The Trouble I've Seen

by Martha Gellhorn

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 an overpowering terror of the future … I haven’t been in one home that hasn’t offered me the spectacle of a human being driven beyond his or her powers of endurance and sanity. They can’t live on the work relief wage; they can’t live on the Public Welfare grocery orders. They can’t pay rent and are evicted. They are shunted from place to place, and are watching their children grow thinner and thinner; fearing the cold for children who have neither coats nor shoes; wondering about coal. And they don’t understand why or how this happened … The majority of the people are workers, who were competent to do their jobs … Then a mill closes or curtails; a shoe factory closes down or moves to another area. And there they are; for no reason they can understand; forced to be beggars asking for charity; subject to questions from strangers, and to all the miseries and indignities attached to desti...