ABSTRACT
A 64-year-old Chicagoan who was out of work applied to the Chicago Welfare Department and received "general assistance". Partisans of the city welfare department thought Raymond Hilliard was behind the merger plan and that he was seeking only to increase his own power and prestige. The director of the County Welfare Department was Raymond M. Billiard. In 1934, as a young lawyer just out of DePaul University, his first job had been to prosecute fraud cases for the Illinois Emergency Relief Administration. The county and city welfare departments had important relationships to the Illinois Public Aid Commission (IPAC), the agency which administered public assistance programs for the state. Mayor Richard Daley regarded the merger proposal as a cheap political trick intended to distract public attention from gross mismanagement in IPAC, to give the impression that his administration had been playing politics with relief, and to make Chicago look bad.
