There were a number of cases in which it seems obvious that the grants were unnecessarily and unduly delayed. Twenty-two of these families, notwithstanding the obstacle, were in business; the only comment to be made is that some enterprising and refined families were left to endure the hardships of camp life months after they might have been engaged in independent business, had the machinery and the funds been available.
Among applicants who started in business and later dropped out there was one man so old that results would probably have been the same if there had been no delay. In three other instances the grants were, in the opinion of the reviewer, inadequate as well as delayed, a combination well calculated to bring about failure.
Among the families whose grants were delayed and who did not even start in business there was one man whose grant was delayed for six months, because the check was accidentally delivered to another person of the same name. This man claimed to have lost good opportunities for starting. Another grant was delayed forty days, not an unusual length of time, but in the interval the subjects, a refined American woman and her elderly husband, had suffered irreparably. The wife had injured herself doing unsuitable work and had died, leaving the man powerless to open the rooming house they had planned together. Another applicant, one of the many whose cases were shelved from three to four months during the dispiriting period of arrested progress, had a friend who was ready at the time of the application to loan money to add to the relief grant for starting a notion store. Three months later the friend’s circumstances had changed, and with the relief money alone the applicant dared not make the venture. The predicament of three other applicants was much the same. By the time they received their business grants, late in the winter of 1906, every cent of their insurance money had been used for living expenses. Another illustrative story is that of a German cobbler with a frail wife and two young children, who after the disaster had $100 in savings. He bought tools, but as he could not support his family by cobbling alone and his savings were gone, he asked for a business grant. When he was finally given $200 to stock a small shop with shoes to sell, he and his family had been sleeping on the floor for six months.
Adequacy of Grant.
Inadequate aid, in the estimation of many of the applicants, was the one stumbling block in the path to satisfactory re-establishment. This question, like the two which have preceded it, must be recognized as having an illusory quality. In the opinion of the reviewer the complaint of inadequacy was justified in slightly over 100 cases, in about three-fourths of which the grants were lower than the average grant of $247.
Of the 894 grants under consideration, only 52 were for $500[161] or over, and 162 grants, or nearly one-fifth of the total, were for exactly $250, from which it appears that the latter figure was firmly lodged in the minds of the disbursers of the fund. But one in nine of the re-visited applicants who received business rehabilitation, received grants for other purposes. The average amount given to those who did receive such subsidiary aid was $83.75.
[161] See [Part II], [pp. 128]-[129], for explanation of limitation of grants to less than $500.
The ultra-cautious policy of the initial rehabilitation work was early changed. Between June 1 and July 7, 1906, 21 checks for more than $100 each had been drawn for business rehabilitation, the two highest being each for $400. By the middle of July, four checks for $500 had been drawn for business cases. Before the end of July, a $900 business loan was made. A scanning of the early case records shows that the committeemen were careful to give the exact amount needed.
During the third rehabilitation period the size of the business grants was much smaller than in the preceding period, two-fifths of the grants being under $100 each and four-fifths less than $200. The average grant for the 123 re-visited cases which had been passed during the second period was $305.77; for the 73 passed during the third period, $191.16; for the 698 passed during the fourth period, $242.26. Of applicants who received aid in the third period, the period of arrested progress, when the grants were small, a materially smaller proportion were in business at the time of the review, than of those who received grants in the second and fourth periods.
A few examples show the fate of some applicants who were given prompt, but apparently inadequate aid.