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around here. He's had classes and teaches, and knows them all.” So Ned Bruce was sent for. Ned Bruce was just ecstatic when he learned that anybody had ever thought that an artist too needed relief work. He had a little money of his own that was not earned by paintings, but was some inherited money. He and his wife were in comfortable circumstances, but he knew students and fellow artists who were just desperate with nothing to do, nothing to eat, and no possibility of getting any orders. To him it was a matter of ecstasy that anybody should even think that artists were also human beings, had to eat, and needed a little relief.

I think I have a letter which George Biddle wrote me, saying, “I think it was the most thrilling thing in my life to realize that a government administration, and the President, whom I've never seem, thought that artists also were entitled to eat.” Biddle also was an artist who had means of his own. So he wasn't starving, but his friends were.

At any rate, the enthusiastic response of Bruce stimulated Morgenthau. Bruce was one of these very practical men, as many artists are. He was one of these “can-do” men. He was just a natural born administrator. We got Hopkins into it. Sure, Hopkins knew that artists must be hungry and was sure that it was better to have artists painting pictures and making sculpture than it was to have them shoveling gravel,