Search Results for: war on poverty

That “One Third of a Nation” (1940)

Article by Edith Elmer Wood, appearing in Survey Graphic, 1940. “Equal opportunity which lies at the heart of democracy implies for every man, woman and child at least a sporting chance to attain health, decency and a normal family life. It was because the cards were stacked against a third of the nation that there had to be a new deal in housing.”

Carver, George Washington

At Tuskegee, Carver launched a campaign aimed at lifting black farmers out of the desperate poverty in which most of them lived. Though his campaign ultimately failed in its aim, Carver adapted what he had learned in Ames in such a way as to put the application of its principles within reach of impoverished tenant farmers. In so doing, he anticipated the rise of organic farming and the push for the application of “appropriate technology.”

The Tennessee Valley Authority: Electricity for All

TVA was one of the most ambitious projects of the New Deal, encompassing many of FDR’s own interests in conservation, public utility regulation, regional planning, agricultural development, and the social and economic improvement of the “Forgotten Americans.”

Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane (1936)

The Harlem riot of 1935, now the subject of a comprehensive report, demonstrated that “the Negro is not merely the man who shouldn’t be forgotten; he is the man who cannot safely be ignored.” Alain Locke, early interpreter of the New Harlem in a special issue of Survey Graphic, here pictures the Harlem of hard times

Schools for a Minority (1939)

Article written by Gould Beech, appearing in Survey Graphic, 1939. “…it was ‘too great a compliment to attribute to the Negro child the ability to gain equal education for one dollar to every seven spent on the education of the white child…’ And yet even against such handicaps, the Negro race has advanced in little more than three generations from 80 percent illiterate to better than 80 percent literate—a heartening measure of capacity to make bricks with such straw as there is.,,,Educational discrimination is only one phase of the Negro’s economic, political and social status, but it is perhaps the most vital standard by which his participation in American life is measured.”

Southern Farm Tenancy: 1936

When an Alabama town erected a monument “in profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity” a moral was pointed which this author drives home with recent researches in the South. Cotton still enslaves 8 million people; emancipation can come only by diversified farming, a long range program for which is here given

Pea-Pickers’ Child (1935)

Written by Lucretia Penny, appearing in Survey Graphic, 1935. “The death notice in the county paper was not more than two inches in depth but it had, nevertheless, its modest headline: PEA-PICKERS CHILD DIES. Already there had been three deaths in the pea-pickers’ camp: a Mexican had been murdered, stabbed; a child had died of burns; a baby had died of what his young mother referred to as “a awful fever in his little stomach.” And now the shallow headlines spoke of Zetilla Kane, the seventh child and only daughter of Joe and Jennie Bell Kane.”

But the Children Are Earning: 1935

Miss Bailey Says…
We have to park our principles sometimes in the face of the realities of family situations where the only cash is what children earn. What can a worker do, for instance, about:

A ten-year-old boy who peddles pencils downtown at night to get money for movies, roller-skates and hot dogs?

A family that bare-facedly lies about the ages of children too young to work but whose earnings are desperately needed?

A boy of seventeen, oldest of a turbulent flock who gets his first job, and a pretty good one, and leaves home to live on his own?

A docile girl of eighteen, oldest of six and only one working, who gives her father, for family purposes, every penny of her meager weekly wage??

First Annual Report Of The Trustees Of (Mass.) State Lunatic Hospital: 1833

Other institutions, both in Europe and America, which have exhibited the most remarkable proportion of cures, have discriminated in their admissions, receiving the more hopeful cases only. The inmates at Worcester have been a more select class than were ever before assembled together; but unfortunately for success in regard to cures, it has been a selection of the most deplorable cases in the whole community. Of the one hundred and sixty-four individuals received, considerably more than one half came from jails, almshouses and houses of correction, and about one third of the whole number had suffered confinement for periods varying from ten to thirty-two years.

Women and Nineteenth-Century Reform

The problem for Dix and other women reformers of the nineteenth century was how to engage in social causes without losing their femininity. Opponents of women’s suffrage argued that political engagement would make women “mannish” and thereby undermine the social order. Even Catharine Beecher argued that women should not receive the right to vote because it would destroy their feminine virtues. Instead, Beecher believed that women could best exert their moral influence through their roles in the Christian home and neighborhood.