Damon Runyon

The Bee/February 1, 1937

Sheriff Bert Yells, of Seneca County, New York, asks his board of supervisors to kindly allow him 22 cents per meal for his prisoners, so he can give the jail birds butter for their bread. 

This important item of news was almost lost in the papers among the many columns of reading matter depicting the dreadful situation in the flood area of thousands of women and little children, who among other things, have no bread. 

We Iike to think of ourselves as the least bigoted people in all this world. We are pretty hot at Hitler for his discrimination against non-Aryans. In this great country, as you know, all men are free, end equal, and tolerance is our watchword, which is as it should be in any enlightened land. 

In front of many hotels and apartment houses in Miami Beach, Florida and other southern resort towns we can show you signs reading “Gentiles only.”  

We all want to avoid another war. We do not want to send our young men out to slaughter again as we did in the last war, which cost us 350,000 casualties, counting killed, wounded, and missing. We all agree now that it was sheer insanity. 

In 1935, automobile accidents killed 36,500 persons in this country and injured 705,440 more; 1936 undoubtedly exceeded those figures, and 1937 has started out as if it means to set a new record, and if that isn’t insanity, what do you call it? 

One of the flaming torches of hope behind which upwards of 27,000,000 of our voters marched with the new deal last November, was the implied promise that all unemployment in this country would end, if not at once, certainly eventually.

Mr. Hopkins, the administrator of the new deal’s WPA, tells of discharging 851,000 workers in 1936, and says he is going to fire 600,000 more by June. Mr. Hopkins adds that under our economic system, unemployment is inevitable. He says there will always be around 7,000,000 unemployed in these United States. The torch of hope is flicking somewhat.

We have some of the finest prisons in the world in this country, and we treat our murderers, and burglars, and kidnapers, and rape fiends, and dope peddlers, and other criminals mighty fine. We see that they are well-housed, well-fed, and warmly clad, and that they get plenty of recreation. It costs the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars, but the taxpayers seldom complain about this.

Thousands of our people who never committed any crimes, are not well-housed, well-fed, nor warmly clad, and they have mighty little recreation, but many taxpayers who do not mind paying for the criminals, set up an awful squawk at any effort to provide a little comfort for the old ’uns’ declining years.

If you walked into a neighbor’s house, without permission, and started making free with his belongings, he would probably hit you a clout on the jaw, and throw you out, or call a cop, and put you in jail for trespass. Everybody would say it served you right, because we make much of property rights, and the protection thereof in this country.

But a comparatively small number of strikers can take and hold unlawful possession of a manufacturing or utility plant, and gum up the operation, and nobody seems able to do anything about it—or care.

The United States hasn’t been able to collect a quarter of the dough it advanced those European countries on the war account, and has apparently stopped trying, though the loans represent a sum of money that would cover the cost of permanent protection against floods along all the rivers of the land.

We know a fellow in New York who owed the U.S.A. $9.40 on back income taxes, and the government hounded him like an old time loan shark, and all but called out the marines on him, until he kicked in with the money.

Speaking of incomes taxes, and this is a good time of year to be speaking of them, the government very kindly and generously allows for the wear and tear on machinery, and the subsequent deterioration in value of same.

A friend of ours, a professional man past his zenith, last year set up in his return wear and tear on his brain and body that had earning power over the previous year at least $10,000, and it caused talk in government circles. They did allow something, however, for the deterioration in value of his old automobile.

If two men go into an alley, and start in settling a difference of opinion in the good old-fashioned way, which is with the dukes, they are amenable to the law, and to charges of disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, assault and battery, and numerous other things.

The same two men could put gloves on their fists, and step into Madison Square Garden and fight ‘til the cows came home, and that wouldn’t be anything but what we call sport.