But People Must Eat

I

CHICAGO’S fighting alderman, otherwise known as economics professor Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago, recently carried an armload of groceries before an audience he was to address. The bread, milk, cereal, prunes, and other low-cost foods were valued at approximately $1.05, representing the amount supposedly granted relief families of four persons for one day’s food. Unfortunately, relief families had not for months been receiving what they were supposed to get, and provision for food was only two thirds of the established standards. To illustrate this deficiency the alderman-professor reduced by one third the meagre groceries before him. There remained 70 cents’ worth of food. With this homemakers were expected to provide four persons with three meals each. At best only cheap foods could be purchased, and but a minimum of those. Little could be saved out to cover odds and ends needed in cooking, or to provide desserts, fresh fruits, protective foods, or variety. Since purchases would of necessity be limited strictly to pennystretching buys, attempts to provide much of the spice of life would be likely to leave somebody hungry. Monotony of relief diets is almost as galling as their inadequacy.

That Chicago’s food allowances fell one third below established standards was not all, for those standards represented, not what families needed, but only what the relief administration with depleted resources thought could be provided. This was so much below family requirements that a well-known Chicago social worker christened it a ‘skeleton budget’ to make clear its sub-minimum nature, and to distinguish it from minimum budgets recommended by home economists. During the fall of 1939, a minimum budget would have provided, in Chicago, $65 a month for a mother and three young children. The skeleton standard would have given such a family only $44. Actual relief allowances represented only two thirds of the skeleton standard and less than half the minimum! No term to be applied to these sub-skeleton grants has yet been coined.

Inadequacy of relief in Chicago has been so glaring that the city has been shocked by revelations of the number of Chicagoans who have less than enough food. The number of children found to be weakened for want of proper food compelled one nationally famous Chicago social centre to modify its program, substituting quiet activities for games like basketball and baseball.

During the most recent of Cleveland’s recurring relief crises, 16,000 were reported to have gone without relief. Under circumstances like these there is little talk of three meals a day. The problem is to find one. A Cleveland welfare official, during the relief stoppage, was quoted as saying that an expectant mother went three days with nothing to eat but apples; a mother with eight children had no food but corn meal; another woman spent her last $1.25 for a streetcar pass so that she could ride streetcars night and day to keep warm.

Low relief standards, unfortunately, are not unique to Cleveland and Chicago. They are found in every section of the country.

St. Louis’s relief program, according to a newspaper dispatch, was recently termed by the health commissioner ‘an experiment in malnutrition.’ In October, families were given only $24.30 for all purposes for the entire month — approximately $6.00 per week, barely enough to feed its members, to say nothing of housing, clothing, or keeping them warm. Single persons were, on the average, given only $8.62. Whole families in Cincinnati and New Orleans in October were also granted less than $25 for all purposes for an entire month. Only three or four dollars more per family were provided in Boston and Cleveland.

Relief allowances sharply below minimum needs are more the rule than the exception in the United States. Reports received from cities as widely separated as Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Atlanta all indicate that relief allowances have, within the past twelve months, provided only a fraction — perhaps 80, perhaps 60, perhaps 40, or even but 25 or 30 per cent — of what homeeconomics experts regard as an irreducible minimum. As a result, many a relief recipient receives less for one day’s food than is spent in some households for a dog. And although children, like monkeys in zoos, need fresh lettuce, bananas, oranges, and spinach, only the monkeys are assured these necessities. Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, within the year limited relief grants, for a family of four, to approximately $12 a week, or $1.70 a day. One cannot but wonder what these might have been if Philadelphia had been merely, as some cities advertise, a friendly city. Rule-of-thumb methods used in some areas prescribe one dollar, or perhaps a dollar and a quarter, per person per week for food. These amounts, which cannot decently feed a human, are sometimes augmented by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent to cover incidentals.

Miserable as general relief standards frequently are, the whole trouble is not in the starvation level of life they impose. Almost as bad as their inadequacy is their uncertainty. Without warning, relief offices sometimes close for indeterminate periods. Or a specified percentage of relief grants may suddenly be lopped off.

Then, too, allowances granted to cover designated items (usually food and sometimes food alone) must often be used for rent, fuel, electricity, clothing, carfare, medicines, soap, or other incidentals for which no provision is made.

Although it is usually food money which is diverted to meet other pressing needs, the converse sometimes occurs. A letter received by a Chicago social worker stated the problem baldly: ‘Miss, we have ate our budget of coal and light also rent, ples excus and help.’

Worse yet, allowances wholly inadequate to meet current needs must sometimes be applied to back rent or grocery bills long overdue. This necessity not infrequently springs directly from policies which in some areas require people to exhaust all possible credit before applying for relief. The inevitable result of these practices is that when relief is granted it must sometimes be spread back over the period during which potential applicants were being forced ever deeper into the quagmire of destitution.

What standards and practices like these mean to families throughout the United States is evidenced by the average amounts actually granted relief recipients last winter. Data for winter are used here because it is then that need for food, clothing, shelter, and warmth is most acute, and the inadequacy of grants most apparent. Averages for this winter are not yet available.

In December 1938, Christmas month (although hundreds of thousands have no reason to recall it as such), relief in 39 states for which reports were available averaged $26.15 per household. But this was only the average. At one extreme were states like New York and California, where grants for the month averaged over $30. Even these maxima, however, provide no beds of roses. This is evidenced by the fact that food allowances in New York City, where standards are among the most nearly adequate in the country, provide for a family of four an average of only 8 cents per person per meal. If food money must be diverted for other needs for which no provision is made, even this modest allowance is reduced.

At the other extreme were 10 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) in which average grants for the month fell below $10, reaching a mere $4.60 in Arkansas. In Mississippi, the average sank almost to the vanishing point, only $2.73, less than 10 cents a day. And these grants, it must be remembered, are not for individuals, but households which probably average three or four persons each. The meagre grants cited here must therefore be split at least three and perhaps four ways.

Fortunately, relief grants do not necessarily represent all that relief households have to live on in any one month. Many also have at least some other resources like those described below. Furthermore, average allowances also understate somewhat the amounts actually given to households for an entire month, since some grants included in the average are for only part of a month.

Relief (sometimes termed ‘general relief’), to which reference is here made, is one of the five basic types of public aid now being granted in the United States. The other four are WPA employment and three types of assistance granted needy persons under the federal Social Security program — aid to dependent children, old-age assistance, and aid to the blind. Emphasis placed upon the inadequacy of general relief must not be construed to mean that WPA wages and Social Security benefits are adequate. They are only relatively so.

When contrasted with old-age assistance, general-relief grants appear all the more insufficient. In August, 31 of 41 states reporting on a comparable basis granted more to individuals receiving old-age assistance than to relief families which probably averaged between three and four persons each. Two states, notably Arizona and Colorado, granted individual aged pensioners more than twice as much, on the average, as relief families. A number of others granted individual old-age pensioners half again as much as families given general relief. The nub of this is not that pensioners get too much, but that relief families get far too little.¹

WPA wages, over the nation, vary from about $31 to $95 a month, averaging perhaps $50 for the country as a whole. Although this average is nearly double that for general relief, WPA wages are frequently wholly insufficient to meet families’ needs. This is especially true when workers are unskilled, work in areas where lowest wages are paid, or have a number of dependents.

In a meeting of WPA workers not long ago a frail little man, nervous and tense, arose to remind his hearers of what they apparently well remembered — that he had refused repeatedly to go with delegations demanding that WPA officials increase wage rates. Apologetically, his eyes not meeting those of his hearers, he made his confession. Suddenly fire burst out of this hitherto mild man. ‘But now, by God,’ he almost yelled, electrifying his listeners, ‘now I’ll join a delegation. By God, I had a delegation come to me, and I’m ready now to join one myself.’ The delegation that had come to him, he explained when the flame had subsided somewhat, consisted of his two little daughters. At the close of their evening meal they had picked up their empty tin plates and walked to their father asking for more supper, more than he felt could be provided out of his WPA wages for unskilled labor. Little wonder that these workers gather in neighborhood houses, schools, or empty stores to ask each other earnestly how they make their wages last, how they manage to find houses they can afford to rent, what they use for food.

But WPA wages are not merely too low decently to feed, house, and clothe many families. Every so often they stop completely. In this they are like general relief. Congress in its wisdom recently decreed that all workers (except veterans) continuously employed by the WPA for as long as eighteen months must be discharged for at least thirty days. Two things, however, Congress forgot. One was to appropriate funds sufficient to provide jobs enough to reëmploy these furloughed workers at the end of their enforced thirty-day layoff, if at that time they still needed work. The second was to declare a moratorium on hunger. The effect of these oversights is to sentence, not to bread and water merely, but to no visible means of support, many whose crime it was to need WPA jobs for eighteen continuous months.

II

Harrowing as it is to live on inadequate and intermittent relief, living without it when in need is worse. How many persons there are who need but do not receive relief is not known. That they represent several hundred thousand families is altogether likely. This very uncertainty as to their number but symbolizes the degree to which federal, state, and local governments have neglected their plight.

Who they are is clear. Some are single men and women. As a rule they are among the first to be denied relief when funds run low, a chronic condition in not a few areas. Somehow people without dependents are expected to be able to fend for themselves even though they have no jobs or resources. Some are childless couples. When there is only so much relief to be divided among so many, those with dependents are sometimes given a priority that sentences to utter resourcelessness those with none. Others are fathers, mothers, and children who have not lived long enough in one place to meet what are often stringent residence requirements. Still others are those who do not quite meet qualifications for assistance under the Social Security program — old people not quite old enough to qualify for old-age assistance, blind persons who technically can see a little too much yet not well enough to work or support themselves, young children who are a bit too old or whose fathers are incapacitated but not for a long enough period. Large numbers of those denied relief despite their being in need are able-bodied or employable persons and their families. The plight of all these is unenviable.

It is a strange paradox that wives and babies who have never lived in any other community than their present home may be denied relief because of some technicality regarding the residence of the head of the family, that children under working age are denied aid because their father is employable though without work. It is no less whimsical that, although federal-state provision is made for needy aged persons sixty-five and over, none is made for those who are only sixty-four; that although the federal and state governments coöperate to aid certain (but not all) dependent children under sixteen, there is no such coöperation to aid children attaining that ripe age. Beginning on January 1, 1940, the Federal Government can participate in assisting dependent young people under eighteen years of age provided they attend school regularly. State laws, however, must still be amended before this new policy can be effectuated.

With regard to employable persons, eight states and the District of Columbia were, within the past year, reported by the federal WPA as granting them no relief. The states were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Another six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma — were reported as giving ‘practically no relief’ to those who were employable. Another thirteen states — Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington — were reported as having ‘ low standards ‘ or only ‘limited funds’ for direct relief. Employable persons and their families in many of these states were probably aided only on a very restricted basis if at all.

Failure of a state to appear in any of these three groups does not mean that all was therefore well for employables. In New Jersey, for example, a local relief director boasted not long ago that he secured local funds for relief only by demonstrating that it would cost less to give people relief orders than to bury them. Relief designed merely to keep people out of the hands of undertakers cannot be expected to offer much to families and growing children needing more than to be kept alive.

Denial of relief to those who are really employable is bad enough. Its denial to persons of doubtful employability is worse. In one state, if a person was able-bodied he was construed to be employable, and anyone able to go to a relief office was automatically classified as able-bodied. Thus ability even to apply for relief rendered one ineligible. In another state, unless one was almost ready to qualify for old-age assistance he was regarded as employable and therefore ineligible for relief. In a third state, relief to employables might be given in emergencies. However, being foodless or evicted and on the street was not construed to be an emergency.

Why is provision for needy employable persons, and those not given assistance under the Social Security program, so inadequate? A first answer is that, for those who are employable, there are not and never have been enough WPA jobs to go round. WPA officials themselves have estimated that the federal work program has from time to time failed, by from 350,000 to 1,300,000 jobs, to provide work for all needy employable workers. This inadequacy is due in part to failure of the administration to request appropriations large enough to meet the full need; failure of Congress to appropriate even as much as requested; failure of local and state authorities to initiate and contribute toward the expense of projects; failure to create the kinds of work that can be done by those needing jobs. Most important of all, however, is the failure of the American people to demand that proper provision be made for those unable decently to maintain themselves and their children.

Since the WPA and Social Security programs do not provide for all needing aid, why do not the states and localities make proper provision for them? Some of course do. More do not.

One bar to effective action is the unsettled question whether, since the Federal Government apparently will not help to meet the whole need, the obligation is one for the states or for cities, towns, and counties. State responsibility for general relief is less widely accepted than for relief granted under the federal Social Security program. Federal law requires that states contribute toward the cost of old-age assistance, aid to the blind, and aid to dependent children. In addition, states must assure good administration of these programs in all political subdivisions. This requirement in itself necessitates substantial contributions of state funds in order to make supervision effective. Lack of comparable provisions in regard to general relief has contributed to the present chaos. A first step obviously demanded is for the Federal Government to give to establishment of sound general-relief programs the same degree of financial support and leadership it has given to the inauguration of special programs of assistance under the Social Security Act. Only thus can a sound beginning be made at the all-important task of meeting the distress of people who are not eligible for any type of public assistance provided in coöperation with the Federal Government.

III

How do needy people get along when granted inadequate relief or none? Some, of course, don’t. A very few don’t even try. Sometimes mere anticipation of the experience is so overwhelming that people choose not to face it.

In New York City news stories have told within recent weeks of two workers who, when discharged from their WPA jobs, chose not to face what lay ahead. One of these, a woman, shot herself after one glance at the envelope known to contain her dismissal notice. The other, a man, seemingly in a daze of disappointment after discharge by the WPA, marched stolidly into the path of an onrushing subway train.

As for those who choose to ‘tough it out,’ as all but the rare exceptions do, there are other ways. What these are is by no means clear. Even social workers and public-welfare officials who are closest to the problem, when asked how people get along, reply, ‘We simply don’t know’ or ‘We can’t imagine how they do it.’

Yet only details are lacking. The broad outlines are clear enough, and first-hand observers agree that getting along without relief, or with only inadequate aid when one is in need, is a bitter, grueling experience. Those compelled to undergo it are left stunned, bewildered. A recent report by a social agency in Baltimore declared the insecurity and dependence of needy families receiving no relief to be ‘devastating.'

Families suffering this devastation are shaken to their depths. Men become embittered over their failure to find work and to feed their families. One father, because of his inability to provide more than one bed for his entire family, was recently reported to suffer recurrent ‘black moods.’ How even the youngest are affected was evidenced by a five-year-old who looked into his father’s face and said half-assuringly, half-questioningly, ‘But we’ll soon find a job, won’t we?’

Tensions and stresses among destitute families always become aggravated around Christmas time, when parents have to try to explain slip-ups in Santa’s schedule. To many a family, and to several times that many children, Christmas is something like the twenty-ninth of February. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t.

Fortunately, people in bitter need frequently don’t have to endure it for long at a stretch. Something may turn up, after a week or month or so, to break the agonizing tension. After longer or shorter periods, families may be able to manage without difficulty. Some, however, may again fall into need when the smile vanishes from the face of fate. However infrequent, however short or intermittent, may be one’s descent into dire unrelieved need, the experience leaves its mark.

One way of getting along, perhaps the first (after earnings, credit, ability to borrow, and insurance adjustments have been exploited to their fullest), is to give up cherished belongings. When sold or pawned, these may bring no more than enough for a meal or two. A wedding ring, usually the last thing of value to go, may yield food for a day, possibly enough for a week. Investigators in different sections of the country have reported finding homes of people in bitter need without one article which could be sold or pawned for ten cents. This is the Midas touch in reverse. Instead of base things turned to gold, cherished keepsakes are turned into bare crusts.

One resource almost everywhere available to needy families is federal surplus commodities. These, for hundreds of thousands, have constituted a last thin line of defense against hunger. The commodities are those purchased by the Federal Government, not so much with a view to their appropriateness for feeding hungry families as to stabilizing agricultural prices. Amounts and types of commodities available for distribution vary both from place to place and from time to time. The range of items is so limited and so unpredictable that they give families dependent upon them no more than a tenuous hold on life — a Tobacco Road sort of existence. Commodities granted at any one time may include, perhaps, flour, prunes, beans, grapefruit, and corn meal. Again they may include only onions, flour, and cracked wheat. Butter and eggs sometimes made available are genuine delicacies.

What the government’s new ‘stamp plan’ may ultimately accomplish in terms of augmenting relief allowances for food is not yet clear. There is, however, the constant threat that too-low relief standards may be further reduced as the plan develops. Should these not be lowered to offset possible gains achievable under the plan, there still would remain an elemental difficulty. Free commodities to the value of half the amount granted in relief for food would still not raise to a defensible level many food allowances. Half of nothing isn’t much, and half of very little isn’t very much more.

Next in importance to surplus commodities are casual earnings. Driven by necessity, needy persons sometimes work for such miserable wages that their hourly rates are unbelievably low. Rates of ten cents or less per hour are not unknown. Low earnings which might appear to be sufficient to raise relief families’ level of life somewhat above that afforded by relief allowances frequently have no such effect. In the first place, it costs money to work. Carfare, clothes, and lunches cut deeply into meagre wages. More important is the fact that, in some jurisdictions, earnings in any amount disqualify families for relief — this because agencies do not want to ‘subsidize private industry.’ In areas where persons having private earnings may be given supplemental relief, allowances are usually reduced by an amount commensurate with the earnings. Thus earnings do not raise the low plane upon which relief families must subsist. This is particularly true in areas having lowest relief standards.

Another way of getting along is to live off each other. The necessity of ‘looking up a friend’ every time he wanted to eat or needed carfare to hunt a job was described by one man as the bitterest pill of all. One by one, friends tired of it. Friendships waned. Gradually he was left more and more alone, withdrew more and more into himself. Finally, as he put it, ‘you feel all withered inside.’

Relatives are normally expected, under our social system, to help one another. Even here, however, there are limits which any court would recognize. Under our relief system, however, admittedly needy people who are denied necessary aid must sometimes be taken in or aided by almost complete strangers who for some reason are willing to share with others resources which many times are not adequate for themselves. This robbing of hungry Peters to help starving Pauls is sometimes called ‘invisible aid.’ It is frequently lauded as a manifestation of desirable social attitudes. This lauding, however, is usually done only by those not called upon to play the part of either Peter or Paul.

Another device is for someone to leave home. Or perhaps a family will split up. Youngsters may be sent to live with grandparents, leaving the parents to face the rigors alone. Children in at least one section of New Jersey are still taken from their parents and given temporary institutional care when families are dispossessed. Among social agencies with high standards, the practice of removing a child from his family because of poverty alone has been outlawed for thirty years. Keeping a roof over a family’s head, it may be pointed out in passing, is no less cardinal a principle than keeping families together.

Sometimes, instead of sending children away, the father may leave home in the hope that perhaps remaining members of the family may, in his absence, be granted relief for which they are ineligible as long as he is there.

Again a family may be broken up simply because there is no way to care for it as a whole. A family of eleven recently put into the street was thus dealt with. The father was sent to a shelter, the mother and children given institutional care. Separations of this kind may not be for long. Again, they may.

IV

Most devices to which families resort in order to keep together and alive are legal. Sometimes, however, people in dire need do not stop when all conceivable legal means have been exhausted. Hungry men to whom relief agencies have denied food have been known to walk into restaurants and eat long-postponed meals, telling cashiers to charge them to the city.

Sheer desperation has driven men to other extreme steps. There was, for example, the case of an ex-waiter. In better times he had worked in some of the largest hotels in his city. While he was out of a job and receiving relief in that city, his little daughter fell sick. The doctor prescribed for her an extra quart of milk a day, and urged that if possible the milk be served warm. Prescription in hand, the child’s father hounded and harassed relief authorities every day for seven days until the coveted ‘medicine’ was at last authorized. Milk to that family assumed overnight a value and importance worthy of radium; gas with which to heat it couldn’t have been more highly prized if it had been helium. Suddenly a new blow fell. The gas was turned off; bills had gone too long unpaid. When the gasman had left, a meter on those premises was broken. And that meter hasn’t been the only one operated on. Unfortunately the ex-waiter was alone neither in what he suffered nor in what he did.

Electricity, too, has been carried into houses without benefit of meter. This involves stringing wires which at times become real fire hazards, threatening both life and property. Yet they bring light. People otherwise might have to sit in the dark. School children might otherwise have no light to study by.

However needy families get along with little or no relief, the result is likely to be the same — adults and children hungry and, on occasion, fainting from hunger; families evicted, ‘doubled up,’ living in darkness; adults too weak or improperly clothed to work; children too run-down actively to play; few properly clothed, all more or less cold — the whole constituting a mass of unrelieved misery.

In view of relief conditions, it is surprising how some federal officials can refer with ill-concealed pride to the administration’s policy, adopted in 1935, of quitting this business of relief. And this despite the fact that the Federal Government has never quit, and is not now out of the business. It has only withdrawn from the one all-important field of general relief. It administers directly the work-relief program of the Work Projects Administration, pays 100 per cent of the cost, and itself administers direct relief granted farmers by the Farm Security Administration. It coöperates too with the states in continuing the business under a different name adopted when the federal Social Security program, embracing three types of relief, was established.

Needy persons not provided for through these special programs, whether because they are not eligible or because the programs are not adequate, the Federal Government passes by on the other side. This lack of federal aid and leadership has undoubtedly contributed to continuance of present chaotic, deplorable conditions. There is little room for pride in either the policy or its results.

To suggest that the Federal Government has not fully met its relief responsibilities is not to disregard the importance of possible economies in federal spending or of limiting the growth of the national debt. It is only to point out that, in the absence of federal aid and leadership in this field, people are in want or only inadequately aided. Perhaps the country’s whole relief scheme needs restudy to determine whether the programs to which the Federal Government is already contributing represent the best possible use of funds available for relief. Perhaps the whole structure of local, state, and federal taxation should be reviewed to arrive at the most equitable division of responsibility consonant with the well-being of the country as a whole. Until some such steps can be taken, however, there are strong reasons for federal aid for general relief. Among these are unmet need; disparities between state and local resources on one hand and unemployment and destitution on the other; the handicap placed upon industry in one state which provides comparatively adequately for its needy as opposed to another state which levies upon its industries distinctly lower or perhaps no relief taxes.

By stressing the necessity for federal aid I do not intend to imply that relief is the best possible way of helping people eat when they lack other means. No one likes relief. Those who pay for it don’t like it. Neither do those who administer it, nor those who receive it. It is not even a good second-best. Ultimately, it is hoped, some fairer way may be found to absorb into the nation’s economy at least those who are able to work, thereby reducing need for relief to them. More equitable distribution of the national wealth, income, and the products of industry might also serve to reduce the need for relief. But these possibilities, though they may be for tomorrow, avail nothing today. In the meantime many needs remain unmet or only partially met. Relief, at least for the day, must go on.

A high federal officer in a recent radio address told workers discharged by the WPA that in the absence of jobs and relief they’d better take in their belts another notch and get ready to face a tough winter. This advice, realistic though it may have been, hardly squares with assurances that ‘no one in America shall be allowed to starve.’ Failure of the American people to aid hundreds of thousands of needy, destitute families which happen not to benefit or to benefit only inadequately from existing federal or federal-state relief programs, suggests that what is really meant is that ‘no one in the United States shall be allowed to starve too long,’ or, perhaps, even ‘ no one shall be allowed to starve to death.’ It is not the Federal Government or state and local governments which must assume ultimate responsibility for conditions as they are. That rests upon the American people. We have failed to demand a newer deal for large numbers of needy families. We have also failed properly to support proposals made by administration leaders to give greater security to those in the nation who are most disadvantaged.

But, someone may interject, there are probably millions of people in other countries living on far less than the average American relief recipient; why all the excitement? This may be attributed to at least four factors. In the first place, need is relative. It is materially affected by mores and standards of living. In the interest of public health and safety, for example, authorities in an American city might compel a relief family to vacate a house which in another country might be regarded as a quite adequate establishment. Thus, one corollary of America’s relatively high standard of living is a relatively high standard of need. A second factor is the standard of life a nation can assure to even the poorest of its people. If a country is unable to provide no more than an animal-like subsistence to its most disadvantaged members, that is one thing. If a nation can do better but doesn’t, that is something else.

A further consideration beyond what a nation can do is what a nation should do. If there’s anything in being a good neighbor, in the Golden Rule, or in social justice, surely this has some bearing upon what a nation does for those within its borders who are in greatest need. To many Americans the failure of other nations to do more for their most disadvantaged members no more justifies this nation’s failure to do all that can be done than homicide by one man gives other men a right to murder. Finally, there is the realization that needs unmet today may in the long future ultimately entail even greater social costs and outlays of money than an adequate relief program for the present. Relief, therefore, is looked upon as a preventive of something worse. The recent national health survey which disclosed a markedly higher incidence of sickness and more prolonged disability among those in the lowest economic groups than among those in comfortable or better circumstances again suggested that efforts to improve living conditions among needy people may, in the long run, be good social economy regardless of what other nations choose to do.

Recognition of extensive unmet responsibilities must not, however, be allowed to obscure the tremendous gains achieved in seven short years or to cloud the vastly greater degree of security now afforded millions whose very means of subsistence is vouchsafed only through the WPA and Social Security programs.

Failure to do what remains to be done reduces to a mockery our noble pretenses about establishing a minimum level below which no man, woman, or child shall be allowed to fall. It negates, in large measure, values that might otherwise accrue from broad social, educational, health, and recreational programs upon which Americans pride themselves. Can hungry children play, cold children learn, half-fed children remain well, develop properly? What of destitute and harassed parents who suffer far more from realization of what is happening to their children than from their own deprivation? Can they be good fathers and mothers? Can they rear today the best type of citizens for tomorrow? Difficult if not impossible as these tasks seem, miserable if not intolerable as are circumstances confronting millions of needy persons in this country, they constitute the lot of those of our fellows who are most insecure, most harried by necessity, worst fed, worst clad, and worst housed.