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[Massachusetts, November 15-25] This report will cover my ten days stay in Massachusetts (from November 15 through November 25.) I visited Boston, Lowell, Brockton, Lynn, Leicester, Oxford, Fall River, Lawrence. I saw the ERA administrator, the ERA Head Social worker (where there was one), the Public Welfare Administrator, mill owners, shoe factory presidents, union leaders, Public Health Commissioners, Public Welfare nurses, doctors, and the unemployed themselves. The picture is grim. To begin with, the routine questions and answers: the relief loads will go up this winter (except in Lawrence where a government order has revitalized the mills and employment is on the increase.) Everywhere it is stated that relief is bare subsistence level, and covers nothing but food (and that inadequately). Result: no clothing or home equipment can be bought. Rents are paid at the sacrifice of nutrition; often they cannot be paid and evictions are frequent. The employers I saw are not going to increase employment this winter; if possible they will avoid dropping workers by curtailing hours still further. More of this in greater detail later. I want to deal with a subject which is not included in our instructions. The subject is the administration of relief. I think that in any report on Massachusetts you must have information about the administration, which is so definitely and blatantly bad that it has become an object of disapproval (if not disgust) for both the unemployed and controlling classes (business men etc.). I would not hand on this information if I had only heard it; but it is impossible in traveling through the state and seeing our relief set-up, not to feel that here incompetence has become a menace; and that the unemployed are suffering for the inadequacy of the administration. In the often repeated words of the unemployed, "They're all in this together--the politicians and the relief people." It seems that our administrative posts are frequently assigned on recommendation of the Mayor and town Board of Aldermen. The administrator is a nice inefficient guy who is being rewarded for being somebody's cousin. Second: instead of having a unified ERA set-up which would care for both work and direct relief, the direct relief is handled by the Public Welfare which is a municipal biz and purely political in personnel. I can't very well let myself go as I should enjoy about the quality of these administrators; they were never very clever folk but when put into a job which demands intelligence training and disinterestedness, they are more than pitiful they are criminally incompetent. The effect of this cumbersome, not too savory, and highly ineffectual set-up is the following: the unemployed themselves frankly suspect relief. They feel (and say) that it is a political graft: pull and bribery will get you work but need won't. I hear this kind of talk in every home I visit; and it is the first time I have heard such complaints. In one home the ERA work relief client cited specific cases of graft (by pull or whatnot). I asked the ERA investigator, who had taken me, about this and he said: "Probably he's right; they usually have their facts straight on this kind of thing. And it's not hard to find out. But what do you expect; the top guys in relief have to stay in with the politicians; they're dependent on them." Likewise the public at large is contemptuous and mistrustful of relief; simply on the grounds that it is a political plum--and the idea, after all, was to feed the needy. I should say there is less actual graft(curious and inexplicable bank accounts etc.) than downright incompetence due to appointing people who have no qualifications for the job. But that I do say firmly: and it is bum business from every point of view. Bum business because it is destroying the confidence of the unemployed and creating a dangerous mental attitude; and also because the suspicion of the general public renders them hostile to relief and non-cooperative to the highest degree. I was personally astonished at the calibre of our local ERA administrators; but must say in justice that the Public Welfare very probably gets the laurel for low type human animal in this job. Further: in one town the ERA investigators (who are supposed to be doing some social work) are member of the Vice Squad who have been loaned for the job. In no place is adequate social work going on: usually there is only an investigation, at the office (followed by a perfunctory home visit) to establish the eligibility of the client for relief. This investigation resembles closely the formalities attached to getting a passport though it would be easier to lie one's way through the ERA questioning. I can't see that these questions do anything very completely except hurt and offend the unemployed, destroy his pride, make him feel clearly that he has sunk into a pauperized substrata, becoming merely a number; something anonymous who will presently be more or less fed. People applying for ERA work relief wait from three weeks to three months before obtaining it; there are always four times as many applicants as jobs. Academic question: what happens to these people while they are waiting in their homes for aid. I think this is a wretched job: wretched in every way. I have seen about four people who seemed both equipped and devoted, dealing with this work. Politics is bad enough in any shape; but it shouldn't get around to manhandling the destitute. Now about the unemployed themselves; this picture is so grim that whatever words I use will seem hysterical and exaggerated. I have been doing more case visiting here; about five families a day. And I find them all in the same shape--fear, fear driving them into a state of semi-collapse; cracking nerves; and an overpowering terror of the future. These people are probably (by and large) more intelligent and better educated than the unemployed I saw in the south--which isn't unfortunately saying much. The price of this intelligence is consciousness. They know what they're going through. I haven't been in one home that hasn't offered me the spectacle of a human being driven beyond his or her powers of endurance and sanity. They can't live on the work relief wages; they can't live on the Public Welfare grocery orders. They can't pay rent and are evicted. They are shunted from place to place, and are watching their children grow thinner and thinner; fearing the cold for children who have neither coats nor shoes; wondering about coal. And they don't understand why or how this happened. There are some cases in every locality of unemployable; people who have lived for two or three generations on the Welfare. (Why aren't there sterilization laws; all such cases are moronic, unequipped physically or mentally to face life--and they all have enormous families.) But the majority of the people are workers, who were competent to do their jobs and had been doing them over a period of years ranging from a dozen to twenty-five. Then a mill closes or curtails; a shoe factory shuts down or moves to another area. And there they are; for no reason they can understand; forced to be beggars asking for charity; subject to questions from strangers, and to all the miseries and indignities attached to destitution. Their pride is dying but not without due agony. I get these comments constantly: We can't live on that $12 (family of ten)--we're going to starve--and my husband can't find work--he's out every day looking--and I get afraid about him: he gets so black..." "If anyone had told us a year ago we'd come to this I'd have said he was a liar; and what can we do..." "It's a terrible thing when decent people have to beg..." "We always tried to be as honest and decent as we could and we've worked all our lives; and what has it come to..." "What's the use of looking for work any more; there isn't any. And look at the children. How would you feel if you saw your own kids like that: half naked and sick..." "It seems like we're just going backwards since the last two years..." "We can't go crazy; we've got the kids to think about...I don't want to ask for nothing. I hate this charity. But we haven't got any shoes; do you think you could get us something to put on our feet--just a pair of rubbers would do..." I could go on and on. It is hard to believe that these conditions exist in a civilized country. I have been going into homes at meal time and have seen what they eat. It isn't possible: it isn't enough to begin with and then every article of food is calculated to destroy health. But how can they help that; if you're hungry you eat "to fill up--but the kids ain't getting what's right for them; they're pale and thin. I can't do anything about it and sometimes I just wish we were ail dead." Health: the Welfare nurses, doctors, social workers, the whole band, tell me that t.b. is on the increase. Naturally; undernourishment is the best guarantee known for bum lungs. The children have impetigo--as far as I can make out dirt has a lot to do with this. Rickets, anemia, bad teeth, flabby muscles. Another bright thought: feeblemindedness is on the increase. Doctors speak of these people as being in direct degeneration from parent to child. My own limited experience is this: out of every three families I visited one had moronic children or one moronic parent. I don't mean merely stupid; I mean definitely below normal level intelligence: fit only for sanitariums. Again, due to unemployment and also to prevalent low wages (all these mill hands and shoe workers are working part-time; and their wages are not more--and often less than relief), families are evicted from their homes. So they double up, in already horribly overcrowded houses. The result (my sources are labor leaders, social workers, doctors, nurses) is increased nervous disorders; and the nurses who work in the schools speak feelingly of low scholarship; the nervous state of the children--involuntary nervous gestures, sex perversions, malnutrition, increased t.b. Again I can only report that there are no organized protest groups: there is only decay. Each family in its own miserable home going to pieces. But I wonder if some day, crazed and despairing, they won't revolt without organization. It seems incredible to think that they will go on like this, patiently waiting for nothing. The ERA relief cases do not feel that ERA is charity; it's work. Badly paid to be sure; but then it's only three days (or less) a week, and they're used to low wages for part-time. The Public Welfare cases, on the other hand, present a different problem. Where you have the shattered nerves, despair and fear (signs of life still) of the ERA people; you have apathy and listlessness in the Welfare people. I think this is due to the fact that their living standards are even lower; that they feel themselves irrevocably pauperized; that they hate the indignity and humiliation of the Welfare treatment, and that by the time they get around to applying for Welfare they have given up all hope and are pretty finished human material. The Labor Leaders and social workers tell me there is a distinct decline in living standards as from a year ago. I find that the foreign born (or one generation American) reacts better to hardship than the native. The reaction of the native to these circumstances is demoralization and nervous breakdown. (It's very interesting: what used to be a phrase for rich neurotic middle-aged matrons is now on the lips of all this working class.) Whereas the foreigner attempts still, despite hopelessness and poverty, to maintain his home; and the women somehow keep alive their pride in what few possessions remain. This is not true of the lowest class Latin worker, with a large family; but there I think the economic conditions have (after a long struggle) beaten them out of a strong natural tendency to care for the foyer. The natives' homes are going quickly to hell; both from the material point of view (filth and decay) and from the moral point of view--the family ties melting under this strain. I'm giving you this picture as I have been able to see it and through the eyes of the people (supposedly informed) with whom I talked. Grim is a gentle word: it's heartbreaking and terrifying. And I feel that as long as these people go on reproducing in such quantity, we can't begin to cope with the situation. (In Lowell, there are 1994 families on Public Welfare direct relief; an average of thirty babies per month is born to this group. Since May 213 babies have been born to the Lowell ERA work relief people. These are just typical figures.) Moreover, as long as these people are undernourished and undereducated, I don't see what can be done about them. Benevolent despotism is fine: but they have to be able to do something for themselves and at present they are pretty incapable. Now, we are only feeding a third of the people who need relief; and inadequate food, bolstered up by odds and ends of clothing, and fuel is all we can give. (Not always that.) Men of fifty and over have given up hope; for them there is no future. But what is most frightening is the young (between the ages of 18-25): they are apathetic and despairing; feeling there is nothing to look forward to, sinking into indifference. (By the way, the majority of v.d. cases in county clinics are patients of this age group and class.) I cannot write too feelingly of the physical condition of small children. I just don't want to think about what they're growing up to be. Concerning mills and shoe factories: (Lawrence is out of this--they scooped up about three million dollars worth of government orders and business is booming at the moment.) Labor relations seem quite good here. Which is a definite change from the south and from our point of view, as it concerns the mental state of the worker, this is cause for thanksgiving. There is none of the widespread southern worker's persecution complex (largely justified there): fear of being fired for joining the union etc. But the mills are on their last legs: cost of production having mounted, so that market prices are below manufacturing costs: therefore no orders; therefore either shut down mills (the state is studded with factory and mill skeletons) or curtailment of hours. The workers do not get the code weekly wage simply because they work two or three days a week. The mill owner here seem to feel very keenly the misery of their workers but they also feel there isn't much they can do. After a certain amount of red writing in ledgers, they are bound to fold up. (That's their story.) The shoe industry is in a frightful state. The problem does seem to be unionized labor; which is to say that this being the stronghold of the shoe unions, the employers cannot compete with non-unionized centers. The employers, labor leaders, and workers describe the non-unionized factories in Maine, New Hampshire, etc., as sweat-shops; where the minimum NRA wage is also automatically the maximum. But they cannot compete in underselling; and buyers arrive, make an offer, say take it or leave it, and the manufacturers are forced either to leave it or produce at a loss. Factories are moving wholesale to Maine, New Hampshire and other non-unionized areas. The factories here are running erratically, often for a few weeks until an order goes through, then with several weeks wait or time-marking. The workers are in terrible shape; and both workers and employers agree that unless the government steps in, the Massachusetts shoe industry is finished. They want the code reopened; and prices fixed for all the piece work operations which go into the making of a shoe. They also want a really strong Federal Arbitration Board which can make and enforce decisions. There is much general disgruntlement with existing Labor Boards; but neither employer nor worker feels that strikes or closed factories should be the answer to controversies. Both want to rely on a strong and impartial Board to settle disputes. Since the code, 27 firms have moved from Lynn to other states; more are planning either to move or liquidate. The town has an air of desolation and abandonment. And what is most curious: the labor leaders will tell you that actually the sweated labor in other shoe areas is better off than they are (though their wage scale and piece work quota is protected by agreement between union and employer.) At least, the non-unionized labor is working. I've gotten this comment frequently from labor union presidents (this is quoted from the Brockton president of the union): "We're doing our best to keep them calm--but they're getting desperate. They laugh at the code and the Labor Board; but they're behind the president. If they don't lose faith in him it will be all right." It fills both the workers and the unemployed in this area with astonishment that there is nothing for shoe factories to do; but none of them have shoes to put on their feet and are facing the winter with husks of shoes bound up in rags.... I'm not thrilled with Massachusetts. Sorry about these reports, but it is impossible to gloss over conditions. I wish you could send somebody who could stay longer and do a more thorough job; but I honestly believe anyone would simply find the same and more of it. My next report will cover New Hampshire, Cover is a pretentious word.
Yours Very sincerely,(SIGNED)
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