National Affairs: Bread & Progress

The Workers Alliance of America, union of unemployed and relief workers, decided last spring to hold its fourth annual convention in Cleveland, where people who could not get relief were then fighting in the streets for food (TIME, May 16). Last week 500 Alliance delegates assembled in Cleveland’s Public Auditorium. They did not look like darlings of Harry Hopkins or anybody else. Some were ebony Negroes from the South. Nearly all had an air of shabby insecurity. All showed fight.

Top Alliance men at the convention were wan, tireless President David Lasser. 36, and bespectacled, soft-spoken Secretary-Treasurer Herbert Benjamin. 37. Two-and-a-half years ago Socialist Lasser’s original Alliance and Herbert Benjamin’s Communist Unemployment Councils submerged their differences, merged with lesser organizations into the present Alliance. The membership (now claimed 400,000. mostly in Eastern, Midwestern and Pacific Coast cities) continually shifts as clients go on & off relief. The leadership is also in constant flux, at the moment includes such active but seldom mentioned figures as John Spain of New Jersey, Lee Morgan of Ohio, Al Brockway of Washington. Dependent for dues on citizens who have no surplus cash, the Alliance is chronically short of money. Treasurer Benjamin last week reported that in the past 14 months he collected $56,783, spent all but $2,435.

Communists would be dullards indeed if they did not cultivate such a vineyard of the poor. Accordingly, the Alliance has to play a canny game of Truth & Consequences with hostile investigators like Congressman Martin Dies. Fact is that the relatively small Communist fraction in Alliance ranks is larger than in most trades unions. Last week in Cleveland many of the delegates lodged with local Communists. The convention barred two New Yorkers who complained that, just as the Communists have tempered their revolutionary doctrines (TIME, May 30), so has the Alliance gone milk-&-watery in its dealings with WPA.

Ground for this charge is that David Lasser lately has preferred quiet negotiation to violent demonstration. In the Alliance’s executive board’s report at Cleveland, President Lasser and his 25 colleagues claimed credit for: a raise in Southern relief minima from $21 to $26 per month; sufficient Federal relief funds to care for the present peak of 3,102,000 WPAsters (see col. 1); a growing respect for the Alliance in Congress. David Lasser’s next demands on Harry Hopkins and Congress will be a 20% increase in WPA wages, to bring them up to local union standards, and a $6,600,000,000 work relief outlay to make jobs for 4,000,000 over the next six years. Lasser & Friends look on Harry Hopkins not as a golden goose but as a well-meaning, progressive employer who must be prodded.

One Alliance prod is political action. Last week David Lasser claimed large credit for purging Manhattan’s Congressman John J. O’Connor (see p. 72). He cried: “Shall we engage in political activities? My fellow delegates, we are in political activities!” Whereupon the convention offered its support to Franklin Roosevelt for a third term if he wants one and resolved: “Bread and Progress are of greater concern to us and to the American people as a whole than so-called traditions.”

An impression which David Lasser would like to erase is that the Alliance wants to perpetuate Relief. He and his board declared: “Those whom we represent do not desire to help pile up Government deficits: do not desire to remain on the Government payroll one day longer than necessary. . . . We . . . understand that a works program and relief alone cannot solve our economic problems or end unemployment and insecurity. Such Government aid can but mitigate the suffering. . . .”