extent too. yeah. [applause] >> [inaudible] >> thank you all very much. >> next up from this year's roosevelt reading festival, michael golay on journalist lorena hickok's reports from throughout the country during the great depression. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon, everyone. good afternoon. hello. hello, good afternoon. you're all so excited because we're nearing the home stretch. my name is bob clark, i'm the deputy director here at the roosevelt library, and welcome to the penultimate session of

the 11th annual roosevelt reading festival. for those of you who have not been in this room before, let me go over a few rules. the first is would everyone please take out their electronic devices and turn them off so that our presentation isn't interrupted today. the next is if you haven't had a chance to see our new permanent exhibits that opened just last year, come and find one of the library staff members, and we'll be amendment happy to give you a button before the end of the day. the exhibits close at 6:00, so you have plenty of time to see them after the last presentation. and finally, our friends from c-span are here filming as they often do, and we appreciate them being here and showing support for our program. because c-span is filming this session, at the question and answer period at the end of the session we would that you, please, come to the microphone and ask your question from the mic so they can be sure ask and capture the sound. so let me kind of go over the order of the day.

our speaker will speak for about 30 minutes, after which there will be about ten minutes of questions and answers, and then i will whisk him out to the new deal store where he will be happy to sign all of the books that you're going to want to rush and buy after you hear his presentation. so michael golay is the author of a number of back back to boo- number of books on american history including "the ruined land" which was a finalist for the lincoln prize, and "the tide of empire." he is co-author of a critical companion to william faulkner, a former newspaper journalist and has taught history at committeer the acadny -- exeter academy, and he is the author of the book you're here to hear about, "america 193: the great depression, lorena hickok, eleanor roosevelt and the shaping of the new world." ladies and gentlemen, michael golay. [applause] >> thank you. and thanks for turning out.

and i also want to thank this presidential library which no one interested in the roosevelts and their era could survive without. it's a fantastic resource for historians. as you've heard, i teach history at phillips exeter academy. you should know that teachers at exeter do not lecture. we have small classes around an oval table x it's a -- and it's a discussion-based system. i am not, therefore, a skilled lecturer, so this will be a bit of an experiment. much like the early days of roosevelt's new deal. [laughter] a couple of weeks ago i i was in new york city, with the history department, actually, and we toured the lower east side tenement museum. if you have a chance, do tour it.

our tour was called hard times, and it featured an italian immigrant family from the 1920s and 1930s that lived in a three-room apartment, i think they were probably 8 feet by 8, very dark even in midday, airless, pretty cheerless. the building was built in, i think, 1863. he was a cabinet maker, did fairly well until 1929, and jobs became fewer and farther between after that. the guide didn't have a lot of detail about how the family got by during these years, but i would suspect that in the early days they had some assistance from their parish church, maybe from other private charities. i know that they did get some food allowances from the city of new york because in the apartment were boxes of, that had contained cream cheese. i also noticed that there was a

radio in the apartment, and that must have been a later addition because in 1932 and 1933, the period that this book covers, if this family had applied for relief, an investigator would have come to test them for means, and that investigator would have seen the radio, regarded it as a convertible asset and had them sell it before they could be eligible for city aid. in 1931 then-president hoover asserted that government aid to the unemployed would sap americans' initiative, would turn them dependent on government. his view was that the job isless could look out for themselves -- jobless could look out for themselves with a little bit of help from their neighbors, perhaps, and from private charities. hoover went on to insist that these charities, among them the

american red cross, were adequately equipped to see the crisis out which he regarded as temporary. but most private agencies were tapped out by the second and third year of the great depression. in fact, by 1932 fully a third of private charities had shut down entirely. there was nothing to distribute. the common place phrase "hard times" is a vast understatement. in march of 1933 when roosevelt took office, 25% of the u.s. working population -- about 13 million people -- was unemployed. for one example, u.s. steel mill in homestead, pennsylvania, which had employed 5200 men in 1929 employed 424 men full time in 1932. the need overwhelmed the private agencies, and the cities and the towns were not set up either to meet it. there was no safety net to speak of in 1932, 1933.

the churches, too, had little left to give. in the coal ham let of scottsdale, pennsylvania -- western pennsylvania town -- the parish priest begged a touring government investigator for as print for his parishioners, he'd exhausted his credit at the drugstore. in new york city one and a quarter million people were wholly dependent on relief in october 1933 and another one million needed help more or less desperately and weren't getting it yet. many of these were from the stratum that jacob reese in the 1880s called "the other half," among them the italian cabinet maker that i mentioned at the start, the one who's been memorialized at the tenement museum. no one would be surprised to hear that the marginal people suffered, but one of the elements that made the great depression great was how deeply its effects were felt in the broad middle class.

long-term joblessness led to health problems, psychological despair, and sooner or later for many, it led to homelessness. and these ills, all of them, affected the middle class also. new york city in this era operated a series of municipal shelters, supplements to the hooverville encampments. there was one in central park. there's also, incidentally, a very good picture of a hoover in the museum that has been -- hooverville in the museum that has been refurbished and reopened. if you get a chance to get over there, look out for it. the shelters were places not only for the marginal. the writer, matthew josephson, described the shelters in the new republic, and i'm going to read a short passage that includes his description. he found the east 25th street

municipal shelter in the south ferry annex filled to capacity. the shelter served watery oatmeal and thin black coffee for breakfast, 20 ounces of coarse reddish-brown vegetable stew -- sometimes, though not often, with a beef in the broth -- three pieces of stale bread and black coffee for supper. the place was warm enough, almost too warm, he wrote, and filled with a nightly human stench. the men slept in shelter-issued rough cotton night shirts packed like immigrants in the steerage compartments of old steamers. truly he noteed star doneically, a nanolonger feel -- a man feel not alone. the warders turned the men out into the streets. some passed the hours in the comfort of the public library and its branches. the libraries are a godsend, one said. others shuffled from park to scare to park, and still others

enlisted in the army of panhandlers. men forged for cigars and readies carded newspapers with close attention. as the population of the municipal shelters increased, its character altered. getting a very good class of people in here nowadays, the one of the shelter officials told josephson. half of them are not bums at all. professionals too fastidious for the -- [inaudible] could seek a bed in the upmarket gold dust lodge, an abandoned flour mihm in the east river. the mill housed 2,000 men who maintained it themselves doing all the work from sweeping up to keeping the books and rotating shifts. the accommodations were spartan but clean except for the flour dust, white rather than golden, and the meals were an improvement on those at the municipal shelters; beef stew, spaghetti or beans, cod fish on

friday. the inmates were subject to less regimentation than the unfortunates on east 25th street. they could stay home during the day and read or smoke in the public rooms. the more docile among them remained for as long as five or six months. they have no fight in them, josephson said. they are reluctant to complain or make trouble for fear of being cast into the streets. my purpose with this book was to present the great depression as a lived experience. and another was to take a close look at the programs of the early new deal, the national recovery administration, public works administration and the civil works administration to name three. and to try the assets their effectiveness. it wasn't my intent, but the book also offers a sort of history of the journalism of this period. especially magazine journalism. jay cobbson as an example. and much of that of outstanding

quality. the narrative is based almost entirely on contemporary work starting with a series of reports from lorena hickok, a former journalist, to harry hopkins who headed the first national welfare agency in history, the federal emergency relief administration. hopkins sent hickok on the road in the summer of 1930, and over the following 18 months she filed a series of reports from around the country totaling hundreds of pages. she supplemented these with private letters to eleanor roosevelt, her close friend. it was eleanor roosevelt who got her the job with hopkins. those letters, by the way, they're warm, they're emotional, and they're full of detail about how americans were enduring the catastrophe. and taken together, they form an incomparable record of how ordinary americans experienced the great depression. as i noted above, i enhanced hickok's reporting with

journalist accounts, local newspaper reports from the places she visited, magazine pieces, letters, diary entries and memoirs of important writers such as edmund wilson, malcolm cowley and the aforementioned jacobson. i also saw with my own eyes a lot of the territory that hickok covered. i recreated several of her trips, following her routes as closely as i could. the west virginia/kentucky coal country, upstate new york, northern and the middle border region -- iowa, minnesota, the dakotas. i was struck by how much remained physically from the 1930s. small town main streets haven't changed a lot, especially in the dakotas. and the gaunt, abandoned farmhouses along the back roads are a poignant reminder of the calamitous 1930s. change may be coming, though. in the times the other day, i read an article about the most desirable states for retirees looking to resettle.

north and south dakota were two of the top five. [laughter] i can see this surprises you as much as it surprised me. i'm not sure what it is. maybe the oil boom in north dakota. i think it was the same article. north dakota produces a million barrels of oil a day now. in any case, in the 1930s the dakotas were among the hardest-hit places in the united states. lives were barren, grim and deprived. hickok suggested to a friend that mothers could frighten their children with mere mention of, "do as i say, or i'll send you to dakota." [laughter] she also alluded to the fact that roosevelt might need to exercise dictatorial powers. if the president ever does become dictator, she wrote to hopkins, he can label this country out here liberia and send all his exiles here. a more hopeless place, i never saw. she included a recipe for

russian thistle soup in the book, in one of her reports. to give you -- it's tumble weed. to give you something -- and it's for real. the recipe actually worked, i guess. but to give you something of the flavor of the depression in the dakotas, i'll readed a short passage from -- read a short passage from the book. west of bismarck a dirt road, rutted and barely passable, led over smooth, rounded hills where hickok found a dozen men waiting for a word with the morton county relief agency. paintless and frail looking, the church stood alone in the vast, wind-scoured prairie. the men near the entrance, their crops destroyed by ferocious storms in june and july. with winter coming on, they were desperate for help. on the way to this bleak rendezvous, hickok passed

withered and stunted cornfields the hail had beaten into the ground. only one or two of the men wore overcoats. the others shivered in thin, shabby denim. cotton denim doesn't keep out the wind very well, she observed. when she returned to the car, it was full of men seeking warmth. they had crawled in and rolled up the windows. the gaunt, weather-beaten men outside the church once were prosperous farmers. most owned substantial holdings, at least 640 acres. a 640-acre farm at $10 an acre, which is about what land is worth here about these days, means only $6400 worth of land, hickok calculated. if immediate conditions were desperate, long-term prospects struck her as hopeless. the region appeared to be in the process of drying up and becoming what the explorer john wesley powell had called it a half century ago, a desert unsuitable for intentive cultivation. the farmers kept lots of stock,

30-40 head of cattle, a dozen horses, some sheep, hogs and chickens, but the animals were in pit i can't believe position. the cows had gone dry, and the hens weren't laying. some farmers had tried feeding the grazing animals russian thistle. they might as well have eaten barbed wire. many animals would die of hunger or exposure over the winter. the men's families weren't much better off. they needed everything, especially warm clothing. everything i own i have on my back one farmer told the investigator. he wore two pairs of overalls and two ragged den anymore jackets -- denim jackets. men had mortgaged their animals and land up to the limit. all were in arrears with taxes. there was no money left for clothes. i hadn't realized how important coal remains in the u.s. energy

picture until i traveled through west virginia and into kentucky for research on this book. coal remains an environmental question. when president obama issued new standards for coal burning a couple of weeks ago, the outcry was immediate. it was a bipartisan condemnation from congressmen and senators from both states. this is a passage from the chapter entitled "coal country." wood roe mosley, a morgan county miner, gestured toward a hillside. you ought to go up there, he told an interviewer in 1988. it looks good from our way, where you see. it looks good. but see what you see on the other side. there ain't nothing there. they anticipate even pushed no -- ain't even pushed no dirt over where they got the coal. mining companies efficiently

exploit the rich coal seams lying near the surface. the miners put explosives to what they call the overburden, layers of soil and rock that cover the seams. earth-moving machines lop up the summits and dump the spoil in the upper reaches of the valleys. this type of strip mining is concentrated this southern west virginia and northeastern kentucky, and it alters the landscape in a drastic and shocking way. the ridge and valley system known as pine mountain stretches north to the southwest for nearly a hundred miles, angling through two counties in kentucky. the scene of bitter mine wars in the early 1930s. u.s. 119 ascends the ridge via long s curves to 360-degree rim to the view of the world. ..

>> when she reached coal county she found an area that was desperate. west virginia, west of

morgantown was her first stop. he encountered an aggressive united mind worker campaign to organize the coal men. here is something of what she found in west virginia: after a romantic landscape, deep wooded valleys, hills, twilight till mid morning. the days drew in early and the sun dropped behind the western ridges. the state capital had shops and violence, repiesal and vigilante justice. the roads are beautiful but i am starting to hate them. they went about the business of living in scarcity and brutality

she had never seen. child slavery flourished. they were astonished with the docile attitude most americans accepted the great depression. the radicals were outraged. there were lots of strikes, serious unrest in the country side, but very little of what might be called organized revolutionary agitation. much of the violence was spontaneous. as malcolm observed there were

no riots unless the police started them. perhaps the most serious challenge happened in the country. for one example, an operation bombed and shoted and hijacked. nelson covered with for the nee republic. according to wilson, they were dismissed as communist inspired and some not natives or farmers spilling milk, poisoning wells and shooting out delivery trucks. wilson traveled the same roads and sometimes referred to himself as a socialist in the cultural critic.

but he worked hard to surprise him. wilson spent family time in lewis county and a dozen miles up route 120 and knew the country people there all of his life. when we came up from the city to investigate, they told them they were not okay with being caused communist. he written about bitter strikes in lawrence, massachusetts and investigated labor conditions in henry ford's detroit. i have never seen such feeling in any industrial strike he wrote. the towns are acustomed to having their living standards taken away and then when they rebel the police suppress them. they are not surprised by bullets and clubbed. upstate new york residents had

not been clubbed yet. wilson reported an august 1 clash outside as a police riot. the farmers gathered at mid morning to block the road leading to the dairy plant. they moved their cars along the pickets. the crowd made fun of the troopers who went back to their cars for gas masks and steel helm helmets. a moment later the laughter died in their throats. the troopers shot gas bombs and clubbed them, old and young and men and women alike, they pursued people in the fields and beat them over the head. they fired tear gas and called them sons of bitches and wraps. they concluded they must have

been drunk later on because they other explanation accounted for the trooper's behavior. while the insurgeon filled out, milk prices were far below the cost of production and farmers started shooting their cows it was reported. even today, it is difficult to measure the effects of the programs of the deal. did fdr's programs make things better? how much? the presidents critics were legion on the right and left. there is nothing the new deal did so far that could not have been done better by an earthquake it was said. and to many on the right roosevelt was simply a demon. my only view is that the

recovery act did little toward recovery and relief. it was struck down as unconstitutional in 1935 by the supreme court and fdr implemented the ruling. pwa never spent enough fast enough to put a dent in unemployment. the british economist advised him to spend on public works and nothing else matters in comparison with this. i don't blame him for being cautious but the risk of speed must be stressed. the president took canes' advice up to the point when he established the civil works administration in the 1933. this was one program that worked. at least during the four months

fdr permitted it to live. it put hundreds of thousands of people to work and they brought home cash wages with many handling money for the first time in years. the proceeds for a 40 hour week was 43 cents an hour. today was the first payday in the state of iowa reported. 5,000 men who went to work with picks and wheelbarrows and shovels showed up and got paid. but fdr dreaded budget deficits as much as he feared jobless. he shutdown the program but the jobs were indispensable. at its peek in 1938, the pwa

employed 3 million people. fdr was a master of impremploi improvisation. i will close with something that talks about the legacy of the organization. a woman in charles city, iowa used part of her husband's first pwa paycheck -- he had been out of work for two years -- to buy a dozen oranges. i had not tasted any in so long i forgot what they were like. then she met a nebraska man who was out of work and allowed his teenager dollar to ordered a high school ring priced $4.64.

i bought that ring he confessed. it was explained people got an erroneous impression of how fast the deal was going to move and this man felt sure he would have a job by now. he could only find a couple temporary weeks of work toward the end of summer. the job ended and he figured to be back on relief. most of time while she has been growing up i have been out of work and it has been you cannot have this or that because i cannot afford it. he took a procedureal risk and bought the ring. the tale ended happily. the girl got the bubble, the director escaped the trouble and he was told to turn up at a job site on monday morning. thank you and i am happy to take questions. [applause]

>> you have been in the academy 14 years with the most exclusive private school in the world and i doubt many of the children, boys and girls in your class, could relate to what you are writing about in your book. i am curious to know how you interacted with them and what their response was? >> i assigned a chapter for my u.s. history winter term class that covers the new deal. the students come from all over the place and all sorts of backgrounds. i don't set the tuition but it is high. and we also have a lot of people

on financial aid. it is over 40%. so to a degree it is a mare talk. the students by and large are fairly conservative and highly achieved students and think if they can succeed you can to. i think a lot of schools cut against that feeling. there are times when people through no fault of their own need a hand. i think the students come to a realization of that as they go through the u.s. history program.

>> my name is patsy, i am a hyde park native. i was a neighbor of hillcox. i read your book and thought it was great to see how this person that lived diagonal across the street from me and was a friend of eleanor roosevelt and what she did to record the history for the country. she went from maine, to texas to california to the dakotas and what she accidently documented for history. and i just wanted you to know that at one time we took a whole bus load of people here from hyde park to arthurdale, west virginia to see the coal mining area and see what she and

eleanor roosevelt accomplished. i still keep in touch with the executive director at acting arthur dale today. it started with 50 homes and now has 150. i would suggest everybody buy this book. go to arthurdale. and the other thing i wanted to tell you is i went to a play in kingston saefshl several years ago. it was a one-woman show about the life of her. i was impressed by the play and then when i came back i thought i have never finished dorris faber's book on the like of her. but it said her remains were handled by this funeral home and

i wonder where she is buried. i called her three times and they finally got back with me. they said by new york state law they were obligated to keep her ashes for 2 years. they kept them 20 years and no one claimed then. so they are buried in an unmarked grave in the ryan back cemetery and i thought this is terrible. this is eleanor roosevelt's friend. the most famous female writer during the roosevelt administration for the associated press. i brought it to the attention of the people in kingston that put on the play. we had a fundraiser at beakman arms and several people came. her biographers and other people and we raised enough money to put in a blue stone bench, a tree, and a plaque in the cemetery in memory of lorana

hicock. thank you. [applause]. >> a couple comments. hickok -- >> she drove herself on most of the trips. including a couple cross country trips. driving was different then than now. i tried to re-create the journey she made on the much-improved roads. she was a terrific reporter. i drudged up some of her associated press dispatches. she was good. there was one where she was assigned to cover the passage of hardings -- the train with warren g hardings remains. and the reports dashed off at night are models of this kind of reporting. they are well-worth reading in

their own right. i quoted them in bits and pieces but the reports entire are well worth the read also. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. >> now our final program from this year's roosevelt reading festival. james tobin looks at franklin roosevelt's life with polio. >> good afternoon. i am the director of the franklin roosevelt library and museum. it is my pleasure to welcome you to the key note address of