Idle: 6,050,000

The Census Bureau in its nation-wide count of population last April found 2,429,062 persons out of work. Critics charged that this figure was too small for reality, that the Hoover Administration was trying to minimize Unemployment. Therefore last January the census bureau made another count of Joblessness, selecting for their enumeration the 19 largest cities of the country, which had shown 775,565 involuntarily idle in the April total. Last week Secretary of Commerce Lamont announced these results:

1) The 19 cities in January had 1,930,000 April.

2) In Detroit, unemployment ran highest (11% of the population); in San Francisco lowest (6 1/2%).

3) By applying the percentage increase for the cities to the whole country, it was officially estimated that 6,050,000 persons were out of work at mid-winter.

Declared Secretary Lamont: "Since the Census there has been evidence of a slight but unmistakable improvement."

Again critics raised their voices to ask what good President Hoover's Unemployment Relief program had accomplished while Unemployment was more than doubling. Declared Senator Borah: ". . . An occasion for a special session of Congress! We should be legislating."

Meanwhile in Manhattan jobless relief focused on single women. Public sympathy was whipped up by a story of eight out-of-work girls who occupied one $2-per-week room, subsisted on five bananas per day. Mrs. August Belmont, head of the Woman's Fund Committee, raised $4,500 by reading in public what George Bernard Shaw described as his "love letters" to her, written in 1904 and 1905 when she was famed Actress Eleanor Robson. And in Washington Mrs. Herbert Hoover returned from the Rapidan camp to speak over the radio in praise of girls and women who have fought Drought and Unemployment as follows:

"You have given additional work where you could. You have postponed the burdens of full payment of debts, of rent, of loans, or mortgages, of those whom fate and not their own shortcomings have handicapped. You have helped tactfully with food, with coal, with clothing, those of your friends who were facing a more strenuous period than you were yourself, as well as those strangers a mile away whom formerly you knew not even of."

President Hoover would thank U. S. womanhood for Drought and Unemployment "in his own way and time."

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