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"IT'S GOING TO BE A HARD WINTER!"

The city of Troy, New York faces the immediate approach of winter with this dirge on its lips.

I heard the bleak prophecy of a hard winter everywhere--from the men and women receiving relief. From the city officials, who proudly tell the visitor how solvent is Troy, how sound its work projects, how considered and consistent its welfare work, how stable its citizens.  >>more...>>

Title:     Report, Troy, New York, October 29, 1934
Author:    Ball, Ernestine
Source:     Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hopkins Papers, Box 65
Date:     October 29, 1934

Publisher:     Hopkins Papers, FDRL
Type:     Letter

Listed Under:
Federal Emergency Relief Administration
New York (State)
Work Relief

Notes:     In the Fall of 1933, Federal Emergency Relief Adminstration director Harry Hopkins sent sixteen reporters to investigate social and economic conditions around the country. "I don't want statistics from you," the journalist Lorena Hickok remembers him saying. " I don't want the social-worker angle. I just want your own reactions, as an ordinary citizen." (Bauman and Coode, p. 1) This is one such report.

For a detailed account of the FERA Reports, see In the Eye of the Great Depression : New Deal Reporters and the Agony of the American People, by John F. Bauman and Thomas H. Coode. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988).