Cwa Quotes

The people need education,’ Lolita Palma interjects. ‘Without it, there can be no patriotism.

There are times when I am ashamed to be a man.

The problem with this war is not the war itself, it is the mayhem it brings.

Imagination may lead one along the right path, but sometimes it makes one go astray. Besides, it is wise to be wary of drawing on one’s reserves of knowledge, of piling information on to the facts and obscuring them.

Throughout the South, time and again Hickok heard the same complaints: that CWA, unlike NRA, refused to recognize historic black-white wage differentials; that the prospect of federal relief payments was sucking low-wage agricultural workers, blacks especially, into cities like Savannah, where they threatened to become a permanent welfare class; that "the Federal Government came down here and put all the bums to work at more money than labor had ever been paid down here before"; that the insistence of many federal officers on "mistering the niggers" had stirred up southern blacks and threatened to explode the region's volatile race system.10 These criticisms exposed the depths of the region's economic backwardness, as well as the difficulties that attended any policy that might perturb the tense membrane of class and race relations in the South.

Only 16 percent of farm households earned incomes above the national median of fifteen hundred dollars per year in the mid-1930s. More than half of all farm families had annual incomes of less than a thousand dollars. In 1934 the per capita income of farm households was just $167. In that same year, even after the efforts of CWA, only one farmhouse in ten had an indoor toilet; only one in five had electricity. Frequent pregnancies, medically unattended childbirths, malnutrition, pellagra, malaria, hookworm, and other parasites exacted heavy tolls in human life and energy. More than thirteen hundred rural counties, containing some seventeen million souls, had no general hospital, and most of them lacked even a public health nurse. Illiteracy was twice as common in rural districts as in cities. Nearly one million rural children between the ages of seven and thirteen did not attend school at all. In this generally dismal picture, the southeastern states were the most dismal by far. Sharecroppers and tenants, an agrarian class peculiarly concentrated in the old South, were probably the poorest Americans. One study of employed sharecroppers in four southern states revealed average annual cash incomes of $350 for white families and $294 for black.