RELIEF: First Billion

With four billion Work Relief dollars in their pockets, Frank Walker, Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins went to the White House one afternoon last week, spent two hours parceling out the first billion. Half of it went for highways, roads, streets, grade crossings. PWA got a quarter billion dollars for slum clearance, low-cost housing. Rural Resettlement Administrator Rexford Guy Tugwell received a round $100,000,000 to spend as he pleased. Another $100,000,000 went to Army engineers, half of it for dredging the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Two genuinely newsworthy prizes were drawn from the grab-bag by the Democrats of Maine and the Progressive La Follette Brothers of Wisconsin.

Army engineers, a special PWA board, other surveyors have unanimously thumbed down the idea of spending $48,000,000 to harness the 20-ft. tides of the Bay of Fundy at Passamaquoddy, Me. They declared that Maine’s remote northern tip offered no market for the vast amounts of power which would result, that necessary power could be produced more cheaply from coal. But. when Maine was preparing to whirl its political weather vane last summer, President Roosevelt expressed renewed interest in Passama quoddy, Secretary Ickes visited the site. Maine swung to the Democrats and last week got $10,000,000 for Passamaquoddy.

As the only applicants smart enough to step forward with a plan embracing every project to be undertaken in their state, the La Follettes got $100,000,000 for Wisconsin. Strings: the State must raise another $105,000,000 needed for its 140-odd projects, must arrange to repay $30,000,000 of the Federal Government’s advance.

This week in an executive order President Roosevelt prescribed wage scales for the work relief program. Dividing the nation into four regions—Deep South, Middle South, Central States, Northern States—he established rates based upon five population classifications ranging from rural districts and towns under 5,000 to cities over 100,000. Categories of workers: unskilled, intermediate, skilled, professional and technical. Lowest pay will be $19 per month for unskilled rural labor in the Deep South; highest, $94 for Northern professional city workers. Pay will be on a monthly basis, with no deduction for interruptions such as caused by bad weather. Professional labor leaders, not bothering immediately to take all factors into account, squawked that this scale would pull down wages in private industry.