Part 2: Remember that the purpose of this assignment is to develop comparison and contrast skills. Read the following viewpoints and then answer the questions.
View One3:
We have always had a shiftless, never-do-well class of people whose one and only aim in life is to live without work. I have been rubbing elbows with this class for nearly sixty years and have tried to help some of the most promising and have seen others try to help them, but it can’t be done. We cannot help those who will not try to help themselves and if they do try, a square deal is all they need, and by the way that is all this country needs or ever has needed: a square deal for all and then, let each paddle their own canoe, or sink….
The women and children around here have had to work at the fields to help save the crops and several women fainted while at work and at the same time we couldn’t go up or down the road without stumbling over some of the reliefers, moping around carrying dirt from one side of the road to the other and back again, or else asleep. I live alone on a farm and have not raised any crops for the last two years as there was no help to be had. I am feeding the stock and have been cutting the wood to keep my home fires burning. There are several reliefers around here now who have been kicked off relief, but they refuse to work unless they can get relief hours and wages, but they are so worthless no one can afford to hire them.
As for the clearance of the real slums, it can’t be done as long as their inhabitants are allowed to reproduce their kind. I would like for you to see what a family of that class can do to a decent house in a short time. Such a family moved into an almost new, neat, four-room house near here last winter. They even cut down some of the shade trees for fuel, after they had burned everything they could pry loose…I will not try to describe their filth for you would not believe me. They paid no rent while there and left between two suns [sic] owing everyone from whom they could get nickels worth of
anything. They are just a fair sample of the class of people on whom so much of our hard earned tax money is being squandered and on whom so much sympathy is being wasted….
Is it any wonder the taxpayers are discouraged by all this penalizing of thrift and industry to reward
shiftlessness, or that the whole country is on the brink of chaos?
View Two4
: …One hears a good deal about “relief psychology” these days—that if it were all direct relief, with no work, thousands would never apply. No social worker out in the field would deny this. Through work the stigma has to some extent been removed from relief. Into every relief office in the country have come applicants, not for relief but for jobs.
More of them than you would perhaps believe have shaken their heads and turned away when informed that it was really relief.
Without doubt there are many thousands of families on work relief in this country who would not have applied had they not been able to call it—to themselves at any rate—“a job.” But when one hears the testimony of clinical doctors, school nurses, teachers, and social workers that the “marginal families” –those who haven’t yet come on relief—are 3 Minnie A. Harden (Columbus, Ind) to Mrs. F.D.Roosevelt, December 14, 1937, as reprinted in McElvaine, Robert, ed. Down and Out
in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 145-147.
4 Report Summary, Lorena Hickock to Harry Hopkins, January 1, 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Federal Relief Agency Papers,
FERA-WPA Narrative Field Reports, Surveys by Investigators, 1934-1938.
really worse off than those on relief, one wonders how long these people could have held out after all…This from a doctor in a medical hygiene clinic in Providence, R.I.: “most people we see are not on relief, but are starving.
Many of these are white collar people and people in the skilled labor class who avoid relief, whose pride remains stronger than hunger. The result on the children is malnutrition and a neurotic condition produced by hearing and being constantly part of parental fear. The child grows obsessed with the material problems of the home and mentally shoulders them, and the nervous system cracks.”
….a FERA investigator a few weeks ago sent this poem from a town in Ohio. It was written by an 18-year-old boy:
We are the men who rise the swaying freights,
We are the men whom Life has beaten down,
Leaving for death nought but the final pain,
Of degradation, Men who stand in line
An hour for a bowl of watered soup,
Grudgingly given, savagely received.
We are the Ishmaels, outcasts of the earth,
Who shrink before the sordidness of Life
And cringe before the filthiness of Death.
Will there not come a great, a glittering Man,
A radiant leader with a heavier sword
To crush to earth the enemies who crush
Those who seek food and freedom on the roads?
We care not if their flag be white or red,
Come, ruthless Savior, messenger of God,
Lenin or Christ, we follow Thy bright sword.
Evaluate: Compare and Contrast
1. What complaints does Minnie Harden make to the First Lady, and why does she make them?
2. What picture emerges from the field report, including the poem included at the end of the report?
3. How do you account for the differences between the two views?
