I try not to think too much on things – just try to stay above water and not dwell too much. But I have a little more time on my hands these days since they’ve shortened my schedule at South Works If I thought it was to share the burden among everybody at the steel mill it would sit all right with me, but it’s obvious that the boss is giving special treatment based on skin color. Aren’t we all in this together?

I voted for President Roosevelt. For the first time in my life, no one kept me from the polls with fake taxes, impossible tests or beatings. I guess I thought the vote would mean something, but here I am on a three-day work week, sitting in my crumbling apartment on the South Side of Chicago, and I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst. My wife and daughters aren’t home. The girls are in school, and Susan is looking for housework. They can’t see me just sitting here, listening to the radio. So many celebrations around me, but I just can’t help thinking:

I left my home in Mississippi for this?

Daddy says I have to turn down the Gramophone. But doesn’t this make you want to dance? I want to be a The Rockettes, we went to go see them a few Christmases ago, but Mommy says I should just forget about them. But I don’t want to! They’re more fun to remember than anything SHE wants me to think about right now. SHE wants me to think about Peter and Eric all the time like she does, or to watch over Kurt and John. But there’s so much else to see, right here in New York! Like the dancing on Election Day.  She said it didn’t matter, because Peter and Eric and Daddy still have no work. My brothers have been out of school for a year now, trying to find work. Gracie Adler asked me at school yesterday why they don’t just stay at home like Daddy if no one is hiring anyway. Daddy can’t find work after the Saloon closed and didn’t need him there. I think Gracie’s right, because Peter told me a secret that he and Eric are thinking of sneaking onto a train and going far away so they’re not a burden anymore. I promised not to tell, but I really don’t want them to go.

…..Daddy let me turn up the radio, but only because they’ve stopped playing music and now President Roosevelt is speaking –

“We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity, with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values, with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike.”

Mommy’s crying again. I am too, but because “stern performance of duty” makes me think President Roosevelt is going to force me to do more chores.

Over the past few years my husband, Al’s, barber shop has become the congregating place where the local unemployed men spend their days shooting the breeze when not looking for work. It keeps them out of the house (and out of their wife’s hair!) Even in this economy men still need haircuts and shaves, so initially we were not greatly affected by this depression. But then Al started to ask the fellas to pay up their tabs and many simply didn’t have the money A few weeks ago, money had gotten so tight for us that Al was forced to close up the shop and move his business into our kitchen. Now he just sits all day reading the paper most of the time, cutting a few men’s hair, as I cook and clean around him. I can see that he is worrying about paying our bills and providing enough to put food on the table. Although I have not consulted him, I have begun to look for jobs to supplement his income. I know that if the shop can open up again, he will be much happier. I can’t stand to see him so dejected.

Al's Barber Shop

I worked as a teacher before I married Al, but that is certainly not an option for me now. They refuse to employ married women in most school districts, and now with the unemployment rate at nearly 25% it would really be impossible for me to get a teaching job. Besides, I’ve heard that in some places teachers have been working for months without any compensation. I’m trying to find clerical or factory work. My neighbor Ann has been working in various clerical jobs for almost two years. Often times she will work for a few weeks, get laid off and find another jobs a few weeks after that, which is common.

Today in his inaugural address, our new president, Franklin Roosevelt stated that “This nation is asking for action, and action now.” He’s sure right; we need work so that we can continue to manage to put food on the table and a roof over our head. I sure hope that “action now” means NOW and not in a few months, because we have to pay the bills NOW and eat NOW!

I’m a long way from home, now. Working for Secretary Perkins is going to be quite the change from being a social worker back in Indianapolis. I got the call that the office of the President could use a woman with my capabilities within the Public Employment Bureau. Imagine my surprise! The Labor department is going to be a meaningful place with Roosevelt taking office. Part of my job will be to cooperate on interdepartmental initiatives and communicate policy properly. Although, based on the speech happening behind me, the President will be quite effective at communicating on his own. Can you hear that?

I was not a part of his Brain Trust or even the New York governor’s office, which means I still do not know what to expect. Other colleagues with a social worker background have been speculating that the President’s hatred of the Dole is going to keep us from helping the poor the way we would like to. Maybe I am naive, as some of the men in the office have already started to insist, but I think it is our job to show him that these times call for more than what governments have offered in the past. I can see that in him.

But enough about that – It’s time to celebrate, then I will get to work!

We have come a long way from Thomas Jefferson’s concept of the idealized yeoman farmer. It is almost laughable to think a small, independent farmer could survive, let alone thrive today. Industrialization and nation building dramatically impacted farming in America. As people moved westward in the mid to late 19th century, fulfilling the country’s quest for manifest destiny, the Great Plains were opened up for homesteading. Throughout the center of the country, homesteaders cultivated acres upon acres of rich farmland by busting up the sod that covered the Plains as fast as they could.

Industrialization brought new machines and methods to increase farming efficiency and production of crops, which we farmers paid for by taking out mortgages. Increasingly, the once independent American farmers developed dependent relationships with numerous banks, suppliers, and middle men to get their products to the market, an unstable industrial economy, and the national and international markets themselves.

The whole system of agriculture that developed fundamentally clashes with our ideals of independence and control and we want a new approach to agricultural policy that could give us that power back. We want higher prices, cheaper credit and minimum governmental interference, which ultimately resulted in an us against them mentality in which we farmers tried to either organize in cooperatives or win political backing for legislative/regulatory controls to alter the marketplace.

The crash in ’29 was not the beginning of the Depression for us, since the early 20s, following the Great War we have been struggling with drought, surplus and devastatingly low prices for our crops. Just due to the nature of farming, being at the mercy of the weather and the non-agricultural economy, we are extremely vulnerable. It also didn’t help that around the turn of the century in what might be considered a “golden age of American agriculture” we tripled the output of goods. Too much sod was busted and land cultivated, so now there is too much product. But there is a new president in office today and I’m optimistic things will change; I’m a farmer after all, it’s in our nature. How else could we survive the inherent ups and downs of farming?

The immortal words of Dick Burnett (1913):

I am a man of constant sorrow,
I’ve seen trouble all my day.
I bid farewell to old [Tennessee],
The place where I was born and raised.
(The place where he was born and raised )

For six long years I’ve been in trouble,
No pleasures here on earth I found.
For in this world I’m bound to ramble,
I have no friends to help me now.
(He has no friends to help him now)…

Like many people out there, I’ve been accustomed to hardships my whole life. I was born and raised in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, a beautiful place where I grew up hunting, fishing, farming and learning the family logging trade. Many people in this region do not have cars or electricity and get by as by maintaining small farms for themselves and through the trading of goods and services. Since the crash in ’29 the timber and coal industries have suffered greatly. Like most of the other older lumberjacks, I was laid off from my family’s logging company, and I’ve tried to turn to farming full time now to provide for my family. But since the Great Drought a few years back, in ’30 and ’31, the crops are not growing and vegetable gardens are shriveling up under the hot, unrelenting sun.

I can’t stand the thought of not being able to provide for my family and my wife sought some assistance from the local Red Cross chapter, only to be turned away. This is a small community and word travels fast, so I’ve learned that the local businessmen, who still have some money to throw around in these hard times are trying to curb the amount of assistance by local relief organizations in the hope it will force families to migrate elsewhere. But as I said, I’m accustomed to hardships, they build character and this is my home, so my family is not going anywhere!

I want to bring aid to the people directly, that is where my talents are best used. Instead, my first task is to help prepare speeches about the banks. The President has decided to declare a Bank Holiday. According to some of the transition team members,before he took office the President had been pressuring President Hoover to close the banks until they could be back on solid footing, to prevent the runs on the banks that we have been watching fearfully for too long.
Banking is not my area of expertise, so I sought out staff from the Treasury Department, from Woodin’s inner circle. The previous administration, I learned, had been more prepared for this step than I thought, since it the President’s Proclamation actually first read: “I Herbert Hoover, President of the United States of America.”
Not everything was just for the average citizens who put their money and trust in their local banks. They wanted to keep bank investors from taking out money in the form of gold, which would deplete the gold reserves.
It sounds like a powerful first step, but I can’t help but think that the people who need our help will only stop losing money, they won’t get anything back, yet. If the President can use his power to rearrange banks for investors like a checkerboard, what else can we get him to do?

At approximately 6 PM last night just as were sitting down to dinner the ground started shaking violently. We all scurried under the dinning room table to wait the earthquake out as we heard glass shattering and things falling all around us. When it was all over, we emerged to find our house in shambles. Many things on shelves had fallen off or been knocked over, pictures fell off the wall, our bookcases in the living room had toppled over, smashing our coffee table and there was glass everywhere from the broken china, windows, and picture frames. Thankfully, there was no major structural damage that we can see. At least two houses on our block will need to be completely demolished and a small fire broke out a few blocks away, but it was quickly contained, thank goodness. I remember seeing pictures of San Francisco burning after the Great Earthquake of 1906 and feared that would happen here too.

Our neighborhood in Pasadena after the earthquake

We all slept outside on the back patio last night because my children are afraid to be in the house or alone in their rooms since there have been a few sporadic aftershocks, and frankly I’m scared too. While I am thankful we did not lose our home, I have no idea how we are going to afford to pay for the repairs needed. We have just a little bit of savings we were able to withdraw during the recent run on the bank. Al and I decided it was safer to keep the money under our mattress rather than potentially lose it all if it were in the bank, but in light of the earthquake that destroyed so many homes, I don’t think any location is safe. Besides the banks have been closed since March 6^th, due to the nationwide Bank Holiday and who knows when they are going to open.

Al and I used to go dancing at Ray's all the time when we were dating

It looks like the children will be out of school for while since their elementary school, as well as several in our area, was severely damaged. People are saying that all of the Los Angeles area schools will have to be rebuilt with more stringent building codes because they sustained some of the most damage. It was estimated that the death toll would have been far more catastrophic if the earthquake had happened a few hours earlier while the children were still in school. I’m just happy our family is alright.

In light of the recent earthquake that has nearly crippled our area, causing thousands of dollars in damage to homes and businesses, it was very nice to hear the strong and reassuring voice of our new president, Franklin Roosevelt. Tonight our whole neighborhood gathered at the fire station, to listen to Mr. Roosevelt’s radio address to the country since the fire trucks are the only vehicles with radios in them around here. The president discussed the banking crisis, explaining what he and the government were doing to fix the problems.

After listening to him say how bad it was for the banking system to hoard money and certifying the legitimacy of the banks that are slowly reopening, Al said on the way home we should do our part to help the economy and put our savings back into the bank when it opens. I am so grateful my whole family is safe, but I am deeply concerned what the damage from this earthquake in the midst of this depression could mean for us and our community. I need a job now more than ever.

The rain has made everything so dreary that I thought it would be nice to go outside today. I usually love to walk along 86th Street, especially after being cooped up inside for so long. Daddy took the subway train downtown and we kept walking without him. I kept wondering where he went, but we passed by Kleine Konditorei and I wanted a pastry. The little ones did too, but Mommy made them stop crying and walk faster. She wouldn’t say where Daddy went, where we were going, or why she wasn’t as happy as everybody else that the bank on the corner just reopened. When we stopped at church, at first I didn’t understand. It wasn’t a holiday, it wasn’t even a Sunday! We weren’t the only ones outside, and instead of going to play in the park I had to wait in a line.
A line for food. We were in line for everyone to see.
Kurt and John were playing hide-and-seek between the people. I wished I could hide too. All of a sudden the St. Mark’s doors opened and some of the workers came up to us, saying, “there’s no more”. One woman gave Kurt and John some leftover rolls and told us to try again in a few days.
It turns out Daddy had been downtown waiting in line too:
I hate waiting.