Who Gets Relief?

FOR the past fifteen months I have been acting as a humble unit in the vast emergency set-up of relief machinery created by the depression. My job is that of investigator with our local county relief board, which serves a large metropolitan area. I am not a trained social worker, nor do I subscribe to most of what currently passes for socialist doctrine. My point of view is necessarily that of an observer — an observer who has had the good fortune to be taken into the confidence of some of the unfortunates who represent the relief problem in our country.

At the present writing my own district numbers 187 families. Most of these have been receiving relief since I came with the organization in July 1933; many have been on the rolls since the early fall of 1932, when the present relief system was inaugurated; and a few have social-service histories with public and private welfare agencies antedating the panic. Finally, there are the most recent arrivals, those, let us say, who were accepted as relief cases during the past summer.

My work, then, has to do with four general groups, each determined by its chronological position in the history of the depression. Needless to say, the boundaries of each group arc arbitrary, being set up merely for the purpose of clarity and convenience in handling the whole. The only importance of visualizing them as groups at all is in order to try to answer some

of the questions which naturally arise out of two years of federal unemployment aid.

I

We begin with Group I — those people whose troubles started a little before ours did in 1929. Most of the cases in Group I are referred to as ‘chronics’ by the social-service worker — that is to say, they are people who have either drifted or fallen into the class of permanent dependents. For the most part they spend their lives standing in lines — at the free clinics, at the free clothing centres, at the agencies where it is rumored that rent money may be had, at the local Veterans’ Administration bureaus, occasionally at the free employment agencies. In many ways they go to make up the most interesting social stratum of the lot, although not the most pleasant, perhaps. From my own district I can present a statistical picture of Group I. These figures are based on actual data —reports from clinics, summaries from institutional psychiatrists and from asylums, and answers to special inquiries sent to former employers.

TOTAL ADULT PERSONS, GROUP I: 76 Reasons for Permanent Dependence

One can readily see from these figures that Group I constitutes a special problem in social rehabilitation — that it exists as an isolated unit, apart from the need for a temporary programme of unemployment relief. It is not like the other three groups, a normal social unit in an abnormal economic period. The class of permanent dependents has nothing to do with the economy of the depression, with the absorption into private industry of those now existing under conditions of enforced idleness. The aged, the insane, the socially maladjusted, and the physically incapacitated do not confront us with an emergency unemployment problem so much as with the need for a specialized social programme — a programme first of segregation, and then of rehabilitation.

I have found this to be true time and again of cases that are being treated in my own district as products of the strike, the lay-off, and the bear market. In one of my Group I families the son has been made the victim of an unnatural vice which has been allowed to develop unchecked over the past five years. The boy is now eighteen, with a long history of moral delinquency, documented by juvenile court records and S. P. C. C. and other welfare agency summaries. Aside from suffering from definite social maladjustment, the boy is utterly unequipped to take his place in society as a selfsupporting individual. The mother is living, but during the whole process of demoralization has remained a nonresistant factor in the family unit, partly by reason of fear and partly out of moral apathy. There have been repeated attempts — earnest and intelligent— on the part of the social agencies mentioned to cope with the situation and to force it to a solution. But each time it has been abandoned to parole or probation by the juvenile court the old features of the case have reasserted themselves. On and off, this family has been receiving public aid since 1927. To-day it is active with our organization, and we are the only ones left to participate in the problem, hardly one of unemployment relief.

The old-age dependence cases are the most pathetic, and the most numerous, in Group I. Mr. and Mrs. C., aged seventy-one and sixty-eight, live in a furnished hall room for which they have been able to pay nothing in over two years. Thanks to the indulgence of their landlady, they still have a roof over their heads. They are such a delightful old couple that when I go to see them I am continually forgetting that they are relief clients. Mr. C., up to 1927, was doing a $15,000 a year business in yellow pine timber for the construction trade, and had been enjoying moderate business success since 1900. When, in the 1920 s, yellow pine began to be replaced largely by structural concrete and fabricated steel as a building staple, Mr. C.’s business was among the first to suffer. By dumping his profits, and finally his life savings, back into the business he was able to keep it solvent and his men at work, while he tried to recapitalize in order to enter some more profitable market. Because of the scale of his business the process was slow, and dubious. His plans were never completed. In 1928 Mr. and Mrs. C. ‘temporarily’ accepted relief from the local Department of Public Welfare. With the collapse of the 1929 market and the subsequent paralysis of credit, their sun had definitely set.

Their serenity in the face of all that has happened is miraculous. Mr. C. thinks that if it were n’t for his high blood pressure he might be able to do clerical work, if there were clerical work to be found. Mrs. C. is an expert dressmaker, but of course with the sweatshops . . . To-day our organization is giving them the same assistance that it deals out to strikers, mill workers suffering a seasonal lay-off, and youngsters seeking enlistment in the CCC.

II

We pass from Group I to Group II, where our problem loses its social emphasis and becomes more purely economic. This is the group whose relief history dates from the inception of the FERA in September 1932.

If one were to plot the social curve of Group II, he would find it beginning among the illiterate foreign-born and Negro laboring population and climbing up steadily through the trades to lose itself in the lower reaches of the upper middle classes. It would require more time than is at my disposal to prepare factual statistics on so sizable a body of cases, but in order to acquaint readers with the general character of this group I have attempted the following tabulation.

APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF EMPLOYABLE ADULTS, GROUP II: 150

As is reflected in the above table, the solid majority of Group II families have been reduced to public dependence by the wholesale industrial collapse affecting such general industries as building and construction and the allied trades, railroads and manufacturing. They constitute what I should call the ‘relief norm,’ for want of a better term — those in whose particular interest relief legislation was made the sine qua non of New Deal planning.

Departing from this norm are the 35 per cent whose presence on relief rolls raises separate questions — specifically, the 12 per cent white-collar workers, the 20 per cent floating clientele (strikers and seasonal lay-offs), and the 3 per cent from the professions. Shelving for the moment the white-collar and professional groups, I should like to direct your attention to one of the most delicate situations with which the Federal Emergency Relief Administration has been faced in the two years of its history.

Had the administration, let us say of Mr. Coolidge, been confronted with the question as to whether or not the ultimata of labor organizations should be underwritten by the government, we can well imagine what the answer would have been. In our day the ‘federally financed strike’ has become a thinly disguised commonplace.

When a local of the A. F. of L. in our city recently ordered a walkout of all cab drivers pending arbitration with the holding company over pay rates and union privileges, it was the Federal Government, and not the union, that footed the bill. Through the agency of federal unemployment relief, idle strikers’ families were provided with grocery orders, coal, clothing, shoes, and milk for the children, during the period of arbitration. The question that was immediately raised is one which even to-day has not been settled — the question as to how far the government can allow itself to go in the matter of financing collective bargaining out of public relief funds.

The relief-underwritten strike has placed embattled capital in a position the paradoxical nature of which runs almost to comic opera. By virtue of already being a heavy contributor, through taxation, to the FERA, big business now finds itself unwittingly helping to subsidize the very strikes which loom as its major problem. Even more than a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, the federally financed strike threatens to place relief as a weapon in the hand of the labor agitator and the union boss. So far the impasse has been dealt with as an emergency problem. How much longer it can continue to be treated as such remains to be seen.

I quote from recent instructions on the matter: —

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration is concerned with administering relief to the needy unemployed and their families. Each case applying for relief to the local emergency relief agencies should be treated on its merits as a relief case wholly apart from any controversy in which the wage earner may be involved.

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration will not attempt to judge the merits of labor disputes. State and federal agencies as well as courts exist which are duly qualified to act as arbiters and adjusters in such disputes.

Unless it be determined by the Department of Labor that the basis for the strike is unreasonable and unjustified, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration authorizes local relief agencies to furnish relief to the families of striking wage earners after careful investigation has shown that their resources are not sufficient to meet emergency needs.

To return to the remainder of Group II, we find another interesting phase of the question, ‘Whither relief?’ in that class composed of the professional and white-collar workers. The conception of relief as an economic stop-gap, providing the individual with barely enough food and clothing to tide him over until he regains employment, presupposes that he will regain employment sooner or later. Applied to the professional and white-collar relief client, such a conception often fails adequately to cover the needs of the case. As he is a more complex individual than the day laborer, so the brain worker’s problems are more complex. The questions of retaining health and morale, of maintaining his special capabilities so that they may be ready for instant use should the opportunity arise — these are only a few of the many factors governing his situation and peculiar to it.

Immediately there arises the question of budgetary discrimination in computing the individual relief grant. So far no cognizance has been taken of this question, eligibility for assistance and the extent of such assistance being based on two factors — first, the family’s size and the ages of its members; second, its income or resources. Under this system the family of an unemployed chauffeur or hod carrier receives the same basic relief grant as the family of an unemployed physician or lawyer.

Since the purpose of relief is not to furnish a substitute for employment, but only to provide a temporary remedy for the effects of unemployment, and since admittedly the system fails where it multiplies rather than reduces the conditions which stand in the way of a speedy return to economic independence, the basic or collective system of determining relief eligibility and relief apportionment often defeats its own purpose. Where client A, an unemployed house painter, may still hope for a gradual return to his trade in an open competitive field, client B, an unoccupied physician, is obliged to consider his future in terms of the A. M. A., the County Medical Association, and that definite standard of professional ethics which both represent. To bracket client A and client B under a communal relief standard may solve the immediate biological problem of existence, but it leaves the ultimate question of social and economic readjustment unanswered.

There is still remaining to us out of Group II the 65 per cent majority whom we thought of as constituting a sort of ‘relief norm.’ This is that great inert shoal of humanity which, having neither bat tened on the boom nor yet quite starved to death under the slump, has kept on having its babies, its evictions, and its funerals in a sort of cosmic defiance of economic graphs and alphabetical bureaucracies. True, the ‘employment turnover’ here is negligible, but this fact is almost offset by the stubborn will of the group as a whole to survive, and in some instances to survive comfortably enough in the face of odds.

Mr. R. is an unemployed colored truck driver who lives with his family in a verminous frame hutch on which no rent has been paid since we accepted the situation for relief on September 15, 1932. Altogether there are nine in the family, seven of whom are children ranging in years from three to fifteen.

Even at the crest of the boom, Mr. R. never earned more than $18.59 a week driving a coal truck. Out of this he managed somehow to clothe, feed, and insure his family, and to make fairly regular payments of $22.50 a month to his landlord. To-day we are supplying him with a grocery order of $9.05 a week plus four quarts of milk a day; paying his monthly gas bills; outfitting each member of the family, every six months, with three complete sets of new clothing, and one pair of new shoes or a requisition to have the old ones repaired; authorizing carte blanche medical and dental service (not merely clinical attention) at nominal periods; and, during the heating season, chuting one ton of nut coal into his cellar bins every five and a half weeks.

My enumeration of what is being done for Mr. R. may lead you to suppose that I begrudge it. On the contrary, Mr. R. and I are friends, and we have talked the whole thing over. He has allowed himself to become comfortably phlegmatic about the possibility of his ever returning to work for $18.50 a week.

I have tried to goad him with the prospect of his unpaid rent and his lapsed insurance. He only grins. Doesn’t his landlord know he’s ‘on the welfare’? As for the insurance, well, he guesses he could have got by without that anyhow — it was only something else to ‘belong to,’ like his lodge or his political ward. He is quite ready to agree that his general standard of living has been bettered by the depression, and looks back to the ‘good old days’ with no regret. He is only the ghost of the Mr. R. who lost track of himself somewhere in the mazes of a system whose one extreme had tried to enslave him and whose other extreme has fairly well succeeded in pauperizing him.

It is important to remember, Mr. R. notwithstanding, that subsidized idleness is a distinctly minor phase of the relief norm. The great burden of clients still accept the grocery order as a necessary hardship and continue to haunt the employment offices and the city streets in the desperate search for a way out and a return to an honest living.

If it is true that our organization stands convicted of supporting Air. R. in his verminous complacency, it is likewise true that the same organization assures the worthy ninety-nine of their bread in a world which might otherwise have nothing to offer but stones.

III

A question frequently asked of new relief applicants is, ‘Why have you waited until now to apply for help — how have you managed to get along so far without it?’

The question furnishes a particularly effective vantage point from which to view our last two relief divisions — Group III, numbering those on relief since July 1933, and Group IV, numbering those who made application during the past summer. Here the statistical picture is more varied, from an economic point of view, than were those of the first two groups.

TOTAL NUMBER OF FAMILIES, GROUP III: 102

TOTAL NUMBER OF FAMILIES, GROUP IV: 38 Reasons for Deferred Application

In the light of our data on Group III, it appears that the larger number of families were kept off the relief rolls until July 1933 by aid in the form of food and shelter afforded by relatives or friends, or by the philanthropic activities of churches, lodges, and other private organizations. The failure of one or the other of these subsistence resources made the family directly dependent on the federal unemployment relief programme for existence.

In most cases the problem was found to be one of housing, aggravated by the pressure of temperamental differences among the members of the families due to crowding and other factors. In some instances the original family unit had suffered so many multiplications that it had almost lost its group homogeneity. As an example of this, the M. family, several years prior to its registration with us, existed as a simple family unit in which there were Mr. and Mrs. M. and six children — four of whom were of marriageable age, two sons and two daughters. Two months before Mr. M., a machinist, was retired on pension, one of the sons, who was employed, was married, and brought his mother-in-law and an unemployed brother-in-law into the M. house to live. The son’s wife had two children, making a total addition of five members to the household. Mr. M.’s income from his pension being no longer sufficient to meet the family budget, the son was obliged to carry the burden of the living expenses. In the same year both of the daughters were married, but neither of their husbands was employed. The situation grew from bad to worse and finally culminated in the married son’s moving out to a separate address, taking with him his younger unmarried brother and the remaining two unmarried sisters. Although he continued to help from time to time as he was able with the father’s household expenses, the M.’s were ultimately served with a constable’s levy ordering them to vacate the house for rental arrears. It was at this crisis in their affairs that they applied for relief.

In arriving at our decision we were obliged to consider the family as two units, excluding Mr. and Mrs. M. from the grant in consideration of Mr. M.’s pension income. Thus there were left, as the remaining unit, the families of the two married daughters, one of which we identified as the ‘primary’ family, and the other as the ‘livingwith’ or secondary family. Mr. and Mrs. M. were considered as contributing free shelter, and relief was granted on a simple, no-income basis.

Often the complications are such that it is impossible to establish a reliefeligibility basis until a complete reorientation of the various groups within the household has taken place. Usually the prospective clients become aware of the conditions surrounding eligibility, and, upon rejection of their case, one or more of the groups separate themselves and apply individually. Many of our rejected complex-family cases have managed to resolve themselves, in this manner, into simplefamily units and establish their eligibility for assistance on separate grounds.

IV

Applying our current question to Group IV, — those who were accepted for relief during the past summer, — we arrive at a wholly new and different problem, one that has developed, as it were, by the way. This concerns the most recent phase of relief administration, which came into being with the creation of the Civil Works programme on November 7, 1033, more properly known as ‘work-relief.’ As its name implies, work-relief proposes to replace relief-in-kind by a system of subsidized public works, designed to enable the client to ‘earn’ his relief allotment instead of merely receiving it as a dependent. Almost everyone is acquainted with the programme as it has been carried out during the past year under the familiar initials LWD.

The necessity for transferring families from a simple relief-in-kind status to one of work-relief added amazing complexities to the clerical phase of our work, and often caused unavoidable hardship to the families themselves. Because of budgetary limitations and the attendant uncertainty of the duration of individual projects, the whole programme has from the beginning moved forward under a pall of confusion and ambiguity. As a further consequence of the limited budget it was found in numerous instances that the change in status could not be effected by a single operation, the size of some families requiring their being carried as both relief-in-kind and work-relief cases. For instance, a man earning only $15 a week, with a family of eleven to support, was still eligible for a small supplementary grocery order, and was being continued in the files of the relief organization as its client while being listed on the payroll of the Local Works Division as an employee.

But these surface snarls were perhaps to be expected, and as the programme goes into its second phase many of them have been recognized and eliminated. Unfortunately, the real and inherent weakness of the LWD programme has remained. This is concerned directly with the basis of eligibility for LWD work. As anyone knows who has applied for such work, a person must first establish his identity as an active relief client before his name is even given consideration. In principle it has had the effect of putting a premium on unemployment. Turning back to our statistical tabulation of Group IV, we note a direct ratio between the percentage of families who gave private aid as their reason for delaying relief application and the percentage of families who admitted that they sought relief at that particular time as a means to establishing their eligibility for LWD employment. The figures tell us, in substance, that 40 per cent of the families in this group might have been independent of relief, either in kind or in work, but were practically invited to prove themselves paupers as a condition to their being accepted by LWD.

As a fair example of how this operates, I was obliged recently to reject a young married couple for relief on the grounds that the woman’s mother and father, with whom they were living, had an income sufficient to include their support. The man had been unemployed for more than two years, and the situation had become almost unbearable to all concerned. I was particularly impressed at the time by the mother-in-law’s domineering interest in the whole interview, and found that I was not wrong in supposing that she had initiated the relief move solely for the purpose of assuring her son-inlaw of LWD eligibility. When I had explained the reasons for our inability to authorize relief, she demanded to know what would be our attitude if she were to put them out on the street. Since the facts were in her favor, I was obliged to admit that probably they would then be eligible. I had quite forgotten the case when several days later a fellow worker came to me with it. The couple had been given enough money by the mother-in-law for the specific purpose of establishing themselves at a new address, and had promptly reapplied. They were accepted as being without sufficient resources.

So far the general effect of the reliefeligibility basis has been to decentralize the LWD as a separate federal recovery agency and at the same time to distort and obscure the essential principles and aims of unemployment relief.

As is the case with most human enterprises whose motive power is idealism, the salvation of work-relief lies not with those who were its authors, nor with those who happen to be its administrators, but with the great living and breathing bulk of the thing itself — with the LWD workers who compose it and for whom it was brought into being. On them it stands or falls, and the degree to which they use it as an agency to human betterment must determine whether it will grow to something of really American proportions or fall away to a cheapjack political racket.