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In late 1933 and early 1934, Harry Hopkins, director of the infant
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), dispatched an elite
corps of journalists and authors, including Bruce McClure and
Lorena Hickok, to obtain a grass-roots portrait of
Depression-wracked America. His marching orders to Hickok were "to
go out around the country and look this thing over.... Tell me what
you see and hear.... All of it." She and her compatriots spent two
years in different regions of the country, talking with preachers,
teachers, civic leaders, businessmen, and "the small fry John
Citizen," monitoring the mood of a nation battered by natural and
economic disaster. They found the downside of the American dream:
flophouses overflowing with tenants who once had been sturdy
middle-class citizens, aid administration offices awash in
incompetence and corruption, and, beneath it all, a permanent
underclass of the illiterate, the mentally ill, and the aged.
Untrained in sociology or economics, the reporters described their
impressions in passionate and graphic terms that helped move the
Roosevelt administration to implement the work programs of the New
Deal. Bauman and Coode reveal another dark side of 1930s America,
one that is evident in the words of the writers themselves: racial
and class prejudice. Comfortably middle-class, mostly from
traditional East Coast backgrounds, Hopkins's reporters reflected
prevalent beliefs concerning the "deserving" and "undeserving"
poor-beliefs that would influence the scope of such New Deal
ventures as the 1935 Social Security Law. Author Marth Gellhorn,
repulsed by the pattern of inbreeding and degeneration she observed
among the "white trash" families of South Carolina, suggested a
two-pronged aid program of education and eugenics. In the Eye of
the Great Depression objectively portrays a period of American
history that is too often romanticized as a time when a combination
of inspired leadership and pioneer resilience pulled the nation
through a great test of its mettle.
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