The Trouble I've Seen

by Martha Gellhorn

To assist him, he was given a division of Research, Statistics and Finance. Soon he was complaining that he was drowning in facts, yet knew very little about the human tragedy of unemployment, what it was actually costing in terms of broken families, alcoholism, disease and hunger. He wanted something more, something intangible and descriptive, 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’. And so, in the summer of 1933, a remarkable venture was born.

‘Don’t ever forget’, Hopkins told her, as he sent her out to observe and report on the effects of the Depression on the American people and the success of his relief programmes, ‘that but for the grace of God, you, I, any of our friends might be in their shoes.’

He was also very conscious of the stigma that went with accepting charity, not least because throughout the country there were people protesting against the indignity of public handouts. Was it better to boost work programmes? Should assistance take the form of cash or food parcels? And, hovering over everything was the alarming question of the extent to which communist agitators might be fomenting trouble.

Webster remarked repeatedly on the spreading sense of dependency on relief, bringing in its wake more complaints, more mental suffering and, particularly in the ‘higher socio-economic groups increasing groping, bewilderment and discouragement … They consider themselves disgraced’. Everything must be done, he wrote, to avoid this ‘wreckage of personality’ and the destruction of ‘those incentives without which no man or woman can carry on’.

Gellhorn, however, had a knack for total absorption in work and was soon engrossed in interviewing families. The style of her reports, typed up at night in her hotel room, was very simple, with a careful selection of scenes and quotes, set down without hyperbole. What made it so powerful was her tone, the barely concealed fury at the injustice of man and fate towards the weak, the poor, the dispossessed.

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, ...

Grim is a gentle word; it’s heartbreaking and terrifying …

One of the clearest answers given by the investigators regarded Hopkins’s basic question about the value of work programmes. 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.

The worst thing, Mrs Maddison decided, would be ever to admit that you didn’t have any hope left at all, and that living was too much for you.

‘I’m walking like I was unemployed.’

Everything’s too slow, Joe thought. Sometimes, it seems like there must be millions of people not doing anything but waiting; all of them waiting for something to happen, or somebody to say something. And nothing does happen. Things just go on.

‘We will have to go on Relief. That’s not our fault. You work when you can and you work as hard as any man could. You’d do anything you got a chance to. It isn’t your fault if we have to go on Relief. It’s their fault. It’s the fault of the rich people who run things, it’s not the fault of people like us. We’ll take what we can get from the Relief and not go around thanking them either. If we can work and want to work, we’re not beggars, no matter what anybody says.