Word: reliefs
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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What maddens relief-men more than abstract ideas about capitalism and the class war is the ever-present specter of the official axe. Life on the dole is no career of social security at best. But when funds are bounced around from project to project with the hit-and-miss efficiency of startled rabbits, and workers are fired in Manhattan and hired in Brooklyn at the same moment, those whose life blood depends on federal cash rise up in righteous anger at their treatment...
Aside from the C.C.C. the relief work of the administration has been wretchedly handled. Projects started in haste have been dropped like burning coals. Money has poured into valueless jobs like water over a dam. The Florida canal has been openly repudiated in Congress, leaving the laborers to wonder where their next few dollars are coming from. Cash must be spent on a certain day or not at all. Robert Moses must tear down the Casino by June thirtieth, or leave it forever a blight on the landscape of Central Park...
...W.P.A. could justify its existence on an economic as well as charitarian point of view, though it should of course be flexible enough to hire and discharge its employees as business conditions vary. In any event the workers' agitation serves a useful function in calling attention to the whole relief problem, and cannot be smoked out with a fusillade of "anti-red" propaganda...
...Sequoia National Park, CCC Worker Ray Williams, working for $36 a month, opened his pay envelope and found a check for $250,000.22. Explained relief officials: "Bookkeeping error...
...Nikolai Sokoloff, onetime conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, reported on what he had done so far with $7,641,814 of Federal funds allocated to his project. To WPA's payroll were transferred 15,639 players, singers, composers, teachers, librarians, copyists, arrangers, tuners, music-binders from non-musical relief jobs. "Hundreds of musicians," reported Director Sokoloff, "came with swollen, calloused fingers, with their lips stiff and chapped from unaccustomed toil in inclement weather." Since December WPA had formed 163 concert orchestras, 51 bands, 15 chamber-music ensembles, 22 choruses and quartets, 69 dance orchestras...