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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 23, 15 April 1933, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Tens of thousands of American boys are being herded into regular army camps, presumably for forestry training. A quarter of a million will be regimented by May 15, according to Robert Fechner, national head of the “Civilian Conservation Corps”. The government is pushing for the full quota of 250,000 by the middle of May, when the reforestation program is to begin in earnest.
The 1,800 supposedly homeless youths from New York who boarded the buses for Fort Slocum are the first victims of a novel brand of efficiency known as the “New Deal”. According to the government plan, each of the nine military corps areas from New England to the Pacific Coast, will be a recruiting or “conditioning” center for the forestry workers of that area. They will be given army work clothes, army grub and live n army barracks. They will all get military training in the form of infantry drill under the strict discipline of superior officers. “Education” and “recreation” will be completed supervised by government authorities.
“We intend to make self-supporting men of them,” says Adjutant Furey of Fort Slocum. Let’s see what he means by that. Do the men actually receive the $30 per month that they are promised? Not at all. The “investigators” of the New York Home Relief Bureau of the Department of Public Welfare are instructed to supply 7,500 unmarried young men between the ages of 18 and 23 from off the relief list. They are neither homeless nor wandering. $25 of every $30 earned by the worker is to be deducted and turned over to the Home Relief Bureau which promptly deducts that amount from the family budget, plus $1.50 per week (or over $6 per month) from the food budget. Others are removed entirely from the Welfare list. Anyone who knows the narrow margin upon which “relief” families live, knows what hardships these deductions are.
Now the Home Relief Bureau of the Department of Public Welfare has on its lists 180,000 families, or almost a million individuals. It spends ten million dollars a month caring for them. Of these there are about 60,000 on what is called “work relief” under the City Commission Work Bureau. Each man works five days every other week, or a maximum of ten days a month: For this he gets $45 a month, but he is cut loose and must support his family on this sum. Those on Home Relief, however, average $55 to $65 per month. The budgets are pared down to an almost unbelievable minimum and paid in credit tickets. There are today hundreds of large families close to starvation on this budget. The reforestation camps are being recruited from among those now receiving relief.
What becomes, then, of the homeless and the wandering? There was a great agitation before the elections about them. The Scripps-Howard syndicate, for example, estimated that 500,000 of them roam the country. The January census of the Committee on Care of the Transient and Homeless showed 1,225,000 homeless and transient people in the Untied States, of whom 200,000 are youths. Boys and girls, unable to go to school, unable to get a job, a burden to their poverty-stricken family, join the ranks of migrant youth in a futile search for work in other cities. A restless tide is moving across the United States, hitch-hiking, walking, riding the freights, begging, stealing, living as they can. They are treated as traditional hoboes – a night in jail, a meal of beans and coffee and twenty-four hours to get out of town. They are clubbed by railway detectives and hobnob with petty criminals in jail. The good citizens demand government action to relieve the municipalities. Something had to be done for the American “beg prizorni”. So, the Democrats fervidly promised, if elected, to take care of them also. At the same time, liberal and progressive groups clamor for the reforestation of land denuded by the lumber and paper interests in the heyday of rugged individualism. An ideal chance to kill two birds with one stone, and do it cheap! Conservation and Unemployment Relief. However, they are in this dilemma: Either they use conservation funds for municipal relief, in which case they do not reach the wanderer; or, if they recruit the latter, then conservation funds cannot be allocated to city relief. America’s homeless youth is lost in the shuffle of the “New Deal”.
What about the dignity and honor of honest toil, ask the army men? The men get $5.00 a month for doing the work of regular foresters. It is exploitation in the crudest sense, it is humiliating to the person and degrading to the class. Out West they call this racket, “gyp labor.” And it is well named. Investigators of the Public Welfare use economic pressure on families to get their “quota” of boys into camp. One realizes the bitter irony of this situation: Workers “volunteer” for their six months’ enlistment.
With the brazen self-interest of the business men they have converted a twenty million dollar reforestation fund into a new scheme for pauperizing workers and creating the basis for national conscript labor. “Citizens Conservation Corps” means human cannon fodder trained, with funds intended for unemployment relief. The Democratic party in power, like its Republican predecessor, to rise out of the crisis by still further exploiting and degrading the working class. Against this the American worker can and will organize a struggle.
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