The Lean Years

I

To workers in settlements, as to others in daily contact with wage earners, are first revealed the signs of the times affecting their security. As the periods of depression come over us, there is no sudden avalanche, but a creeping daily change — shortening hours of work, an increasing number of dismissals, wage cuts, and the uneasiness which none can comprehend unless they have learned to recognize and share it. It permeates a neighborhood like a thickening fog of anxiety and fear.

Increasingly in the winter of 19281929, months before the stock-market crash, we were made aware of the foreboding among our neighbors. In the kindergarten one morning, when the little ones were sitting around the table drinking their milk, I said, ‘What do you think you are going to be when you grow up?’ There was no very active response, and to prod them I said, ‘When I was a little girl I thought I should like to be a carpenter — the shavings are so curly and the carpenters who came to our house were such nice folks.’ Whereupon a four-year-old who sat there, his head in his hand, a sober expression on his little face, answered, ‘Miss Wald, the carpenter that lives in our house ain’t got any work.’

The nurses’ daily records are delicate barometers of conditions. This was brought home to me once as I watched our statistician sticking her pins in the map that shows the current cases of pneumonia, and observed an increasing number of blue pins in the Syrian quarter. Inquiring into this, I was told that the children of the kimono workers then on strike were probably getting less milk and good nourishment, and hence their resistance was lowered.

Signs of the gathering storm multiplied. Within a brief period a succession of individuals came to ask for work, and that stimulated us to further inquiry. In January 1928, we discussed this with our intimate circle. In February 1929, eight months before the ‘boom’ collapsed, we summoned our colleagues to a meeting, just as, on the first declaration of war in August 1914, we called a group to come together in solemn conference.

There was general agreement that times were increasingly hard in the neighborhoods where small wage earners lived, with mounting numbers of men and women ‘laid off.’ But at that time the public was absorbed in ‘the greatest period of prosperity the world has ever seen,’ and the storm signals were unheeded.

As troubles grew, we realized that in respect to the disaster to individuals and to the community these desperate years were to prove even more serious for American workers than the war. Families were broken by war and homes knew terrible griefs — the sacrifice of youth, the lost anchors of safety and security. But all these disasters also befall the people when there is no work, no family income, when youth is sacrificed because its hopes, its dignity, its ambitions, crumble away, and there is no sense of common cause, of a goal to be attained, to glorify the sacrifice. Homes were swept away during the war. Pitiful they were, those fallen roofs and broken walls that I saw in France. But, though less tragic to the onlooker, such depression as we have been experiencing has meant the devastation of homes without number, simple and luxurious, built up with high hope and with confidence in the ability of the breadwinner to support the family and to help the children to a higher estate.

II

Since 1893, my first acquaintance with the Henry Street neighborhood, there have been repeated periods of depression and consequent unemployment. That first unforgettable year plunged us into abysses of need and helplessness never dreamed of by young crusaders. In the early morning, before we had time to put the kettle on, people began their tramp up our five flights, and the procession continued after our nursing rounds were ended till the last minute of the night before we sank into fatigued sleep. They came begging us to help them find work, or at least to give them a ticket entitling them to a few days of the ’made work’ which was being provided as a relief measure.

The help for the unemployed that year was not, of course, so well organized or so effective as the united efforts of the better-trained workers in the present period. And it was tragic then to see the battle between the desperate need of the situation and the dear traditions of so many of our neighbors — more frequently met with forty years ago than now.

A sensitive tailor who lived near us and who was devoted to his home and to his wife, the daughter of a rabbi of distinction in the old country, was out of work for many months. There was, of course, a large family, and the usual accompaniment of illness. But even under this burden of pressing need the man finally did not feel that he could continue to keep the ‘ made work ’ which was the family’s sole dependence, because it meant labor on the Sabbath, and that was a desecration. He looked worn and anxious as he told of this decision. But in the midst of our troubled conference his face brightened and he said, ‘We know, with all our trials, that the Lord has not forsaken us, for we are going to have another baby.’ And he was further assured that the Lord was on his side when, exerting myself to find some solution for that desperate household, I introduced him to an employer in Passaic, New Jersey, who offered a job and demanded no religious sacrifice to hold it.

The House on Henry Street has seen five major depressions in its forty years—1893, 1907, 1914, 1921, and the years since 1929. No depression has touched in magnitude the situation of to-day, which must be described, not as critical, but as desperate. During different crises I have served on committees appointed to work out measures of protection against future disasters. The forces have never been so well organized as they are to-day to avoid waste motions, to mobilize resources, to prevent overlapping. But those who have been closest to the chief sufferers know best how inadequate have been even these heroic efforts to meet the most elementary need. And perhaps veterans of experience realize with special clarity the price that must be paid for a break of such magnitude in our economic and social life.

As one sums up the effects of unemployment on the individual and the community, it seems to me that the loss of the dignity of man is the first and most tragic. With this is bound up the loss of home, of ties, of position, the humiliation of the long bread lines, the appeal to relief agencies, the overwhelming sense of failure.

Next I should put, as a result of loss of home, a further break in housing standards, with families herding together for shelter rather than for a home. From that comes loss of family unity, of self-respect, of ambition and pride.

Under the strain of prolonged unemployment, irritations and loss of personality are inevitable even among the heroic.

The people most troubled are often marked by an inexplicable patience, or, it may be, apathy. Perhaps because of lack of leadership, the little groups that have assembled to protest against delay in relief or methods of relief have had little to contribute. If there is willingness to discuss with them the difficulty of satisfactory relief methods with available resources, their protest melts away. This was illustrated in the attitude of Washington authorities toward the ‘armies’ which demanded relief through the bonus payment in two successive winters — a menace to public health and public dignity, a tragic and absurd display of armed brutality one year, and the next (1933) the remnant of the ‘army’ well ordered and immediately responsive to considerate treatment.

Finally, this prolonged period of unemployment has forced upon young people the conviction that society, which helped rear and educate them, has no place for them.

III

The most obvious antisocial effect of unemployment is the breaking up of the family. Social workers long familiar with the vicissitudes of those whose margin between income and expenditure is narrow are impressed by the passionate desire, even from unexpected sources, to cling together that family life may be maintained, that the household may go on. Here is one instance to illustrate: —

A neighbor, a teamster with good wages, was a man of questionable habits until he married a girl of exemplary character. When their baby came, no one who owns a shooting lodge in Scotland or a villa in Florida could feel more pride and satisfaction than this young couple evidenced in moving into an apartment with a bathroom. The room was not only a modern convenience to them, but a long step forward in standard of living and self-respect. The housekeeping was immaculate, but special care was lavished on the bathroom, and no visitor departed without being shown its glories. In the winter of 1930-1931, there was no work for the teamster, and, hoping against hope, we lent the young people rent each month for three months. But recovery did not come, and they were forced to move to cheaper rooms, of course with unkept halls and unkempt janitor. Quickly came the next step down — the demoralization of overcrowding under the necessity of sharing with another couple the rent of the miserable little place. The whole level, not only of housing, but of cleanliness, recreation, personal pride, manners, slumped — as in the days of the Terror in France, when so many heads went under the guillotine, and no tomorrow seemed likely or worth anyone’s living for.

During that same winter we knew of many instances of three families herded into one apartment. In one such household there were in three rooms seven children and five adults, among them two pregnant women.

And yet our neighbors never hesitate to share their meagre quarters when need arises. The day after a young mother came home from the hospital with her first-born, the nurse called to teach her how to give the baby its bath. To her amazement, she found two newborn babies and a second mother, a young girl who was a stranger to her. This girl had occupied the bed next to the nurse’s patient in the ward, and had confided to her that she had no home and no friends to whom she could go when she left the hospital. Her neighbor in the ward therefore invited her to share her tiny tenement quarters. ‘I can’t do much for her,’ she said apologetically to the nurse, ‘but I can put a roof over her head.’ The husband gave up his half of the family bed to the stranger and slept on a narrow couch, and the extra baby slept in the kitchen in the carriage proudly provided for the child of the house. But there was only good will shown to the guest, and a determination to ‘make out the best we can.’ I am glad to add a cheering footnote to this story. The husband, so long out of work, has at last obtained a good job, and the young girl also secured employment and has been able to go her way.

When we first lived in a neighborhood of small wage earners, to see on the sidewalk the furniture of a family dispossessed for nonpayment of rent was an everyday affair. Gradually the welfare agencies freed one neighborhood after another from that humiliating evidence of inadequate and tardy relief. It is a matter of pride in the Settlement that there was only one such instance in the past winter in our neighborhood, and that was through an unforseeable slip in procedure. But during the continued depression this problem has grown beyond the power of the relief agencies in some sections, and it is now beyond us. The frequent sight of the belongings of the shattered household could, without great stretch of imagination, be compared with the ruined homes we saw in the occupied territory of France. But in this emergency, as in so many others, coöperation is forthcoming from the neighbors whenever possible.

Mrs. D. went to the hospital to be delivered of her first child. In her absence the ‘dispossess’ was served. Her husband disappeared, taking most of the household goods with him. This, let me hasten to add, was not an example of the ‘shiftless poor.’ The wife had taken a four-year commercial course after graduating from a Chicago high school; the husband was a licensed teacher. Desperate would have been the plight of the young mother when she returned from the hospital had it not been for a neighbor who opened her door to Mrs. D. and the baby. The neighbor herself was receiving relief, but she shared what she had with the deserted, homeless wife and child. The nurse secured such supplementary help as she could for the household. The most delicate consideration is being shown Mrs. D. by her hostess. But we hope the kind neighbor will soon be relieved of this burden, which she ought not to bear; the initiative will not come from her.

The folk feeling, always at first limited to immediate kith and kin, is widened through sympathy, and the recent years have brought forth, as does every time of stress and strain, not only quick sympathy, but immediate sharing. No ceremonial or convention waits upon the act. Compassion is a basic element when people are thrown together, and too much cannot be said of the simplicity with which our neighbors give and take.

It is at the opposite social pole that one sometimes finds those who frankly refuse to be involved in other people’s troubles. At a dinner party in the second winter of the depression I found myself sitting beside a man who told me that he did not care to hear stories of need, that he never read the appeals which came to his bank or to him personally, that he was deaf to their urgency. And when examples of the help of the needy to one another were cited, he complacently retorted that this was inevitable ‘because they see it around them all the time.’ He seemed to pride himself on his deafness, and to be all unaware of the death of the spirit within him.

Under the strain of unemployment and the anxiety and hardship it brings into the home, the wage earner’s rebellion against his predicament or his boredom with the long, empty days not infrequently expresses itself in outbursts of temper. In one such home, the ambulance doctor, summoned by our nurse, diagnosed the mother’s illness as ‘starvation complicated by follicular tonsillitis.’ And the kindly young physician added, ‘If I have to make many more diagnoses like this I’ll be a chicken-hearted fool.’ The husband, a skilled artisan, had been with the same firm for nine years. Then his employers failed, and for nearly a year he had had no job except a few weeks of ‘work relief’ at a third of his former wage rate. In apologizing to the nurse for rudeness to her and to his family, the man said, ‘I don’t mind being hungry myself, but it’s hard to see the wife and kids without enough to eat. And sometimes you get mad and holler just because you feel so bad.’

IV

These trying days have been a challenge to the settlements to keep life as balanced as possible, particularly for young people who, having sometimes been educated at great sacrifice, find themselves unwanted. Home conditions have gone beyond reasoning, and they are often reproved for not finding work, with barbed reminders of what others have done. Henry Street has participated in and initiated measures to serve the people, particularly youth, in danger of quagmires from which it might be impossible to bring release. The dances, the music, the club meetings, the gayeties, have never been so strenuously pursued as during these lean years.

One evening, a hot August night, when the children of the neighborhood were playing games and singing in the street, I stopped to talk with three girls walking arm in arm. Young and at the romantic age, it seemed there must be something better for them to do than to walk up and down this hot and crowded street, where children and garbage cans on the sidewalk made even a stroll difficult. I knew there was a dance on the roof of our Playhouse to which ten cents would admit them. To these young girls of dance age I said, ‘Why are n’t you at the party to-night?’ In chorus they answered, ‘We’re out of work. We have n’t got ten cents.’ There was a committee meeting at eight-thirty the next morning, and the price of the dances was adjusted to conform to the means of those who most needed the pleasure.

Because of urgent pressure for the most primitive needs of the people, food and shelter, the essentials of recreation are in danger of being overlooked or even considered indecorous when family cupboards are bare of bread. One truly anxious friend questioned the time and money, however reasonable in amount, allocated to pleasure and recreation in the Settlement budget. But she readily withdrew her objections when the plight of the unemployed boys and girls was described. Few people who have brought up their young under comfortable circumstances have failed to see the importance of a wholesome atmosphere for youth, but they have not always realized that the same rules of control and protection they know to be essential apply to those who live in congested rooms, who hear the doleful tales of their kinsfolk and neighbors, and who may not have even the cheapest movie as a release.

The human side of unemployment as seen by social workers is perhaps best expressed in the studies, the source book of materials, and the coordinated statements by the settlements. Helen Hall’s research and writing as chairman of the Unemployment Committee of the National Federation of Settlements illustrate our desire for reliable facts and our unwillingness to allow the human interests involved to be eliminated.¹

One cannot yet reckon the final cost of this depression. The nurses’ records show that it takes an increasingly long time these days for children to recover from what would not have been considered serious illness in happier times. Convincing arguments as to the future values of a healthy childhood, familiar to those interested in child protection and culture, become nightmares when we think of the harvest ahead, when these real victims of depression try to build their adult health and strength on the poor preparation of these years. One cannot

estimate the loss by mortality statistics. The sick and feeble do not always die. One is reminded of Dr. Osier’s famous observation, ‘People seldom die of the diseases they have.’ Malnutrition, bad housing, anxiety, and the other evils of depression, are fraught with consequences that cannot be appraised.

One of the most dramatic phases of the depression as it affects youth is the large number of boys, and some girls, too, who have gone ‘on the loose,’ tramping back and forth across the continent, riding freights, ‘hitch-hiking,’ and often living in hobo jungles. We were horrified by the reports of the ‘wild children’ of Russia, but they were starving little ones without parents, without any spot that they could call home. When I was in Russia at the time, I was told that the children had heard as if from the winds and the birds of the air, certainly from no known human agency, that there was food in Moscow’. From various hamlets they met on the public roads, and when they reached Moscow they were said to number 100,000. Our young wanderers are older. They have homes and relatives known to them. But though the old impulse of youth to roam must be recognized, the greater number set forth not because of lack of ties, as did the young Russians, nor of Wanderlust, but because of the poverty of their homes, their inability to find work in their own communities, and the futile discussions of ‘what to do’ on the street corners.

V

The problem of the large family with a small and irregular income is not, of course, reserved for periods of depression. Sometimes the personality of the wage earner, sometimes the nature of his occupation, causes sharp and not infrequent ups and downs in the family fortune, and a general slump only serves to accentuate this difficulty. ‘Ah, yes,’ sighed a Scotch acquaintance, ‘Robbie is a grand roofer, but he’s more out o’ work nor in.’

The resident in charge of the relief office at Henry Street reported the usual pleas varied one morning by the appearance of an Oriental-looking man who pressed for attention: ‘ No work — no work in my trade.’

‘What is your occupation?‘

‘Lady, I am a professional mourner.’

‘But people die as usual.’

‘Yes, lady, but they do not mourn — they just bury them.’

Though the mothers feel the brunt of unemployment and the real sacrifice of giving up even pennies and nickels to the children, they have a protective instinct which enables them to comprehend the price youth may pay if entirely deprived of natural outlets for fun and comradeship. In the face of dire need, it is oftentimes startling to find how deeply embedded in the mothers is the urge to save the young from hardship or from discredit with their comrades.

A mother in the last month of her pregnancy slept on the floor, that her two little children might occupy the only bed in the house. Another mother dragged home a packing box she found on the street and helped her young son make of it a chair to use at table. ‘He’s got to learn manners,’ she explained. Another mother removed the outer cretonne covering from a mattress supplied her by the Red Cross, and turned it into curtains to hang at the two windows, ‘so home will seem nicer to my girl.’

VI

Relief has been given in the past three years on a hitherto unknown scale, but, despite the many millions contributed by individuals, municipal, state, and national leaders realize with increasing clarity that large-scale unemployment and the relief of its victims constitute a public responsibility and one that cannot be met alone by private effort, however zealous. In this country, this necessitates a changed attitude, expressed in legislation and in new administrative machinery. We have already launched many important undertakings to this end. Perhaps it is only in time of peril and despair that we summon the courage to push ourselves forward along such new and difficult roads of social pioneering. Certainly we have had in recent experience the goad to drive us forward, however untried the way. Overwhelming need has called forth heroic response, showing itself not only in the abandonment of old traditions and long-held convictions, but in a willingness to experiment with untried and even radical legislative and administrative procedure.

The public has not been left in ignorance. Admirably formulated publicity has made clear the need, and leaders in social work have detailed the methods used to meet it in reports, in interviews, in public hearings, before Congressional and legislative committees, and in statements to officials who allocate public funds. The importance of social workers gains unwonted recognition through the continuing evidence of their intelligent devotion. Walter Lippmann, that clear thinker and unimpassioned interpreter of the events of the day, said to the National Conference of Social Work (1932): —

‘Among all who have had to deal with this great crisis, among statesmen and business men, among reformers and economists, your record is the clearest. You have the least to regret. You have had to administer relief on a scale which was utterly unforeseen.

You have been provided with resources that were rarely adequate. The patience and the courage, the resourcefulness and the single-mindedness with which you are carrying on are beyond all praise. When the history of these times comes to be written it will be said of the social workers of America that they did their duty without flinching and that they deserved well of their country.‘

The army of people engaged in relief measures, working harder than it is safe for anyone to work, have not only helped shape and carry forward emergency administration, but have coordinated the various welfare agencies, knitting together the often overlapping efforts of a big city. One of the best demonstrations of this type of vital activity is in the Welfare Council of New York City, under the expert leadership of William Hodson.

Naturally the more imponderable needs have been most easily understood by those who live close to the low-waged workers of a city. Wage earners with the least margin to build up reserves of their own are also those having least assurance of the continuity of their employment. They are the first to fall by the wayside.

A man who has worked and supported his family does not take his first dismissal as a doom. He has always been on good terms with his boss and his foreman, and he feels sure that he will get work again soon. But, after an actual experience, unemployment is to him a constant threat and terror. Inadequate as it is under any scheme now put forward, unemployment insurance offers a measure of protection against this vast indignity that even in good times threatens millions of the wage earners of the Machine Age. Perhaps only such assurance of some degree of security could free from fear men like the skilled furniture finisher, whose story, though I have told it before, bears retelling, I think.

The man had had no steady work for more than two years, but his wife had succeeded in getting part-time factory work. Except for the husband’s occasional odd jobs, this small wage was the sole family support. One of our nurses was called in to see the wife. The diagnosis was ‘pregnancy complicated by underfeeding.’ The nurse suspected that the parents were giving to the two children most of what food they had, and were slowly starving themselves. The husband, who was over six feet tall, weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. The nurse urged the wife to give up her job and apply for aid. This the woman refused to do.

‘ We want work. I ’ve got to keep my job till labor pains begin.’

Before she went home that night, the nurse purchased the suburban papers and found to her delight a Long Island firm’s advertisement for a furniture finisher. She telephoned the employer and he promised to interview the man if he came to the office at eight the next morning. The nurse went back to see the anxious man, told him the good news, and gave him carfare. But the next morning she was disappointed to find him waiting at her office, already half an hour late for the possible job. ‘ You ’ll never get it now! ’ she exclaimed. ‘I could n’t help it,’ he replied dully. ‘After you left, my wife’s pains began. I had no money to get a doctor, so I went for a policeman and he got an ambulance. The ambulance surgeon delivered her. But the baby died and he took my wife back to the hospital. I could n’t leave the children or the dead baby. During the night I made a little coffin with some nice wood I had. But I don’t know what to do next. . . .’

The nurse accompanied him to the morgue. ’He had the look of Lazarus,’ she said.

It seems incredible that, with so much threatened that means life and happiness, there should have been so little organized protest. Down in the hearts of American men and women there has been, I think, faith in America. Despite the suffering, disappointment, and uncertainty, there has been an unshakable belief that in time we shall find our way out. That the revolution we are passing through should have been so far so nearly bloodless is due in large measure to an awakened sense of responsibility in the community and to the knowledge that the burden has not fallen on the wage earner alone. As usual, there have been valorous instances of people who have accepted the loss of much that once seemed to them important by reappraisals of what really counts for happiness. And indeed the horizon is brighter, and hope of better days is built upon sound plans which, if carried through, will preserve the dignity and self-respect of our people.

VII

It was a disheartening experience, in preparing this article, to go back to the report of the unemployment committee appointed by Mayor John Purroy Mitchell, in December 1914, of which I was a member. On the basis of the experience gained in that terrible winter, the committee in its final report, submitted in 1917, stated its conviction that unemployment is a problem calling for constant study and attention, and for a permanent organization to lead the community in forestalling and mitigating its effects. The committee outlined eight major factors in a community attack on the problem: fact finding; stabilization of seasonal industries; adequate public employment service; public works planned ahead to take up the slack when private industry sags; unemployment insurance; vocational guidance and training; relief; and emergency employment. There is something almost prophetic in a sentence from the foreword to the report, written by Henry Bruère, who, as Chamberlain in the Mitchell administration, took the initiative in setting up the committee. Mr. Bruère observed, ‘Always industrial crises find American communities unprepared to deal with the crucial social problems which they develop.’

Even as the report was submitted we began to feel the stir and lift of better times, and this valuable contribution was left to gather dust in the files. The report was reprinted and given wide circulation in 1921. But it was only in the fourth winter of the next depression that some of the recommendations of fifteen years before were embodied in legislation and in administrative machinery, notably the new state and federal relief agencies, the recently enacted Wagner-Lewis public employment office measure, the provision for vast public works under the National Recovery Act, the improved gathering and dissemination of statistics of employment and unemployment under Frances Perkins, the new Secretary of Labor, who brings special training and fitness to her important post. Further, there is to be noted the steady movement toward unemployment relief through public funds rather than through private philanthropy.

Most people now realize that there is no single remedy for unemployment. There is widespread conviction that measures to correct our failures must be many and coördinated.

In addition to efforts already under way, there must be, first, security of home — and this implies housing that will meet the requirements of reasonable standards of living, on the basis of which a decent home can be built. Mothers and fathers, too, should have training for parenthood. We should make more general the farseeing provisions for child health that have been stated and restated. Recreation suited to different ages is essentially practical, and we must not omit cultural opportunities, that life may be enriched and that all may share in the music, the drama, the libraries, the athletic contests, which have been recognized in other ages, as well as in our own, as part of the provision for right living.

We need intelligent vocational guidance and training, to avoid as far as possible the round peg in the square hole, and to give a variety of skills and greater adaptability. Widows’ pensions, so vigorously demanded by social workers, and established in the obligations of many states and cities, should be expanded and increased, and will be when their economy of money and childhood is more clearly understood. Old-age pensions and workmen’s compensation for industrial accident and disease, so long features in European life, have entered into the American scheme of community responsibility. Unemployment insurance, now stirring the public mind, is the logical next step toward a measure of protection against a hazard for which the individual is not responsible and before which he is helpless. A shortened work day or work week, fortified by minimum wage laws, will help raise the general level of employment. Legislative standards on these matters have matured. From the old fear of ‘socialism’ we have progressed to a sense of the obligation of a democracy to uphold its people.

Effort is to-day being directed toward the stabilization of industry and the elimination of cutthroat competition. There is reason to hope that this year’s serious and often solemn searchings will in the end prevent a recurrence of this depression experience. The part played in the present situation by war debts, armaments, and tariffs is recognized and strengthens the conviction that people and problems are interrelated the world over.

There is no one panacea to bring about a saner and more balanced security. The intent of the people in the settlements may seem bewildered, scattered, and, indeed, irrelevant. And yet the pressing message to which the community is now ready to listen does have a part in the movement toward a better-ordered society. What is urged on the basis of knowledge and experience has weight in furthering a reasonable provision for days when business and industry slow down, for old age, when life ceases to function strenuously; and preparations for right living are as essential as the stirring of conscience which, in the last quarter of a century, has brought about our gains in the direction of widows’ pensions, old-age pensions, preventive medicine, vocational guidance, the establishment of the visiting nurse to serve and to educate. The millennium is not yet in sight, but the success that has been achieved is a challenge to every rightminded person to become interested, to study, to understand, and to participate. Those who are despondent lest our vigilance be weakened can stiffen their courage by a backward look over the way we have come.