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?

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!

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.

They say that desperate times call for desperate measures, so how can anyone be very surprised at the actions of the Farmer’s Holiday Associations? Since 1930 they have been springing up throughout the Plains states, calling for farmers to keep their products off the market in hopes that the prices of the products will rise due to scarcity. We have mortgages to pay and so many of us lost any savings when the banks crashed so it has been necessary for us to try to come up with our own solutions. But these associations simply have not done enough, so a group of us have decided to start what is being called a “Committee for Action” right here in Newman Grove, NE. We use intimidation and force, if necessary, to stop the foreclosures and auctions of nearby farms.

Today our Committee for Action succeeded in saving Hugh Peterson’s farm. Late last night Hugh showed up on my doorstep greatly distraught and hoping the Committee could help him out. I could see it was difficult for him to swallow his pride and ask for assistance, but his only real alternative was to do nothing and lose everything. We all knew he was in trouble, so I was ready to send the word out, even at that late hour.

At the Peterson's farm - mostly Committee for Action men

A group of about a dozen of us showed up at the auction, and in speaking with the bank agent I made it abundantly that no real auction would be going on if he wanted to make it home safely to his family tonight. I don’t make idle threats and I could tell by the fear in his eyes he knew that. By the time the auction commenced three other Committees for Action from nearby communities had joined us to ensure this auction went as we planned it. On a $540 mortgage the property and equipment went for $5.46 and we transferred the ownership immediately to the Petersons.

In three days I will be eleven years old. When I turned six, we went to the Plaza Hotel. Mommy and Daddy saved up for a long time to do that. Then we went on a carriage ride through the park, and I got a pair of beautiful ballet slippers.
I outgrew the slippers almost right away. We haven’t been able to buy anything since. This year, all I want is a cake big enough so everyone in the family can have a big slice. And Gracie can come over and have one too.
(That’s not true. Here is what I really want:

There’s no money for new toys right now. Mommy says maybe soon, when President Roosevelt finishes his New Deal and the Banks have been back from their vacation for longer. I don’t know why if our Bank takes a trip it helps me get a Little Orphan Annie doll, but now that’s what I’m praying for.)

The news around town is that our President is trying to get a bill through Congress that would establish a project in Muscle Shoals, AL to fix up the land, plant trees, absorb marginal land, and provide flood control—essentially fix what we have destroyed through mining and deforestation (I guess I’m guilty of that last one.) They’re calling it the “Tennessee Valley Authority” a pretty fancy name for such a small project. Is this going to mean more projects throughout the Tennessee Valley? I sure hope it does. They are going to need local workers to get all that done and while I may be blind in one eye and have a few less fingers, I can still swing an ax or wield a shovel. I need to find some work, I’m going a little crazy being stuck at home with a farm that won’t grow anything. My wife and daughters have taken up making these mock handicrafts that are sold around the country as “authentic mountain crafts.” It’s their work that is putting food on our table, but they shouldn’t be doing that, it’s my job.

This is an aerial view of the Muscle Shoals area

After a long day of toiling in the fields and keeping up with the chores I like to relax by sitting out on the porch and whittle little figurines for the kids. I’ve become pretty adept at it even without a few of my fingers. My wife is always busy knitting or quilting in the evening. It is funny that she works all day making these fake “authentic mountain crafts” then we both spend our evenings making real “mountain crafts”! Well, I guess we need to do what we can if we are going to make it through this depression!

I’m feeling a little calmer today. I guess I have a little of what you would call, perspective. Susan brought home last night’s edition of the Defender that she was reading on the El. The courts may not be able to protect a group of boys in Scottsboro, Alabama. They might be lynched for looking the wrong way at a white girl.

That is what I left behind in the South. Like my father and his father before him, we were tired of being rural country boys sharecropping other people’s land for next to nothing and bringing home even less to show for it. And on top of it all, having to fear robes and burning crosses when night would come.
We moved to Chicago when Susan and I married. Jeaneatte and Anne-Marie never saw Mississippi. Things may not be great, but they will never have to see what I have seen. But I tell them stories of their grandfather, freed at the end of the War, who lived the toughest life of anyone I know. Yes, it’s true that Binga State Bank has been closed for three years, so that’s how long it’s been since we’ve seen our savings. We’ve traded one set of worries for another, but I look at the children in these pictures of the South and think, there but for the grace of God…