Janice is stoutly proud that, like her dad, she never “took a dime from the government. . . . For five years at the telephone company and forty-three years here . . . I never one time ever drew an unemployment check or got any government assistance,” she says, adding, “I did get a small student loan when I was going to college—back then the government didn’t just give it to you—and I paid every nickel of it back.” Getting little or nothing from the federal government was an oft-expressed source of honor. And taking money from it was—or should be, Janice felt—a source of shame. The sharpest
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