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Publishing Information
Memoranda for Mr. Harry Hopkins
From Martha Bensley Bruere
Buffalo, November 14th to 15th, 1934
- Buffalo and Rochester are both cities of diversified industries. Neither of them has been especially hard hit by the depression, and both of them are recovering. But in Rochester there is unrest and discontent, which may result in violence, while in Buffalo, there seems very little chance of trouble. The chief factors in this wide difference are; First, the fact that Buffalo is not and has never been a "trade union town" and that the workers, employed or not, are not used to acting together for any purpose; second, the personnel and policy and efficiency of the Board of the Emergency Relief Bureau which has given it the backing of the solid citizens, the cooperation of the Mayor, and the confidence of the common people.
With a population in the neighborhood of 700,000 Buffalo had on November 8th, 29,469 families on relief, an advance over the corresponding week last pear of over 204. For the past three months however, the relief load has remained almost stationary, and there was a general belief that it would not go up during the winter. 18,985 of these cases were on Home Relief; 9,150 on Work Relief; and 1,434 on a mixture of the two. This is estimated to include some 130,000 to 140,000 individuals on relief, a little less than 20% of the population--a proportion which has varied only slightly in the industrial centers which I have visited.
At the meeting of this Board, which I attended, there were eleven men and one woman present and for two arduous hours they discussed the technical problems involved in raising the standard of relief without running up the cost or antagonizing groups in the community whose cooperation they needed.
The city had been combed for gifts of clothing till there was no more to be had. The board called on the retail merchants for a plan by which clothing, made in Buffalo, if possible, would be available for those on home relief. The plan adopted made it possible for each family to shop about in any of the cooperating stores to the extant of an "order" given by the Relief Administration, to have purchases delivered at the house and to have the same right of exchanging as cash customers. This pleased the clothing manufacturers, the retail merchants and the clients.
They sent out 70,003 food and milk orders a week. On the 19th, they opened five stores for the distribution of $1,350,000 of meat and provisions. All clients in the home relief and white collar division of the ERA, and the clients receiving aid from private relief agencies will be eligible to receive food the first week through these stores. Within a week, all employees in the work relief division of ERB also will be given access to these supplies, but it was simply impossible to issue orders for this division in the short time allowed to get the system under way.
This cooperation with the private welfare agencies and social service groups, helped to allay friction between them.
They made no concealment of the "Stove Racket" which had been worked on them. At the beginning of last winter, stoves had been given to the families who needed them. In the spring some thousands of families had sold their stoves to a group of junk men. This autumn they again applied for stoves and the junk men offered the stoves they had bought to the committee at a price which when the cost of the necessary repairs was added, made them considerably more expensive than they had been when new. What could they do? The stoves had been given the clients and were legally their property--is there any law to prevent a man's selling a thing that is his? $1O,000 would be needed to supply all those who needed stoves.
They considered the problem of giving families who had children o' the age to do home work in their studies an extra allowance for electricity so that they would not endanger their eyes by poor gas or lamps. They considered the problems of saving mortgaged homes; they considered those pitiful lost sheep of the new picture--the white collar workers, and then they settled resignedly against their chair backs to consider work relief versus home relief. Obviously, it was no new question to them--obviously too, it had never been solved. Starting with the fact that they one and all advocated work relief rather than home relief and wanted to keep as many people on it as possible, how were they to do it? The Work Relief wages were painfully low, but those that industry occasionally offered were sometimes lower still. Should they insist on their clients taking such jobs as were offered and then make up the necessary difference in cash? If they did, wouldn't they be subsidizing industry? Didn't the fact that outside jobs were apt to be temporary, and relief jobs relatively permanent tend to keep men on relief? If men were kept on the rolls from 30 to 90 days after they had taken an outside job so that they could come back if it stopped, wouldn't that help some? Coming back again and again to the need to get as many as they could back into industry in some fashion so that the terrible cost of relief would come down--and this on top of the conviction which they all seemed to hold, that part of this relief load was to be a permanent thing. They did agree however that aside from supplementary relief which would probably have to be paid to 5000 new families, the load was not going up, it had even dropped 4 cases since the past week
"Relief for Recovery", said the chairman.
I came out of that meeting tremendously impressed with the intent of this group to make their relief work the most effective possible. Had they done it?
The City Commissioner of Public Welfare and an engineer took me to see some of the projects and to get, if possible, the temper of the men employed on them.
There was a great sewer with a double set of pipes six feet in diameter which was a needed improvement for the city. I am no judge of sewers, but it seemed to me that the 600 men at work on the part I saw were putting that job through with quite as much energy as men on pick and shovel work usually exhibit. I watched the tops of their heads 27 feet down below, watched the wagons fill up with dirt and clay and then saw the tractor catch a string of them and haul it up the steep incline and lower another string of the empties to be filled. If you compare that job with one carried out by a contractor with the aid of steam shovels and all the modern aids to excavation, it was perhaps inefficient, because it relied on man power for everything that men could do--but if you considered that one of the objects was to give employment to numbers of men, and so save that very precious thing their morale and independence, then it seemed to !re an efficient job, because the sewer was a necessary improvement and according to the opinion of an engineer whom I consulted, was a good job so far as the quality of the work went.
The men on this work had apparently been picked with preference to their physical fitness for that kind of work. They were all decently dressed and looked well fed. The two foremen with whom I talked said that they were in better physical shape than when they began the work. One who had formerly been on the same sort of job under regular contractors said that the men were as good laborers as he was used to having and that under proper supervision they put in just as good a day's work. If he found any of them loafing he warned them that they would have to go back on home relief, and if he found them doing it again he sent them back, To be sent from work to home relief was like losing their jobs. "They keep coming to me and begging for just one more days work a week--and I can't give it to 'em. That's about all the trouble I have." he told me.
There are probably enough projects in the ways of sewers and the like to keep the same number employed until spring--but there's not money to operate them.
Sewers and roads and parks and buildings are projects common to most of the cities I have visited. Buffalo has special and distinct activity in its "Meat Boning Plant." This is a link in the chain of government activities to combat disaster. The meat which was coming in that day was from some of the 10,000,000 cattle purchased by the government in the drought areas. This particular lot had been purchased in Arkansas and Kansas; had been sent to pasture in Tennessee; had been slaughtered east of Buffalo, shipped frozen to this meat boning plant. It was to be repacked in barrels and reshipped to packing plants in several places. The train that day was bound to Dayton. From there the cans marked "Not to be Sold" would be sent to wherever they were needed for relief.
In an old warehouse, remade by the relief workers, I saw 1441 people busily taking the bones out of meat. About 200 of them were women.
They have all been examined for any possible infections or disease in accord with the State law covering food handlers, they wear white smocks, made by relief workers, laundered by them and kept in repair by them.
"Just think," said one of the staff to me, "when we had these made we forgot to order buttons. Do you know how hard it is to get 20,000 buttons of a given kind and size on short notice?"
They have rest rooms and lunch rooms where the workers can get coffee with milk and sugar to supplement the food they bring at just what it costs.
There is a doctor (on relief) and a nurse (also on relief) in a little room ready with first aid to repair the occasional slips and cuts which though in no case serious, are fairly numerous.
The foreman told me that when the work began he had ten people who had been butchers before and that they trained the others. The number of accidents is about half what it was at first. When I was there, the first shipment of frozen veal came in. Before this they had had only beef. An experienced butcher was teaching a group of about twenty intent men just how the cutting should be done, demonstrating as he went along, and the next "class" was waiting for him.
"Have you had any trouble with the workers?", I asked the foreman. "We've found knives and hooks and things dropped into the barrels of meat sometimes, and we think it's someone connected with the packing plants--they're not so keen about this job you know--and when the knives get into the machines that chop up the meat, they ruin them. We watch for that all the time and sometimes we find it. I don't think it's workers here because there'd be no reason for it. They all seem to like it alright except some of the women. It sort of makes them sick. They can't stand it and they leave. It's mostly women that ain't used to doing work with meat in their own kitchens--young girls, I guess."
His concern is what the plant can do when the supply of relief cattle is exhausted. They could transform it into a vegetable canning plant but that season is past.
In talking with member of the two groups on relief--those on work relief and those on home relief I found that the same thing held good for them in Buffalo, that was true for all the other cities I had visited. Those on work relief were sorry sometimes resentful that they did not earn more money. They protested that their families could not live comfortably on what they got. But they were neither hopeless or despondent. They had jobs. Those on home relief were divided into two classes--those who were there reluctantly and those who were there contentedly. The first group unless because of age or disability, were definitely re-employable; the second, whether from hopelessness, apathy or long time demoralization, were probably not. Those re-employable and eager for jobs made up by far the larger group.
Among those contently relying on home relief and making the greatest demand on the staff were the Italians, and next to them the Poles--a condition which seems to be the same everywhere that I have been.
The most pathetic case is that of the Lost Sheep--the white collar group. They are not fitted for most of the regular work relief jobs and home relief is particularly galling to them, they present the most fertile field for dangerous discontent. I talked with the woman who has been put in charge of the 1700 White Collar workers for whom something was actually been done. Ten teaching centers have been established for adult education where those who are qualified to teach are conducting classes. They are being paid at the regular rate of work relief. They are helping in the various recreation centers on the same terms. About 530 of them are holding clerical jobs under the relief administration. On each manual project there is one relief doctor assigned--there are fifty of them on relief. They range in age from those who have just graduated from medical school and who have had no chance to build up any sort of practice, to those who are old and whose patients have grown too poor to employ them. In the effort to keep them in fire with their profession when better times do come, they are being allowed to keep a car, a telephone, and electricity as necessary to any practice of their profession. Most of them--and this is also true of the dentists--have professional equipment which they got on credit and which has not yet been paid for.
There are about 1700 returned CCC workers in Buffalo, and in addition those who have finished with high school and college within the past five years and for whom there is no place in industry. A good many things have been suggested and some put into operation for their distraction--even for their improvement--but very little that can be considered in the light of work has been offered them. There has just been a large and successful "Hobby Show," there is a good deal of further education, there is some recreation--but no member of the staff or of the committee with whom I talked had any illusions as to its being enough. The "Y's" are not in a position to do much--they have been too hard hit themselves to help. In this case the "Y.W." is doing a little more than the "Y.M." which is not usually the case in an industrial town. For the young even more than for the old perhaps, there is no substitute for a job.
There is not in Buffalo any fear of revolt, nor so far as I could discover, any reason to fear it. The much talked of Houde case where an engineering firm is said to have violated labors' right under the code to collective bargaining, and which is so concerning the Labor Board, does not loom at all large in Buffalo itself. The policy of those in authority from the Mayor to the policemen, is to let them all talk it out. Apparently, it is a policy that makes for peace especially when joined with even a little rise in prosperity.
I talked with three members of the Council of the Unemployed who were avowed Communists. They were in the mildest most reasonable state of mind. They had complaints to make, it is true, but they were not of the revolutionary sort. One was a Jew, one an Italian, the other of some undetermined nationality. They objected to certain things in the food budget--canned milk tasted better in coffee than all this fresh milk they were getting and their children liked it better too. They didn't like to have the sweaters that were given out by the home relief all so alike that anyone who saw you would know you were on relief. They thought that the lodging house where homeless men were sent for the night ought to be improved and cleaned--"Now a man walks around in his bare feet, he gets something--the skin of his feet, it comes off." And they did think that it would be a wonderful thing if relief could provide them with a few cigarettes--"A man gets two, three cigarettes, he don't nave to have no lunch" said the Italian. These seemed not unreasonable demands. The E.R.B. is now sending nutritians into the homes to explain about the use of milk for the children; the last lot of sweaters which I saw are of four different styles and several colors, the lodging house is to be renovated a cost of $40,000---only about cigarettes has nothing been done! Revolt will have to hang on a cigarette butt if it comes here.
I called on the Mayor and he assured me that things were not bad in Buffalo. That the city could continue to handle the problems on the same lines; that there was no danger of disturbance or violence in, or revolt; that business was definitely picking up. He said also that the projects put through on work relief were of great advantage to the city--things they would have had to have sometime and which would later cost them a great deal more. He was exceedingly proud of the E.R.B. committee. No politics could interfere with relief in Buffalo. "Relief toward Recovery" was his slogan also.
Then back to get a summing up of it all from members of the board and from representatives of private social relief--trained and experienced social workers.
"Well, if the Mayor wants to get a few people on relief once in a while, why shouldn't he? He's probably a good judge of whether they need it or not."
"When I came in here about 90% of the employees were political appointees. We have been weeding out and weeding out but a good many of them are that sort still. The trouble is that there are not enough trained social workers here to do what must be done. We are up against the idea too that they want everyone to come out of Buffalo itself. That simply cannot be done."
The Secretary of the Interior's published statement to the effect that a greatly enlarged P.W.A. program might be a way to ease work relief back to regular employment, was discussed and, in general, agreed to. It was, they felt, the first concrete thing the government could do to reduce unemployment.
It was suggested, and that more than once, that to parallel the old established Social Service agencies with the TERA was probably a necessary emergency measure but that it was bold to lead to some overlapping and that as soon as possible it ought to be readjusted.
Buffalo has got its problems well in hand. There is a disposition for business to admit its own increasing prosperity and not to stage any spectacular protest against taxes. The general policy toward possible revolt groups is to let them talk it out and to use no strong arm methods of suppression--Peace and a prospect of Plenty!
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