The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

When I came back the cars were going off down the road quietly. And men were calling to each other saying: “So long, Jake . . .” “Hi there, Billy . . .” “See you t'morrow, Sam. . . .” Just saying goodnight to each other and going home.

  The driver and the man with the bottle came back to the truck and got in. They seemed in a good frame of mind. The driver said, “Well there won't be no more fresh niggers in these parts for a while. We'll get you to Columbia now. Sorry we hadta keep you waiting. . . .”

  My Dear Mr. Hopkins

  Washington, D.C.

  November 11, 1934

  My Dear Mr. Hopkins:

  I came in today from Gastonia, North Carolina, and was as flat and grim as is to be expected. I got a notice from your office asking about “protest groups.” All during this trip in both Carolinas 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 honor over the mantel; I can only compare this to the Italian peasant's Madonna. I have been seeing people who, according to 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.”

  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 colored picture as a wedding present. The children have no shoes and that woman is terrified of the coming cold. There is almost 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 omnipotent.

  I have been seeing mill workers; and in every mill, when possible, the local Union president. There has been widespread discrimination against Union members 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 two to three days’ work a week. The price of food has risen (especially the kind of food they eat: fat-back bacon, flour, corn 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 a man can 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.

  What the rights and wrongs of this are, I don't know. But the fact remains that they believe the President promised them they would get their jobs back after the strike, regardless of whether they were Union or non-Union men. The President will see that they have work and proper wages; and that the stretch-out1 will be abandoned. They don't waver in this faith. They merely hope the President will send “his men” (the Labor Conciliators) quickly, because it is hard to wait.

  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;2 and they weren't sticking to 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 if this class (what 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. 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.

  To go on with the mills. The stretch-out is the constant cry of the workers. Needless to say, every mill owner angrily denies that there is a stretch-out and some of them asked what the word means. But I saw, by intention, some of his workers; a couple of them had quit his mill after the strike. (They were Union people, and also felt that as Union people they would be highly unwelcome there, when the mills re-opened.) They told me that during the summer two or three women a day fainted in the mill; a man of 35 died, between his looms, of heart failure.

  Other cases: “When you get out, you're just trembling all over, and you can't hardly get rested for the next day.” “We don't know how long we can keep it up: it's killing the women and the men are all afraid they'll lose their jobs because they can't do the work.” I went to see one man in his home, and said, “How are you?” “ Tired,” he said, “tired and weary—like all the others; like all of us working here.” That sounds like something bad out of Dickens, but it was pretty grim, seeing the man. Their faces are proof of this statement; faces and bodies.

  The people who seem most physically hit by this are the young girls, who are really in awful shape. I have watched them in some mills where the naked eye can tell that the work load is inhuman. They have no rest for eight hours; in one mill they told me they couldn't get time to cross the room to the drinking fountain for water. They eat standing up, keeping their eyes on the machines. In another mill I found three women lying on the cement floor of the toilet, resting.

  Again (let us be just if possible) in some cases this speed-up is an academic question. I may be terribly bad but the mills only run two or three days a week; then you have the obvious complaint of not being able to live on what they earn.3 And there is the mill owner's side, naturally. I've been looking at ledgers, written beautifully in red. All of them tell me business is worse than last November, and they will have to curtail during the winter. In Gaston County, the leading mill owner told me there were 10,000 textile workers too many; there are 106 mills of which very few are running full time.

  The workers tell me that things are worse since the Code; there is the stretch-out and part-time work, and the price of food is rocketing up.

  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 pellagra;4 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.” “C
onditions are really horrible here; it seems as if the people are degenerating before your eyes: the children are worse mentally and physically than their parents.” “I've just come in from seeing some patients who have been living on corn bread and corn hominy, without seasoning, for two weeks. I wonder how long it takes for pellagra to set in; just a question of days now.” “All the mill workers I see are definite cases of under-nourishment; 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 some time 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 also 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 smallpox.

  I have seen three v.d. clinics only. One of them was over a store—three rooms; run by the county doctor, a nurse, and a colored janitor who acted as assistant. I am told by these clinic doctors that most of the patients come in when the disease is in the second or third (and incurable) stage. That of course it is being spread regardless; and often they treat the whole family. That congenital syphilis is a terrible problem and practically un-treated; nature kills off these children pretty well.

  One doctor whose clientele was entirely mill workers showed me 50 Wassermans,5 all four plus. Not one of those people is taking treatment. All of them have families. As you know, these people sleep four in a bed; with the smallest children in the same bed with the parents.

  Cases: a woman brought in a four-month-old baby; both of them looked deathly ill and the child was paralyzed. The mother thought it was infantile; they were both four plus Wassermans. But the treatment costs 25 cents a shot, and in that area the clinic is not allowed to accept relief orders for treatment; they were not being treated. . . . Saw a family of four; everyone has syphilis. The boy was moronic; and the girl also had t.b. . . . A twelve-year-old girl with open syphilitic sores; her mother thought she had scratched a bite which had become infected.

  In Camp Jackson Transient Camp 15–20% have it. Here the problem is different; these men know what the disease is and definitely want to be treated; are willing to stay and work for their treatment. But amongst the Negroes syphilis is “rheumatism.” And amongst the ignorant mill workers it is “bad blood.” In neither case can any adequate job be done; partly because the people themselves are ignorant and careless. The doctors tell me that they have one child a year born to syphilitics, just as nicely as to the others.

  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. Likewise, the larger the family, the lower the intelligence 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 could be worked into prenatal clinics; and the grapevine telegraph is the best propaganda I know. If it isn't done, 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 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 pellagra 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. Another mill village, which beats any European tenement I have seen: the houses are shot with holes, windows broken, no sewerage; rats. The rent for these houses is twice as high as that of fine mill houses. (Likewise, here, the company forces its employees to buy from the company grocery and makes a 50 to 75% profit. It is probable—and to be hoped—that one day the owners of this place will get shot or lynched. Their workers resemble peons I have seen in Mexico, who are eaten away by syphilis and pulqué.)

  The houses in some mill villages are pretty good, and then there is a definite improvement in the humans who inhabit them. You can almost judge from a village what grade worker you will find there. But there is more than a housing problem, though I can't see much hope for people who have to “pile up as best we can” in beds without blankets, and have to walk to a well for water, and dump their garbage wherever it's handy. However, there is a problem of education. (Do you know that the highest-paid teacher in a school in North Carolina gets $720 a year? You can pretty well imagine what they get in the way of teachers. This is not criticism of the teachers; it is downright woe.) But the schooling is such awful nonsense. Teach the kids to recite the Gettysburg Address by heart: somehow one is not impressed. They don't know what to eat or how to cook it. They don't know that their bodies can be maintained in health by protective measures. They don't know that one needn't have ten children when they 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 and 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.)

  By the way, I get this constantly: talking to workers about a shut down or part-time mill, and saying the mill can't run because it has no orders. And they say to me wonderingly: “But we haven't had any sheets for years and hardly any blankets. And no shirts or underclothes; and no towels. We could use the cloth.”

  I hope you won't
misunderstand this report. It's easy to see what the government is up against. What with a bunch of loathesome ignoramuses talking about “lavish expenditure” and etc. And all right-minded citizens virtuously protesting against anything which makes sense and 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 destroyed 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 lower 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.

  1Heavily increased individual work load.

  2Minimum wage.

  3Wages: 7½ to 10 cents an hour.

  4Vitamin deficiency disease, affects skin, proceeds to emaciation, paralysis, dementia, death. Easily cured by meat, eggs, milk, liver, yeast extract, etc.

  5Blood tests for syphilis.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  November 26, 1934

  My Dear Mr. Hopkins:

  This report will cover my ten days in Massachusetts (from November 15 through November 25). I visited Boston, Lowell, Brockton, Lynn, Leicester, Oxford, Fall River, Lawrence.