In the Eye of the Great Depression: New Deal Reporters and the Agony of the American People.

Abstract

late 1933 and early 1934, Harry Hopkins, director of infant Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), dispatched an elite corps of journalists and authors, including Bruce McClure and Lorena Hickok, obtain a grass-roots portrait of Depression-wracked America. His marching orders Hickok were to go out around country and look this thing over.... Tell me what you see and hear.... All of it. She and her compatriots spent two years in different regions of country, talking with preachers, teachers, civic leaders, businessmen, and the small fry John Citizen, monitoring mood of a nation battered by natural and economic disaster. They found downside of American dream: flophouses overflowing with tenants who once had been sturdy middle-class citizens, aid administration offices awash in incompetence and corruption, and, beneath it all, a permanent underclass of illiterate, mentally ill, and aged. Untrained in sociology or economics, reporters described their impressions in passionate and graphic terms that helped move Roosevelt administration implement work programs of New Deal. Bauman and Coode reveal another dark side of 1930s America, one that is evident in words of writers themselves: racial and class prejudice. Comfortably middle-class, mostly from traditional East Coast backgrounds, Hopkins's reporters reflected prevalent beliefs concerning deserving and undeserving poor beliefs that would influence scope of such New Deal ventures as 1935 Social Security Law. Author Marth Gellhorn, repulsed by pattern of inbreeding and degeneration she observed among white trash families of South Carolina, suggested a two-pronged aid program of education and eugenics. In Eye of Great Depression objectively portrays a period of American history that is too often romanticized as a time when a combination of inspired leadership and pioneer resilience pulled nation through a great test of its mettle.