Word: matanuska
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...they wanted U. S. bankers to chip in. The U. S. Department of Labor was considering the possibility of hypothecating its German-Austrian immigration quota for the next three years to admit up to 81,000 refugees into the country. Secretary of the Interior Ickes suggested that as his Matanuska colony of dust-bowl refugees grew, it would open up a frontier where Jewish professional people would be needed and welcome. This was long-range stuff, however, and the Secretary was emphatic on the point that other U. S. territories like the Hawaiian Islands and Puerto Rico were already overpopulated...
...chief function was to move chunks of the U. S. population from unproductive terrain to land where they could make a living. Most remarkable of a series of what even the President called costly failures was an effort to settle 200 U. S. farmers in Alaska's Matanuska Valley, where many of those settlers, still remaining after two years of tribulation, are spending this summer trying to raise a crop of winter wheat because the Government supplied them with the wrong seed. In June 1936, R. A. had a 19,700 payroll. Last July, it had been cut almost...
...prime talking point for the New Deal's Matanuska Valley resettlement project (TIME, May 6, 1935 et seq.) was that it would supply some of the food which Alaska must otherwise import. Last week in Washington, returned from a month of Alaskan observation, Oklahoma's Senator Elmer Thomas asserted that Matanuska is a flat failure. One-third of its transplanted families, said he, were ready to quit. Though the cost of settling had run to $14,000 per family instead of an anticipated $3,500, the experiment was worth every cent it had cost, declared the Senator, because...
Reason was that Alaska's lush but extremely short growing season made its vegetables bloated, watery. Matanuska vegetables, said Senator Thomas, "taste like icicles." Potatoes must be dried in a slow oven before they can be stored even briefly. Alaskans, he declared, generally refuse to eat their native produce...
...this blast, Matanuska's Federal manager retorted that its 164 families had this year fed themselves, put 714 tons of hay and potatoes in storage, sold $4,000 worth of vegetables and creamery products...