Word: reliefers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...There is a moral purpose in the universe." In the substance of his speech he merely showed the intellectual and practical impoverishment of the Republican national leadership by bringing forward the usual vague charges of corruption of the party out of power, and advocated an amateur administration of relief. The Republicans will have to find something more than this rather poor philosophy of individual morals if they are to do anything practical again...