Housing--a National Disgrace

I

‘THE rentals which we have set, I am proud to say, are the lowest ever established for low-rent public housing in the United States.’¹

The speaker is Administrator Nathan Straus, referring to rentals fixed for $130,000,000 PWA construction taken over by his United States Housing Authority. But he fails to explain that these are possible only because the government, without informing the public, is quietly writing off much of the buildings’ production cost which taxpayers once were assured by law would be recaptured, in part at least, through selfliquidating rentals.²

The USHA also is spending $800,000,000 for additional housing of its own, and officially predicts this will go for still cheaper rents. But neither Mr. Straus nor any other official has ever announced the fact that the prediction is based on contracts that may compel taxpayers to contribute more than $2500 in rental subsidies for every $1000 worth of buildings.³

Mr. Straus insists that ‘construction cost’ of these buildings, as covered by the first $258,270,349 worth of contracts, will be but $2200 to $4626⁴ per family unit, and he boasts that ‘these figures represent the result of constant and painstaking effort by USHA’ in the interest of economy.⁵ But nowhere in any government statement do you find an official estimate of the total cost of any unit. If you did, you would find the average is about $5555.87 apiece.⁶

As a wage earner who has paid $80 a month for a remodeled Negro shack, I invite interest in my own housing problem; and as a reporter who has seen large families sweltering in an oven of a room thrice removed from a window, I favor federal aid for slum dwellers. But also it has been my duly as a Washington newspaper man to follow closely the Administration’s so-called low-cost housing efforts since their inception five years ago, and to discover to my disappointment that the instances of evasion noted here are typical.

Indeed, if you look behind the propaganda barrage laid down to batter the public into believing that the programmes are heaven-sent, you find they are founded on a policy of evasion, of concealment, of deliberately misleading the people concerning expenditure of their funds. The reason is that these many years the government has been bowing before pressure and rackets which have so inflated costs that any sincere attempt at low-cost housing is a myth. Officials admit this privately. Yet, because organized labor is involved, the officials not only must publicly ignore such abuses, but must actually countenance them. The government has considered it politically wiser to fool the public by concealing facts about a programme which evidence shows contains elements of national bankruptcy than to fool with union labor. A chronological history is sufficient to prove these points.

II

Case histories recently unfolded by disgruntled union members to Safety Director Eliot Ness of Cleveland stress that racketeers still achieve control of unions by having gorillas at elections to guarantee that the brothers vote for the right candidate. Thereafter, with strikes, terrorism, and building codes assisting them in promoting a labor monopoly, they muscle in on the big money.

With a structure half completed a strike is called, ostensibly because two of nineteen unions cannot agree which should have the exclusive right, say, to screw radiator shields to the walls. Other unions walk out ‘in sympathy,’ and the dispute which ties up millions in investments cannot be settled until the contractor pays off.⁷ Robert P. Brindell collected $1,000,000 in two years as a strike settler. Skinny Madden demanded $1000 a floor to permit construction of Chicago’s twenty-story Insurance Exchange, then halted work at the tenth because he had received only half his fee.⁸ These men are part of buildingtrades history, but while the Labor Department last year was recording 552,741 man-days of labor lost through jurisdictional or sympathy strikes, Cleveland was admitting that dozens of its business men had been all but ruined and that it was virtually impossible for contractors to conduct profitable operations there because of the necessity of paying tribute to modern Maddens and Brindells.⁹

Interesting variations have been disclosed to the jury which convicted Donald A. Campbell, president of the painters’ and business agent of the glaziers’ union, and John McGee, head of the laborers, and on March 8 heard them sentenced to from one to five years in the Ohio penitentiary. The Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co., for instance, was compelled to keep a blacklist of orders it could not fill because Campbell had not approved them. When Andrew T. Christansen, a contractor, wanted glass in a building, a window-cleaning contract first had to be given to another union in which Campbell was interested. Then $50 had to be given because Campbell insisted that ‘if you want to get that glass in you’ve got to pay up.’ But to get workmen to the scene necessitated $50 more and $300 overtime, and with the glass finally installed Campbell demanded $200 extra or the work done over because he ‘did n’t like it’ that the moulding had been put up by ironworkers instead of glaziers. The jury decided that President Vernon Stoufler of the StoufTer Restaurant Company had been blackmailed for more than a thousand dollars, the racket in this instance taking the form of a threatened walkout leaving a building windowless on the eve of a scheduled opening. Bror Anderson said he had to kick in $150 because he wanted mirrors installed which Campbell had blacklisted as having been silvered by non-union labor. Another man received complaints because a member of his family instead of a union painter was doing his painting. A few days later his windows were smashed and could not be replaced till he paid $35.¹⁰ These are a few of Cleveland’s samples.

In Kansas City we find the editor of the Journal-Post being awarded a national journalism prize this year for his exposé of local union racketeering. New York employers have reason to remember Jake (the Bum) Wellner, Michael Belsky, Joseph Rivolin, Charles Stolof, and Isadore Goodman, union officials sentenced to the penitentiary for extortion. The idea was that for a payment they would permit a contract to be completed without interference from a painters’ union.¹¹

All of this, however, pales beside collusive agreements under which union men refuse to work with any materials except those supplied by chosen manufacturers and dealers who ‘play ball,’ or will consent to be hired only by a ring of favored contractors.

Conditions of this sort became so bad two years ago in New York that the Associated Builders of Kings County threatened to suspend $20,000,000 worth of projects and throw 15,000 out of work. They charged it was impossible to go on because subcontractors and unions covering forty-two trades had entered into compacts to compel them to accept rigged bids, and to institute a campaign of strikes against builders who balked. In no other way could they account for sudden 20 to 50 per cent increases in their costs.¹²

The most recent example, though, is the evidence of ring activity produced at the trial brought by the National Electrical Manufacturers’ Association in an effort to break a boycott, of its members’ products by Local No. 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. After a year of investigation for Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, his assistant, Thurston Greene, declared New York electrical ring activity responsible for at least one murder, for violence that has driven many persons out of the contracting business, and for a 20 per cent or $10,000,000 annual toll on contracts.¹³ Harry Snyder, an ex-member, testifies as to details. Union officials, he swears, told him he would have to join the Brooklyn Electrical Contractors’ Association if he wanted to be a contractor, transferred themselves to jobs as association managers, oversaw distribution of contracts at rigged prices, dictated the division of contractors’ profits, ordered them to buy their supplies from specified concerns, and then, when he stalled on a profit split, called him before a union committee and told him he was ‘through as a union electrical contractor.’ He since has been reduced to ‘$5 and $10 jobs’ on which he does the work himself.¹⁴

Isaac Tenner testifies that, when he finally revolted at dishonest bids, his union employees so soldiered that his labor costs soared 50 per cent; he lost thousands of dollars through sabotage; he had to meet demands for free beer, liquor, and even raincoats, to stave off walkouts; and when he actually caught his foreman stealing, the union ‘induced’ him to forget it.¹⁵ The office of Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey describes as ‘symptomatic of others’ Tenner’s complaint that it is impossible to stay in business under the union’s terms, and describes finding numerous $30,000 items mislabeled for ‘work’ in the books of firms doing business with it.¹⁶

Terrorism helps keep the workers in line, as is indicated by Cleveland’s Safety Director Ness, who says that persons he approached for information about union racketeering were ‘fearful of personal or business reprisals’ and that ‘one union member told us that at least three fourths of his local would, if the members were not afraid, march down in a body to my office to tell about the conditions.’¹⁷ But even more binding is the power of the dollar — as, for instance, the rejection of a nonunion $1,350,000 bid for a New York sewage disposal plantand theawardof thejob to a union contractor for $310,000 more, although engineers called the first price fair for any type of labor.¹⁸ Again, high initiation fees, such as $500 for plumbers’ apprentices in some areas during the boom and the $2000 fees which Umbrella Mike Boyle collected for temporary electricians’ cards in Chicago,¹⁹ may be extortionate, but by curtailing the labor supply they benefit men already enrolled. WPA reports disclose that there have been competent craftsmen unable to break away from relief because of inability to pay back union dues.²⁰

The record carries its own proof. In New York 5000 $1.70-an-hour electricians and other unionists in a mass meeting of January 1937 cheered the denunciation of Prosecutor Dewey. His investigation was condemned as being destructive of the union. Supported by Louis Weinstock, secretary-treasurer of District Council No. 9 of the Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers (who said his 16,000 men were ‘behind your organization’), John Drennan, secretary-treasurer of the Building Trades and Construction Council, and Moe Rosen, chairman of the Council of Sheet Metal Workers, they protested to Governor Lehman against him.²¹ When the carpenters’ bail-jumping Harry Barrington was returned to Cleveland to plead guilty to extortion and to go to the penitentiary, the Federation of Labor adopted resolutions assailing his accusers. When Donald A. Campbell, John McGee, exconvict. Carl Nadalny (assistant business agent of the painters’ union), and James C. McDonnell (assistant business agent of the glaziers) were indicted for blackmail in the glazier-painter rackets, the unions voted $30,000 from their treasuries for cash bonds, though surety companies refused to take the risk on them because of Campbell’s and Nadalny’s collective record of arrests for pocket picking, robbery, intent to kill, and carrying of concealed weapons.²²

Not for a minute do I blame labor for all the abuses in this field. Rackets have so permeated the supply businesses that the Federal Trade Commission finally has been impelled to act against the National Federation of Builders’ Supply Associations on the ground that it highpressured manufacturers into refusing to sell direct to large consumers or to trade with ot her dealers who would not uphold monopolistic resale prices.²³ In their turn, politicians help by deliberately concocting building codes so restrictive that a contractor may not be able to put up a house unless he violates them — and pays heavily for the privilege. There is too much evidence of unscrupulous price fixing by cement manufacturers even to require a statement of proof.

But labor also has allied with the politicians, with the result that D. Knickerbacker Boyd of the American Institute of Architects characterizes codes as vehicles for ‘loading’ and ‘misguided desires.’ In one town the brick walls of a small house alone cost $350 more than they do ten miles away owing to stipulations requiring more materials and more work for masons.²⁴ In Chicago the bricklayers’ union and brick interests for years had sufficient political power over code revisions to prohibit the general use of tile in residence construction, though architects and engineers favored it.²⁵ In New York it has been charged that a model building code gathered dust for four years, the aldermen refusing to act on it because ‘this or that individual’ was not permitted to write certain parts.²⁶

In Minnesota cities a state law prohibits the homeowner from hiring anyone loss than a ‘registered’ journeyman to paint his house.²⁷ Union plumbers not only have established similar monopolies under the codes in other cities, but use them to corner merchandising as well. In some instances the homeowner who buys a cheap mail-order bathtub is not allowed to install it himself, even if he knows how, and the union plumber may refuse to do it for him; he must purchase another tub through the plumber and seldom knows its cost, since the price he pays usually covers installation. The plumbers’ union in New York, for example, has a regulation by which its members will refuse to install or connect twenty-five different types of plumbing equipment, embracing almost everything in the plumbing field, unless purchased from the master plumber. Some unions prohibit their employer from working on the job. Steamfitters object to having pipe below a certain size cut by machinery.²⁸

III

Do the non-labor oppressions inflate housing costs more than those of labor? This may be said, that the former may be concocted by business men who make the most of the industrial pattern in which they find themselves, whereas labor struggles to prevent any alteration of the pattern.

There is reason for this. Industry in general has tended to seek its profits in mechanization, mass production, and consequent cheaper prices, which in turn create more consumption, more production, more jobs, and more revenues which employees may share when they become strongly enough organized. The building trades, however, were organized in advance of mechanization. Because their only possible source of wealth was the individual construction project, they applied pressure to make it yield more money and jobs. Their policy has been to extend control in order to secure their position and to resist any modernization, reform, or economy which might affect the incomes of hand workers who for years have performed the same tasks in the same manner.²⁹

Thus, Chicagoans have been limited to installing thirty bundles of lathing a day, New Yorkers sixteen. Union rules have outlawed brushes which dip up a large amount of paint. Some locals have refused to allow masons to lay bricks faster than the pace set by their less efficient colleagues.³⁰ In Cleveland it was testified that labor leaders sent ‘punks’ to jobs and threatened to pull off all craftsmen should they be discharged.³¹ It was against the Washington jurisdictional rules for the plumber to relay a square foot of tile which he had removed from my bathroom floor to reach pipes; that was a union tile-setter’s province. In Chicago 150 carpenters were called from the Drake Hotel construction to force abandonment of power saws, though these were allowed by the agreement under which they started work.³²

Under such circumstances, construction still is what it always has been — a chaotic peddler’s market with supply manufacturers, equipment makers, speculators, promoters, wholesalers, dealers, contractors, subcontractors, architects, all compelled to seek their profits in relatively few sales and high prices, because labor is the final handler of all the others’ products and therefore is able to call the rules.

The net result has been the defeat of labor’s own hopes. Sole responsibility for this defeat cannot be traced to the ever-ascending pay scales which labor demands during structure booms, then freezes, so far as possible, until the next period of activity. United States Commissioner of Labor Statistics Isador Lubin estimates that a 20 per cent reduction in these wages would cut the cost of a house by only 6 per cent.³³ Rather, the evidence shows that defeat is due to the combined weight of the wages, the jurisdictional system, the abuses, rackets, and restrictions against mechanization and efficiency, which in the end limit construction to families in the wealthier class. Thus we have the admission of Harry C. Bates, who, as president of the Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers International, testified that a city bricklayer back in the golden ’20s was fortunate to obtain 150 days of work a year for a total income of $1200 to $1500.³⁴

IV

I have endeavored to sketch in the background of the building business. Private enterprise, especially in hard times, could not produce good low-cost housing against such a backdrop. So the government decided to do it itself, first through the Public Works Administration, whose projects costing $130,000,000 are now being tenanted, and lately through the successor United States Housing Authority, which is spending $800,000,000 as a curtain raiser.

In its move to solve America’s housing problem (with a fund which in dollar bills would reach nearly four times around the equator) one would expect the government to attempt to correct the conditions which caused private enterprise to fail at the task. It has not. True, PWA Administrator Harold L. Ickes, after a couple of years’ experience, did project those mass-production methods which are so necessary for the business. Interviewers, myself among them, gained the impression that his idea included huge direct purchases from manufacturers in return for price concessions on standardized materials, and annual salaries for labor (long-term employment) instead of high hourly pay scales.

The potentialities of any such plan have been made apparent. By purchasing 17,000 electric refrigerators at one stroke, PWA has obtained $141 models for $66, similarly $55 gas ranges for $34, and gas refrigerators priced from $139.50 to $199.50 for $74.³⁵ But that is about all. Because of pressure from the unions, the government has continued to walk the same old toll roads laid out under the building codes. The contract for a completed structure is awarded to a concern of shrewd guessers which bets against fate and the unions that it can deliver. This concern in turn distributes its wager among a horde of subcontractors. Thus, under the codes, the local contractorunion ring has taken its cut by furnishing labor and supplies at much its own prices throughout the list of subcontract items, and in the end the government is as handicapped as any private builder.

If the local plumbers demand too much for their tubs, all the general contractor can do is fall back on the basic law exempting government work from the codes and contend that he therefore can buy his plumbing and hire his plumbers where he pleases. Cut in Oklahoma, where this was done, the union forces sued.³⁶ Rather than risk disapproval of the unions, the government now closely follows the codes, whether they involve plumbing or wall thickness.³⁷

In Detroit, PWA awarded separate bids for housing foundations, but when it came time to let contracts for completion of the buildings the bids were dominated by local contractors and so high that twice they had to be rejected. The reason did not become apparent until the local newspapers published charges that racketeers had warned outof-town contractors not to compete in the bidding, under penalty of suffering ruinous strikes by Detroit union workers, so that local union-contractor rings could monopolize the jobs and rig each subcontract for heating, plumbing, plastering, and the like, $100,000 higher than the government estimated was a fair price.

Herman J. North, a Cleveland contractor who wanted to bid, wired Mr. Ickes that floors in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis projects had started buckling, that specifications were being violated, and that the government was being ‘defrauded through inferior workmanship until it was receiving only twenty-five cents in value for a dollar spent.’ An investigation meantime had been started by PWA investigators in Detroit, and Mr. North said this would mean that for once the PWA would receive full value for its expenditures.

It is true, too, that the subsequent set of successful bids was $1,373,900 cheaper than those which had gone before, for, under the whiplash of the local press, the labor-union spokesmen finally felt impelled to make it plain that they would work for any successful bidder, even though he might come from out of town, and out-of-town contractors did carry off the jobs.

Through all this, the government worked the desired result, but it was careful to save the face of the folk who wanted to become rich in a hurry; at no point did its spokesmen criticize the unions. Contractors, whose misdeeds always make them fair game, bore the official criticism for being selfish. But even so tactics were employed in order not to embarrass them too much. Indeed, even plans and specifications were revised and brick veneer substituted for fireproof masonry in a few of the buildings which were to withstand the batterings of slum families for sixty years. President Roosevelt hinted that they might well bid lower than they had ‘because the subsequent revision of the plans has resulted in considerable savings.’

While the newspapers were headlining charges of contractor-union collusion, the PWA was even denying knowledge of a government investigation.

‘How do we know there is any collusion before the bids are even in?’ A. R. Clas, the then assistant PWA administrator, was quoted as saying.

W. R. Carman, resident PWA representative, described the investigation reports as ‘ baloney.'³⁸

The nearest Mr. Ickes came to enlightening the public was in a press release blaming contractors for ‘inflated prices’ which reached a ‘climax’ in Detroit, ‘where strong indications came to the surface that collusion was being practised.’ He did not specify the other parties to the collusion.³⁹

In Cleveland there are charges that a union contractors’ association decided to rig bids so that seven contracts should go to five members. Numerous investigations have been made of suspicious developments at other projects. But in only two instances has there been retaliation.

One was in St. Louis, where an anonymous letter led to indictment of five contractors and four union leaders of the plasterers and lathers for conspiracy to defraud the government. But there have been no convictions.⁴⁰

‘You must understand that we were obstructed at every turn by fear,’ government men told me. ‘First, information for the prosecutions had to come from the workers themselves; but when we went to their homes for affidavits, they were so afraid that they pulled down the shades, and their wives wrung their hands, imploring them not to sign. When we finally did get the case ready for trial, our chief witness was declared a suicide.’

In many places where the government has investigated, I am told, it has encountered the paralyzing fears which hindered the St. Louis prosecution. In its files, its own officials privately declare, are pages of testimony which cannot be made public lest the workers be imperiled. This cannot be proved, for no PWA official will say it publicly because of the government’s labor policy, but anyone who doubts its truth should read the impressive list of building-trades slayings contained in the New York Times annual indexes.

The official record shows that in 1936 and 1937 there were 824 strikes on PWA projects of all varieties.⁴¹ In Washington there even was a strike because steamshovel operators were asked to dump their dirt into CCC trucks which were to transport it to a WPA golf course. Most significant, however, has been the storm against the government’s plan to have a single sheet of concrete, painted underneath, serve as both floor and ceiling. Not content with $1.50 an hour for plastering side walls, the unionists have resented this innovation as an underhanded reactionary trick to withhold from them the portion of the taxpayers’ cash to which they were entitled.

As he applied pressure right and left to have the specifications overhauled, James Myles, as vice president of the Operative Plasterers and Cement Finishers International, even had the temerity to go before a Senate committee and announce that the union had struck, purposefully halting operations on huge projects because the PWA had ‘started a type of construction that had never existed before’ and thereby deprived plasterers of 213,280 hours of additional work and an extra profit of $1,919,520.

‘They have granted us alternatives here and there, but it is either “yes” or “no” with us,’ he stormed.

There was no other complaint, nothing about the employment of non-union men anywhere. He affirmed that the union pay scales were satisfactory. But he was adamant against the new construction technique, and of all those present at the hearing only Senator Josh Lee of Oklahoma dared even to hint at criticism.

‘If no work at all was being done by the government, there would not be anybody getting jobs, then,’ the Senator interposed mildly.

The union leader turned on him.

‘Then I think we better stop them,’ he exploded, referring to the housing projects. ‘It would be better if we do not build them at all under the present system of construction.’⁴²

What did the government do about this brazen effort to prevent modernization of an afflicted business? Did it call on the public for support? It did not. The plasterers struck again and again, demanding that completed cement ceilings be routed out and plaster laid on them. PWA officials privately estimate that they thus delayed the $12,400,000 Williamsburg Houses in New York from two and a half to three months, at tremendous cost, to the taxpayers. And in the end the PWA made a deal; it promised never again to permit use of moneysaving cement ceilings if the men would return to work.

The USHA now is making much of the fact that in return for promises to prevent wage cuts the American Federation of Labor’s national building trades organization has agreed to discourage jurisdictional strikes on USHA construction and many local union councils have agreed to submit jurisdictional disputes to arbitration before walking out. That is a step in the right direction. It tends to curtail any racket strikes styled after those of the Cleveland glaziers. But it does not pretend to obstruct antieconomy strikes such as those of the plasterers, and trouble with the plasterers would not be unexpected because the USHA now is planning to make another attempt to construct the same type of ceilings which caused woe for PWA. It does not cover the type of strike which is the weapon of the unioncontractor bidding ring. In fact, the government under USHA will not have even the power which PWA had to effect a saving in Detroit. Whereas PWA Administrator Ickes recently has been threatening to cut off that city from PWA funds owing to persistence of what he describes as the same old ring methods which previously caused him trouble, the USHA after approving contracts must pay out $25,000,000 there for more housing and let the ring overcharge as it sees fit, unless the city politicians show more interest in protecting the taxpayers than they have in the past and unless the USHA decides to designate more authority to itself than it generally is credited with possessing.

V

Instead of a direct frontal attack on these cost-raising factors, it would appear that the government’s sole alternative is to seek economies elsewhere. Government agents have diverted attention from actualities and, to obtain funds, have stressed how the United States has lagged behind the British in public housing for the poorer classes. The country has been shown photographic exhibits of stinking holes where large families must live in inherited filth because, like thousands in our cities, the entire clan cannot raise more than three dollars a month for a single room.

These tactics stir national pride and demand action in a country which wants to lead in everything. They arouse charitable impulses in the hardesthearted reactionary, for no beggar has a more compelling set of props than the government has in its photographs; they literally cry out against the horrible plight of people who must exist in conditions which would be fatal to cattle. But, with the money once in hand, the government until now has constructed only middle-class accommodations and turned its back on the British cottages which, despite higher materials costs, represent an outlay of only $2017 (instead of the $5555.87 which we are spending for each unit), because their sites are chosen with an eye to economy and their combination fireplaces and cookstoves fulfill all heating and cooking requirements.⁴³

These cottages in England would be self-liquidating at a rental of $14.85⁴⁴ a month, but USHA Director Straus declared that in the best of European projects the ‘sanitary facilities are below what we deem a minimum; running hot water is a rarity, and bathtubs and that sort of thing are at a minimum in size’;⁴⁵ and Horatio Hackett, as PWA’s housing chief, remarked that ‘we first try to designate the lowest standard to which a man should live, and then instead of trying to build our houses and our rooms down to the gutters, we are trying to bring the slums and gutters up to our standard of living.’

This has necessitated PWA sites which cost as much as $4.30 a square foot in New York and have been correspondingly expensive elsewhere, because they must be close to the heart of cities, where land has a high potential value for industrial purposes. The theory is that people will refuse to leave their miserable hovels if they must desert their neighborhoods or spend much time traveling to work. Again, at least 70 per cent of the site must be left free of buildings because the ideal way is to lay this out in trees and playgrounds, and in some cases even to provide bandstands. The policy has been so stretched that in Louisville only 6.8 per cent of the site has been used for buildings, thus providing 63 acres of recreation ground for 286 families.⁴⁶ Such planning goes to fantastic extremes, even to the projection of laundries with electric driers and private garages!

Inevitably, costs have soared. At first PWA experimented with 4 per cent thirty-year loans to privately sponsored limited-dividend organizations.⁴⁷ But when these produced results such as the Hillside project in the Bronx at a cost of $1156 a room, the government deplored these profit-making enterprises as being too expensive for the class it had in mind. As an antidote PWA built a $2028-perroom colony for Harlem Negroes and the $2195-per-room Williamsburg Houses for whites. In Philadelphia a $1035-perroom limited-dividend project could not meet the problem of the ‘bandbox’ alley hovels which were being propagandized because they contained only a room to a floor, a family to a room, and one outdoor privy for a goodly portion of the community. The supposed cure was a $1765-per-room undertaking. In thirtyfive cities where PWA has had projects the results have been comparable. In non-metropolitan Wayne, Pennsylvania, the room cost is $1788, in Enid, Oklahoma, $1518.⁴⁸

But, in spite of the fancy planning, the evidence does not support any conclusion other than that the major responsibility for the costs must fall on the building system.

The system back in 1905 meant contractor-union bidding rings and agreements whereby unions would allow their men to work only for members of their pet contractor associations.⁴⁹ It still does. In 1908, one Mr. Goellnitz, a delegate to the first annual convention of the American Federation of Labor’s Building Trades Department in Denver, was proclaiming to the conclave that ‘bricklayers have done their utmost to get control of the concrete work, not to do it, but to destroy it.’⁵⁰ The evidence is that this still is unionist attitude toward mechanical progress making for cheaper construction. The Dailey Investigation in Illinois reported in 1921 that graft, obtained by union racketeers with the aid of‘murderers, sluggers and bomb throwers in their nefarious war upon society,’ was ‘not the exception but the rule,’ and that ‘millions of dollars every year’ were collected by Chicago building-trades overlords.⁵¹ There has not been an investigation of such broad scope recently, but even so there is evidence that the same type of racketeers are collecting cash in the same old way.

No citizen will object to the necessity of subsidies which will provide poor people with decent housing, but there will be no limit to indignation if it can be proved that neither the government nor the tenants are getting their money’s worth owing to abuses in the building trades. As far as this article has gone, it would seem at least debatable whether the New Deal has done much to get its money’s worth or to extend its passion for reform to the building trades it patronizes in furthering programmes to house a good many thousand persons at public expense. But there still is a lot more to this story to be told.