Hard Times (64 page)

One man I had known lived in New Rochelle. Proud of his nice family, his wife and three children. He had been a treasurer in the theater, which housed a play I had managed in 1926. He was very worldly, knew everything—that wonderful kind of knowledge you often find in people of the theater. A completely capable man.

It was in 1931 that I ran into him on the street. After I had passed him, I realized who it was. I turned and ran after him. He had averted his eyes as he went by me. I grabbed hold of him. There was a deadness in his eyes. He just muttered: Good to see you. He didn’t want to talk to me. I followed him and made him come in with me and sit down.

He told me that his wife had kicked him out. His children had had such contempt for him ’cause he couldn’t pay the rent, he just had to leave, to get out of the house. He lived in perpetual shame. This was, to me, the most cruel thing of the Depression. Almost worse than not having food. Accepting the idea that you were just no good. No matter what you’d been before.

The Depression didn’t affect me financially. On the contrary. I was successful almost the moment things crashed. But it did affect me in everything I saw. Making money while all this was going on.

I co-produced a play in October, 1929. It opened at the Bijou Theater. It wasn’t a very good play. I stood across the street, alongside the old Astor Hotel, and watched people going into the theater. I wondered what was the matter with them. They looked so down, so silent, sullen. How could they have heard of the play already? It wasn’t until the next day,
when I got the papers for the reviews, that I realized the stock market crashed. The play closed quickly, but I remember the evening very well.

It wasn’t really until well into 1930 that it became visible. The theater, for some reason, kept on going much as it had been. It was a slower descent. Plays were still being produced, great numbers of them, people were working.

Later in the year, I produced and directed
Grand Hotel.
It was surprisingly successful for me, it being my first time as a director. All of a sudden, a man whose pockets had been empty for years, I was making $7,000 a week. Yet the country’s slide had begun.

I became very conscious of the effects of the Depression, of the yellowing that seemed to take place on the streets of Broadway, of the stores that were closed, of the shops that had been turned into one or another kind of cheap food places, of shops which had gone bankrupt and were being turned into little gaming parlors with automatic machines.

Broadway was still alive every night, crowded with people as it had always been. But there was a change. Their clothes were shabbier, they stood around more, they walked aimlessly up and down the streets, rather than going somewhere. And those long lines of silent men, accepting the coffee and doughnuts and moving away…. It was disturbing to me. Here I was, making money and what did I do about it?

I’ve always remarked at the ability of people to forget. I think even people who were enveloped in its greatest horrors have forgotten, emotionally forgotten. The memory of pain is extraordinarily evanescent. I wonder if the psychological scars are really visible. I know many people who’ve lived through it, my contemporaries. I wonder if they remember the suffering and agony and the shame they went through. I really don’t know.

 

 

Never, never. I’ve brought it up sometimes, but I don’t find it a subject anybody is interested in. I don’t think it’s something they want to evade. It’s just a bellyache that’s passed. They’re just not interested in discussing it.

It’s fear, I suppose. A man is scared of his job, scared someone might cut in, scared of what happens on the street. The fear in people of great means and in people of small means. Were a Depression to come again, 1 fear we could have a Fascist state.

POSTSCRIPT:
“Every time I go over to Central Park, I walk into the Children’s Zoo. This was built during the Depression by WPA workers. It’s an absolutely lovely place. I go into the Park often. And I cannot help remembering
—
look, this came out of the Depression. Because men were out of work, because they were given a way to earn money, good things were created.”

 

IN ’33, I’d just been hired as a social worker by the United Charities. Social work at that time was beginning to get psychiatric. I found this absolutely obnoxious. I got taken by some of my clients in a way that made me keenly aware of how stupid were some of our approaches. The irrelevance of the kind of goodies we were handing out. It was the psychiatric approach. Sit, be passive, and let your client tell you what’s wrong. It was my first contact with poverty. I found out the hard way.

I saw the impact on one family. There were nine children and two parents living in three rooms. I found them a great, big, sunny apartment, with enough bedrooms for a decent sleeping arrangement. And a dining room table for the first time. And enough chairs for the first time. I saw the magic that house performed. The family bloomed. I learned my first lesson about the meaning of a house. But that wasn’t the whole story. This is my point.

There was a drunken father and a tough little German wife, toothless. I’ll always remember that. The children had every ailment in the book. The twelve-year-old boy was a truant because he had to wear his sister’s shoes. He was very proud, the only possessor of a toothbrush in the whole family.

I remember the girl I thought was feeble-minded. She changed completely
when they moved into the new house. I couldn’t quite understand it. Her mother confessed to me that she used some of the food budget to get this little girl a permanent. She was scared to death I was gonna scold her. But that was one of the things that helped this girl out of her condition. She found a job.

In that three-room apartment, when the father came home drunk, he beat up his wife. The girl was right there, next to it. It obviously had an effect on her. In the new place, when the father wanted to beat up his wife, the boys would put him in the back bedroom and lock the door. So there was no more of this savageness near the girl. These things happened just by the virtue of
room
. But there was the quality of the mother, too. She was one of the best social workers I ever knew.

She
made the house work its full magic. When the other girl, the sixteen-year-old, started to date, there was a front parlor for her to sit in. There was a plant, there was a sofa. I had kept this room bare. She filled it. The mother had the girl buy a pink electric light bulb, so it looked pretty when she had a date. That’s what I call social work. (Laughs.)

In a way, this shows a falsity of the New Deal concept: All you need is a good, sanitary house. The person herself had ideas.

In 1937, the United States Housing Act was passed. The concept was a good one, different from those sterile words. We built quite beautiful projects throughout the country. The standards of the Federal Administration were high. But it never occurred to anybody that the people might make their own decisions about playgrounds, housing design or management policies. So the institutions became more and more institutionalized, while we took in more and more deprived people. In many cases, we tried to pick the nicer of the deprived and avoid the less-nice. We had absolutely no insight …

Our legislation is still not phrased in concepts which work today: that sometimes these people have awfully good ideas, better than ours. We’re just beginning to learn. Tenants have a right to make their own decisions.

In the early Forties, we ran out of ’37 money. By that time, austerity had set in. The new policy seemed to be: Because public housing was for poor people, it ought to look poor. There was a great resentment if it looked nice. That was the beginning of the sterile, barracks-like housing projects.

It had a multiple effect. We housed fewer and fewer people who benefited by the house alone. We found that housing itself was not enough for people who were really defeated. So the rules of the New Deal era aren’t good enough today. ’Cause at best we were awfully kind, benevolent Lady Bountifuls. And, boy, that doesn’t work these days.

“Project people” was a term of pride back in ‘37 and ’38. Incredible pride. Our problem was preventing the tenants from becoming snobbish
about their belongings. I had to get it clear to them that the children across the street had a right to use their playground. There wasn’t any other around.

I can remember a young woman who moved into Jane Addams.
¹⁶⁶
She got married about the time we planned to build the project. From the day she saw the houses go up, she wanted to move in. She got pregnant and bought new furniture to store in the barn where she was living at the time. When she moved in with her new baby and new furniture, she was the proudest woman in the world.

I remember Mrs. Pacelli. She said, “I never used to talk to my neighbors when I lived in the slums. But here we’ve all been selected.” There was a sense of aristocracy which was very funny. It’s quite the opposite today.

There were lots of unsystematized, uninstitutionalized, good native works. After two babies died of whooping cough, a group of women in the project volunteered to find out about preventives. They knocked on all the doors, so that all youngsters under six got whooping cough inoculations. They had so many creative ideas.

This was in spite of us. And we had a perfectly good staff. Nothing wrong with them. We simply had no idea of the independence, the role of citizens….

It remained that way until ’49. Then we had to purge. The eviction of high income families, God bless us. The average income for the Addams families was $1,027. When their incomes reached over $1,250, they were evicted. It was a vicious, dirty thing to do. All over the country, I meet people who say: I was evicted from the project and moved into very inferior housing.

Fights over the selection of sites didn’t exist in those days. It was a honeymoon, ten years of pure honeymoon. The only limitation on our capacity to produce was our brains. We didn’t know how to foster the idea that these people could think for themselves.

By and large, they were two-parent families. Most of them were middle-class oriented, caught in the Depression. A large percentage were WPA families. They were people who were naturally mobile. They sought out a house because it was a good house.

We had a pitiful percentage of Negroes. The sites for the early projects were vacant lands in white areas. It was the official Ickes policy that you did not change the complexion of a neighborhood. Race relations advisers, good people, didn’t go any further.

We put twenty-four Negroes on single, segregated stairwells. Then came the turnover in white families, but none among the Negro occupants. We
promptly broke up the segregated stairwells and had a steady increase of Negro intake. It was not until the veteran’s program in the late Forties that we really adopted an integrated policy.
¹⁶⁷

There followed a descending pattern. The poorest people were heading that way by virtue of relocation—urban renewal. If they didn’t know what to do with a family, they’d send them to a project. So there was a crash input of people on welfare and broken families. The feeling of the “project people” changed. It wasn’t a question of their right any more. I can still hear the voice of one woman. In a bored tone, she was saying, “I got me a project. If I can’t get anything else, I’ll move in.” At that moment, I knew most clearly our families no longer felt as they used to.

It was no longer a step up. It was a place where you were investigated. Private habits were never investigated in the old days. Because investigators felt they were being rooked by welfare families, the counting began of toothbrushes, birth certificates and sleeping arrangements. The institution of public housing fossilized, stiffened.

If you’re the female head of a household and you don’t have an identifiable father of all the children, you’re really up against it. Welfare has broken up families because of the man-in-the-house rule. It’s venal. The damage we’ve done to human beings is incredible. Today, we don’t build homes, we build institutions.

The New Deal was an enormous step. It was a leap forward. The Government assumed a responsibility toward subsidized housing. But we didn’t realize that the house is not enough. There’s the person. In ignoring his possibilities, we have a welfare generation. We begot it.

 

A MOTHER of nine children was receiving two quarts of milk. Because of a budgetary crisis, she was cut down to one quart. She raised hell at the relief station. She became vituperative. The case worker wrote her up as a psychotic. And sent her to a psychiatrist. Fortunately, he responded as few did at the time. He said: When this woman stops reacting the way she does, let me know. Then she would be abnormal.

At the time of the budgetary cuts, I found out that large dogs at the animal shelter received more per meal than a man on relief. I said so. One of the papers streamered it on the front page. The skeletal budget remained until, suddenly, more money was found.

I couldn’t understand this sudden change of heart. Later I learned that shoplifting on State Street had become so great that the merchants petitioned the welfare people to give more monies, so that shoplifting costs would go down. It may have been that if a kid didn’t have clothing, his parents shoplifted a pair of pants or a sweater or something of that sort.