Hard Times (27 page)

We had to cut ourselves down so that it would not look too far out of line. After all, I was in the midst of a very close relationship with a lot of people who had nothing. I was running the welfare field.

 

 

Before Hoover’s term ended—I called on him personally—I got for the State of Illinois, the first federal money for relief ever granted. It was a curious thing for me to do. I was bitterly opposed to federal funds at that time. But I realized the problem was beyond the scope of local government.

I first went to Springfield to obtain funds. I got $12 million. You can imagine how far that went in relief programs in 1932. It lasted only three months.

The legislature couldn’t understand it. They had no comprehension of what was needed. We had to battle. They didn’t believe any public money should be used in this way. It should all be left to the private welfare agencies.

I think the Old Deal, the Hoover Deal, would have accomplished many of the reforms of the New Deal. I was very close to Hoover, a great admirer of his. He had asked me to take some appointments in Washington, but I declined because of my other responsibilities. If he had been re-elected … but the public wanted a change. Hoover was a humanitarian, more than any President we’ve ever had. Certainly in my lifetime.

 

In 1935, the Ryerson Company, distributors, merged with Inland Steel, manufacturers. Inland was part of a loose association of companies known as Little Steel, among others being Jones & Laughlin and Republic. Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel, was the most recalcitrant in dealing with the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee of the newly emerging CIO
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That strike of 1937 was a terrible one. Were seven people killed?

Ten
.

Tom Girdler was quite a different kind of person than anyone at Inland. I knew him very well. He had great ability, but he was a little too hard-boiled to deal with. He never quite grew up to accept the fact that conditions were different in this country than they had been years before. You remember the statement he made: he would never sign up with the CIO, he would go down and sell apples, or something.

Our philosophy was different. We recognized the difficulties. We recognized the seriousness of some things in the demands of labor. We all realized we had to deal with it in a different way than we were used to in the old days, when the industry was being run by the so-called steel barons, Gary, Schwab and so forth. Tom Girdler and a few others were a carryover from that philosophy. I think they saw the light before they were through.

Sewell Avery was another. He was a colorful, brilliant, able man, before he began to go to pieces. He was in full command of his capacities up to the time he was carried out by the army.
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A change came upon him after that. He felt the country was going to pieces under the New Deal. Bitter. I was sympathetic to him. But I didn’t agree that everything was going to the dogs. I felt we’d pull out of it.

Her father’s recurring illness, together with the oncoming of hard times —the farmers and the townspeople unable to pay their bills—caused the loss of the store. He went into bankruptcy
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THE BANKS FAILED about the time I was getting ready to go to college. My family thought of my going to Wellesley, Vassar, Smith—but we had so little money, we thought of a school in North Carolina. It wasn’t so expensive.

It was in my junior year, and I came home for Christmas…. I found the telephone disconnected. And this was when I realized that the world was falling apart. Imagine us without a telephone! When I finished school, I couldn’t avoid facing the fact that we didn’t have a cook any more, we didn’t have a cleaning woman any more. I’d see dust under the beds, which is something I’d never seen before. I knew the curtains weren’t as clean as they used to be. Things were beginning to look a little shabby… .

The first thing I noticed about the Depression was that my great-grandfather’s house was lost, about to be sold for taxes. Our own house was sold. It was considered the most attractive house in town, about a hundred and fifty years old. We even had a music library. Imagine my shock when it was sold for $5,000 in back taxes. I was born in that house.

I never felt so old in my life as I felt the first two years out of college.’Cause I hadn’t found a new life for myself, and the other one was finished.

I remember how embarrassed I was when friends from out of town came to see me, because sometimes they’d say they want a drink of water, and we didn’t have any ice. (Laughs.) We didn’t have an electric refrigerator and couldn’t afford to buy ice. There were those frantic arrangements of running out to the drugstore to get Coca-Cola with crushed ice, and there’d be this embarrassing delay, and I can remember how hot my face was.

All this time, I wasn’t thinking much about what was going on in this country… . I was still leading some kind of social life. Though some of us had read books and discussed them, there wasn’t much awareness… . Oh, we deplored the fact that so many of our young men friends couldn’t find suitable things to do… .

One day a friend of my father stopped me on the street and said, “Would you like a job? A friend of mine is director of one of those New Deal programs. She’ll tell you about it.”

Oh, I was so excited, I didn’t know what do do—the thought of having a job. I was very nervous, but very hopeful. Miss Ward came. She looked like a Helen Hokinson woman, very forbidding, formal. She must have been all of forty-five, but to me she looked like some ancient and very frightening person from another world.

She said to me, “It’s not a job for a butterfly.” She could just look at me and tell that I was just totally unsuitable. I said I was young and conscientious and if I were told what I was supposed to do, I would certainly try to the best of my ability… . She didn’t give me any encouragement at all.

When she left, I cried for about an hour. I was really a wreck. I sobbed and sobbed and thought how unfair she was. So I was very much amazed to receive a telegram the next day summoning me to a meeting in Raleigh —for the directors of women’s work.

There were dozens of women there, from all over the state, of all ages. It seemed to me very chaotic. Everyone was milling around, talking about weaving projects, canning, book binding… . Everyone there seemed very knowledgeable. I really didn’t know what they were talking about. And nobody really told me what I was supposed to do. It just seemed that people were busy, and I somehow gathered that I was in.

So I went back home. I went to the county relief offices at the courthouse. There were people sitting on the floor of a long hallway, mostly black people, looking very depressed, sad. Some of them had children with them, some of them were very old. Just endless rows of them, sitting there, waiting… .

My first impression was: Oh, those poor devils, just sitting there, and
nobody even saying, “We’ll get to you as soon as we can.” Though I didn’t know a thing about social work, what was good and what wasn’t good, my first impulse was that those people should be made to feel somebody was interested in them. Without asking anybody, I just went around and said, “Have you been waiting long? We’ll get to you just as soon as we can.”

I got the feeling the girls in the office looked very stern, and that they had a punitive attitude: that the women just had to wait, as long as they were there and that you had to find out and be sure they were entitled to it before they got anything.

I didn’t know a thing about sewing, bookbinding, canning … the approved projects. I’d never boiled an egg or sewed a stitch. But I knew seamstresses, who used to make clothes for us when we were children. I went to see them and got them to help me. I sought help from everybody who knew how to do things.

In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people … and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn’t have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food—how could they ever pull out of it?

Caroline, who used to cook for us, came in. I was so shocked to see her in a position where she had to go to the agency and ask for food. I was embarrassed for her to see me when she was in that state. She was a wonderful woman, with a big heart. Here she was, elderly by now, and her health wasn’t good at all. And she said, “Oh, the Lord’s done sent you down from heaven to save me. I’ve fallen on hard times. How beautiful you are. You look like an angel to me.” In the typical southern Negro way of surviving, she was flattering me. I was humiliated by her putting herself in that position, and by my having to see her go through this. (Weeps softly; continues with difficulty.)

For years, I never questioned the fact that Caroline’s house was papered with newspapers. She was our laundress for a while, and I remember going to her house several times. Caroline was out in the yard, just a hard patch of dirt yard. With a big iron pot, with fire under it, stirring, boiling the white clothes….

She was always gracious and would invite me in. She never apologized for the way anything looked. I thought to myself at the time: How odd that Caroline uses newspapers to paper walls. I didn’t have any brains at eleven or twelve or whatever to think: what kind of country is this that lets people live in houses like this and necessitates their using the Sunday paper for wallpaper. I’m shocked that I can’t say to you: “When I was twelve, I was horrified when I first went into this house.” I was surprised, but I wasn’t horrified.

The girls at the office—when the clients had all gone—it’s funny you
treat them this way, and you still call them clients—when they had all gone, the girls would be very friendly with me. They would ask what I wanted to know and would show me the files. I was quite impressed with their efficiency. But when they were dealing with clients, they were much more loose. I didn’t see why they had to be this way. Perhaps they were afraid the people in town would think they were too easy with the welfare people.

Because even then, people were saying that these people are no good, they didn’t really want to work. Oftentimes, there were telephone calls, saying so-and-so Joe Jones got a bag of food from Welfare, he got an automobile, or his wife’s working or something like that. I spent my time away from the job talking to my old friends, defending the program, saying: You don’t know about the situation. They would tell me I was terribly sentimental and that I had lost my perspective. That was when I first heard the old expression: If you give them coal, they’d put it in the bathtub. They didn’t even have bathtubs to put coal in. So how did anybody know that’s what they’d do with coal if they had it?

We were threatened the whole time, because funds were constantly being questioned by the legislators. After I’d been there three months, the program was discontinued. By this time, I was absolutely hooked. I could almost weep thinking about it. I told Miss Ward, who had by now become my staunch friend, that this is what I want to do with myself: I want to do something to change things.

By this time, the girls in the office—Ella Mae was the one I liked best—were perfectly willing to let me interview people, because they had more than they could do. Something like 150 cases each. In two months, I was employed as a case worker.

As I recall, when a person came into the office and applied for help, you filled out a form, asked all those humiliating questions: Does anybody work? Do you own your own house? Do you have a car? You just established the fact they had nothing. Nothing to eat, and children. So you give them one food order. You couldn’t give them shoes, or money for medicine—without visiting and corroborating the fact that they were destitute.

So, of course, you get out as fast as possible to see those people before the $4 grocery order ran out. You know, the day after tomorrow, I used to drive out to make house calls. It was the first time I’d been off Main Street. I’d never been out in the rural area, and I was absolutely aghast at the conditions in the country.

I discovered, the first time in my life, in the county, there was a place called the Islands. The land was very low and if it rained, you practically had to take a boat to get over where Ezekiel Jones or whoever lived. I remember a time when I got stuck in this rented Ford, and broke down
little trees, and lay them across the road to create traction, so you could get out. Now I regard that as one of my best experiences. If somebody said to you: What would you do, having been brought up the way you were, if you found yourself at seven o’clock at night, out in the wilderness, with your car stuck and the water up to your hubcaps or something like that? Wouldn’t you worry? What would you do? I could get out of there: I could break down a tree or something. It helps make you free.

I would find maybe two rooms, a dilapidated wooden place, dirty, an almost paralyzed-looking mother, as if she didn’t function at all. Father unshaven, drunk. Children of all ages around the house, and nothing to eat. You thought you could do just absolutely nothing. Maybe you’d write a food order….