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The countryside was a desolate barren stretch of dead trees and drifting brushwood. As people ceased to be able to afford their mortgages or rent, so they lost their homes. Camps were spreading around the outskirts of cities, along the dry riverbeds and railway sidings, built out of cardboard and sacks and corrugated iron, widely known as Hoovervilles, after President Herbert Hoover. There were also ‘Hoover blankets’, made out of newspapers, and ‘Hoover leathers’, cardboard soles for shoes.
While those on the right maintained that the ‘losers’ and ‘chisellers’ were experiencing the natural consequences of their own moral collapse, and developing an unhealthy expectation of handouts, those on the left argued that the Depression was caused by the excessive, concentrated power of the elites, looking out for their own interests. Meanwhile the rising number of the unemployed was overwhelming the traditional instruments of welfare, and local organisations, once able to cope with periodic economic downturns, watched helplessly as families were thrown out of their homes, fathers lost
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Under a first New Deal, a Civil Works Programme was established under powers granted to him by the National Recovery Act, intended to stimulate demand and provide work and relief through increased public spending. Within four months, four million people were back in work. A Public Works Administration followed, employing people to build bridges, parks and schools. A second New Deal added social security, a national relief agency and strong stimulus to the growth of labour unions.
Roosevelt appointed a brains trust of practical and imaginative New Dealers. One of these was a crumpled, argumentative man called Harold Hopkins, whose eyes bulged and who chain-smoked and drank too much coffee. In New York, Hopkins had helped create one of the first public employment programmes in the country, before drafting a charter for the American Association of Social Workers.
As an administrator, Hopkins was creative, sympathetic and driven. He was fortunate that when he arrived in Washington, there was no bureaucracy and no model for him to inherit. He could pick and choose the people he wanted and he could also experiment far more quickly and radically than other New Dealers. Until that moment, relief had been the responsibility of states. Hopkins was entering uncharted waters.
something that would tell him what it felt like for a man to lose his job, his savings and his house and to watch his family sink into misery. Only then, he said, would he really be able to take the pulse of the country and devise a sound relief programme for the ‘third of the nation’ that was ‘ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed’.
Hopkins began by hiring as chief investigator into the ills of the Depression a tough-minded, overweight, erratic 41-year-old reporter called Lorena Hickok. The daughter of a travelling butter-maker, who had beaten her as a child, Hickok left home at 14 to work as a hired girl until rescued by a cousin who helped her through school. Joining the Minneapolis Tribune as a cub reporter, she became one of the first women to be employed by the Associated Press.
Hickok, who had been responsible for introdu-cing Eleanor Roosevelt to the American public, and had since become very close to the First Lady, had bright blue eyes and wore raincoats and hats with wide brims and vivid red...
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In many of the places where Hickok stopped to talk to employers, and to those who had managed to escape the worst effects of the Depression, she noted appalling racism. A Baptist pastor told her that he ‘understood Negroes and loved them – as one loves horses and dogs’. ‘Negroes’, she was told, were ‘going to get it in the neck’, because as jobs vanished, ‘the tendency is to throw out Negroes and hire whites, and this was only right since they are uniformly lazy and shiftless’.
And so he recruited a team of 16 writers, journalists, economists and novelists, all people accustomed to listening to what people said, marshalling facts quickly, and writing it all down simply and clearly. His investigators would report to him alone and have no powers of implementation.
From Pennsylvania, Henry Francis wrote to Hopkins that he had been so sickened by the spectacle of the mining towns that he had fled, ‘sick at heart’. The soft coal industry had been one of the first to crash; the local mines had closed, partly or totally; outside the crumbling shacks were garbage-strewn slags, closed company stores and filthy ragged children, all of them without shoes and ‘losing their grip on themselves’. Some of the families who had lost their homes were now living in caves. ‘Conditions on the patch are bad,’ he wrote.
Benjamin Burdick is a former miner. He lives in Stonewall Park. Pays $13.50 for his house. Is on work relief five days a month. Had a splendid garden and has a cellar full of preserves. Commodities help out. Daughter, 19, formerly worked with Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co., but was let out four months ago. She walks six miles to the plant and return to look for work. She is going again on Wednesday and, as the Relief visitor has interceded for her, hopes for a chance to earn $12 a week again … The daughter is ready to crack under the strain. She’s intelligent, good-looking. But there’s fire in her
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Charles West, formerly a miner and more lately a janitor, received underwear from the relief organisation and, upon our visit, begged that it be changed for shoes for his wife. ‘I can get along without underwear,’ he said. ‘Give the missus some shoes instead.’ Mrs West shrank back in embarrassment, flushed and stammered refusal. Both are real people. Own their home. Owe two years’ back taxes. Mrs West’s father, an invalid, lives with them. He’s eighty; they’re over fifty … The home is spotless. Clothes needed badly.
Hopkins decided to send Gellhorn to the textile areas of the Carolinas and to New England. Before leaving Washington, she was given vouchers for trains and five dollars a day for food, hotels and local travel. Being broke, she had no money with which to buy clothes suitable for tramping around derelict towns. So she set off with what she had brought back with her from Europe, Parisian couturier dresses once worn by models, and a brown crocheted hat with a bright plume of pheasant feathers; she wore plenty of mascara, eye shadow and lipstick.
Above all, what fascinated and touched her were the stories of individual men and women laid low by malnutrition, illness and despair. None of the reports that reached Hopkins from his investigators during the autumn of 1934 carried more indignation and pity, though she remained acutely aware that all she was doing was sending Hopkins ‘a bird’s eye view – a bird flying hard and fast’. From Massachusetts, she wrote: I have been doing more visiting here; about five families a day. And I find them all in the same shape – fear, fear driving them into a state of semi-collapse; cracking nerves; and
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Talking of the young, Gellhorn wrote: ‘They don’t believe in man or God, let alone private industry; the only thing that keeps them from suicide is this amazing loss of vitality; they exist.’
Everywhere they travelled, whoever they talked to, employers as much as workers, the replies were always the same: jobs were what was needed, with decent wages; relief, in the form of groceries, vouchers or cash, was not just humiliating but often inappropriate. Thomas Steep, writing from Chicago, reported that the Italian, Jewish and black families he had spoken to had all told him that when it came to home relief, cash was better than kind, since the grocery parcels invariably contained items that one or other of the recipients could not eat.
Like Hickok, the investigators belonged to – or had become part of – middle class America, and like her they were not free of prejudice. Not one of them failed at some point to remark on the ‘unworthy’, the ‘chisellers’, the ‘derelict’, those who were basically ‘unemployable’ and for whom no amount of work projects could help. Gellhorn raged against lack of birth control, families of 14 or more where mothers and daughters were pregnant at the same time and in which children were growing up ‘in terrible surroundings: dirt, disease, over-crowding, undernourishment’. ‘You have to fight
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From Beaver County, in Pennsylvania, came a report that the Koppel Steel Car Company was withholding 50 percent of the very reduced pay packets of the few men still at work for back rent; and that from the remainder they deducted money for water and insurance. On the last day before Christmas 1932 some of the workers were given between 5 and 15 cents for a two week period.
What Hopkins made of the many thousands of words that reached him, week after week, is not known, but their conclusion – that the best way back to dignity was through employment – helped him frame his campaign for work projects, old-age pensions and child benefits, and focus on longer term measures to introduce the benefits of modern technology to farmers and to put in place safeguards against anything of the kind ever happening to the country again.
Timmy, the first one, had been her favourite. She’d forgotten now really what her husband looked like, since he’d been dead twelve years. But she’d never forget what Timmy was like, dying in the charity hospital of typhoid. And Rupert close after him. We all had it better once, Mrs Maddison decided. We were real folks once; we had places to live, and we had families, and we knew what we’d be doing the next year and the next one. Now, now …
that busy. ‘Farming,’ Mrs Lowry said; ‘you just gotta keep
Indomitably, Mrs Maddison made pictures for herself again: pictures of a reunited and contented family; of plenty, of a home, a garden, things on the shelves in jars. Soothing and strengthening herself with the future, which never came, but was at least always there to dream about.
The larger factories lie on a narrow low strip of land beside the river. The Minton soup factory is the biggest. In common with most big factories it hesitates in appearance between a hospital and a prison.
Men like themselves, workers like themselves with as little as they, as much to want, coming here with police thick around them, to steal work, to break this strike. After three weeks of this cold, of waiting, of fear at night and the wives doubting, they should come to break the strike, people like themselves. There was a quality of wonder about their anger. This was something they had been prepared for, but could not believe. They could understand that the police were against them, the management, and the newspapers. But not others like themselves.
He had never been in jail before but then he had also never been in a strike. He wasn’t unhappy about it; beyond the pain in his head he remembered those few minutes when he, Pete Hines, had seemed to be a powerful man, a free and dangerous man, hitting out for himself and everybody else. It was cheap at the price.
‘Yes. We ain’t got none. We ain’t had none for four days. My Pa sez he’s gonna steal some off the railroad tracks tonight, but Ma sez no, he oughtn’t, because Miz Hammerstein’s husband got arrested for stealing coal off the tracks.’
Being winter still, or the bleak beginning of spring, the street was quiet. No one could afford to go outside and get cold. Six families lived in the house. Ruby lived with her mother in one room. There was a stove and a streaked sink in it for washing dishes and bodies and clothes. In the hall on the second floor the bathroom, grey and unlighted, boasted a choked-up tub and a toilet with a broken seat.
They were all from the eighth grade. Ruby didn’t know them, but she could tell by their size. She was in the third grade herself. Looking at them, she suddenly wondered whether she would ever get through all the rooms that separated her from them, all the blackboards, all the teachers, all the mornings with her stomach empty and growling to itself.
