OHIO: (‘Mass Misery

“Mass Misery”

Germany was vexed by President Roosevelt’s attack on dictatorships in his opening message to Congress. So last week Der Angriff, organ of the regimented German Labor Front, solemnly reported in a dispatch from the U. S.: “Lack of officially organized aid for the needy has resulted in frightful misery. In Cleveland 65,000 are in dire need. Numerous hungry persons sit crying, often with small children, in the municipal welfare bureaus begging for food.”

Actually in Cleveland during the first six days of the New Year 65,000 people on the relief rolls went without food and clothing orders. This hardship, which caused one reliefer to commit suicide, was due, as Cleveland’s Mayor Harold H. Burton explained, to the “inexcusable failure of the State of Ohio” to pass a relief act before the year end.