RELIEF: Kindness

A stock anti-New Deal argument is that citizens on relief are supported in such comfort that they lose all desire to find jobs, improve their circumstances. Last week in Seattle, scrawny Ester Hilda Olson, 33, confessed that she had bashed in the head of her pretty, 16-year-old daughter Rose with an axe, cut her throat with a bread knife, buried her in a thicket near their shack. Explained Mother Olson: “I thought I was doing Rose a kindness by killing her. I was tired of living like an animal and raising her that way. I’ve been on relief, getting $10 a month, for a year and a half. What chance did Rose have to be anybody or have anything?”