The New Yorker:

From 1938: A tale of faith in human dignity restored.

By Joseph Mitchell

The winter of 1933, particularly the three weeks preceding Christmas, was by far the unhappiest period of my life. That winter, the fifth winter of the depression and the winter of repeal, I was a reporter on a newspaper. Several of the editors believed that nothing brightened up the paper so much as stories about human misery. In the three weeks before Christmas there was an abundance of such stories, and for one reason or another I was picked to handle most of them. One morning I spent a harried half-hour in the anteroom of a magistrates’ court talking with a woman who had assaulted her husband because he took money she had saved for Christmas presents for their children and spent it in one of the new repeal gin mills. That afternoon I was sent up to the big “Hoover village” on the Hudson at Seventy-fourth Street to ask about the plans the people there were making for Christmas. The gaunt squatters thought I was crazy; if they had thrown me into the river I wouldn’t have blamed them. Next day I was sent out to stand on a busy corner with a Salvation Army woman whose job was to ring a bell and attract attention to a kettle in the hope that passers-by would drop money in it for the Army’s Christmas Fund. I was told, “Just stand there four or five hours and see what happens; there ought to be a story in it.” The bellringer was elderly and hollow-eyed and she had a head cold, which I caught.

Day in and day out, I was sent to breadlines, to relief bureaus, to cold-water flats; each morning I called on cringing, abject humans who sat and stared at me as I goaded them with questions. My editors sincerely believed that such interviews would provoke people to contribute to the various Christmas funds, and they undoubtedly did, but that did not help me conquer the feeling that I had no right to knock on tenement doors and catechize men and women who were interesting only because they were miserable in some unusual way. Also, the attitude of the people I talked with made me wretched. They were without indignation. They were utterly spiritless. I am sure that few of them wanted their stories printed, but they answered my questions, questions I absolutely had to ask, because they were afraid something might happen to their relief if they didn’t; all of them thought I was connected in some way with the relief administration. I began to feel that I was preying on the unfortunate. My faith in human dignity was almost gone when something happened that did a lot to restore it.

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