ALMOST every day something happens to give Harry Hopkins a firmer claim to the title of Unhappiest Man in Washington. As if his days and nights were not sufficiently horrendous with thoughts of the inadequacy of the program he is administering and of the still more callous inadequacy of the program his White House boss proposes to have him run after July, Hopkins's dunderheaded subordinates are everlastingly busy concocting new tortures for him. Their latest invention has been the arrest of ten pickets in a Pennsylvania WPA strike on charges of violating Section 9 of the Emergency Relief Act of 1935, which Hopkins publicly had promised never would be used to break strikes or otherwise curtail the collective-bargaining rights of workers under the WPA.
The section in question says: "Any person . . . who knowingly, by means of fraud, force, threat, intimidation, or boycott, deprives any person of any of the benefits [of (this act] . . . shall be fined not more than $2,000 or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both." When the act was pending before Congress last year this section drew protests not only from officials of the building-trades unions but also from Hopkins's own labor advisers. Those protests were withdrawn when assurances were given that Section 9 was aimed only at crooked administrative officials, political leeches, and grafting contractors. Nevertheless, on April 13 and 16 ten WPA strikers in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, including the county chairman of the Workers' Federation, an unemployed organization affiliated with Steve Raushenbush's Pennsylvania Security League, were arrested under Section 9 on complaints issued by two federal agents, Thomas E. Stakem, Jr., and William B. Glendenning, working out of the WPA's offices here. The excuse for the arrests was a fight on one of the struck projects which resulted in the beating up of a "loyal" foreman, but only a few of the men arrested were involved in the fight; the others were miles away from the scene.
The arrested men were hustled before the United States Commissioner at Clearfield, a New Deal appointee, who only a few days earlier had appeared as defense counsel for a hosiery mill arraigned before the NLRB for violation of the Wagner act. The Commissioner, John C. Forsyth, fixed bail for the men at $1,500 each, a figure well beyond the reach of the strikers, and then bound them over for action of the federal grand jury meeting at Pittsburgh May 4. They were taken immediately to Pittsburgh, more than a hundred miles away, and clapped into jail there. And there they remained until a delegation of strikers came to Washington this week and after three days of haggling with Hopkins's subordinates finally forced their release some time Friday night.
The important thing in the situation is not that the men were arrested and held in jail for from eight to eleven days. Nor is it the fact that the WPA has in its employ men stupid enough, order the arrests. The important thing is that responsible lieutenants of Hopkins, including in particular Aubrey Williams, assistant federal administrator, and Edward N. Jones, WPA administrator for Pennsylvania, had to be forced to act. More important still is the fact that Hopkins headquarters staff was concerned primarily with saving the WPA's face rather than with righting the wrong that had been done. Face-saving has come to be a ma occupation in the fraternity. In this case it delayed the release of the men and resulted in a covering-up explanation that they would be tried for simple assault in the state court in Jefferson County.
In another recent case there was an even more blatant attempt at face-saving. That was the case involving the discovery that the WPA had been financing construction of a group of private garment factories in Mississippi disguised as "vocational training schools." John Edelman, of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers, who with a publicity threat forced Hopkins's lieutenants to report the facts to their boss and thus got the projects canceled, said he found them concerned solely with keeping the facts from the public. He added that one of them proposed that, as a way out, the WPA should withdraw its funds from the projects and let the state use the left-over FERA funds to complete the factories. The suggestion may or may not have been passed on to the state authorities, but a few weeks later, following the withdrawal of WPA funds, it was found that FERA funds were being used precisely as suggested, and Hopkins had to order a second cancellation.
Still further evidence of the way of thinking of men occupying responsible WPA posts would have been found in a recent conference here of its "labor adjusters," a groupworkers of men employed to see that the rights of WPA workers are observed throughout the country. I am informed by an impeccable authority that a substantial portion of the conference's time was taken up in search for a euphemism with which to cover up discharges for union activity, and that there was a prolonged and serious discussion of whether "vocal activity" would not fill the bill. With such a coterie of field agents at work, it is no wonder that such Instances are cropping up as the recent discharge of two WPA foremen in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. One is named Phillips, the other Volpe. Both were of officers of the Beaver Valley lodge of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, and both, the NLRB recently ruled, were fired last fall by the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation at Aliquippa for union activity. A few days before they were to appear before the NLRB to testify against the steel company they were fired from their WPA jobs because of "pay-roll irregularity," according to their identical letters of dismissal.
There is at least a suggestion that the steel company had something to do with these WPA dismissals in the fact that its counsel called the attention of an NLRB aide to the dismissals in an attempt to discredit Phillips and Volpe as witnesses just before they were called to the stand. The fact that the company controls both the Republican and the Democratic machines in the area does not lessen the suspicion; nor does the fact that the incidents given as the reason for the dismissals in March occurred several weeks before Christmas. Pointing in the same direction is the report of the district WPA director, J. V. Downey, who held a hearing on Volpe's and Phillips's appeal from their dismissals. His report is a labored attempt to sustain the dismissals without sustaining the grounds alleged therefor. In this report the dismissals become "indefinite suspensions," the "pay-roll irregularities" charged against Phillips become "some confusion," and the charges against Volpe vanish entirely. There is a reference to "incompetence" and one, to "pressure groups," which appears to be Mr. Dowey's gentle way of conveying to his superiors that Volpe and Phillips were what America's Daughters and their friends like to call "agitators."
In the final paragraph of his report he abandons his effort at justifying the dismissals, suggests that since WPA workers are having to be laid off in Jefferson County it would be "impracticable" to rehire Volpe and Phillips, and that, anyway, he understands the NLRB has ordered Jones and Laughlin to take them back. So saying, he washes his hands of the case, and so apparently does the WPA, for officials here, though confessedly aware that the steel company has defied the NLRB's order, say they plan to take no action in the case--unless the Pennsylvania Security League wants to press it. Volpe and Phillips were officers of an unemployed organization affiliated with the league. It is doubtful that Hopkins himself would do anything in the case, for to do anything would mean running up against State Administrator Jones; and behind Jones, a Pennsylvania Democratic leader and former Republican police chief of Pittsburgh, stands Senator Guffey, who has persuaded Roosevelt and Farley that the services of such men as Jones are essential to Democratic success at the polls in November.
