A Secret Gift (21 page)

In the forty years leading up to 1933, Canton’s population quadrupled, but its capacity to provide for the needy had not kept pace. When the Depression struck, Family Services was hit by a tsunami. In December 1929 it provided relief to 188 families. In 1930, the number was 1,324. In 1931, it was 3,128. By 1932, it had risen to 3,511. The number could have soared far higher but resources were exhausted.

In August 1933, the once-private Family Services, no longer able to cope with the demands made upon it, became a public agency under the Stark County Relief Administration, and in 1935 came under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, or FERA. But no change of administration could overcome the reluctance of Donald Jury or thousands of other Cantonians raised to believe that a man who could not support his family was not a man at all. That was in part the genius of Roosevelt’s New Deal, that it understood and took stock of how down-and-out Americans were feeling, offering them the three things they hungered for most—a job, self-esteem, and a second chance. The hope that Roosevelt kindled was reflected in the names of some of Canton’s businesses: The New Deal Lunch, New Deal Oil Company, and New Deal Tavern.

In the fall of 1933, the Roosevelt administration created the Civil Works Administration, or CWA. It was the first of the New Deal’s public jobs programs, and though it lasted only until the following spring, it led the way for Americans to both provide for their loved ones and preserve their sense of self-worth. Letter after letter to B. Virdot refers to the CWA and the hope that it might come through with a job.

Charles Minor, a father of five, was out of work and in dire need when his wife, Mary, wrote to B. Virdot. “While a steeple jack by trade not turning down digging a ditch. While some of the children needing shoes others needing clothes and unless some Good Person sends us a dinner haven’t got a thing in sight. In the past three weeks had many meals on bread and coffee.” But this was not the first such letter she’d written. Earlier she had written Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s federal relief administrator, hoping he might persuade the CWA to find her husband a job. His response had arrived in that morning’s mail: “said he would try to take it up with head of the CWA here but don’t know when that will be.” Still, it offered a glint of hope.

In its brief time, the CWA put some four million Americans to work, and is credited with building some half a million miles of roads, as well as work on thousands of schools, playgrounds, airports, and other public facilities in which individual workers and entire communities could take pride. Its successor agencies, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), understood that to restart America, it must offer a hand up, not a handout.

The County Poorhouse, which took in the homeless from Canton and the surrounding area, like Family Services, underwent a succession of names, each reflecting an attitudinal shift—from County Poorhouse in 1837 to County Infirmary in 1850 to County Home in 1924. Its purpose remained largely unchanged. But during the Depression its meager capacity to hold a few hundred homeless men and women was no match for the numbers in need. Ironically, it provided shelter and sustenance in another, less direct way: one of the jobs the WPA came up with for the unemployed was archiving the records of the poorhouse.

But for many in need that December of 1933, Roosevelt and the promises of a New Deal were still just that, mere promises. The day the B. Virdot offer appeared in the
Canton Repository,
Roosevelt amended yet again an executive order related to the National Emergency Council. To the hungry in Canton who even bothered to follow such bureaucratic minutiae, such news only fed their suspicions that help was still a ways off. Frank Walker, a wealthy lawyer for Anaconda Copper, was named acting executive director of the council, and
Time
magazine on December 18, 1933, noted wryly: “To outsiders this looked like a new title for an old job. . . . On a nation-wide scale his Council’s representatives were to steer befuddled citizens through the fog of new Washington agencies to the particular bureau that could supply the relief needed.”

Compared to such shuffling and reshuffling of the bureaucratic deck and the growing proliferation of agencies and boards, there was something utterly refreshing about B. Virdot’s offer. It was direct, free of politics, and immediate.

I
t was an intense source of pride among even the neediest that winter of 1933 that they had not given in and sought help from Family Services. As long as they had the strength to resist that temptation they could claim that they were not yet defeated. For some, even Sam Stone’s anonymous offer of help was too close to a handout. What they wanted was work.

George Hensel wrote, “We have asked for no charity all through the depression. . . . I would like to have work for a Christmas present for I have no shoes. You may think I have nerve writing this, but if you have been in need as long as my wife and I have you know how it feels to eat only one meal a day. . . . I walk so much every day and come home hungry and not much to eat. It makes you feel pretty bad. . . .” In a postscript he added, “There will be no Xmas for us.”

Before the Depression, Hensel had worked for years in a steel mill. Now he was going door-to-door peddling his wife’s doughnuts and cupcakes, but almost no one had any money to buy them. It was all made that much more uncomfortable wearing a pair of shoes he’d long since worn out. In the fierce competition for jobs, employers often looked to hire those who most needed work, but need was defined in ways that disadvantaged the likes of George Hensel, who had only his wife and himself to support. That put him at the back of every line. “We have no children,” he wrote, “and folks thinks we do not have to live.”

Such triaging for work was common during the Depression. Alwyn C. McCort, who had long worked on Canton’s streetcars and in a steel mill, had been out of work for three years and was trying to provide some support to his aging parents, Henry and Anna. From B. Virdot, he wanted only a job. “Now I am not asking for charity,” he wrote, “but thought since you are interested in unfortunate people you might be able to help me get a job. I get turned down again and again because I am single but my parents need my help very badly and I would like to be able to help them and know once more what money looks like.”

But it was the women, married, widowed, and unmarried alike, who often had the most difficult time during the Depression. Employers large and small presumed, often wrongly, that men were the principal supporters of families and women merely supplemented their incomes. But many of the letters to B. Virdot were from women who had no other support than whatever they earned, and on whom others—fatherless children, aging parents, and disabled spouses—counted for their survival.

Catherine Miller, the mother of two children, a daughter aged seven and a son aged four, faced the bleakest of holidays. “I have to support myself and they are both in school,” she wrote to B. Virdot. “They have never known what Christmas is. My husband is in a penal institution at present in York Pa. The children are both in need of clothing and I don’t get any help from any Society.” Days later, her check from B. Virdot arrived.

Wrote another woman, intent upon not throwing herself on the mercies of charity, “I am a widow with an only child, a daughter, and have been struggling to send her to school, and feed her and myself, and often I have gone with nothing to eat, as long as she, who is growing gets it, for she needs it worse than I do. As long as I know my little girl is not hungry it’s all right even though I am.”

These women shared the men’s disdain for charity and the dole. They were no less proud. But in the depths of the Depression, they had fewer options than men. Unlike their male counterparts, few had served apprenticeships or acquired the skills sought by Canton’s mills and factories. They were the first to lose their jobs, as companies, assuming that men were the families’ primary breadwinners, furloughed en masse all married women. It was a sign of how different the times were that there were no uprisings or challenges to such edicts and that these measures were generally greeted as prudent under the circumstances. For these women, such decisions were devastating. Those who made their way through the Depression on their own without recourse to charity or Family Services were a special breed—tough, resourceful, and resilient. B. Virdot’s offer was addressed not only to the men of Canton but to the families that allowed for women too to come forward, and they did.

My grandmother Minna would not have had it any other way. As a teenager and an only child, she provided essential support to her mother and father, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who returned with a disabling case of malaria. Minna would never have allowed Sam to ignore the appeals of women, even if he were inclined to do so, and he was not. Sam had known nothing but strong and independent-minded women in his family. His mother was not to be trifled with, and two of his three sisters had wrenching struggles with poverty. Minna was a feminist with a fierce social conscience whose influence over Sam in such matters could not be overstated. She would have read every incoming letter, doubtless helped him triage the worthiest from the rest, and championed the case of the women. She knew exactly what they were up against.

Years later, in World War II, as men marched off to war, women like the much-celebrated “Rosie the Riveter” filled the industrial ranks. But it was not for lack of ambition or need that the women of the Depression eyed those same positions. Given half a chance, the generation of Rosie’s mother would gladly have rolled up their sleeves in Canton’s mills and factories, and no one thought less of those who were able to do so. In Canton, the fortunate found work as nurses, secretaries, shopgirls, and maids, and did piecework in factories. But as the Depression deepened, they were the first to be let go.

A photo from the 1920s taken at the Hoover vacuum plant shows a vast room filled with women sitting row upon row at sewing machines. But in March 1931, the order went out—all married women must go. No inquiry was made as to whether their husbands had jobs or whether they were their family’s sole support. The next year, Hoover launched a national ad campaign “based on the powerful appeal that the Hoover was the one possession which enabled the women of modern means to enjoy equal luxury with their wealthier sisters.” The appeal fell flat. In 1933 the company began a marketing drive built around the slogan “Elmer is the key to ’33.” The idea was that in Hard Times, Hoover’s sales force should concentrate on the husbands—the “Elmers”—who alone had the authority to purchase costly items like sweepers. Sales sank even further. The company had failed to show women due respect, either as employees or as consumers.

F
or many women the Great Depression represented a bewildering descent into poverty. Many had been working even before they reached puberty. Their struggles echoed those of their mothers, whose hardships became templates for their own lives. Childhoods, such as they were, had been cut short by the demands of family and their own survival. In Canton, as across the country, there was nothing novel about the idea that a woman would have to support herself and others, but opportunities were rare.

So it was with Rachel DeHoff, who was among those who reached out to B. Virdot. She never enjoyed any delusions that life was going to be easy. The daughter of William and Elizabeth Davis, she was born in August 1897. Her father, William, the son of Welsh immigrants, was a gritty-faced coal miner, a veteran of the Civil War who was born in 1836, already sixty-one when daughter Rachel was born. Her mother was a Scottish immigrant, twenty-nine years younger than her husband. Their bare-bones home in the rural coal-mining village of Somerdale, Ohio, relied on an outside pump, an outhouse, and a crudely dug-out fruit cellar. In 1905 her father died, leaving Elizabeth, then a forty-one-year-old widow, to house and feed her three daughters on her husband’s meager Civil War pension.