanding."

  29. In the face of all this the relief clients themselves are extremely philosophic. "the most amazing thing in this whole situation," says Father Barry, "is the docility, patience, courage and hope of the American people. The greatest job that the Government has done has been in the stifling of possible disorder or protest. These people have no leadership, good or bad, except the Communist fringe, of trifling importance. Swartwout told me that on many jobs the men on that particular job have a sort of loose organization, but I didn't find it so on any of the ERA jobs I happened to visit, or find anyone else who knew of any organization at all worth speaking of.

  30. About half Boston's 12,000 ERA workers are under the Parks Department and I went around and talked to men, foremen and supervisors on projects that account for perhaps 10 per cent of these. Undoubtedly I was shown the best, but what I saw seemed swell. At Marine Park, for instance, the supervisor is a particularly good man, humane and yet getting the job done. It was bitter cold on the beach where the crew, many insufficiently clad and more than half without gloves, were wrestling great rocks into place to form a wall. "A lot of them are not used to the work--a couple were accountants, one a real estate man," said the supervisor, "How could I drive them as on a private job? One man came to me all taped up with a broken back. Was I to send him home without a job? I gave him light work. The real estate man first begged me for inside work, said he couldn't stand this, but when a cold day came and I got around to it he said he'd got used to it and wanted to stay on it; that he ate and slept better than he had in years." There was a fair amount of joshing among the men and they looked and acted, except for their clothes, as you might expect from a similar private crew. There appears to be little grousing among them and they are anxious for their jobs. They are a section of South Boston Irish, the toughest in town.

  31. "Men are interested in anything they can see going forward, and a job of endlessly wheeling dirt in a wheelbarrow is the hardest thing to keep them going on, even under private contract, "he said. There was much of that earlier, wheeling the dirt a quarter of a mile over heavy-going on the beach. People of Boston in general laugh at the slowness with which the work progresses, he said, without realizing that by the primitive hand methods used more people are given work. He figures that a private contractor with machinery could do in 3 or 4 weeks with 25 men what his crew of 300 makes 4 months to do, and at the same cost if he had to buy his machinery new. (Cheaper, of course, actually, because the machinery would be left over after the job) But the development seems a worth-while one, well-planned and well-executed.

  32. When the supervisor felt more confidence in me he lamented that the cost of materials kept skilled workers from having the same break that unskilled got in ERA and added that "liars seem to stay on the job while those who tell the truth get kicked off." (ERA has managed to investigate only about 2/3 of its workers as yet, so there would not necessarily be any connivance in that if true; those who had fewer than two dependents and said so were dropped at once).

  33. The whole thing on work relief seems to rest on the ability and tact of the immediate supervision, I was told at the Army Base, where one of the largest local CWA and later ERA projects was carried out. Their people (though chosen frankly and baldly by politics under CWA and carried on under ERA as long as the job lasted) worked as well as these officers had seen under private contract, built a high-pressure water line, made extensive and complicated repairs, etc., which came as a life-saver to the Army Base. All that same time another gang worked on a Navy strip of land right next door and did nothing, the Navy headquarters being far away at Charleston and no immediate supervision being possible. The Army officers set for the idea that perhaps they had been able to get such good results because they were familiar with government "paper work" and so were not as confused as civilian supervisors as a welter of orders came through. One of the officers, now touring New England on a War Department check-up of manufacturers' war production abilities, reports substantially the same general attitude toward relief and toward this winter's business hopes that I've given above.

  34. As to specific morale: All thoughtful welfare people I talked to felt that one of the greatest problems arising from the (perhaps necessarily) inflexible budgetary standards was that on the one hand they would be too high for the lower fringe, taking away incentive to get off relief, and on the other, too low, forcing people to abandon their contacts and the neighbors they had known and their living standards (and thus in many cases making it unlikely that they will ever be able to get off relief in the future) in order for them to qualify. There is no question but that both things are happening in Boston.

  35. A Catholic Welfare man whose parish is in the North End (Italian slum), a cop on the beat there who knows the intimate family affairs of everyone on the street, and a license investigator who happened along estimated that at least half the people on relief in that section were well contented with it and would never stir up a stump again unless forced to. Qualifying for, let us say, $12 a week even from PW because of a large family, a man would rather have that without working than make the precarious $20 which was all he ever made even in the best of times. (So they say) When all due allowance is made for the vivid disrespect of foreigners up here (The old Bostonian considering everyone, including myself, foreign, the Irish looking down on the Italian, and so on in the order of immigration, to an extent that really deeply colors all thought) and for the natural disencouragement of taking jobs to get off relief, having them fold and finding yourself in relief again, there is a large section of the population here where the old abhorrence--if it ever existed--of "going on the Welfare" has died out.

  36. In a typical family where there are two adults and one minor, the ERA budget is $14.25 (though ERA pays only $12 if the breadwinner is unskilled) and the PW budget is $9 a week. Undoubtedly the ERA budget is right or even low, based on a minimum standard of decent subsistence. (PW frankly confesses it is not adequate, says that it gives "aid" not "support") But here you are faced with families that never had a "decent" standard and even the PW budgets enable them to carry on in relative comfort if not what is to them positive luxury (in cases that have just the 7 dependents to qualify for PW's maximum of $15. The question at issue, of course, is whether in relief an attempt is also to be made to raise sub-decent living standards (A quite different program).

  37. ERA has a uniform budget, not all over Boston but all over the State. That results in such glaring inequalities in practice by giving equality in theory that Mr. Carney, when I saw him the first day I was here, before he had resigned, said "a lot of Portuguese on the Cape" were fattening on it, and added that his personal idea of the remedy was to fire everyone on ERA and let another batch of applicants get the jobs, so that people wouldn't be getting used to having them. I suppose the State ERA will get around to having its budgets scaled to the locality as its hourly wage rate is already, but the problem within political units like the City of Boston will remain even then. A suggested solution was that rents be treated separately from the budget and paid according to whatever dicker could be made with individual landlords, keeping the client in his own locality. Also that neighborhood food costs be taken into consideration. Problems of the home owner who may have no equity in the property and not be able to give it away but not qualify for relief, for the man who needs a car to go on meeting, let us say, half or two-thirds of his budget by his own efforts, and of the white-collar person like myself who needs a telephone as much as a carpenter needs his tools if he is to keep his contacts and have much chance of getting a job had no proposed solutions.

  38. Anyway, from the head of Boston ERA casework (herself and old PW caseworker) and one of her most experienced subordinates I got the reluctant guess--reluctant because of their loyalty to the higher ERA budget--that perhaps 1/8 of all cases in Boston, despite low PW standards, got enough so they wouldn't ever make any effort to get clear of relief. They arrived at their guess by allowing that perhaps half the cases in such slum districts felt that way and then estimating that about 1/4 of all relief cases in Boston were in such districts.

  39. So much for such cases. To get the other side of the see-saw, where the straight yardstick might be expected to crush people down, I visited with a PW caseworker in Dorchester, a middle-class, white collar, artisan district. He may have been hand-picked for me as one of the most intelligent workers, but the day we spent was his regular routine as it happened to come to hand and, I gather from him, perfectly typical of that district. I was chiefly impressed with the quality of the job PW is doing--if this caseworker be any sample, as he thinks he is--within the limits of its inadequate budget allowances and its caseload of over 200. But I was impressed chiefly with the courage, hope and fortitude of its clients and their constant struggle to get off relief, intermittently successful.

  40. First case visited was an emergency one where the father of five youngsters, for years foreman in an automobile part factory, an "American," had first applied for relief in 1928 when General Motors took over the place and closed it down, but had avoided PW then because a $200 bonus came in time. In '31 he had relief to the extent of $35 from the police fund to help with two months' rent and in 1932 he had been on relief by odd jobs, painting and so forth, and hadn't been heard of since until the day before my visit when he fell off a ladder and went to the hospital with a fractured skull and two fractured elbows. The wife had come to PW and got an emergency food order for $3. She said that would last until the day after the visit, when in the regular course she would be started on the regular cash allowance.

  41. In this case what will happen is that the PW will chisel down the landlord and far as possible from his $28 monthly rent (to $5 a week or maybe a little less) and that the family will go on living in the apartment, sacrificing on food to be able to keep its standards of neighborhood and associates for the children. That is what happens pretty generally in this class.

  42. It is apparently what has happened in all the families I happened to visit there, except the one, mentioned above, that would be marginal anyway. In the house of the emergency case, there was much for them to cling to; the place was beautifully kept, if modest: flowers, and a really first-rate pastel in the living room. In all the caseworker was trying to solve these people's problems individually, to help them to ERA or other jobs they might qualify for, etc.

  43. Even in the marginal case, which happened to have been known personally to the worker as head of the medical lab or Tufts back in 1926, a hustler, but never with any advantages, and dumb, there was still a striving to get off relief and no notion that it might be permanent. In fact, since this particular client is tubercular, the worker was trying to restrain himself from taking a private job that he knew was too heavy for him and would kill him.

  44. When the PW budget is chiseled on from the rent angle in order to keep the children in a decent neighborhood, and then squeezed further to provide clothes and necessary household supplies (neither figured in the PW budget) it must be pretty tough on the children's food, though I've not been able to get hold of any definite facts. Clothes, codliver oil and milk to meet this gap are provided in hit-or-miss fashion by private agencies, which do as good a job as they can under the circumstances. As I said before they are weighted down here by having to supply some of the regular employment relief elsewhere supplied by public agencies.

  45. On the whole there is excellent cooperation between public and private agencies, use of each other's files and experience, etc., which seems to make possible a better aggregate job than might otherwise seem credible--always within the limits of the pitifully inadequate budgetary standards of the Public Welfare. Its administration, I am assured by the State ERA, is getting better and better all the time, following a PW shake-up when the new Mayor came in this spring.

  46. Under all this the people seem, not contented, but confident that it will all be over soon; not grateful, but very glad of this chance that is being given them to be able to tide themselves over.

  47. That's about all, except to record the great mystery to social workers here of what has happened to the white-collar class and how it keeps itself going with out being on relief. Analyses show but a negligible number on PW. Speculations are that in this section of the country white-collar people have more resources in income here and there, family and friends and perhaps in ingenuity, as well as a fierce desire to keep off PW. A more normal proportion have come in under ERA.

  48. I'm sorry to have made this so much at one crack, but Boston was such a tough nut that I wanted to get the loose ends tied up to some extent before reporting at all.

  49. If I've trespassed in the field of detailed administrative policy it's because it seemed to me that the whole set-up, especially the confusion resulting from the separation of PW from ERA work relief, has left a dangerous bewilderment in the minds of public and relief clients, who continue unanimously to acquiesce in--I think that's a more accurate way of saying it than "support"--the program, partly because they have faith it won't have to last much longer and partly because of emotional sympathy with the New Deal.

  50. It's as dangerous as if there were crystallized opposition, more dangerous than if there were, in fact, because with this sort of emotional, uninformed and unquestioning support there is no reckoning or arguing. If people suddenly get bored with the whole complex subject and turn on the program and rend it (vide League of Nations, 1918-1919), there is no way of staying their hand; even the social necessity of the program won't count and there may be a national tragedy.

  51. One factor in the public confusion is that the State ERA has no good publicity service to give information regularly, see that it is explained as it is given out, and interpret the program to the people. No reports are regularly made public, so that people who really want to know learn things piecemeal, as they ask, and often put the wrong slant on things innocently. One social agency, trying to make a graph of relief expenditures in the State said they'd not been able to find out what the CWA spent. Maybe they didn't know where to ask. I found the New England Council within three days had written someone that the Federal share of relief expenditures in Mass. was 10 per cent--a piece of apparently honest misinformation, honest in intention, I've not gone into this elementary side of the matter before because it seems to me that with this complex set up the best publicity in the world couldn't do much.

  52. In New York we are always saying that it was from necessity, not choice, that the State and later the Federal Government came into the relief picture. We are wrong, as the record here shows. It wasn't necessity; it was only simple intelligent foresightedness. If the set-up continues here as complex as at present, it will be surprising if reaction against the program doesn't develop first in this state (unless there are others, God forbid, where the set-up makes the job of those in charge even more difficult). If it develops at all, if the need continues and people suddenly wake up to realize that the need is here, it will be surprising, too, if opposition in this State, whenever it crystallizes, doesn't take the most stupid and anti-social form of simply washing its hands of the whole business. Unless something can be done to simplify the thing, make it easier to administer, and possible for the intelligent public to understand.

    Sincerely,

    Robert Washburn