Headlines v. Breadlines

Through the press last week flowed two contradictory currents of news on industrial unemployment. One current ran uphill to large headlines proclaiming a quick return to Prosperity. The other ran down- hill to accounts of breadlines and jobless distress. Behind headlines for prosperity was sound Republican politics to minimize and gloss over unemployment. Behind breadlines for the jobless was equally sound Democratic politics to blame the party in power for a serious labor slump.

Since last fall's depression, President Hoover has tried to bolster up business with optimistic proclamations that conditions are improving, that industry will soon be back to normal (TIME, March 17). Other public men have caught the White House cue. When it was found last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that February employment had risen one-tenth of 1% over January, this headline followed:

TRADE IS IMPROVING, LAMONT REPORTS, AS EMPLOYMENT RISES.

The Department of Labor's employment service report that "industry had made no substantial gain in February," that it was apparently "consolidating the progress made in January for an expected upturn during the spring months" produced such headlines as:

EMPLOYMENT GAIN EXPECTED IN SPRING.

U. S. FORECASTS BETTER TIMES.

When President Hoover's national business survey conference reported last week that "some early retarding factors, partly psychological, appear to have been gradually overcome," detailed trade conditions in different industries, predicted improvements, these headlines appeared:

BUSINESS GROWS AT STEADY PACE

RETARDING FACTORS FADING

U. S. OVERCOMING TRADE SETBACK

The William Randolph Hearst papers were emphatically confident about prosperity in their headlines. Samples:

TRADE BODIES COUNTRY OVER SEE GOOD TIMES.

SUBWAY WORK SEEN AS QUICK AID TO JOBLESS.

GOOD NEWS OF GOOD TIMES.

(This last was the set caption over a box of all the prosperity items in each edition.)

In the other current of news, breadlines in New York City stretched out for blocks. The Bowery Y. M. C. A. was feeding 12,000 jobless per day. Manhattan's Church of the Transfiguration ("The Little Church Around the Corner") opened, for the first time since 1907, free meal counters for 1,000 unemployed per day. Mrs. Irving T. Bush set up a food dispensary which lined up the jobless for two blocks. Demands on charity organizations doubled. Colyumist Heywood Broun started a "Give-a-job-till-June" crusade in the New York Telegram.

In Washington, before the Senate Commerce Committee, began hearings on bills offered by New York's Democratic Senator Robert Ferdinand Wagner to relieve unemployment. Senator Wagner flayed the Hoover administration for what he charged was its attempt to produce "prosperity by proclamation." He insisted that unemployment was far more widespread and severe than the Department of Labor's statistics would indicate. Against photographs of New York's breadlines he set a picture of Citizen Calvin Coolidge being banqueted in California at a "prosperity dinner."

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