Reporting the Plight of Depression Families

MARTHA GELLHORN, Field Report to Harry Hopkins (1934)

Journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn’s heart-rending field report describing impoverished Gastonia, North Carolina, families vividly captures the desperate hope of depression-era families. Hired by Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s point man for federal relief efforts, Gellhorn detailed the enormous challenge facing the administration. Compounding the epic humanitarian crisis she encountered was the political opposition, which she singled out as one among many obstacles hampering relief efforts.

All during this trip [to North Carolina] I have been thinking to myself about that curious phrase “red menace,” and wondering where said menace hid itself. Every house I visited — mill worker or unemployed — had a picture of the President. These ranged from newspaper clippings (in destitute homes) to large colored prints, framed in gilt cardboard. The portrait holds the place of honour over the mantel.… He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And, though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.

I have been seeing people who, according to almost any standard, have practically nothing in life and practically nothing to look forward to or hope for. But there is hope; confidence, something intangible and real: “the president isn’t going to forget us.”

Let me cite cases: I went to see a woman with five children who was living on relief ($3.40 a week). Her picture of the President was a small one, and she told me her oldest daughter had been married some months ago and had cried for the big, coloured picture as a wedding present. The children have no shoes and that woman is terrified of the coming cold as if it were a definite physical entity. There is practically no furniture left in the home, and you can imagine what and how they eat. But she said, suddenly brightening, “I’d give my heart to see the President. I know he means to do everything he can for us; but they make it hard for him; they won’t let him.” I note this case as something special; because here the faith was coupled with a feeling (entirely sympathetic) that the President was not entirely omnipotent.

I have been seeing mill workers; and in every mill when possible, the local Union president. There has been widespread discrimination in the south; and many mills haven’t re-opened since the strike. Those open often run on such curtailment that workers are getting from 2 to 3 days work a week. The price of food has risen (especially the kind of food they eat: fat-back bacon, flour, meal, sorghum) as high as 100%. It is getting cold; and they have no clothes. The Union presidents are almost all out of work, since the strike. In many mill villages, evictions have been served; more threatened. These men are in a terrible fix. (Lord, how barren the language seems: these men are faced by hunger and cold, by the prospect of becoming dependent beggars — in their own eyes: by the threat of homelessness, and their families dispersed. What more can a man face, I don’t know.) You would expect to find them maddened with fear; with hostility. I expected and waited for “lawless” talk; threats; or at least, blank despair. And I didn’t find it. I found a kind of contained and quiet misery; fear for their families and fear that their children wouldn’t be able to go to school. (“All we want is work and the chance to care for our families like a man should.”) But what is keeping them sane, keeping them going on and hoping, is their belief in the President.…

These are the things they say to me: “We trust in the Supreme Being and Franklin Roosevelt.” — “You heard him talk over the radio, ain’t you? He’s the only president who ever said anything about the forgotten man. We know he’s going to stand by us.” — “He’s a man of his word and he promised us; we aren’t worrying as long as we got him.” — “The president won’t let these awful conditions go on.” — “The president wanted the Code. The president knows why we struck.” — “The president said no man was going to go hungry and cold; he’ll get us our jobs.”…

I am going on and on about this because I think it has vast importance. These people will be slow to give up hope; terribly slow to doubt the president. But if they don’t get their jobs; then what? If the winter comes on and they find themselves on our below-subsistence relief; then what? I think they might strike again; hopelessly and apathetically. In very few places, there might be some violence speedily crushed. But if they lose this hope, there isn’t much left for them as a group. And I feel [if] this class (whatever marvelous stock they are, too) loses its courage or morale or whatever you want to call it, there will be an even worse social problem than there now is. And I think that with time, adding disillusionment and suffering, they might actually go against their own grain and turn into desperate people. As it is, between them and fear, stands the President. But only the President.…

What has been constantly before me is the health problem. To write about it is difficult only in that one doesn’t know where to begin. Our relief people are definitely on below subsistence living scales. (This is the unanimous verdict of anyone connected with relief; and a brief study of budgets clinches the matter.)

The result is that dietary diseases abound. I know that in this area there has always been pelagra;1 but that doesn’t make matters better. In any case it is increasing; and I have seen it ranging from scaly elbows in children to insanity in a grown man. Here is what doctors say: “It’s no use telling mothers what to feed their children; they haven’t the food to give.” … “Conditions are really horrible here; it seems as if the people were degenerating before your eyes: the children are worse mentally and physically than their parents.” … “All the mill workers I see are definite cases of undernourishment; that’s the best breeding ground I know for disease.” … “There’s not much use prescribing medicine; they haven’t the money to buy it.” … “You can’t do anything with these people until they’re educated to take care of themselves; they don’t know what to eat; they haven’t the beginning of an idea how to protect themselves against sickness.” …

The medical set-up, from every point of view, in this area is tragic. In Gaston County there is not one county clinic or hospital; and only one health officer (appointed or elected?). This gentleman has held his job for more than a dozen years; and must have had droll medical training sometime during the last century. He believes oddly that three shots of neo-salvarsan will cure syphilis; and thinks that injecting this into the arm muscle is as good as anything. Result: he cripples and paralyzes his patients who won’t go back. He likewise refuses to sign sterilization warrants on imbeciles: grounds “It’s a man’s prerogative to have children.” Another doctor in this area owns a drug store. He was selling bottled tonic (home-made I think) to his mill worker patients as a cure for syphilis. This was discovered by a 21 year old case worker, who wondered why her clients’ money was disappearing so fast. When asked why he did this he said that syphilis was partly a “run-down” condition, and that “you ought to build the patients up.” Every doctor says that syphilis is spreading unchecked and uncured. One doctor even said that it had assumed the proportions of an epidemic and wouldn’t be stopped unless the government stepped in; and treated it like small-pox.…

Which brings us to birth control. Every social worker I saw, and every doctor, and the majority of mill owners, talked about birth control as the basic need of this class. I have seen three generations of unemployed (14 in all) living in one room; and both mother and daughter were pregnant. Our relief people have a child a year; large families are the despair of the social worker and the doctor. The doctors say that the more children in a family the lower the health rating. These people regard children as something the Lord has seen fit to send them, and you can’t question the Lord even if you don’t agree with him. There is absolutely no hope for these children; I feel that our relief rolls will double themselves given time. The children are growing up in terrible surroundings; dirt, disease, overcrowding, undernourishment. Often their parents were farm people, who at least had air and enough food. This cannot be said for the children. I know we could do birth control in this area; it would be a slow and trying job beginning with education. (You have to fight superstition, stupidity and lack of hygiene.) But birth control would be worked into prenatal clinics; and the grape vine telegraph is the best propaganda I know. I think if it isn’t done that we may as well fold up; these people cannot be bettered under present circumstances. Their health is going to pieces; the present generation of unemployed will be useless human material in no time; their housing is frightful (talk about European slums); they are ignorant and often below-par intelligence. What can we do: feed them — feed them pinto beans and corn bread and sorghum and watch the pelagra spread. And in twenty years, what will there be; how can a decent civilization be based on a decayed substrata, which is incapable physically and mentally to cope with life?

As for their homes: I have seen a village where the latrines drain nicely down a gully to a well from which they get their drinking water. Nobody thinks anything about this; but half the population is both syphilitic and moronic; and why they aren’t all dead of typhoid I don’t know. (It would probably be a blessing if they were).…

[T]here is [also] a problem of education. (Do you know that the highest paid teacher in a school in North Carolina gets $720 a year? This is not criticism of the teachers; it is a downright woe.) But the schooling is such awful nonsense. Teach the kids to recite the Gettysburg address by heart: somehow one is not impressed. And they don’t know what to eat or how to cook it; they don’t even know that their bodies can be maintained in health by protective measures; they don’t know that one needn’t have ten children when one can’t feed one; they don’t know that syphilis is destroying and contagious. And with all this, they are grand people. If there is any meaning in the phrase “American stock” it has some meaning here. They are sound and good humored; kind and loyal. I don’t believe they are lazy; I believe they are mostly ill and ignorant. They have a strong family feeling; and one sees this in pitiful ways — for instance: if there is any means of keeping the children properly or prettily clothed, it is done; but the mother will be a prematurely aged, ugly woman who has nothing to put on her back. And the father’s first comment will be: could we get shoes for the children so they can go to school (though the father himself may be walking on the ground).…

I hope you won’t misunderstand this report. It’s easy to see what the government is up against. What with a bunch of loathsome ignoramuses talking about “lavish expenditure” and etc. And all right-minded citizens virtuously protesting against anything which makes sense or sounds new. I’m writing this extra report because you did send us out to look; and you ought to get as much as we see. It isn’t all there is to see, by any means; and naturally I have been looking at the worst and darkest side. But it is a terribly frightening picture. Is there no way we can get it before the public, no way to make them realize that you cannot build a future on bad basic material? We are so proud of being a new people in a free land. And we have a serf class; a serf class which seems to me to be in as bad a state of degeneration maybe, in this area, worse than the low class European who has learned self-protection through centuries of hardship. It makes me raging mad to hear talk of “red revolution,” the talk of cowards who would deserve what they got, having blindly and selfishly fomented revolution themselves. Besides I don’t believe it; it takes time for all things including successful rebellion; time and a tradition for revolutions which does not exist in this country. But it’s far more terrible to think that the basis of our race is slowly rotting, almost before we have had time to become a race.

From Martha Gellhorn to Harry Hopkins, Report, Gaston County, North Carolina, November 11, 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Harry Hopkins Papers, Box 66.

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