SOCIAL SERVICES: Breaking Soil

Coming to a period in his discourse, President Roosevelt tossed his head back, looked down his nose at the gathering before him and announced emphatically: "I have not changed my opinion."

The opinion the President had not changed was the one set forth in his extraordinary message to Congress last June. At that time he declared in favor of legislation to provide "security against several of the great disturbing factors in life-especially those which relate to unemployment and old age...." Thereafter he appointed a Committee on Economic Security, which in turn gathered around it a group of expert advisers to plow the virgin field of "social security" and raise a fruitful crop of legislative ideas. Last week's White House meeting which the President addressed was, in a sense, a general breaking of hard tough soil.

On hand to clear the ground and pull the stumps of controversy were such eminent gentlemen as William Green of the American Federation of Labor, Thomas Kennedy of the United Mine Workers, Mayor LaGuardia of New York City, Harold W. Story of Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co., not to mention a small army of professors, physicians, health officials and social workers. Some of the conferees were so excited by the prospect of the broad field before them that they wanted to gallop right out and start plowing before the President had determined the distance or direction of the furrows. One such was Relief Administrator Hopkins who fired the conference by impatiently exclaiming:

"We have all heard a lot about the demoralizing effects of the dole system. If the crowd on the lower end of the picture gets a dole, why, that's terrible! And yet I spoke to a man recently who never worked a day in his life. And what a dole he gets from checks, dividends, interest payments and the like! Perhaps $500,000 to $600,000 a year. We've got to bring those two types of dole closer together....

"I am convinced that now is the hour to act, and by a bold stroke, we'll get it. For the life of me I can't see why we should wait until kingdom come to give security to the workers of America."

But President Roosevelt was in no mood to rush blindly ahead without knowing where he was going. In his speech to the conference he roughly bounded the territory in which he expected his helpers to work:

¶ "Unemployment insurance will be in the program....This part of social insurance should be a cooperative Federal-State undertaking. It is important that the Federal Government encourage States which are ready to take this progressive step. It is no less important that all unemployment insurance reserve funds be held and invested by the Federal Government so that the use of these funds as a means of stabilization may be maintained in central management....For the administration of insurance benefits the States are the most logical units. At this stage while unemployment insurance is still untried in this country...there is room for some degree of difference in methods....