The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  As a source of employment, however, it is not brilliant. There is a grueling speed-up (I can testify to this myself and I have backing for the statement from many sources). The tendency is to put two men on a job that requires four. Also, since the strike, one sees the now traditional and epic performance of union workers getting laid off, never to return if the Campbell management knows it. One of the most fascinating angles of 7A is the slyness manufacturers have acquired to combat it. There were about 1,800 Union members in Campbell's. I should be surprised if any of these people had work there within six months. At least, if all of them stick to the Union—which they won't for the basic and cogent reason of hunger.

  Now the Union people are still belonging to the Union, though dues slip into arrears. I had a revealing talk with the local president of the Union, an American (most of the labor here is Italian, Polish or very illiterate Negro). He is a superior kind of man, intelligent, cynical, calm. He has of course been laid off. He says that the speed with which workers become demoralized is amazing. He expects that his own Union cohorts will stay in the Union for a few months and then drift into unemployed Councils or Leagues. He says also that it's terrible to see how quickly they let everything slide; it takes about three months for a man to get dirty, to stop caring about how his home looks, to get lazy and demoralized and (he suspects) unable to work.

  This matter—the demoralization point—has interested me; I didn't originally bring it up, but found the unemployed themselves talking about it, either with fear or resignation. And a labor organizer with whom I spoke, repeated statements they had made. (All of this voluntarily, no “leading the witness.”) For instance: I went to see a man aged 28. He had been out of steady work for six years. He lived on a house boat and did odd jobs of salvaging and selling wood and iron. He told me that it took from three to six months for a man to stop going around looking for work. “What's the use, you only wear out your only pair of shoes and then you get so disgusted.” That phrase, “I get so disgusted . . .” is the one I most frequently hear to describe how they feel. You can understand what it means: it's a kind of final admission of defeat or failure or both. Then the man began talking about the new works program and he said, “How many of them would work if they had the chance? How many of them even could work?”

  Sometimes the unemployed themselves say: “I don't know if I could do a real job right away, but I think I’d get used to it.”

  The Union organizer, already mentioned, is connected with the building trades. There is some small municipal job on (I didn't see it) dealing with making a subway under the street. They have hired the unemployed to do it. He said they had more accidents on that job than they normally had on a big construction job, with men working on scaffolding and really having cause for accidents. He said, “They get so clumsy; they forget how to do their job and then they seem just weak-like.”

  I still believe that if men were offered a living wage and a good stiff piece of work which they could accept as work, they'd come across all right. But they regard work relief as made work; and God knows we aren't giving living wages. Americans don't work for love alone and precious few of them (after from four to six years of unemployment) work to keep their pride green.

  Generalizing (probably accurately), the unskilled, uneducated laborer is probably getting used to relief. The middle-class white collar worker is taking it in the neck, horribly.

  Housing is unspeakable. No doubt the housing was never a thing of beauty and general admiration around here; but ramshackle houses which have gone without repairs for upwards of five years are shameful places. There is marked overcrowding (and it is to be noted that t.b. is on the increase). I have seen houses where the plaster had fallen through to the lath, and the basement floated in water. One entire block of houses I visited is so infested with bedbugs that the only way to keep whole is to burn out the beds twice a week and paint the woodwork with carbolic acid, and even so you can just sit around and watch the little creatures crawling all over and dropping from the ceiling . . .

  Household equipment nil. Apparently what goes last is the unused overstuffed furniture in the front room. Clothes nil. Really a terrible problem here; not only of protection against the elements (a lot of pneumonia among children: undernourishment plus exposure) but also the fact that having no clothes, these people are cut out of any social life. They don't dare go out, for shame. The men feel it in applying for jobs: their very shabbiness acts against them. I am now talking primarily about the white collar class.

  Health: well, they seem to be getting a lot of service here in the system of calling their own doctor who is paid by FERA. The system apparently works here as elsewhere so that the best doctors do not take FERA clients (they do their own charity work in clinics) and some very canny folk, who solicit, get the trade. There are always stories about how badly this works: a man who got treatment at FERA expense for a year for rheumatism. He got no better and his wife asked if she could change doctors. The new doctor had an X-ray taken and found the man had cancer of the hip. He died within six months.

  But by and large, they are getting fairly good treatment I suppose, considering how lousy the medical attention for this class is, all over the country. They do, however, have a bad time getting the medicines prescribed by their doctors. T.B. is increasing; the hospitals for mental diseases (state and country) have over 1,000 more patients than in 1932, epileptics and feebleminded are increasing. Malnutrition seems prevalent among children but not among adults; and venereal disease is more or less static though an entirely different class is beginning to come to the free clinics.

  It appears that the Depression is resulting in a lot of amateur prostitution. This is commented upon by the people who have to deal with the courts and care for delinquent children. The age limit is going down and unmarried mothers are very young. I was talking to a girl about this: she said, “Well, the girls go out with anybody, you might say, just to have something to do and to forget this mess.” (She herself was on relief, getting something like $2 a week to live on.) I remarked that it was understandable, considering that at least they got a good square meal. And she said, very calmly, “Meal? No, almost never. Sometimes they get a glass of beer.” It seems to me that this makes a picture, complete in itself. I’ve seen the girls. Obviously they want clothes, and a little fun. It's grim to think what they're getting for their trouble.

  The young are as disheartening as any group, more so, really. They are apathetic, sinking into a resigned bitterness. Their schooling, such as it is, is a joke; and they have never had the opportunity to learn a trade. They have no resources within or without; and they are waiting for nothing. They don't believe in man or God, let alone private industry; the only thing that keeps them from suicide is this amazing loss of vitality: they exist. “I generally go to bed around seven at night, because that way you get the day over with quicker.”

  1Clause in the National Recovery Act guaranteeing the right to form and join labor unions.

  The Lord Will Provide for England

  COLLIER’S, September 1938

  When you go to London you forget about war. Everything's the same. The high top-heavy buses rumble around with signs that extol laxatives and breakfast foods and inform you that a musical comedy called “No Sky So Blue” is terrific. The people press against an iron railing before a house in a fashionable square, watching the young ladies and gentlemen inside dance to the tune of an expensive jazz band. In Regent Street, the jewelers’ shops seriously display diamond tiaras, which will be seriously bought and actually worn. At the Admiralty Arch, their faces green and violet in the electric light and the coming dawn, stand men and women waiting to get a doughnut and a cup of coffee from the Silver Lady, a charity food van that serves the homeless every day. Red-coated guards pose like wooden Indians before Buckingham Palace and the gentry, in glittering evening dress, stream down Piccadilly while it's still day, on their way to the theater. It's just as it always was. If you buttonholed every
passer-by in Piccadilly Circus and asked: “Do you think there's going to be a war in Europe?” ninety out of every hundred would say, “No,” first, and if they stopped to think about it, they'd probably say: “Well, not this year anyhow . . .”

  England is prosperous, that's the thing to remember. Unemployment has dropped from 3,000,000 to 1,700,000. The great rearmament program gives direct employment to 600,000, which means that families are out shopping again. People have money for a glass of beer or two on Saturday night, and a movie; there are cricket matches to watch on Sunday. People have pretty good homes and the rents are not high; if you work you can eat three times a day. And if the great London press, which sets the tone for the nation—the Times and the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express—avoids scaring the readers and agrees heartily with the government policy, that helps to keep people calm too. The radio is also discreetly advised not to underline troublesome issues, so you never tune in to hear of danger: you tune in on news programs that are as neat and unexciting as the papers. And even the newreels are trimmed, so that bombed China and bombed Spain are avoided, because the English public is not supposed to relish such horror.

  It's all kept quiet, and you forget that across that choppy and uncomfortable Channel lies Europe, and you just think: I am in England, a fine green island, and everybody outside is a foreigner and very likely nasty, and here we'll tend to our own affairs, which means: Business as Usual.

  Besides, England hasn't been invaded for a thousand years, and there is no terror to climb back into the memory of her people. In the last war, in all four years, there were only 1,414 people killed by aerial bombardment, and only 270 tons of bombs dropped on the whole country. For your information, it is estimated now that 200 tons of bombs could be dropped per day. And the English don't go in for imagination: imagination is considered to be improper if not downright alarmist.

  There is a subway stop in London that rejoices in the name of Elephant and Castle. You buy your ticket and take a moving staircase deep down into the earth to the lowest tunnel, and wait on the platform for the train. All this time you (but only you) are thinking what sturdy bombproof cellars these subway stations make. As each stop comes, more people get out, until finally there are only poor people left. The Elephant and Castle station is in a slum packed with small dark factories: no one would go there for pleasure.

  I was looking for Blackfriars Street, and a meeting I never found. The workers of that neighborhood were, supposedly, going to get together and talk about the danger of war, and I thought it would be a relief to see some other folk as worried as I. I walked down many streets, all stony and treeless, between the two-story houses that look painfully alike. In all the windows were shabby lace curtains, and against the light you could see from time to time a man or woman silhouetted, bent over a washbowl, or stretching and yawning, ready for sleep after a hard day. Children played noisily in the streets on homemade scooters, and it was as hot as Marseilles. The wrestling hall where the meeting was held was deserted, and finally, tired of walking about this barren place under the pale night sky, I stopped in at the Friar's Snack Bar.

  It was a small dirty room with a wooden bar and a smell of fried fish, and crowded with the men from the neighborhood. They were talking of the Schmeling-Louis fight. A fat pink boy named Basil burst in and ordered soda pop and started a whole new train of thought by calling for bets on greyhound racing. “What we're interested in, Miss,” a man explained, “is the fights, a bit of dog racing and a bit of horse racing.” This man, the wit of the crowd, stated that he had done two years and fifty-four days of the last war. “I remember it,” he said. “All those bits of iron flying about, it fair gives me nightmares now.”

  “Do you know Robert Taylor, Miss?” asked a young man who had just parked his bicycle outside.

  I said I was sorry but I didn't.

  “Hey, get back to politics.” This was an errand boy talking. “I like discussing politics meself.”

  “America's a silly kind of country, ain't it?” said Basil. “Anyone can carry firearms, can't they? We read all about it in American detective magazines.”

  And then, finally, wistfully, a thin boy in a mechanic's suit said: “Is it true you kin earn $2,000 a week in America just repairing radios in your spare time . . . ?”

  But no one had said anything about a future war; no one had said anything about Spain or Austria or China; no one had wondered about the $1,715,000,000 that's going into the English rearmament program this year. No one said: what are we going to do with the guns and the planes and the tanks and the destroyers, when we get them?

  I began to think, after a time, that anxiety was a luxury belonging exclusively to politicians. At least they talked about war in the House of Commons, and for once you didn't feel that the Channel was as wide as the Atlantic; for once you heard the danger named. The Opposition, sitting on the left of that narrow wood-paneled hall, began shouting: “Where's the Prime Minister; where's the Prime Minister?” and there was anger in their voices. The galleries were jammed. Beneath the speaker's gallery was the great table where the speaker himself presides, and on the government side, Oliver Stanley had his long thin legs hiked up on the table, and farther down to the left was the handsome white head of Lloyd George and across from him, on the government side, was Winston Churchill, with the plump, witty face. Major Attlee, the leader of the Opposition, pale and thin, with a scholar's shoulders, rose to speak, and the House hushed: “All of us would do anything we can to keep this country from war . . .” “Hear! Hear!” from both sides of the room. “If the Prime Minister says he cannot protect the lives of British sailors, he'll be the first Prime Minister in one hundred years to say it. . . . The plain fact is that the Prime Minister has backed Franco to win. . . .” They were talking about the bombed British ships, but what mattered was: is this government keeping us out of war, or getting us into it, worse and deeper? The place was tight with anger. Mr. Chamberlain spoke carefully, not frankly, and suddenly from the public balconies, loud, surprising voices rose. “We're sailors,” one of them shouted, “and the Prime Minister says Franco can murder us.” “We want justice,” another screamed. Then a man called out, with the attendants holding his legs and arms and muffling his mouth: “Social Credit is the only way,” and laughter ran through the House.

  Down in the Commons’ bar, after the session, comments moved quickly among the journalists and M.P.’s. “Perhaps the government should just clean up the monuments and things and turn England into a tourist country.” “Maybe we ought to grow bulbs and have galleries full of Rembrandts and be like Holland: they say Holland was a great maritime power once.” “Did you ever see such a deplorable fizzle?” “You people just want to get us into war: you're all Reds . . .”

  Talking about the possibility of war is called “war-mongering” and not a nice thing to do. But nevertheless all England speaks of air-raid precautions. In England, you can easily prepare on a national scale against air raids, without talking or thinking about war, and without wondering where the raids will come from, when or why.

  The Home Secretary appealed for one million civilian volunteers to carry out the Air Raid Precautions plan. There are to be 600,000 A.R.P. wardens, citizens of over thirty, respected in the community, who cannot undertake active military service; their duty will be to direct the population of England and avert panic when the bombs begin to fall. These wardens are also liaison officers between all the other A.R.P. services. For instance, they must summon the A.R.P. fire brigade, which will help the regular firemen to fight incendiary bombs. (The English government seems to remember Guernica, and how it stood like a black skeleton in the Basque country after the Junkers passed over.) The wardens will also call the A.R.P. First Aid unit—250,000 doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers throughout the country—who are supposed to give immediate care to bomb victims. (But it's sorry work. When a city is bombed, houses collapse and there is little to do for the people who scream until they die. It is sometimes
even hard to decide who the dead are, because the bombs make very big and very messy explosions. It's sad work for a doctor who has spent his life trying to fit people for a healthy life.) The wardens must also send the Evacuation and Decontamination squads to the places where they are needed. These squads are not volunteers, but trained municipal servants—street sweepers, sewer inspectors, garbage collectors, city workmen—who have the job of collecting debris after bombings, washing the streets after gas attacks, propping up the gutted and collapsing houses, and digging out the bodies of the dead. (And all the time you're digging, the planes are there, and it is strange how dark a city gets even on a sunny day, when the bombs fall, and it is horrible how slowly men work when they are trying the lift the bricks and cement, the granite and wood and steel of caved-in buildings off the bodies of still-living people. It is also very sad to prop up a house, while the people who once lived in it wait in tragic bewildered silence on the pavement, wondering where they will live next.)

  England is gas-conscious. There are forty million gas masks already stored in government depots, and all over England people are being fitted with the ordinary civilian gas mask, which sells for about 75 cents and will’ be given away free in time of war. The ordinary gas mask is a small rubber affair, with isinglass over the eyes, a boxlike snout that contains the filter to keep out gas (but you can exhale tobacco smoke through the mask, which makes some people suspect that the masks are not exactly 100% safe) and a narrow face-covering to keep the mask on. ("Of course you can get burned in it by mustard gas,” said the salesman, “but then you can get burned in all of them.”)