by Studs Terkel
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….
“The WPA came along shortly after this. Roosevelt recognized that people cannot stay on relief forever. It degrades them, it takes away their manhood. I’m sure he’d be appalled that people today, who are on relief in Chicago, are allocated twenty-seven cents a meal. That’s just about what it was in 1930. And it was inadequate then… .”
This family … the Rural Rehabilitation program came along, the RRA. I had the joy of certifying certain families from the relief rolls to go to the land bought by the government. To have better houses, to have equipment. And I saw this family move to a different house. Saw that woman’s face come alive—the one who’d been in that stupor—her children clean, her house scrubbed—I saw this family moved from a hopeless situation… . The man had been a sharecropper. Apparently, he had once been a very good worker. There he was with nothing, till … I could go on about that… .
I had twelve families in this program. And Ella Mae had twelve. It was a beautiful farm, maybe two, three hundred acres. With houses, not two-room shacks. Ella Mae and I were involved in the thrilling task of selecting the families. Ella Mae would say, “I think Jess Clark would be good.” And Davis, the man in charge of the program, would say, “That old, lazy bum? He’s not gonna be able to do nothin’. You’re just romantic.” So we became personally involved in seeing these people prove their own worth… .
Every month the program was threatened with lack of funds. We didn’t know if Congress was gonna discontinue it. A lot of the public thought the money was being spent foolishly.
With the program in danger of being killed from month to month, the state administrator suggested she accept other job offers. She attended the New York School of Social Work, under federal auspices; she married; there was an absence of six months from the county.
The first thing I did when I got back, I got out of the car and rushed over to the courthouse—to know how did those people perform. Did they make it?
I talked about this one white family. There was a Negro family, nine of them living in one room. The man was not young; he was in his sixties. But he impressed me as being a strong person—who would really make it, if he had a chance. Every one of the people we had certified had done well and had begun to pay
back the loans. Not one of them had been lazy and done a bad job. They were absolutely vindicated. The people were vindicated, not us.
In 1934, she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C. They were there eleven years. “I’d been invited to a First Families of Virginia Ball at the George Mason Hotel. I’d been picketing it the week before, because they paid their workers some ridiculous wage, oh like seventy-five cents an hour. When I answered the invitation, I didn’t just say Mrs. So-and-So regrets she’s unable to accept … ; I wrote a letter and said I couldn’t possibly go to a hotel where the wages were so unfair. My husband was very much surprised. He said, ‘I never dreamed you would take that kind of stand.’ Well, I never dreamed I wouldn’t.”
I’d like to think that even if we hadn’t lost our house, even if I hadn’t the job with the Civil Works Administration, I might have waked up someday. But maybe I would just have worked on the Community Chest or the St. Luke’s Fashion Show. I don’t know. Maybe I’d never have understood how people feel if I weren’t subjected to it.
Maybe you do have to experience things personally…. Do people in Lake Forest, or Grosse Point, or Scarsdale have to have their houses burned down and bombed before they recognize the state of the society? As long as it happens a few miles away—or in the city, if you live in the suburbs—you just read about it… .
POSTSCRIPT: “I went to a women’s board meeting of a great university. On the way, I had taken the wrong exit from the superhighway and had to go through an area, where I was appalled by the look of the people, living in absolute hopelessness.
“At the meeting, there were black and white women, well-off, intelligent women. Middle, upper, privileged people, the top one percent. I thought maybe when they refurbished the studio of a great sculptor—who used to be here and is now gone—they could somehow begin to think about three blocks away, what’s going on here.
“I said to one of these women, ‘Have you driven through this neighborhood decently?” She said, ‘Diana, dear, with all the new housing projects and everything, it’s much, much better.’ I realized at once that nothing I could say would make them understand… .”
Mrs. Winston Roberts
She came to Chicago from the South in 1906 as the bride of a wealthy young industrialist. His family was included in the city’s most select social circle.
“It was a great shock to my genteel, poverty-stricken southern family. My friends were not at all impressed. My brother commented: I would, of course, have a diet of ham and bacon every day.”
She immediately became part of Chicago’s “best people.” “I loved it. I ate it with a spoon. I had one of the first electrics. When you drove to Marshall Field’s, the man at the door took your car and parked it someplace. Oh, life was very simple in those days.” She was invited to Mrs. Potter Palmer’s most exclusive soirées. (“It didn’t mean anything. I was always happy. wasn’t aware of any of this snobbishness.”)
She was spoiled by her indulgent husband. She slept late; her days were spent driving her friends about in her electric. The English nurse who cared for their four children suggested she see each of them for twenty minutes, an hour or so before dinner. “I talked to the children. When Winston came home, I was all dressed and ready. Then we had dinner and went out.”
She occasionally saw a young man who told her about Jane Addams and Hull House and the surrounding poverty. “I thought he was odd. I thought other people were the funny ones. I thought: he’s an awfully nice young man, but I’m not gonna ask him to tea again. I didn’t think we had much in common. (Laughs.) Everything was handed to me. I didn’t realize a lot of people didn’t have it.”
With the death of her husband, things changed. Though he was hard-working, his investments were haphazard. “They told me solemnly there was very little left.”
I HAD four half-grown children and not much to get along with. I was looking, one day, in the hope that Winston had left a safety deposit key or some receipts. ’Cause they were surprised he had left so little. I came and said, “Is this it?” I can see my brother-in-law’s face: “That’s a streetcar check.” I’d never seen one. I had the electric.
The first thing he said, “How much can you get on with a month?” I said, “Whatever I have. All you have is what you’ve got. Then you get on with it.” There are a lot of things you can do to save money. I used to say, “It’s hard to start up high. It’s easier to start out low.” So I got along low.
About 1930 a friend suggested we go into the negligée business. For a year, she and I were together. We made them and sold them. I could make wonderful clothes. I didn’t learn it, I did it. I was never helpless. When I was a girl, the only way I could have a dress was to sew it. In the South, if you were a lady, you sewed. You didn’t cook. You might not have money for shoes, but you had someone to come in and cook. They didn’t charge anything. They took home with them anything that was left over.
She sold the electric car, and, with her children, moved to smaller quarters. After her business associate quit, she continued her enterprise for ten years.
I had a lot of fun making the third floor into a business place, with a tea shoppe in the corner. The customers would come in to be a fitted and so on. I got a good sewing woman and went into business in a big way. We cleaned up the market on that kind of garment.
I called it my little dressmaker’s home. All my friends felt so badly. They felt I was really giving up the world. You don’t know how snobbish people used to be. But they tried to help me. I didn’t feel a bit of shame.
I had quite a lot of friends and they were all loyal in keeping up with me. I gave them their money’s worth in every way—charm and interest and—oh, I made all kinds of things. I had one woman who had a slightly illicit affair with a doctor. (Laughs.) I designed a velvet grown which she could wear when he came to see her in the evening. All kinds of things. (Laughs.)
But I was always a bit of a rebel. All my friends sent their children to the Latin School. So I sent mine to Francis Parker.67 I’m very happy I did because I learned a lot things.
You didn’t feel your friends were patronizing you?
No, they were pretty mean to me part of the time. Because they wouldn’t see I was giving them their money’s worth. Some were afraid they’d get stung.
When we really almost had no money, I sold a lot of silver. It was very high then. Also, I had a lot more than I needed. That made the railroad fare to go East and join the children. They were all at Eastern schools now. Their education was paid for in grandfather’s will. If I’d had them come to Chicago, I’d a had to pay their fare. I decided it would be cheaper to go to Washington.
It was a great, handsome hotel there called the Admiral. It had a lot of suites used for retired admirals and their guests: that’s why they named it that, maybe. We took one of the apartments. They were very inexpensive. $5 a day for two bedrooms, a sitting room and a bathroom. It was in the early Thirties.
We had bought a lot of big boxes of cereal and big bottles of milk from the grocery. We’d get a certain number of things from the hotel. The elegant waiter would come with this beautiful tray, and then we’d all sit down and divide it up, who gets the Corn Flakes, who gets this, who gets that. It all came out beautifully. We lived like queens for weeks there, at that place.
I was there when we came off the money business. When the moratorium happened, the Bank Holiday. I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t mind. I was just as well off as before. And had the thrill of hearing Roosevelt say those wonderful things: We have only to fear fear itself.
How did your friends feel about Roosevelt?
In those days we didn’t talk about things like that. (Laughs.) That was not conversation. A lot of people objected to Mrs. Roosevelt. I think she was wonderful. All my fine ideas I get from my children.
I became more serious-minded. But I never did get interested in the sufferings of the world as a lot of people. Like my daughter. I’m not quite so much that way. But I became
aware of it… .
Noni Saarinen, Mrs. Roberts’ Maid
She has worked for Mrs. Roberts thirty-two years.
She came to the United States from Finland in 1921. Work as a domestic, with all variety of chores, in all manner of households, has been her American experience.
IN 1930, it was slack time. He didn’t have a job, my husband. Even now, the painter’s work is seasonal. So I went to work those times when he wasn’t working, and he took care of the boy.
Yah. He said he’s walking upside-down, if you know what that means. (Laughs.) You start walking on the floor, and then you put yourself upside-down, how you feel. Because he couldn’t provide for his family. Because when we got married, he actually said: “You’re not gonna work.”
One thing we ever got from bad times is the shoes from the Democratic Party. During election, somebody had brought the basket with the chicken and shoes for my son. One friend of ours used to tease when the boy had those shoes on. He says they are Democratic Party shoes. That’s the only thing we ever got.
When Depression came, I got me a job with a family, and they had a chauffeur, cook, chambermaid, general maid, laundress. I was kitchen helper. They were wealthy. The lady didn’t even meet me till two weeks after I was hired.
I didn’t work very long there. On account of the banks closed, they had to put out so many help. Him and her were in Florida when it happened. The daughter and son was on Astor Street. He wrote a letter, said: Put some of the help off, we can’t afford it any more, and you don’t deserve it either.
We had so little money in the bank that even if the bank was closed, it didn’t matter much. I don’t take it hard. (Laughs.) When Mrs. Roberts was younger, I would tell her: Work is not that kind of thing you must do. You just do it the way you like it, for enjoyment. It’s not punishment. I enjoy work.
