U.S. Unemployed Protest At President’s Golf

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28866, 10 April 1959, Page 11

U.S. Unemployed Protest At President’s Golf

WASHINGTON, April 8. A rally of more than 5000 unemployed persons today cheered a demand that President Eisenhower stop playing golf in Georgia and become busy at putting idle Americans back to work.

George Meany, president of the American Federation of LabourCongress of Industrial Organisations which organised the rally, accused the Administration of “donothing” policies and sounded a keynote for other speakers in maintaining that recent improvements still left unemployment a serious national problem.

Mr Meany said that, in spite of what he called Administration ballyhoo in announcing improvements in March, the country was still left with 4,362,000 workers unable to find paying jobs to feed their families. The Government announced yesterday a drop of 400.000 in the number of unemployed. The Eisenhower Administration’s Labour Secretary (Mr James Mitchell) won applause too, however, when he predicted a 3,000,000 increase in employment to 67 million by October. Mr Mitchell added that he would eat his hat on the Labour Department

front steps if this prediction proved false.

But there was louder cheering for the Autoworkers’ Union leader, Mr Walter Reuther. He followed Mr Mitchell and called for “crash” programmes to reduce unemployment saying that President Eisenhower had ignored the problem to go golfing at Augusta, Georgia. Reuther said: “When the President spends too much time behind the golf ball, he puts the American people behind the eight-ball.”