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December 7, 1934
Palisades
Mr. Harry L. Hopkins, My dear Mr. Hopkins: I am enclosing a summary of conclusions based on the studies I have made of seven industrial cities in central and western New York State.I have found this a most interesting and exciting assignment and if my work teas bean of value to you I shall be very glad. May I at this time congratulate you personally on the remarkable _ efficient job which your department teas put through? That some fifteen million people without resources of their own should have been kept in comfort is such a thing as the world teas never seen before. What I have seen of it has given me a great personal sense Or uplift. With many thanks for even the small part you have permitted me to have in it, I am
Very sincerely,(signed) SUMMARY
To: Mr. Harry L. Hopkins In summarizing the material I have gathered I am making a sharp division between the two things which the TERA is trying to accomplish. If its first object is to keep the destitute fed, housed and clothed, they have certainly attained it. If the second object is to so conserve millions of people that they will still be industrial and social assets after recovery has come, it is not so easy to tell whether they have attained it or not. I have visited seven industrial cities in central and western New York. Buffalo with a population of 573,076; Rochester with a population of 328,132; Syracuse with 209,326; Schenectady with 95,692; Jamestown with 45,155, Olean with 21,790 and Dunkirk with 17,802. Their industrial products vary from locomotives to spectacles, from concrete sewer pipes to silk ribbons. In all seven of them important industries which formerly employed many people have been discontinued, and the industries which remain have continued to substitute machines for men during the depression, so that each city has a body of unemployed, many of whom are now on relief who can never get back their old jobs because these jobs have vanished. If you add to these the people who are past work, and the "unworthy poor" you have a heavy relief load which cannot grow less for a long time. The number of clients who are obviously re-employable is already beginning to diminish in Buffalo, Syracuse and notably in Olean. It is about stationary in Rochester and Schenectady. It is a little higher in Jamestown and Dunkirk. In all these cities except Jamestown and Dunkirk there is every probability that it will be greatly diminished by spring and there is a wide-spread feeling among those in a position to know that a comprehensive PWA program might absorb it all. Home Relief is efficiently administered and in general with a good deal of tact and consideration. It is enough to keep the clients in health so far. That malnutrition and undernourishment are appearing is due rather to ignorance of the women who prepare the food than to any lack in quantity. The same thing applies to clothing and perhaps to fuel. There is not, I think, an adequate allowance for household supplies and for repairs. The fault with home relief is not with the things given nor with the way they are given, but with the effect that this charity has on the people who receive it. I talked with case workers who have had the same families in charge for a long time and they all assure me of the progressive loss of morale. With the chronic cases, the derelict, the "unworthy" this does not matter; for the old and unemployable there is not yet any alternative; but for the others it is a tragedy. For them Work Relief is so much better that there is no comparison. The fact that they consider it as a ''job" even to the extent of striking for better wages, is proof that they can be fitted back into industry as soon as the chance comes. It is true that some of those on Work Relief have refused outside jobs, and that this is a source of annoyance to the TERA workers, but the reason obviously is that these workers know from experience that there is more security in a job under the government than under any private employer and that security is what they want more-than anything else. The new plan of keeping workers who take outside work on the relief rolls for as long as 90 days is perhaps a solution of this problem. People on Work Relief are not going back to Home Relief without a struggle. They are ready to make a stand against what they think of as straight charity. In every city I visited there was fear of trouble and perhaps of violence if Work Relief was stopped, and I think that fear-is well grounded. There have already been small revolts and some unimportant violence in Rochester, Syracuse and Dunkirk. No one concerned with administrating Work Relief was satisfied to have it continue any longer than was absolutely necessary. They hope for a PWA program to tide over the interval between Work Relief and industrial revival. Except in Schenectady, Olean and Buffalo the taxpayers are opposed to work relief on the ground of cost. I think many of them would take their chance of riots. They do not seem to consider the value of the things that the Work Relief projects have given to their towns, or the advantage to some lines of business which the purchase of material has been. In Buffalo a very effective campaign has been waged to buy the material used within the city itself, and this has had a visible effect on public opinion. In Rochester on the contrary, the taxpayers are carrying on newspaper propaganda against all sorts of Work Relief on the one score of cost although the city is relatively prosperous, and has already had evidence of the sort of trouble which may be expected. It appears to be difficult to get business to overtly admit the fact of recovery. They do not want to reassume the responsibilities that the depression relieved them of. It seems to me, however, that since the election beat in on them the fact that they would have to put up with the New Deal for six more years at least, they have tried to adjust themselves and cooperate with recovery efforts more than they did before. One of the special problems--and perhaps the most serious--in relation to the relief situation is that of the young men and women who have finished their education during the past five years and have never had jobs of any sort. Efforts have been made to provide them with recreation, with extra education, and the CCC has done a splendid job, but the fact remains that they have no connection with the industrial organization of the country. According to temperament and surroundings they are becoming careless, listless, inert; or unruly, violent and destructive. In the four cities where I got the figures, the proportion of unmarried mothers who were first offenders is increasing. Employers in two different cities told me that it was easier to fit a man of forty who had worked all his life into a new job than to train a boy of twenty who had bummed about for five or six years, to do anything at all. The disposal of the single men who are on relief is another special problem. Married men are given preference in work relief jobs so the single men are on home relief. There are not enough lodging houses to shelter them and the two that I saw were dirty and desolate. When they are boarded out it is likely to be in some family on relief, often living in crowded quarters, and a few at least of the illegitimate births are due to them. The problem of the white collar workers does not seem to me to have been worked out satisfactorily in any city I saw. It had come nearest to solution in Buffalo. These "lost sheep" almost everywhere are in a bad way. Almost all of the work projects are pick and shovel work. They do not fit into them. There is not enough work in connection with administrating relief to absorb nearly all of them. Because they are a little more sensitive and keyed a little higher, they seem to break under the effects of Home Relief quicker then laborers. They are just as surely the potential leaders of possible revolt as the boys and girls are their followers. Those Flaming Reds whom I saw and who seemed at all dangerous to me were all from this group--and incidentally two of this class in Jamestown who were provided with jobs by the very wise chairman of the ERB are now working contentedly. Those problems of the "reds," of Communists, the "Rank and file," the "Council of the Unemployed" and similar groups, are so interwoven with the other problems of unemployment and relief that I find it hard to disentangle them. There isn't any question that the revolt possibilities are inherent in the situation and it seems to me that the surest guard against them is in Work Relief. The problem of the women is a little different from that of the men. Their adjustment can usually be made inside the home. There is still something between them and real disaster. There is also the possibility of a cheap short-time job now and then--I talked with several who could count on Saturday work in the Five and Ten, with others who served as hotel waitresses when extra help was needed--these things keep up the illusion of employment. The opportunity to do housework is infrequent. Housewives expect to get service for very little more than room and board and this women can get on relief. I did not find any large project planned especially to give work to women, nor in any case did I find women taking men's jobs at lower wages for the simple reason that there are no men's jobs available of the sort they are able to fill. In Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Olean there is a good prospect of a gradual increase in employment which will lighten the relief load by spring. When I was in Schenectady there had been very little pick up but I have heard that things have improved in the General Electric during the past four weeks. In any case the paternalism of that company working with the TERA through its vice president, acts like a kind, though authoritative, hand patting the composite shoulder of the community with the assurance that they shall not suffer. (In this connection it is important to compare the paternalism of Schenectady with that of Endicott on which Mrs. Ernestine Ball has made a report.) In Jamestown and Dunkirk there has not been any general improvement which would indicate any lightening of the relief load. Dunkirk is bankrupt and the largest of its heavy industries, the American Locomotive Company, is moving its shops away. Sixteen Jamestown industries are either moved away or closed for good, and if all the remaining ones began running at full blast, there would still be over 7,000 people out of work. Unlike Dunkirk, Jamestown is solvent and apparently well administered. These two cities are orphan children who will not be able to stand on their own feet for a long time. The relief situation in these seven cities is badly complicated by the present set up. The old Public Welfare Departments, and the private agencies are not equipped either by experience or point of view to cope with the present situation. But they think they are. The TERA was an absolute necessity, but the old organizations resent its presence with varying degrees of bitterness. There is no open opposition in Schenectady where the strong hand of the General Electric Company in a very soft glove has induced peace; there is not much in Syracuse where the tact of Mr. Leon Abbott has acted as a lubricant, nor in Buffalo where the Welfare Commissioner himself has stood as a buffer between his department and the TERA. But in Rochester the three cornered fight between the TERA, the City Welfare Commissioner and the County "welfare Commissioner is a source of innocent merriment to the whole town. The press seems to cheer on one side after another as though it were a dog fight. While I was there the situation got so difficult that the State Chairman of the TERA came up from New York to see what could be done. In Dunkirk the opponents have come to blows and been separated by the police. In Jamestown the TERA is apparently winning out. In Olean it looks like a draw. The citizen-chairmen of the ERB boards are everywhere trying for peace, but this is not easy to achieve when a new organization is given precedence over an old one. I do not see how anything else could have been done under the emergency and with the political influence which has certainly been powerful in the old organizations. I do not see just what can be done about it now. But it certainly makes the local relief work less efficient than it might be... or perhaps I should say far more difficult. I believe that a proper publicity campaign, which would line up the citizens back of what must be done, would ease this situation. I read the local papers in all the towns I visited. They carried the releases from Washington, but frequently these had little baring on the local situation. They played up the squabbles between factions and were eager to get the usual provocative statements from one side or the other, but they did not help to sell the TERA to their readers. I listened in on several local broadcasts which were invariably "pollyanna" blurbs that did not once get down to the facts in that particular city or to what could be done about them. I think that such a publicity campaign could be put over.
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